The Biodiesel Disaster: Why bad Ideas are Always so Successful?

This is a modified version of an article that was published on "Il Fatto Quotidiano" in Italian on Jan 31, 2019

Behind the simian mask, there is yours truly, Ugo Bardi, sitting at his desk.  The sign is in Italian, but you can understand that it is against biodiesel and in favor of Orangutans. 

Sometimes it happens that you are asked a question that forces you to reflect. So, a few days ago, I was at a public meeting on energy and climate and I was telling about the work we do at the university and with the Club of Rome. In the debate, someone asked me: "But, professor, from all these models of the world you make, after all, what did you learne?".

Some questions are not easy when the topic is complex and you have to summarize the answer in a few sentences. And you have to come up with something right away! But I think I could put together a good answer when I said, "The main thing we've learned is that the models work well. Even the famous model of 'The Limits to Growth' that the Club of Rome had proposed in 1972 still describes reasonably correctly the state of the world today. But this has a consequence: the system is predictable because it tends to move in a certain direction. And this means that changing things is very difficult ".

The problem of the difficulty of changing things, even when it would be necessary, came back to me by later on, when reading a recent report on biodiesel. This stuff is really terrible: it causes deforestation and destruction of the fertile soil. In terms of greenhouse gas emissions, it is much worse than traditional diesel fuel.

But, you could say, at least biodiesel replaces a non-renewable fuel obtained from oil. In practice, the problem is that we are not getting very far with the replacement. Making the appropriate calculations, we find that, today the production of biodiesel is about 2.7% by volume of the total production of diesel (the details of the calculation are at the end of this post). Considering that biodiesel contains less energy than diesel fuel, it is just over 2% of the total. And for this miserable 2% we destroyed forests all over the world and massacred untold numbers of orangutans?

Maybe you do not care about orangutans or ancient forests, you just want fuel for your diesel SUV. And you could tell me, couldn't biodiesel production be increased? The problem is that there are not many forests left to be razed in the world. To produce more biodiesel we should start using land that is currently used for food production. This means starving people to feed the cars: and we risk to get to that for real if we continue with current trends.

But how is it that we put ourselves in this absurd situation? The beauty is that the idea was to make an "ecological" fuel. Ecological my xxxx! But it is what I was saying before. The system (and the system is us) tends to maintain its trajectory. When we realize that there is a problem, in this case, the lack of diesel fuel (peak diesel), as well as global warming, we launch ourselves towards the solution that seems to keep things as they are. By replacing diesel oil with biodiesel, it seemed to be possible to fix everything with no change or with just minimal change. We use a renewable fuel and we keep our stoves on wheels running. But it doesn't work like that. We only created a lot of damage without getting anything useful.

What we should have done, and we are still in time to do, is to move from the noisy and inefficient internal combustion engines to vehicles that use electric motors powered by renewable energy, much more efficient and non-polluting for real. Of course, this requires making investments, changing habits. Thus, the knee-jerk reaction of so many people when the idea is proposed is "I do not want to change anything, give me biodiesel so that I keep my diesel car". It is understandable, but we are in an emergency situation both for the climate and for the availability of fuels. And change we must.



h/t Virna Quintini  and Veronica Aneris

Calculation

It is curious that nobody on the Web seems to have bothered to do the calculation of how much biodiesel is actually produced in comparison with fossil diesel. I tried to find the data and the result is a bewildering mess of different units, claims, and counterclaims. Of course, if you are a good conspiracy theorist, you would suspect that the people producing biodiesel don't want to make it easy for us to understand how minuscule is their contribution to the world's fuel production. But, eventually, I could put together a calculation that seems to be correct and that Antonio Turiel kindly checked and validate. And, yes, the contribution of biodiesel to the world's diesel consumption is minuscule. So, let's go with the numbers.

BP.com gives 1577 Kboe of biofuels (the people who use these weird units should be killed by a lightning strike coming from God herself). I think it means one million and a half barrel of oil equivalent per day. And then, it is reasonable to say that biodiesel could be a fraction of that, as you say, ca 0.65 million barrels per day. That makes 237 million barrels per year. One barrel is 42 gallons, indeed we have some 10 billion gallons per year, a datum which corresponds to one provided by the biodiesel journal. Again, these people he should be struck by lightning for using these units. So far, so good.

Then, back to IEA, they say that the world diesel production was 1234442 thousand tonnes in 2016, or 1234 million tons, or 1.2 billion tons. One toneq corresponds to 6.88 -- 7.33 barrels (depending on the assumptions), let's say it is 7 barrels/ton. The result is that the world diesel production is some 8.5 billion barrels/year, which is a reasonable number considering that the total oil production is some 90 million barrels/day, or 32 billion barrels/year. Converting this to gallons, we need to multiply by 42, and we get 350 billion gallons/year

To recap, the good results are

DIESEL production is 9 Billion Barrels/year OR 350 billion gallons/year

BIODIESEL production is 0.237 Billion Barrels/year OR 10 billion gallons/year

Which means that the total production of biodiesel is 10/360= about 2.8% in volume. A little more than 2% considering the lower heat content in biodiesel.

The poor people who had devised the SI system must be twitching in their tombs when they think at the mess that is the story of the zillion units used in this field.

Go Electric, Young Man! The Story of the Electric Fiat "500"

The Fiat "500," manufactured from 1957 to 1975 was a true prodigy of engineering and it left a deep impression on popular culture in many countries. Above, driven by "Lupin Sansei" (ルパン三世), a Japanese Manga character created by Monkey Punch. In this post, I describe how we transformed one of these old cars to run on electric power.

Some ten years ago, myself and my friend Pietro Cambi had the weird idea of "retrofitting" Pietro's old Fiat 500, turning it into an electric car. To understand why we embarked in such a task, you have to consider that we were (and are) both "peak oilers"; but also we were (and are) both Italian and the Fiat 500 is a car that has a peculiar fascination for Italians. Nobody in Italy can forget how the 500 motorized Italians in the 1950s, at the time of the "Economic Miracle". For Italians, the Fiat 500 carries the same fascination that the French have for their "R4", the Germans for their VW "Beetle" and the Russian for their "T34" (this last one not exactly a car, though). 

So, we put this idea into practice in 2007 and it worked. It was, actually, rather easy. An electric car is so much simpler than a car powered by a combustion engine. Just look at the difference: 

You see? The internal combustion engine is a mess of pipes, cables, valves, and all sort of strange things. The electric motor is just what you see: a cylinder with a small fan on top. That's it. To make things even simpler for us, we took a motor of the same rated power (12kW) as the old engine and we connected it to the gearbox. In reality, a smaller motor would have been more than enough. Then, if we had been able to create something more sophisticated, we wouldn't have needed a gearbox, we could have connected the motor (better still, two motors) directly to the wheels. More efficient and even simpler. 

For more technical detail, you can see a post of mine on "The Oil Drum". We added lithium-polymer batteries and a control system. The result was a wonderful little car that ran very nicely with a range of nearly 100 km. It aroused a lot of interest, as you can see in this picture (h/t Chantal, professional model who kindly accepted to pose with the 500)

It also aroused some interest with politicians and we tried to have the government approve a law that favored the electric retrofitting of old cars. It didn't work; the law was rejected, also because the Communists (yes, there were Communists in the Italian parliament, at that time) voted against it. Apparently, they thought that the working class should only take the bus. 

Apart from the diehard Communists in parliament, our attempt to create a retrofitting industry was probably doomed from the beginning. We expected some resistance to the idea, but we were not fully prepared to the howls of disgust we received, directed at the concept of retrofitting and reusing old cars. Apparently, a rule of life is that prosperity comes from building as many toys as possible and discarding them as fast as possible (and he who dies with the most toys, wins). Repairing or refitting old toys is not contemplated by the rules, even though that would save energy and resources. Only subversives, madmen, and peak oilers could ever think of such a thing. 

Ten years have passed. From then, some more retrofitting attempts have been made, some again with the Fiat 500. And the lower cost of batteries has made the task much less expensive than it was in 2007. Still, retrofitting remains a very marginal industry where only a minuscule number of enthusiasts are engaged. 

You may call this result a failure but, rethinking about this story, I think we still did something good. One good result was to demonstrate how simple and practical an electric vehicle could be in an age when there were very few electric cars available. Of course, we were not the only ones who proposed electric prototypes; there were many others. But we added our little bit to a movement of ideas that was leading to something. Then, there came Elon Musk and his Tesla; the electric car is not anymore a toy for hippies, it is a serious commercial and industrial product, moving onward to conquer the market. 

More than all, I think that what we did was a step in a direction which we ourselves couldn't fully perceive at the time. We had this idea that a car needed not to be a huge, smelly, inefficient, destructive monster but it could be something simple, small, friendly, and unprepossessing (see below, Pietro Cambi driving the 500 in the Cathedral Square, in Florence)

Taken to its extreme consequences, the idea of a small and friendly car becomes something that has little to do with the concept of "car" as it was intended up to now. Add to it a GPS positioning system, make full use of the intelligent electronic systems we have nowadays, and we have a completely new paradigm. The car is not anymore a car, but just an element of a "TAAS" (transportation as a service) system, where we don't own cars, we share them. That's the direction in which we are going. And we are going there using electric cars.