Rick Kaufman, the district’s spokesman, said elements in the biodiesel fuel that turn into a gel-like substance at temperatures below 10 degrees clogged about a dozen district buses Thursday morning. Some buses weren’t able to operate at all and others experienced problems while picking up students, he said.

“We had students at bus stops longer than we think is acceptable, and that’s too dangerous in these types of temperatures,” Kaufman said.

About 50 of the district’s 10,000 students were affected. Some waited at bus stops for up to 30 minutes; others were stuck on stalled buses.

Backup buses were sent out, but four of the district’s 10 backup buses were also affected, Kaufman said.

Several students had to go to the nurse’s office to warm up once they reached school and some returned home instead of waiting for buses that never came or were late, but there were no reports of students who required medical attention, he said. Transportation staffers were dispatched to make sure that there weren’t any students left at bus stops.

The decision to close school today came after district officials consulted with several neighboring districts that were experiencing similar problems. Bloomington staffers tried to get a waiver to bypass the state requirement and use pure diesel fuel, but they weren’t able to do so in enough time, Kaufman said. They also decided against scheduling a two-hour delay because the temperatures weren’t expected to rise enough that the problem would be eliminated.

In 2005, a new requirement went into effect that all diesel fuel sold in Minnesota had to contain 2 percent biodiesel. Kaufman said that some school districts keep their buses in temperature-controlled garages, and that the First Student bus service, which contracts with several metro-area school districts, keeps its buses in garages or idles them through the night.

Today’s closing will include community education programs such as Early Childhood, Kids Safari and Adult Basic Education. But high school athletic events will go on as scheduled, and all staff members are required to report to work.

Author: Lora Pabst, Star Tribune, Minneapolis

March 5, 2008
Want to Increase Your Greenhouse Gas Emissions? Use Biofuels!

In almost every essay we feature at World Climate Report, our focus is on climatic phenomena and the general disagreement between observations and what numerical models of climate tell us should be happening given the ongoing buildup of greenhouse gases. We draw heavily from the professional scientific peer-reviewed literature, and our journals of choice range from highly specialized journals in the climate community to far more generalized, but very highly respected journals such as Science and Nature.

A recent article in Science really caught our eye with the title “Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land-Use Change.” This article is not going to be well received by a lot of people given 1000s of websites telling us to switch to biofuels in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions - it looks like those darn “unintentional consequences” are about to bite another great-sounding idea squarely in the butt.
This sure to be controversial piece was written by Timothy Searchinger of the prestigious Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University and his daring eight associates from major institutions ranging from Woods Hole Research Center to the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development at Iowa State University. Before you run off and believe this must have been funded by some biofuel competitor, the authors note that “This material is based in part upon work supported by NASA under grant number NNX06AF15G issued through the Terrestrial Ecology Program and by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.”

They begin their article stating “Most life-cycle studies have found that replacing gasoline with ethanol modestly reduces greenhouse gases (GHGs) if made from corn and substantially if made from cellulose or sugarcane. These studies compare emissions from the separate steps of growing or mining the feedstocks (such as corn or crude oil), refining them into fuel, and burning the fuel in the vehicle. In these stages alone, corn and cellulosic ethanol emissions exceed or match those from fossil fuels and therefore produce no greenhouse benefits. But because growing biofuel feedstocks removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, biofuels can in theory reduce GHGs relative to fossil fuels.” This is the story we learn on all those websites trumpeting the benefits of biofuels - it is all made to look so easy, everyone wins, and biofuels basically buy us time until the next generation of sustainable energy sources are discovered and implemented on a global scale.

Searchinger et al. bring up a little problem that is beginning to rear its ugly head as they write “To produce biofuels, farmers can directly plow up more forest or grassland, which releases to the atmosphere much of the carbon previously stored in plants and soils through decomposition or fire.” Furthermore we learn “As land generates more ethanol over years, the reduced emissions from its use will eventually offset the carbon debt from land-use change, which mostly occurs quickly and is limited in our analysis to emissions within 30 years. We calculated that GHG savings from corn ethanol would equalize and therefore “pay back” carbon emissions from land-use change in 167 years, meaning GHGs increase until the end of that period. Over a 30-year period, counting land-use change, GHG emissions from corn ethanol nearly double those from gasoline for each km driven.”

Now isn’t that great news, switch to biofuels to presumably reduce your greenhouse gas emission and in reality, you double your greenhouse gas emission! Drive around for 167 years and you will finally begin to realize some savings to your greenhouse gas emission - makes sense, right?

From all the biofuels websites, you will discover a crowd that is in love with switchgrass or sugarcane as sources for ethanol production. Well, Searchinger et al. analyzed the situation there as well and concluded “But if American corn fields of average yield were converted to switchgrass for ethanol, replacing that corn would still trigger emissions from land-use change that would take 52 years to pay back and increase emissions over 30 years by 50%”. For sugarcane fans, we learn “Ethanol from Brazilian sugarcane, based on estimated GHG reductions of 86% excluding land-use changes, could pay back the up-front carbon emissions in 4 years if sugarcane only converts tropical grazing land. However, if displaced ranchers convert rainforest to grazing land, the payback period could rise to 45 years”. Finally, they warn “Higher prices triggered by biofuels will accelerate forest and grassland conversion there even if surplus croplands exist elsewhere.” Bye-bye rainforest, all in the name of biofuels which we can burn and increase our greenhouse gas emission - makes good sense to us??

The authors conclude “Use of good cropland to expand biofuels will probably exacerbate global warming in a manner similar to directly converting forest and grasslands. As a corollary, when farmers use today’s good cropland to produce food, they help to avert GHGs from land-use change.” We can only imagine the email Timothy Searchinger has been receiving following the publication of this article - we feel his pain.

By the way, we are not against biofuels. The Searchinger et al. team states “This study highlights the value of biofuels from waste products because they can avoid land-use change and its emissions. To avoid land-use change altogether, biofuels must use carbon that would reenter the atmosphere without doing useful work that needs to be replaced, for example, municipal waste, crop waste, and fall grass harvests from reserve lands. Algae grown in the desert or feedstocks produced on lands that generate little carbon today might also keep land-use change emissions low, but the ability to produce biofuel feedstocks abundantly on unproductive lands remains questionable.”

The biofuels advocates probably realize Searchinger et al. are right, but as with so many other components of the greenhouse debate, the facts will be inconvenient, and biofuels will be promoted as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Go figure?

Reference:

Searchinger, T.R. Heimlich, R.A. Houghton, F. Dong, A. Elobeid, J. Fabiosa, S. Tokgoz, D. Hayes, T.-H. Yu. 2008. Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land-Use Change. Science, 319, 1238-1240.

UPI Science News

– December 4, 2007 — A U.S. study has found feeding distiller’s grains to cattle results in the increased prevalence of E. coli 0157 in their bodies, posing a risk to humans.

Kansas State University Professor T.G. Nagaraja notes ethanol plants and livestock producers have created a symbiotic relationship. Cattle producers feed their livestock distiller’s grains, a byproduct of the ethanol distilling process, giving ethanol producers an added source of income.

“Distiller’s grain is a good animal feed. That’s why ethanol plants are often built next to feedlots,” said Nagaraja, a professor of diagnostic medicine and pathobiology. But the growth in ethanol plants means more cattle are likely to be fed distiller’s grain, thereby becoming a potential source of health risks to humans who acquire the bacteria by eating undercooked meat, raw diary products and produce contaminated with cattle manure, Nagaraja said.

Nagaraja, Professor Jim Drouillard and doctoral student Megan Jacob determined the prevalence of E. coli 0157 was about twice as high in cattle fed distiller’s grain compared with cattle on diets lacking the ethanol byproduct.

“This is a very interesting observation and is likely to have profound implications in food safety,” Nagaraja said.

Here’s a few of the lead in’s to his advice column about how to keep your boat motor from being a victim of ethanol

The villian is e-10, the ethanol gasoline mix that is now standard issue at most fuel pumps …

E-10 means 10 percent ethanol, which is basically corn alcohol … it poses a problem in boats …

If you prowl Internet boating andfishing sites or recent marine industry publications you’ll find millions of words on the perils of e-10 ...

Here’s the article, …

An Inconvenient Truth: Green Motors Are Anything but Smooth Sailing

By Angus Phillips
Sunday, November 18, 2007; D06

After a lifetime of fussing around with balky outboard motors, I’m not going to panic at every little setback. Outboards are cranky by nature; they live and work in a hostile marine environment. If you’re not prepared for a few unpleasant surprises, you’d better take up rowing or paddling.

But it’s getting ridiculous. “A friend of mine who works on small motors has 25 or so just like yours lined up in his shop,” said veteran outboard mechanic Scott Noyes, service manager at Shamrock Marine Service in Pasadena. “They’re all doing the same thing.”

The symptoms should be familiar to anyone experienced with outboards — hard to start, then popping, sputtering, stalling and breaking down at speed. It could be electrical, as connections and relays get funky over time. But usually when outboards start acting up, it’s fuel related.

And never has fuel been a bigger problem. The villain is E10, the ethanol-gasoline mix that is now standard issue at most fuel pumps as the government seeks to decrease air pollution and reduce America’s reliance on imported petroleum.

E10 means 10 percent ethanol, which is basically corn alcohol. The ubiquitous mix seems to work fine in cars, which burn through a tank in a hurry. But it poses problems in boats, which sit a lot.

Why? As E10 sits, the ethanol and gasoline start to separate. Ethanol goes to the bottom of the tank. If there’s water there, or if water vapor gets in through the vent, the ethanol absorbs it. Before long, you’ve got a clump of watery ethanol at the bottom of the tank, where the fuel pickup is. When you crank up the motor, the crud is sucked into the carburetor or injectors and plugs things up. The next thing you hear is pop, pop, splutter, sigh . . .

That’s not all. Ethanol is a solvent, so when it gets into older fuel systems it can clean out the gunk and varnish that’s accumulated over the years and send it upstream to clog tiny fuel delivery apertures as well. It also breaks down rubber gaskets and can turn old fiberglass tanks to mush.

If you prowl Internet boating and fishing sites or recent marine industry publications, you’ll find millions of words on the perils of E10, and get more advice than you possibly could digest. I’m by nature a disbeliever in these sorts of magazine crises, which frequently turn out to be concocted by some marketing whiz to sell new, expensive products. I prefer to wait and see whether the crisis is real.

This one’s for real. So what to do?

According to Noyes, who deals with E10 problems every day, the most important preventive steps for outboard owners to take are:

¿ Install a water/fuel separating filter between the fuel tank and the engine if one isn’t already in place, and spend the extra dollar or two to get a 10-micron cartridge for the filter, rather than the traditional 30-micron cartridge. The finer cartridge does a better job of removing water and impurities, he said.

¿ Add the manufacturer’s recommended amount of fuel stabilizer to every tank when you fill up, unless you’re going to burn up the tank within a week or so. The two most popular stabilizers are Star Tron and Sta-Bil, both of which Noyes said help keep ethanol from separating, and as a result keep water that gets absorbed in the fuel from accumulating in troublesome concentrations at the bottom of the tank. (And yes, fuel stabilizers are expensive).

“But you must put the stabilizer in when you fuel up,” he said. “It doesn’t do any good to do it afterwards.”

Noyes said engines most severely affected by E10 appear to be two-stroke, fuel-injected outboards, followed by two-stroke, carbureted outboards. Inboard-outboard engines rank third on his hit list, followed by four-stroke outboards and finally by inboards.

Some older inboard-powered boats basically can be put to death by E10. Cabin cruisers and the like built before 1986 may have internal fiberglass fuel tanks that are molded into the hull. E10 eats at the fiberglass and turns it to jelly, and the only way to remove the tanks to replace them with stainless steel, aluminum or modern plastic is to chainsaw through the hull. “That’s why you see a lot of old cabin cruisers rotting away on shore,” Noyes said.

It’s been a hard summer on my small-engine fleet, and E10 is the prime suspect. In September, the old 70-horsepower Evinrude gave up the ghost during a fishing trip to the Bay Bridge. It went with a flourish at full speed, little parts clattering in the combustion chambers before it locked up altogether. Oh well, it was34 years old. . . .

Then the Johnson 25 on the crab boat kept breaking down at speed and refusing to start. After rebuilding the carburetor once, the normal answer to a fuel delivery breakdown, Noyes showed me a little trick — just remove the fuel drain at the bottom of the carburetor and pump fresh fuel through, onto a paper towel. “A lot of the time that’ll push the gunk out and solve the problem,” he said. And it did!

Now it’s November and time to put everything to bed for the winter. What to do to ensure a stress-free first outing next spring? Stabilize the fuel in the recommended amount and leave the tank about halfway full of fresh gas, Noyes said. Fog the motor with fogging oil the usual way, and put a new, 10-micron cartridge in the fuel separator before setting out in the spring.

That’s the plan. But who knows what really works? I read on the Web site Tidalfish.com last week that the worst thing you can do is fill the tanks halfway for the winter.

We’re all working in the dark here, plugging along blind in a world where everything keeps changing.

In a previous post (here), my colleague, the mysterious “Gasman,” blogged on a study estimating that nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions released by corn production cause up to 50% more global warming than the substitution of ethanol for gasoline avoids. 

N2O is a potent greenhouse gas with 296 times the global warming potential of CO2. The researchers estimate that 3-5% of the nitrogen fertilizer used to grow corn (for ethanol, in the USA) and rapeseed (for bio-diesel fuel, in Europe) is converted to N2O. This contrasts with the IPCC’s previously estimated conversion rate of about 2%. 

The study, by Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzon of the Max Plank Institute, and colleagues, is not a “life-cycle” analysis. That is, it does not consider the CO2 released by the fossil fuels used to run the farm machinery, manufacture the fertilizer, operate the distilleries, or deliver the bio-fuel to market. Nor, on the other side of the equation, does it consider the CO2 avoided from commercial utilization of bio-fuel byproducts like corn meal. The study solely considers the balance between the N2O emissions released by the fertilizer used to grow bio-energy crops and the CO2 emissions avoided by substituting ethanol or biodiesel fuel for gasoline or petroleum diesel. 

The bottom line: The N2O warming effect is 0.9-1.5 times the cooling effect of the avoided CO2 emissions in the case of corn ethanol and 1.0-1.7 times the cooling effect of the avoided CO2 emissions in the case of bio-diesel made from rapeseed.

In another previous post, I blogged on “Leaping Before They Looked,” a study by the Clean Air Task Force warning that Europe’s Biofuel Directive increases CO2 emissions by encouraging agribusiness firms to clear and burn forests in peatlands in Indonesia, Malaysia, and other tropical countries in order to make room for palm oil plantations.  Peatlands are rich stores of carbon, and when they are drained and dried, and especially when burned, they release enormous quantities of CO2 into the air. In fact, says the report, “recent peatland emissions more than swamp the CO2 reductions that Europe hoped to achieve under the Directive.” Some eye-popping specifics:

“In 2006, Wetlands International and the Dutch consulting firm Delft Hydraulics reported that almost 12 million hectares of Indonesian peatland have been drained, cleared, and often burned–much of it to make room for oil palms. In the process, approximately 2000 million metric tons of CO2 are released annually, making peatlands destruction a leading source of global warming emissions. After accounting for these emissions — which equal 8% of global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel use — researchers determined that Indonesia’s CO2 emissions were the third highest in the world, behind only the United States and China.” (pp. 16-17)

Let’s hear it for central planning and Soviet-style production quotas!

Another recent study looks at the bio-fuel/warming equation from a different angle. Whereas Crutzon et al. estimate the net warming impact of N2O emissions from fertilizer use, and the Clean Air Task Force examines the net CO2 increases from deforestation in tropical Asia, R. Righelato of the World Land Trust and D.V. Spracklen of the University of Leeds examine which land use option–growing bio-energy crops or saving and restoring forests–has the bigger potential, per unit of land, to avoid CO2 emissions over the next 30 years.

Their study, published in Science magazine, estimated the potential of bio-fuels made from wheat, beats, cane, corn, and rapeseed to avoid CO2 emissions. The researchers conclude:

“In all cases, forestation of an equivalent area of land would sequester two to nine times more carbon over a 30-year period than the emissions avoided by the use of the biofuel. Taking this opportunity cost into account, the emissions cost of liquid biofuels exceeds that of fossil fuels.”

Similar to the Clean Air Task Force report, Righelato and Spracklen caution that producing significant quantities of bio-fuels will lead to deforestation:

“A 10% substitution of petrol and diesel fuel is estimated to require 43% and 38% of current cropland area in the United States and Europe, respectively [ref. omitted]. As even this low substitution level cannot be met from existing arable land, forests and grasslands would need to be cleared to enable production of the energy crops. Clearance results in the rapid oxidation of carbon stores in the vegetation and soil, creating a large up-front emissions cost [ref. omitted] that would, in all cases examined here, outweigh the avoided emissions.”

Well, only time will tell. As Ratlif notes, the federal government first funded research on cellulosic ethanol in the ’70s. And although, “We can run our cars on lawn cuttings today; we just can’t do it at a price people are willing to pay.”

However, what makes this article valuable is not the author’s hunches, to which he is certainly entitled, but its lucid overview of the chemistry and economics of cellulosic ethanol and profiles of three leading players in the field. Here are a few tidbits:

• The ethanol we can make today-from corn kernels-is a mediocre fuel source. It generates at best 30 pecent more energy than is required to grow and process the corn-hardly worth the trouble. Plus, the crop’s fertilizer-intensive cultivation pollutes waterways, and increased demand drives up food costs (corn prices doubled last year). And anyway, the corn ethanol industry is projected to produce, at most, the quivalent of only 15 billion gallons of fuel by 2017.
• Cellulose is the most abundant naturally occurring organic molecule on the planet, a potentially limitless source of energy. However, cellulose is a “tough molecule” and no one yet has figured out how to turn it into ethanol at price competitive with gasoline.
• Turning cellulose into ethanol has three main steps: (1) Apply heat or chemicals to strip off cell-wall protections, (2) add enzymes called cellulases to break the cellulose down into sugars, and (3) add yeast or other micro-organisms to ferment the sugars into ethanol.
• Commercially, the make or break step is (2). “Today’s cellulases are the equivalent of vacuum tubes: clunky, slow, and expensive. Now, flush with cash, scientists and companies are racing to devlop the cellulosic transistor.”
• Scientists and entrepreneurs are pursuing three main strategies to build the “transistor”:
  • Bioengineer microbes that can both break down the cellulose and ferment the sugar–also known as “consolidated bioprocessing” (CBP), pioneered by Dartmouth Professor Lee Lynd, founder and CEO of Mascoma.
  • Mutate micro-organism genes to make cellulases that are more heat resistant and more efficient in degrading cellulose–the “directed evolution” approach pursued by companies such as Novozymes.
  • Look high and low (e.g. termite guts in Costa Rica) for better enzymes in the wild–the “collection” method favored by Venerium, an energy company.

In an interesting side bar, the article quotes Jay Keasling’s mantra: “Ethanol is for drinking, not driving.” Ethanol, whether derived from corn, cellulose, or sugarcane, produces only 85 percent of the energy of gasoline, requires retrofitting car engines, and is incompatible with existing oil pipelines. That’s why Keasling, a chemical engineer at UC Berkeley and Lawarence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, is trying to create microbes that can turn cellulosic biomass, not into ethanol but into a fuel molecularly similar to gasoline.

Remember, UL said some months ago E-85 was so corrosive that it could not certify pumps. 

It is politics versus science:

POLITICS: According to Sen John Thune, South Dakota’s Republican: “I think what we need more than anything else is we need some quick action on this. This is a real problem for ethanol infrastructure in this country.”

As for Indiana’s Republican Senator, Dick Lugar, he agrees.   “That’s very serious, and our office has tried to intervene to accelerate whatever consideration they’re giving.”

SCIENCE: But Senators, … patience.  Patience.  You can’t speed science.  UL has said it has to look at the research data; it has to develop requirements; … and then the manufacturers have to submit their products, before anything can be certified. 

In other words, UL doesn’t work like Congress who, for political reasons, keeps pushing ethanol beyond where science justifies it.

This expanded production is necessary to meet the RFS demand for ethanol, … but this marginal increase of ethanol is highly risky from a production stand-point. 

Hey, … wasn’t the whole idea to get a more stable supply of motor fuel?!?!?! 

Read on here

I cringe when the urban newspapers casually say we can make “lots of auto fuel” as ethanol from cornstalks and whear straw.

It ain’t so.

If we turn the crop stalks into ethanol, we’ll have the only problem that could be bigger than an energy shortage-a topsoil shortage.