alt Hacker NewsI vaguely recall reading that biofuels have been debunked as being insanely inefficient as a fuel source and consume land that would be better used to grow food.
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Biofuels are basically green washing. While sugar-based is better than corn-based, Brazilian biofuel is mostly just turning EU subsidies into profit, by converting petrol into sugar-based biofuel to burn instead of burning the petrol directly. Very unfortunate.
The main focus of the article is not biofuels, but plant based plastics. We can replace most of the need for fuel with EV (or hydrogen fuels), but plastic is a harder problem. Micro and nanoplastics are also a problem that urgently needs to be addressed.
There is nothing to debunk. Countries that heavily rely on biofuels did it to fight trade pressures. Brazil is the posterboy.
We KNOW it is inefficient. It's why anywhere someone who has the capital and has a brain, is swapping out cornfields for solar panels to make more money. Problem is the first setup of a corn field when you don't have that capital is cheaper due to subsidies.
America does those subsidies too. You guys voted for it, of course!
Certainly corn ethanol is mostly a bad idea (other than for anti-knock).
40% of US corn goes to biofuel (ethanol), contributing less than 4% of US fuel supply. With soybean oil it's even worse, 40% contributes 1%. Converting all farmland currently used for biofuel production globally to solar would produce 23x as much energy, enough to electrify the entire global (automotive) vehicle fleet.
I'm not familiar with how much feedstock is required to produce bioplastics, but it looks like plastics production globally is, I believe, around 500 million (metric) tons -- ie 500 billion kilograms, vs roughly 120 billion liters of biofuel. Napkin math at 1 kg/L (the density of ethanol is about 0.8 kg/l, so that's close), and that's about 4x more required, assuming no wastage by mass.
In other words, you're right to be skeptical; I don't think the math works.
Methanol and methane produced via DAC has been proposed as an alternative, but will only be feasible economically with extremely low energy costs. Possible with high solar penetration (see Australia), but far from a settled political question.
https://www.wri.org/insights/increased-biofuel-production-im...
https://ourworldindata.org/biofuel-land-solar-electric-vehic...