I stumbled across Blume’s work a couple of years ago and have been an ethanol advocate ever since. I would agree totally that confirmation bias and group think has got in the way of a proper debate on this issue. From my experience ethanol simply evokes a baseline negative emotional response in most people that prevents them from seeing the opportunities beyond just fuelling “business as usual”.

This is a classic example of “not seeing the forest for the trees”. For example looking at it from a New Zealand perspective, approx $9Billion is lost from our communities every year to feed an insatiable appetite for liquid energy. That global addiction to oil is in effect a symptom of a globalised entropic monetary system that is winding down the Earth’s, resources, ecology, atmosphere and cultures.

Ethanol on the other hand has the potential to do just the opposite and the reason for that is that ethanol as a liquid fuel source can not be globalised. (Yet..Industry is certainly working hard to unlock the holy grail of cellulosic ethanol)

The fundamental thing about current ethanol production is that it needs to be produced close to where the feed stock is grown but the feed stock can essentially be any vegetative material that contains sugar or starch. Therefore forget monoculture and start thinking polyculture of diverse species that can be used as food and fuel. Currently many tonnes of orchard waste gets just that, wasted, in fruit growing areas simply because it does not make the grade. Ethanol production is a simple way to value add this waste crop, but it has to be localised.

And there is the opportunity. Ethanol provides a huge opportunity for local communities to recapture some of the petro$$ they are currently haemorrhaging and use them to restructure and rebuild their local economies.

From what I have researched locally, you can build a fuel grade ethanol still capable of producing 10,000 litres per week for about $10,000. Therefore the problem is not the technology or its cost but sourcing the feedstock. FOOD to FUEL I can hear everyone cry!

But what about POO to FUEL! Wetland plants like typha are commonly used to treat municipal sewage. Therefore, in many places we already have a heavily fertilised, high yielding ethanol feedstock that is currently not being utilised. By building a local ethanol plant next to such a sewage treatment facility, local communities could start to develop a system that manages to improve water quality, wean themselves of fossil oil, reduce their Co2, create jobs and build resilience.

Connect that with local farmers and the possibilities are endless. For example since NZ was colonised 80 to 90% of our wetlands have been lost to agriculture. Because many of those low lying flat lands were cleared and drained and are now grazed, our waterways are now seriously polluted with nutrient rich run-off from stock. The ironic thing is our native reed Raupo (Typha orientalis) is considered a pasture weed. Through good permaculture design we could artificially reinstate many of those wetlands, grow Typha to absorb the excess nutrient and harvest it a cash crop to feed for the local ethanol plant.

In that scenario aquatic systems win, the farmer wins and the consumer wins with access to an alternative carbon neutral liquid fuel.

As Blume points out, when you produce ethanol, you are essentially distilling the energy, leaving the biomass and nutrients behind. Such mash can be used for stock feed or making compost products. As many would know permaculture activists are at the forefront of research into soil carbon sequestration and soil building . An ethanol plant could essentially become a community compost processing plant that helps to close the fertility cycle of local agricultural production systems.

A localised alternative to oil and superphosphate.

But it gets better. If a local community developed such infrastructure through a cooperative such as a credit union or community bank, those petro$$ that were once lost from a community to Big Oil, could then be circulated back through that community. Think how many people there are in your town and how much they would spend on petrol each week. Imagine those kind of $$ being put back through your community, creating local jobs and opportunities rather than just profits going to Big Oil to fund the continued destruction of the planet.

When most people think of ethanol they simply think of vast monocultures competing with food crops for dwindling amounts of for arable land. To those people I say loose the “globalised goggles” and start thinking locally. Ethanol will never replace oil drop for drop on the global scale and you wouldn’t want it to but that’s not the point. What ethanol could do is empower and regenerate your bioregion and aid in the transition to a to a lower energy future. Even with local ethanol production we face a significant decline in energy but localised ethanol production at least offers an opportunity for communities to manage that decline.

Given the dire state of affairs that is the post modern epoch I think we should be doing everything within our power to avoid fossil enenergy and instead and set up systems that close the loops.

Lets ditch OPEC and replace it with LOPEC

Local Organic Polycultural Energy Co-operatives.

The problem is the solution.

the ability to do some simple order-of-magnitude guesstimations is often extremely useful. Every physicist should have learned this, but I think we would be in a much better position if more people habitually would do it.

I don’t say David Blume is wrong – but I would strongly advise to take a very close look at such claims (which of course includes independent verification through independent reproduction of results). If he really can demonstrate that he can reproducibly achieve the “impossible”, I’m all ears. I think that it is especially important to keep in mind here that Blume tells people what they want to hear. Maybe that’s because he really can do it. But that alone – if someone tells people what they want to hear – naturally makes me a bit suspicious.

Doing guesstimations can be learned, and I sometimes wonder whether working out a training program for non-physicists may be a good idea…

Carl Sagan said it very nicely in the introduction to “The Demon-Haunted World”:

==>
It was from Kuiper that I first got a feeling for what is called a back-of-the-envelope calculation: A possible explanation to a problem occurs to you, you pull out an old envelope, appeal to your knowledge of fundamental physics, scribble a few approximate equations on the envelope, substitute in likely numerical values, and see if your answer comes anywhere near explaining your problem. If not, you look for a different explanation. It cut through nonsense like a knife through butter.
<==

Essentially, David McKay ("Without the hot air") doesn't do much more than just order-of-magnitude guesstimations over and over again. There are some ways to get it wrong though when biological systems are involved. Rather than re-explaining the problem at length using the Tanganyika Groundnut Scheme as an example, let me refer to this talk I gave two years ago:

http://www.soton.ac.uk/~doctom/teaching/transition/03-guesstimation.pdf

The problem I have with "Biofuels" or other such "solutions" is that the most important aspect usually does not get discussed: "Biofuels – what for"? To keep our round-the-clock-active ~36 million car-equivalents going? I'd say: Forget it. But for important applications – say, emergency ambulances when a bicycle ambulance won't do – why not?

I said in the article I wasn’t going to address them (in detail). It’s a large and nuanced topic, which is why I deferred to Blume (start with Busting the Ethanol Myths – http://alcoholcanbeagas.com/book_menu/489/490). I at least provided examples showing that the popular generalisation of biofuels is an unfair caricature:

“Biofuels compete with food production and are therefore a moral obscenity” — Blume’s system based on fodder beets demonstrates the abundant food production possible from integrated fuel & food systems. In Samboja Lestari the palms are used for sugar production as well as fuel, and the presence of the fire barrier allows other food crops to be grown.

“There’s not enough land to grow the crops necessary to make a dent in our current requirements” — most calculations are done using industrial corn ethanol, a very mediocre fuel crop, typically without acknowledging the value of carbon dioxide, waste heat and distillers grains. There are many better crops, and ones that are able to make use of the abundant farmland and marginal land. Managed sewage grown cattails have a productivity based on starch alone of approximately 10x that. 40x if Blume’s starch & cellulose figure is accurate.

“Biofuels have a low or negative energy return and are just a way for big business to get government subsidies” — Scale and crop plays an important part in the energy balance. Tapping palms for fuel does not involve plowing fields, sowing seed every year, applying chemicals, machine harvesting, shipping, milling, cooking, premalting, hydrolysis, liquefaction, or saccharification. One would expect the energy return to be significantly higher than industrial corn ethanol. Improvements can be identified for other crops and small scale systems involving less shipping and organic/permaculture techniques.

“Biofuels are bad for the environment, destroying native vegetation and top soil, and polluting air and waterways” — Samboja Lestari stands out as an example of biofuel systems improving the condition of the land, air and water. In the US mesquite trees are poisoned to facilitate cattle farming, whereas they could possibly be harvested for fuel, fodder and timber while improving the landscape. Ranging cattle would likely turn it to desert.

Thanks for your thoughts.

Society is so complex, dynamic and unmeasurable it’s of limited value to take a top down approach to design everything and attempt to draw conclusions from it. You do not need to design the whole (how to make vehicles and roads sustainably for example) or know how an individual would source all needs to contribute to movement toward sustainability and regeneration. This is why permaculture is structured as a set of principles instead of as a prescription. It’s a generative grammar and lens that individuals and groups can employ without centralised command & control, concensus or complete knowledge. Instead we can apply ethics and principles to evaluate the merit of specific techniques. Following is my evaluation for biofuels, past and present examples that do not use permaculture design notwithstanding.

Earth care: you can use pioneering species and otherwise soil building plants to secure and improve degraded landscapes, increase biodiversity, habitat and improve climate while producing biofuels as in Samboja Lestari. Using liquid biofuels for cooking may relieve the land from deforestation. Providing an economical alternative to fossil fuels may save the decimation of land by avoiding drilling and mining, oil spills, pipelines, toxic refinery waste and war. Cattails can be used to treat sewage instead of expensive conventional facilities.

People care: Integrated biofuel production provides for stable income and increased food supply, and needs that may not be serviceable without high density portable and storable liquid fuel such as remote health care, emergency response and long distance trade. Biofuels can save backbreaking labour. The local and distributed nature of production relieves pressure between groups that lead to military defence spending and war. Cooking with alcohol can prevent eye and lung damage from wood smoke in poorly ventilated housing common in Africa. Many of the systems employed in permaculture depend on motor fuel, such as earthworks (keylining, dam construction) and even local food distribution (community supported agriculture, for example). Without fuel these systems may not be feasible.

Fair share: Since more workers are needed than in fossil fuel production a greater share of benefits are distributed to many besides shareholders and executives. Biofuels can go to transporting designers, educators, labourers and materials for setting up new permaculture demonstration farms and essential services. Without fuel many people may not have the opportunity to learn and employ permaculture.

Catch & store energy: Biofuels clearly satisfy this principle. It’s similar to a farmer storing silage for working animals, as has been done throughout history. It was typical for farmers to allocate a third of their land plus storage facilities to feed their working animals.

Obtain a yield: Biofuels yield transport, earth moving, processing, heating, cooking, lighting fuel, as well as synthetic rubber, solvents, disinfectants and other useful industrial chemicals, carbon dioxide, organic fertiliser and animal feed. There may be other yields from a well designed system, such as the fire barrier function of sugar palms in Samboja Lestari.

Use & value renewable resources & services: Biofuels are renewable so this principle encourages us to use them.

Produce no waste: Ethanol and biodiesel burn without significant pollution and all of the co-products are useful. Ethanol also burns cooler and with less vibration than petrol so it extends motor life. Without fuel the motors, vehicles, equipment and infrastructure that have already been built will go to waste when fossil fuel runs short. You could run an electric generator on an ethanol/biodiesel blend which would provide heat, humidity and carbon dioxide to a greenhouse. Blume used to collect pickup loads of waste donuts to produce 100 gallons of ethanol each.

Design from patterns to details: Gaining fuel from plants (via food, wood, animal silage or derived liquid fuel) is an accepted pattern. How far that can go to sustaining specific services currently serviced by modern technology is a detail that can be worked out in time.

Integrate rather than segregate: Fuel, food and other production such as timber and craft materials can be integrated. Mollison mentions that the filtered shade between Babassu palms are great for agriculture, and the palms can support vanilla orchids and trellis systems. Blume talks about integration of food production with the fermentation process – greenhouses using carbon dioxide and heat to accelerate plant growth and leftover mash to feed animals or fertilise plants.

Use small & slow solutions: One might argue that using machines is a fast solution but Mollison doesn’t mind this fact. I know that you at least jet around the world, use the internet, and use a digital camera. It’s about appropriate technology, and getting the same job done with manual labour or animals extracts a cost in food (which is a fuel) anyway.

A permaculture biofuel industry would be realised as small to medium sized enterprises employing many people in fair pace, enjoyable work (the tapping of palm as in the article, for example). Compared to the mammoth, centralised fossil fuels industry biofuels look like a significant improvement according to this principle.

Use & value diversity: There are many plants useful for making biofuels, some of which are considered weedy like cattails, mesquite and babassu. Flexibility – some feedstocks can be switched to other products depending on demand and storage capacity – e.g. Cassava starch could either be fermented to ethanol or stored as flour depending on market conditions. This multiple/switchable income may provide dynamic stability for enterprises susceptible to market vagaries.

Use edges & value the marginal: Algae and seaweed grown along watercourses and coasts are good sources of feedstock, for example. Wild cattails and mesquite grown on marginal and degraded land can be harvested.

Creatively use & respond to change: Permaculturists being in a position to ride out the possibly sudden depletion or interruption of fossil fuels puts us in a great position to direct the unfolding response to peak oil and other crises. If we are as helpless to implement our designs as everyone else is at continuing business as usual then permaculture will have relatively less appeal and capacity to meet the crisis.

There is an advantage even if it exists only for only a few years. If there isn’t the time to scale up completely it’s still going to be profitable for those producing and using it, especially when the availability of conventional fuels is uncertain. In any case ethanol is useful for many applications besides internal combustion, so producing it will not be a waste of resources even if vehicles and infrastructure are not serviceable.

Roads and machines were built and maintained before the high quality energy sources and materials we use today were available. With application of permaculture and recent knowledge gained in natural materials (Henry Ford developed car parts using agricultural byproducts: http://www.hempplastic.com/newSite/hp_aboutplastics_fordcar.htm) and cradle to cradle manufacturing solutions could be found to at least keep some of the fleet in service, if not manufacture some new machines. Having even a small fraction of machines and motor vehicles functioning indefinitely into the future will have a significant impact on the quality of life of many people.

As for not having the biomass and subsistence farming being a reality in much of the world, we still have an opportunity to capitalise on the one-off fossil fuel inheritance to make the biomass and improve on subsistence, one permaculture project at a time. Once that’s gone and we don’t have the capital to set up major systems then yes, we will join their boat. We won’t have much ability to help others, especially those in foreign countries, improve their lot either. If biofuels can be as energetically profitable as Blume asserts then we may be able to climb out of that hole.

For example, one article I wrote (http://www.celsias.com/article/biofuels-from-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire/) caused the following title on a fellow environmental website:

http://green.autoblog.com/2007/01/01/celsias-turns-a-jaundiced-eye-on-biofuels/

My writing against biofuels was ‘out of the box’ at the time. I’m thus not a product of media-influenced comfirmation bias – if anything, it’s the other way around. My studies in soil science lead me to be very concerned about our (mis)management of the carbon cycle. This understanding has always caused me to realise we just do not have biomass to burn.

Since those days, I have experienced ‘confirmation bias’ in the sense that I’ve travelled to many two-thirds world countries where the daily struggle to maintain human existence whilst still managing to ‘invest’ in their soils – the foundation of that existence – is a challenge few in the west currently appreciate, but which I believe we’ll soon begin to appreciate, one way or the other.

I invited Tim to put this post up, as he is one of a couple of people who’ve requested this topic get presented, and since he felt so strongly about it, and in the interests of free speech and the spirit of discussion I suggested he make the pitch.

I don’t, however, totally agree with the concept. There are many reasons I feel thus, but will share just a few here:

1) Historically, the dance between man’s needs and the environment he extracts those needs from, over thousands of years, has often ended in disaster. The reason is because we find it very difficult to find a balance between deposits and extraction from our soil bank. Withdrawals have usually exceeded deposits in humus/organic matter/soil life, until society collapses and has to move elsewhere. There are a few exceptions, particularly in Asian cultures (see Farmers of Forty Centuries). Today we cannot move elsewhere – there are no more frontiers, and we’re even at the point where taking land from someone else often won’t help, as those other people are also living on borrowed time in regards to their soil inventory.

It needs to be recognised that it is quite a challenge to live on the land with high populations, and to do so dependably over an indefinite time frame. Take this challenge, and then add yet another ‘need’ – that of running our vehicles – and you are increasing this challenge significantly. Please do not make light of the significance of this. I’d like to see a show of hands from all on whether you’re providing for all of your needs from a modest piece of land. I would wager none of you are. Or, at least, I’d like to hear from people who are actually moving in this direction. Anyone that has actually tried to live sustainably on a small piece of land inevitably discovers a deep respect for the few cultures that have managed to do so. Burning fossil fuels buried deep in the ground is one thing, but to actually burn precious soil-building biomass is quite another.

2) When you look at your car, don’t just look at the vehicle itself. Please also look at all the infrastructure that makes that vehicle possible. Yes, you can run your car from biofuels, but you’re also committing the whole vehicle manufacturing process to doing likewise. It takes an enormous amount of energy to produce and distribute them. A full energy audit needs to be considered on this. Your car will only last a few years before it’s ready for the scrap heap. What then?

3) Also, please think about what other fossil fuel dependent aspects of our society (that’s pretty much everything) will try to switch to burning biomass to prolong them.

Closing thought: I won’t get into a back and forth on this, as I’m too busy. All must make up their own minds on this issue – but I just ask you consider the immense land-redistribution issues we face, in connection with the need to ensure that land is on a soil-building regime of management. We humans are famously good at rapid extraction, but not so good at holistic stewardship.

I would like to see someone show me examples of people providing for their own needs from their land whilst also running a vehicle from that land. Then, if we can find such a person, let’s look at how much land they’re using, what climate they’re in, and extrapolate that out to see what it would mean if all people on the planet were to imitate that model.

Thanks Tim, you’ve hit the nail straight on the head!

thanks for letting the world know that you don’t take research as serious.

“The material fermented contains only a small part of the carbon fixed by the plant. If you do not displace something doing a better job you are increasing the rate of carbon sequestration. Yes, you can generate wealth and drive your vehicle while potentially reversing climate change”.

please resurch this matter, it is importants that we move on from this misguided infomation.
kind regards