Reference no: EM131128824
Pros and Cons of Biofuels
Your readings and required multimedia sources this week have provided background into life cycle assessment and biofuel production. Based on this information, you are to write a paper that discusses the pros and cons of biofuel proliferation in the United States. At a minimum, your paper should contain:
a. An introduction that describes biofuel production and contains a thesis statement.
b. A background of biofuels, including a description of the various types in use today.
c. The environmental pros and cons of biofuel use. Tthis should contain some discuss of life cycle assessment.
d. The economic pros and cons of biofuel use.
e. Suggestions for policies regarding biofuel use that would maximize environmental and economic health.
f. A conclusion summarizing your analysis.
Your paper must be three to five pages in length (excluding title and reference pages) and formatted according to APA style as outlined in the Ashford Writing Center. Additionally, you must use at least three scholarly sources to provide sufficient details of the topics listed above. All sources must be properly cited in text as well as on the reference page.
PLEASE USE below RESOURCES AS WELL AS OTHERS. MUST CITE WITHIN WRITTEN MATERIAL. NEEDS TO BE AT LEAST 3 PAGES.
Botkin, D. B., & Keller, E. A. (2014). Environmental science: Earth as a living planet (9th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
16.7 Biofuels
Biofuel is energy recovered from biomass (organic matter). We can divide biofuels into five groups:
1. unmanaged growth harvested by people, including firewood, grasses, and peat;
2. organic wastes used directly, including cooking oil, which can fuel diesel engines, and methane, emitted from bacterial decomposition of waste;
3. agrifuels, which are crops grown to be converted into liquid fuels;
4. ethanol produced by some algae as a by-product of photosynthesis;
16.7 Biofuels 379 5. ethanol produced by bacteria as a by-product of bacteria's decomposition of organic wastes.
Biofuels and Human History
Biomass is the oldest fuel used by people. Our Pleistocene ancestors burned wood in caves to keep warm and cook food. Biofuels remained a major source of energy through- out most of the history of civilization. When North America was first settled, there was more wood fuel than could be used. Forests often were cleared for agriculture by girdling trees (cutting through the bark all the way around the base of a tree) to kill them and then burning the forests.
Until the end of the 19th century, wood was the major fuel in the United States. During the mid-20th century, when coal, oil, and gas were plentiful, burning wood became old-fashioned and quaint, done just for pleasure in an open fireplace, even though most of the heat went up the chimney. Now, with other fuels reaching a limit in abundance and production, there is renewed interest in using natural organic materials for fuel.
More than 1 billion people in the world today still use wood as their primary source of energy for heat and cook- ing.12 Although firewood is the most familiar and most widely used biomass fuel, there are many others. In India and other countries, cattle dung is burned for cooking.
Peat, a form of compressed dead vegetation, provides heating and cooking fuel in northern countries, such as Scotland, where it is abundant. Renewed interest in bio- fuels grew during the last decades of the 20th century and continues today. For example, on December 10, 2012, a ship carrying nearly 20,000 metric tons of wood pellets produced in eastern Canada arrived at the Wismar seaport in Germany. The pellets will be used in steam-generating electric power plants. Why are wood pellets becoming a new energy source? Because electricity produced from burningthemreleaseslesscarbondioxideintotheatmo- sphere than coal and oil. Nations that want to show that they are reducing carbon emissions are therefore turning to wood pellets. The problem is that the total carbon release involved in growing and harvesting trees and energy used to produce the pellets and shipping the pellets are not ac- counted for by the nations burning the pellets. It may be that in the end more carbon dioxide is released in total using wood pellets to fuel power plants than is produced by fossil fuels. This carbon accounting has been the subject of only a few studies. One, issued by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, stated that burning wood pellets releases a large amount of CO2, creating a carbon debt.
In recent years, biofuels have become controversial. Do biofuels offer a net benefit or disbenefit? In brief:
• Using wastes as a fuel is a good way to dispose of them. Making them takes more energy than they yield; on the other hand, they reduce the amount of energy we must obtain from other sources. Firewood that regen- erates naturally or in plantations that require little en- ergy input will remain an important energy source in developing nations and locally in industrialized nations. Despite pressure from some agricultural corporations and some governments to promote crops grown sole- ly for conversion into liquid fuels (called agrifuels), at present these are poor sources of energy. Most scientific research shows that producing agrifuels takes more en- ergy than they yield. In some cases, there appears to be a net benefit, but the energy produced per unit of land area is low, much lower than can be obtained from solar and wind.
What it boils down to is that photosynthesis, though a remarkable natural process, is less efficient than mod- ern photovoltaic cells in converting sunlight to electricity. Some algae and bacteria appear to provide a net energy benefit and can yield ethanol directly, but production of ethanol from these sources is just beginning and is experimental.
Biofuels and the Environment
The conversion of farmland from food crops to biofuels appears to be one of the main reasons that food prices have risen rapidly worldwide and that worldwide food production no longer exceeds demand. It also has envi- ronmental effects.
Biofuel agriculture competes for water with all other uses, and the main biofuel crops require heavy use of arti- ficial fertilizers and pesticides.
Biofuels are supposed to reduce the production of greenhouse gases, but when natural vegetation is removed to grow biofuel crops, the opposite may be the case. It is estimated that 16 million hectares (40 million acres) have been deforested in Indonesia alone since 1970, a consider- able proportion of which has been converted to oil palm plantation. This is an area equal to more than 10% of all the cropland in the United States, as large as Oklahoma and larger than Florida.
The use of biofuels can pollute the air and degrade the land. For most of us, the smell of smoke from a single campfire is part of a pleasant outdoor experience. Under certain weather conditions, however, wood smoke from many campfires or chimneys in narrow valleys can lead to air pollution. The use of biomass as fuel places pressure on an already heavily used resource. A worldwide shortage of firewood is adversely affecting natural areas and endangered species. For example, the need for firewood has threatened the Gir Forest in India, the last remaining habitat of the Indian lion (not to be confused with the Indian tiger). The world's forests will also shrink and in some cases vanish if our need for their products exceeds their productivity.
Biofuels do have some potential benefits. One is that certain kinds of crops, such as nuts produced by trees, may provide a net energy benefit in environments that are otherwise not suited to the growth of food crops. Another environmental plus is that combustion of biofuels gener- ally releases fewer pollutants, such as sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, than does combustion of coal and gaso- line. This is not always the case for burning urban waste, however. Although plastics and hazardous materials are removed before burning, some inevitably slip through the sorting process and are burned, releasing air pollutants, including heavy metals. There is a conflict in our society as to whether it is better, in terms of the environment, to burn urban waste to recover energy and risk some increase in air pollution, or dump these wastes in landfills, which can then pollute soil and groundwater.
(Botkin 381)
Botkin, Daniel B. Environmental Science: Earth as a Living Planet, 9th Edition. Wiley, 2013-12-23. VitalBook file.
Article
1. Wise, J. (2006, November 1). The truth about hydrogen. Popular Mechanics. Retrieved from https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/next-generation/4199381
Multimedia
1. energynownews. (2010, November 14). Inside fuel cell bus technology [Video clip]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_Itzp4NTD4
o Captions are available by clicking the "CC" icon in the video window.
2. formulaprimer. (2009, November 6). Biofuels - The answer or the problem [Video clip]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_Fw6y4T3Po
o Transcript
3. U.S. Department of Energy. (2012, September 5). Energy 101 | Algae-to-fuels [Video clip]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxyvVkeW7Nk
o Captions are available by clicking the "CC" icon in the video window.