Biomass

There's a thought-provoking article in an IEEE publication on the issue of biofuels. It examines whether it is more efficient to convert biomass into liquid fuel or simply burn it to turn it directly into electricity and use that to power electric vehicles. The answer, at least using today's technology and the set of parameters that this study chose, is that it's significantly more efficient to burn the biomass.

There are many factors involved in this calculation, but the most significant is the inefficiency of the internal combustion engine, compared to an electric motor. Even though more of the energy of the biomass is extracted by the ethanol process, that gain is more than offset by poor efficiency when it's used.

Another aspect of this issue is climate change and the bioelectricity pathway results in more than twice the reduction in emissions per unit area produced by ethanol.

To me, articles like this one call into question the whole ethanol idea. The technology will change and improve as it is developed, but right now I'm pretty sure that making ethanol from corn is a Really Bad Idea. Using things like switchgrass makes more sense to me, but I'm still not sure whether we're using more energy to make the fuel than it provides.