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Politics : Rat's Nest - Chronicles of Collapse -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (9133)	5/11/2009 7:17:26 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Respond to of 24228

Bioelectricity better than biofuels for transport Jeff Tollefson, Nature Vehicles propelled by biomass-fired electricity would travel farther on a given crop and produce fewer greenhouse-gas emissions than vehicles powered by ethanol, researchers report today. Burning biomass to produce electricity is generally more efficient than converting it into ethanol. And electric vehicles — although often more expensive to make and maintain than many vehicles with internal combustion engines — are also more efficient at converting that energy into motion. In the current study, the researchers, led by Elliott Campbell of the University of California, Merced, modelled the entire system all the way from crop cultivation to vehicle propulsion, comparing cumulative greenhouse-gas emissions for both biofuels and bioelectricity. They found that the bioelectric route came out ahead of both corn ethanol and advanced cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass. (7 May 2009) The report in Science (subscribers only): Greater Transportation Energy and GHG Offsets from Bioelectricity Than Ethanol . Abstract: The quantity of land available to grow biofuel crops without impacting food prices or greenhouse gas emissions from land conversion is limited. Therefore, bioenergy should maximize land-use efficiency when addressing transportation and climate change goals. Biomass could power either internal combustion or electric vehicles, but the relative land-use efficiency of these two energy pathways is not well quantified. Here, we show that bioelectricity outperforms ethanol across a range of feedstocks, conversion technologies, and vehicle classes. Bioelectricity produces an average 81% more transportation kilometers and 108% more emissions offsets per unit area cropland than cellulosic ethanol. These results suggest that alternative bioenergy pathways have large differences in how efficiently they use the available land to achieve transportation and climate goals. nature.com