About 15 years ago, government incentives helped to launch a biofuel boom in the United States. Ethanol factories now consume about 130 million metric tons of corn every year. It’s about a third of the country’s total corn harvest, and growing that corn requires more than 100,000 square kilometers of land.

In addition, more than 4 million metric tons of soybean oil is turned into diesel fuel annually, and that number is growing fast.

Scientists have long warned that biofuel production on this scale involves costs: It claims land that otherwise could grow food or, alternatively, grass and trees that capture carbon from the air and provide a home for birds and other wildlife.

But government agencies, relying on the results of economic models, concluded that those costs would be modest, and that replacing gasoline with ethanol or biodiesel would help to meet greenhouse gas reduction goals.

The following submission statement was provided by /u/filosoful:

About 15 years ago, government incentives helped to launch a biofuel boom in the United States. Ethanol factories now consume about 130 million metric tons of corn every year. It’s about a third of the country’s total corn harvest, and growing that corn requires more than 100,000 square kilometers of land.

In addition, more than 4 million metric tons of soybean oil is turned into diesel fuel annually, and that number is growing fast.

Scientists have long warned that biofuel production on this scale involves costs: It claims land that otherwise could grow food or, alternatively, grass and trees that capture carbon from the air and provide a home for birds and other wildlife.

But government agencies, relying on the results of economic models, concluded that those costs would be modest, and that replacing gasoline with ethanol or biodiesel would help to meet greenhouse gas reduction goals.

Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/xyvzzm/how_green_are_biofuels_scientists_are_at/irixmex/

How in the world would ethanol/biofuel reduce carbon emissions? You still burn the stuff, and burning stuff creates carbon dioxide, and carbon dioxide is the problem. What am I missing?

It's supposed to be carbon neutral, it doesn't reduce carbon emissions

The plant captures some amount of co2 while it grows.

The carbon cycle. The carbon plants are made of was taken from the air in the first place. If all we ever did was burn plants which regrew using the CO2 in the atmosphere, the total carbon in the system would be the same.

Where we have a problem is taking carbon trapped under the earth, burning it, and adding carbon to the system continually. That's why fossil fuels are such a problem.

That said, growing a bunch of plants on land that displaces natural ecosystems using mechanized farming equipment and fertilizers and then burning them is not exactly an environmental panacea, and I think most studies have shown it to be more of a farm subsidy that's a bit of a wash environmentally.

But we have less acres of corn than a century ago. I don’t think they were growing corn for ethanol back then. I guess we lose 2 million acres of farmland a year to houses and lawns.

https://beef2live.com/story-us-corn-acreage-yield-time-85-210990

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/us-lost-1-3-million-180438622.html

You yourself are made of carbon from the air.

It can (theoretically) act as a carbon trap since you're not turning all biomass back into fuel, but the reality is that the process of growing the plants (including displacing native flora, fauna), etc. makes sure it's likely carbon positive still.

Way less so than fossil fuels, tho.

While true, thanks to modern crop genetics the yield of the crops have gone way up

Anyone who has remotely been paying attention knows that ethanol production is energy negative. It would be greener just to burn the petroleum. It’s just an expensive farm subsidy that raises the price of food.

> "Replacing gasoline with ethanol has changed landscapes across the globe."

Article mentions nothing but the USA.

Downvoted, misleading and editorialized headline.

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How green are biofuels?

The correct answer is, "almost some".

So the changeover to renewables will mean cutting corn production by a third. Very cool.

And we haven’t even done that because it’s being sold less and less and the price doesn’t make sense. E85 shouldn’t fluctuate with oil prices. They should fluctuate with the cost of corn.

Wash but there’s also added benefits if it would scale correctly. Less dependency on foreign powers if we relied more on e85. Wonder how many barrels/year e85 could offset if properly implemented.

Whats the environmental cost of the renewables? How many million trees did Scotlans cut down to make solar farms again? When those panels go bad, what happens to them? When the batteries in EVs go bad, what happens to them? Does any of this make that big a difference in tne big picture? How much human made pollution does this stopwhen India and China aren't doing the same? Does that make dramatically lowerong the standard of living in the west worth it?

Did we have to use fossil fuels at any point to grow the crops being turned into biofuel? Yes? Not grren at all.

You ask all these questions, seemingly unaware that they all have perfectly reasonable answers.

Lets hear them then

Still waiting