Scientists to CARB: There is No "Indirect Land Use Change" With Ethanol

[JohnWxy]

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/partner/growth-energy/news/article/2010/10/scientists-to-carb-there-is-no-indirect-land-use-change-with-ethanol

Oak Ridge National Laboratory Analysis Finds "Minimal to Zero" Evidence of ILUC

WASHINGTON, DC. A report prepared for the California Air Resources Board by a team of scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory found corn ethanol contributed "minimal to zero" impact from the Indirect Land Use Change (ILUC) scheme.

The report was compiled by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge lab at the request of CARB, which has appointed several teams of expert working groups to assess the methodology and data that went into California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard. That standard used a controversial ILUC formula which heavily penalized American grain farmers for carbon emissions theoretically produced by farmers overseas.

“This should put the stake into the heart of the bizarre ILUC scheme. Here are some of the best scientists in the country – scientists who have no stake in the game – who found that ethanol had little to no impact from ILUC,” said Tom Buis, CEO of Growth Energy. “We must ask why California insists on going forward with a regulation that is based not just on controversial theory, but a theory that has been disproven.”

The report recommended that CARB update its ILUC calculations with the newest ILUC formula models and data. The study, which examined use of grain and demand for ethanol over a 10-year period, found that increased demand by ethanol was largely met by reallocating domestic uses of grain – and not by reducing grain for export, which is the basis for the ILUC theory.

The report can be found http://growthenergy.org/images/reports/101410decomposition.pdf">here. NOte this is just view graphs. I have not been able to track down the actual report (assuming anybody would actually read it).

[guardian]

1. Do the authors speak English?

What a bunch of gobbledegook. Another example of illiterates with graduate degrees. About the only understandable point in the whole 'report' is that funding should continue so they can continue their 'analysis'.

Their conclusion SHOULD have been: "AGW doomers promoted ethanol use and the only result was to increase food prices which starved millions of people to death."

But hey, we feeeeeeeel better about global warming even though it had zero effect on climate. So give us more funding so we can study more very expensive and useless ways to have no impact on climate.

[NNadir]

2. Thus spake the ethanol industry, but in the scientific journal SCIENCE they have another view.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1151861">Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land-Use Change


This of course, is not a link to some web page linked by someone who knows no science whatsoever, but a report in one of the most respected scientific journals in the world.

The paper is very widely cited in the scientific literature.

[JohnWxy]

3. Searchinger's nonsense! LOL. The attorney, not a trained scientist, has been widely debunked and

is not taken seriously by actual researchers looking for legitimate answers in this field.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x195713

A report published this week severely criticizes a study published by Science magazine last year that opened the ongoing debate over indirect land use changes (ILUC) resulting from biofuels production. John A. Mathews and Hao Tan, of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, take issue with the methodology and assumptions used by Tim Searchinger and others in the study, Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases through Emissions from Land Use Change, which was published in February, 2008.
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The concluding paragraph is most damning, not only of the Searchinger "study" but also of the journal Science for even publishing it:


"Indeed if you wished to put US ethanol production in the worst possible light, assuming the worst possible set of production conditions guaranteed to give the worst possible ILUC effects, then the assumptions chosen would not be far from those actually presented (without argument or discussion of alternatives) in the Searchinger et al. paper. This, together with the fact that the paper is not replicable, since the models and parameters used are not accessible, places a question mark over the refereeing procedures used for this paper by the journal Science. A paper that seeks to place a procedure in the worst possible light, and refrains from allowing others to check its results, is perhaps better described as ideology than as science."

..and..

http://www1.eere.energy.gov/biomass/pdfs/obp_science_response_web.pdf">U.S. dept of Energy

The Searchinger study contains some unrealistic assumptions and obsolete data. The key issues are as follows:
•
The study assumes a corn ethanol production scenario of 30 billion gallons per year by 2015, which is double the amount established by EISA (see Figure 1). To meet the new RFS, after 15 billion gallons, biofuels must come from feedstocks other than grain, and primarily be produced from cellulosic feedstocks, such as agricultural wastes and forest residues.
•
The study relies on a worst-case scenario by assuming that land use and deforestation in 2015 will mirror that which occurred in the 1990s. Better land management practices and avoided deforestation credits, if adopted, could reduce deforestation rates. In fact, deforestation rates have slowed down over the past decade.
•
The assumption that corn exports will decline by 62 percent is contradicted by historical trends. As Figure 2 shows, U.S. corn exports have remained fairly constant at around 2 billion bushels per year throughout the entire growth phase of the ethanol industry. Specifically, the 2007 exports represent a 14% increase compared to 2006 level, while US corn ethanol production has reached close to six billion gallons that same year.
•
The premise that dramatic land use will result from U.S. corn ethanol use production is flawed. US corn production for food and feed has increased by 1 percent per year for the past two decades. Moreover, Figure 3 shows the increase in protein-rich U.S. Distiller Dry Grains (DDGS) exports, which are growing significantly as U.S. corn ethanol production expands. DDGS export growth will be a growing contributor to the global food supply.2
•
One scenario analyzed in the study incorrectly assumes the conversion of US corn cropland to switchgrass. No farmer would convert corn acreage to switchgrass as the value of corn will most likely exceed that of a non-food crop. Furthermore, a DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory study found that more than 1 billion tons of biomass resources are available in this country (Figure 4) without displacing corn cropland.

..and..

The Gallagher Biofuels Review

5. Outwith the concerns below over particular assumptions, there is evident disquiet
over the modelling approach taken by Searchinger. There are two main points:
– It may not be feasible to model world economics to a level of precision that will
enable quantification of secondary or tertiary effects of a relatively small
perturbation in the global system. Given the limited success with modelling
other complex systems – weather, biological organisms, etc. – a global model
will not necessarily enable trustworthy predictions. For the predictions to be
trusted, the models need to be validated, perhaps demonstrating that their
predictions of past seasonal perturbations in prices match those observed
satisfactorily (Wang & Haq; ES62).

– It is not likely that the consequences of a biofuels initiative will be allowed to
play out with the degree of free market economics that is modelled here.
Biofuels initiatives will be accompanied by policy instruments such as
certification, tax rebates and investment in research and development that will
also affect GHG outcomes.

Feedstock conversion and displacement

6. There have been no criticisms of ethanol conversion rates assumed by
Searchinger, however, Searchinger’s ‘pound for pound’ substitution of feed corn for
corn diverted to bioethanol appears to be an overestimate (ES15, Wang & Haq,
ECCM). It should be recognised that the co-product, dried distillers grains
(DDGS), has ~30% protein and ~5% fibre. If heat damage is avoided, maximum
inclusion in diets can be ~400 g/kg for cattle, 200 g/kg for sheep, and 100-250 g/kg
for non-ruminants (Cottrill et al. 2007). Thus the displacement value of DDGS is at
least 23% higher than that assumed by Searchinger et al. (Klopfenstein et al.
2008).

Indirect Land Use Change

10. A fundamental problem raised by several respondents arises from Searchinger’s
inaccurate assumption (see 6 above) of ‘pound for pound’ displacement of corn.
Allowing for the higher protein of DDGS, and also for land to replace the oil
foregone (we assumed oil palm); we calculate that Searchinger’s assumption about
doubles the land required to substitute for US corn-ethanol. Ensus (ES15)
conclude the assumption trebles the result, but they do not account for the ‘lost’ oil
from the displaced soya.

It should be clarified what has been assumed in Searchinger’s approach about the
inter-changeability of maize, rice, wheat & barley etc. It is puzzling that there is 23
Mha of unused arable land in Eastern Europe & the former Soviet Union (Riddle
2008), yet the predicted response in these parts is for cropping to decrease!

~~
~~

GHG emissions

12. Searchinger sets savings of direct GHG emissions from bioethanol production
relative to fossil fuels at an unrealistically small level (i.e. ~20%) compared to GHG
efficiencies of grain conversion estimated for the EU (i.e. 40-70%). A greater
saving would significantly shorten his estimated payback periods (Wang & Haq;
ES15).

[NNadir]

4. Really? A blog post refutes a paper in Science? Do tell, science boy.

First read your own admission that the ethanol industry, which you've been representing here for ten years is a failure, to wit:

The study assumes a corn ethanol production scenario of 30 billion gallons per year by 2015, which is double the amount established by EISA (see Figure 1). To meet the new RFS, after 15 billion gallons, biofuels must come from feedstocks other than grain, and primarily be produced from cellulosic feedstocks, such as agricultural wastes and forest residues.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_impcus_a2_nus_ep00_im0_mbblpd_a.htm

You need to be able to do something called "math" to follow this, and clearly the "biofuels will save my car CULTure" mentality is very weak on this score.

A barrel of oil, not that ethanol has the same heating value as oil - it doesn't - contains 42 gallons, if one insists on using the unscientific gallon/barrel units. Thus at 30 billion gallons is 714 million barrels of ethanol. The US imports about 12 million barrels per day to support dumbass car CULTists with contempt for science, but burns considerably more than that.

It follows, that via soothsaying, 15 years after little anti-science wishful thinkers started coming here hawking ethanol to drunks, that the industry predicts it will be able to produce about 61 days worth of fuel imports, destroying the Gulf of Mexico with run-off and earth's atmosphere with N₂O.

The hand waving about cellulosic ethanol goes on and on and on and on and on, but by Iogen's own figures, it has managed to produce less than 2 minutes worth of fuel in a decade of hype and horseshit, in fact, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/10/19/905107/-US-Croplands,-Climate-Change,-Biofuels-and,-um,-Science.">One minute and 17 seconds worth.

If ethanol was going to do something meaningful, 30 years of vast subsidies, destroyed rivers, strip mining the Ogallala acquifer would have done something <em>meaningful</em>.

It's now 2010, a full 35 years after we started heraing ethanol horseshit. Ethanol is effectively useless at addressing the problems of climate change, useless.

Heckuva job. The cellulosic ethanol folks really qualify for going into the Arabian Horseshow business.

Why don't you um, submit your blog post to Science and see if they publish it?

I'm sure they'll be very impressed and will publish it immediately.

[JohnWxy]

5. a "BLOG POST"?? The paper/critique, if you had looked at the url was written the U.S. Dept of Energy

the url I gave as a link: http://www1.eere.energy.gov/biomass/pdfs/obp_science_response_web.pdf

heres the Dept. of Energy, biomass site: http://www1.eere.energy.gov/biomass

you can tell where the data comes from (if you link to it) by looking in the navigation bar of your browser. Looking at the url you would have seen it came from the Dept of Energy, Energy Efficiency Renewable Energy Website.

Due to lack of time I didn't post critique of searchinger's stuff from Michael Wang, from Argonne National Laboratory.

[NNadir]

6. Um, um, um... It is wholly unsurprising to hear it said by a renewables cultist that a web page

is the equivalent - whether or not it comes from the DOE or anyone else - of publication in Science.

As it happens, I was in a government laboratory today, discussing the subject of journal publications, and the topic was the difficulty of publishing in journals for reasons that are not always scientific but - unsurprisingly - often political. Of course, the person I was speaking with has published many hundreds of papers, and is the author of major graduate level text books, hardly a flake who can't tell the difference between Science and a web page, the latter being accessible to any damn fool who can work an editor.

In fact, I have observed directly that clueless people can and do publish worthless, dogmatic, wrong headed and outright delusional stuff on the web. This is not to say that the web is useless, but if one has children, as I do, the first thing to teach them about the web is, um, critical thinking.

It is also true that not everything in the scientific literature is true. Often it is wrong. Many damn fools - Mark V. Jacobson comes to mind and Benjamin Sovacool - publish pure garbage in the scientific literature.

But, that said...

It always amuses me to no end when those who hold Science and science - journal and practice - in contempt then attempt to make declarations about scientific credibility.

It is true, by the way, that Searchinger is a lawyer. Although I never have met him personally, I use the engineering, science (Lewis) and general (Firestone) libraries at his institution - Princeton University - and I have learned that anyone with access to those libraries, and a reasonably prepared mind - can learn almost anything one wants to know.

There are people with advanced degrees and oodles of post docs who will not ever have a publication accepted in Science.

Searchinger's paper has been cited by hundreds of other papers, including those by the famous or infamous Robert H. Socolow - also of Princeton - who claimed in the famous but thus far completely meaningless "stabilization wedges" (or stabilization wedgies) paper that biofuels could actually be useful. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/305/5686/968">Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current Technologies.

This very glib paper was the subject of much discussion by wishful thinkers who are clueless and who wallow around in tons of anti-intellectual fat while the atmosphere collapses. In the first six years of the "next fifty years" of Socolow and Pacala spoke, the derivative of carbon dioxide concentration with respect to time is not decreasing, it is increasing.

And still we have clueless twits come here and ridicule Searchinger, an intellectual heavyweight on the grounds he conflicts with their wholly religious, oblivious to data, faith.

The biofuels car CULTist fantasy has proved, thirty years into the game, to be pure garbage, and only lead to more wastes of human and material resources. The funds for this horseshit comes out of the future. In Trenton, a beautiful but impoverished, hard-luck city, they are closing four of the five city libraries, selling off the books and the buildings.

The young people in that city are poor, and left nothing but drugs and crime, and now just one tiny path open to them, their libraries, are being shut.

For what?

Well for one thing, so the corn lobby can countinue to feed pigs and a few stupid and worthless cars.

Oh and by the way, Socolow - biofuels fan - was a, um, co-author with Searchinger in a recent publication in, um, Science.

One could look it up, if one knows how.

I guess Socolow, who is a Princeton Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering with a Ph.D. in high energy physics doesn't regard Searchinger as "just a lawyer."

However, none of Socolow's credentials make him infallable. His ideas in the wedgie paper have not done a damn thing to affect climate change, other than to induce further complacency and wishful thinking.

The world is still arguing over biofuels, and in fact, no one can say if they are good or bad. One thing they are not is significant. Given the fact that they are propped up by huge subsidies and produce almost nothing for them, they do not deserve government funding.

Humanity needs to make choices. It's very clear this late in the game that biofuels are at best marginal, and at worst, a continuance of the disaster.

Have a nice evening. Try, just once, to try to wonder how, um, Malians might feel about the swell flex fuel Chevy Tahoes you guys are driving around.

[poopfuel]

7. Malians doing very well because of biofuels

http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5101

Mali does not allow food crops to be used for biofuel production. So can many other countries and have a significant impact.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100723080115.htm

And if one keeps it small scale, it works very well indeed

http://www.iied.org/pubs/pdfs/17059IIED.pdf

ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/011/aj991e/aj991e.pdf

Don't think they are doing it in order to exploit the potential of flex fuel automobiles.

And I don't think Trenton library is suffering due to biofuels. Try the defense budget or oil subsidies or some such. Or Governor Christie.

[JohnWxy]

8. I happily repeat the serious criticism not only of Searchinger but also of Science for publishing

a work of such questionable methodology. Also, the frankly amazing thing pointed out is that the supporting data was not available for others to review and thus test the conculusions of this "study". It's actually quite incredible (and VERY questionable) that Science would allow this submission to get by the first level of review!

The reader is advised (I apologize if this is rather basic but apparently not to the commenter I am responding to)....that this is one of the most basic principles of the scientific examination of nature.. to make your data, assumptions, models used fully available to other researchers so they can test your results. Without this YOU DO NOT HAVE SCIENTIFIC ENQUIRY. It is obvious (to every researcher in the field who perused Searchinger's stuff, that it does not meet the most basic requirements of scientific enquiry.

FROM MY previous comment:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x195713

John A. Mathews and Hao Tan, of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, take issue with the methodology and assumptions used by Tim Searchinger and others in the study, Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases through Emissions from Land Use Change, which was published in February, 2008.

The final concluding paragraph is most damning, not only of the Searchinger "study" but also of the journal Science for even publishing it:

"Indeed if you wished to put US ethanol production in the worst possible light, assuming the worst possible set of production conditions guaranteed to give the worst possible ILUC effects, then the assumptions chosen would not be far from those actually presented (without argument or discussion of alternatives) in the Searchinger et al. paper. This, together with the fact that the paper is not replicable, since the models and parameters used are not accessible, places a question mark over the refereeing procedures used for this paper by the journal Science. A paper that seeks to place a procedure in the worst possible light, and refrains from allowing others to check its results, is perhaps better described as ideology than as science."

....

I will not bother to comment on desultory ramblings and philosphizing that are not relevant to this thread. IT's not worth my time and I doubt if very many people read them (I only quickly scanned them to see if there was anything of relevance and found very little to meet that criterion).

The reader is advised that the Environment/Energy Forum's resident http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=263283&mesg_id=263416">soi-disant philosopher/web-base expert/energy guru.. will to on talking to the air ...ad infinitum. That anybody gives a damn what he is saying, or that anybody is listening(reading it) is of no importance to the E/E forum's Great Thinker. He will just go on and on and on trying to prove to himself how brilliant he is. He loves to listen to his own echo, and presumably his own applause. LOL

(I realize he is desperate for attention from me. I really should not reinforce his psychological pathologies.)

[JohnWxy]

11. Searchinger said increased Ethanol production would reduce cattle production but failed to take into

account that reduced cattle production would mean less GHG emissions from cattle (methane, 23 times heat trapping potential of CO2) and less deforestation due to cattle ranching .. meaning less GHG emissions. This was a part of the results of using the models he said he used.. But a part he preferred to ignore! LOL!!

and how much reduction in GHG emissions are we talking about? an amount equal to ONE HALF THE TOTAL EMISSIONS HE HYPOTHESIZED COULD BE ATTRIBUTED TO INCREASED ETHANOL PRODUCTION!!


Here's the criticism of the very indiosyncratic "methodology" of Searchinger:

http://growthenergy.ehclients.com/images/reports/ILUC_liska_perrin_bbb09.pdf

Indirect land use emissions in the life cycle of biofuels:
regulations vs science

Adam J Liska and Richard K Perrin, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, USA

Received February 25, 2009; revised version received March 18, 2009; accepted March 19, 2009
Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com); DOI: 10.1002/bbb.153;

Biofuels, Bioprod. Bioref. (2009)
Abstract: Recent legislative mandates


Livestock have an immense GHG footprint, accounting for nearly 80% of agricultural emissions
and ~18% of global anthropogenic GHG emissions (7.1 PgCO2e yr-1) – more than the entire global transportation
system.45 Searchinger et al.1 (Table B1) estimate that livestock production would fall by 0.9% as a result of an
additional 56 bly of corn-ethanol production, and their model accounts for associated reductions in cropland
used for feed grains. But the model does not account for other changes in livestock-related emissions including
less methane emissions from enteric fermentation and manure, and reduction in livestock-related deforestation, which account for ~6.4 PgCO2e yr-1 globally. A 0.9% decrease in livestock could contribute an additional emissions reduction of about 58 TgCO2e yr-1, which would off set nearly one half of Searchinger’s ILUC estimate of 127 TgCO2e yr-1 (Table 1).

Let me repeat that. Searchinger estimated the increase in production of ethanol would drive down cattle production but he "forgot" to take into account the reduced GHG emissions from cattle (methane) and the reduced deforestation from the reduction in cattle production.

NOW, seriously, how good (or legitimate) an analyst is this guy if he computes a reduction in cattle production and mysteriously forgets that cattle are a very significant source of GHGs and that therefore there would be a reduction in GHG EMISSIONS from cattle production and "forgot" that cattle are a very significant cause of deforestation and the reduction in cattle production would reduce GHG emissions from reduced rates of deforestation??

An inconvenient factor, perhaps?? ... only if you already have a conclusion you are trying to contort your analysis to support. Searchinger only wants to count the GHG emissions increases he can claim are due to ethanol production but IGNORES the impacts - PREDICTED BY HIS MODELS - that REDUCE LAND USE CHANGES, DEFORESTATION and RELATED GHG EMISSIONS! ....LOL!! THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE SCIENCE?? BULLSHIT!



NOTE that according to Mongabay, http://rainforests.mongabay.com/0812.htm">Cattle ranching was responsible for 65% to 70% of the deforeststion in the Brazilian Amazon from 2000-2005

[JohnWxy]

9. Reader is advised that Oak Ridge National Laboratory concluded U.S. could meet 30% of it's fuel need

... for transportation from biomass (mostly from cellulosic sources).


http://www.ornl.gov/info/press_releases/get_press_release.cfm?releasenumber=mr20050421-01


Growth in biomass could put U.S. on road to energy independence

OAK RIDGE, Tenn., April 21, 2005 — Relief from soaring prices at the gas pump could come in the form of corncobs, cornstalks, switchgrass and other types of biomass, according to a joint feasibility study for the departments of Agriculture and Energy.

The recently completed Oak Ridge National Laboratory report outlines a national strategy in which 1 billion dry tons of biomass - any organic matter that is available on a renewable or recurring basis - would displace 30 percent of the nation's petroleum consumption for transportation. Supplying more than 3 percent of the nation's energy, biomass already has surpassed hydropower as the largest domestic source of renewable energy, and researchers believe much potential remains.

"Our report answers several key questions," said Bob Perlack, a member of ORNL's Environmental Sciences Division and a co-author of the report. "We wanted to know how large a role biomass could play, whether the United States has the land resources and whether such a plan would be economically viable."

Looking at just forestland and agricultural land, the two largest potential biomass sources, the study found potential exceeding 1.3 billion dry tons per year. That amount is enough to produce biofuels to meet more than one-third of the current demand for transportation fuels, according to the report.

(more)

[Nathanael]

10. Thanks for this.