corn and soy less bad, jatropha in space

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the models are all wrong- corn and soy and jatropha are ...less bad. But hang on, things going to get even less horrid once we breed jatropha in space...

from biofuelsdigest

Chicken Little, Corn Little, Jatropha Little: Is the sky really falling (or is that jatropha floating in space?)

In the children's fable Chicken Little, a farmyard is brought to a state of mass hysteria based on a bad extrapolation from insufficient data. In short, an acorn fell on Chicken Little's head and the poor thing concluded that the sky was falling in. A wily predator named Foxy Loxy offers a series of consulting services to alleviate the crisis, and manages in the process to eat just about all the animals on the farm.

In 2008, an article in Science magazine concluded that it would take 167 years to pay back, through reduced vehicle emissions, the carbon debt caused by land-use conversion stemming from the increased production of corn to meet the resulting ethanol production demand. A team at Iowa State has succeeded in recreating the Searchinger model, using the same CARD and GREET agricultural and biofuels models.

Their conclusion?  The team found that, by increasing corn yields by just one percent over a ten-year period (and eliminating a mistaken assumption regarding forest conversion in the US), that carbon payback period is reduced to 31 years; by switching to the BESS model from the University of Nebraska, the payback is reduced to 15 years.
What the researchers did not explore is the impact if corn yields increase by 1 percent per year, rather than 1 percent per decade, or zero percent until the end of time. One reason to investigate that scenario? Corn yields are actually increasing at that rate.

Imagine re-running the climate change scenarios based on a world in which carbon emissions never increased. Any such model would show that climate change had been completely addressed, and the entire carbon regime being established worldwide could be safely dismantled.

We don't do this because, in fact, the carbon numbers are increasing and science dictates that we use real numbers to project real scenarios. The same as projecting computer processor speeds based on Moore's Law, or future sales of hybrids based on rising demand.

Le's be clear on something. Biofuels Digest is not "for" corn. The Digest is "against" BS. Solid science based on established trends are warmly welcome in our pages, and not every biofuels trend is a pretty one.
But the United Soybean Board found, in a new study, that US lifecycle data on soybeans -  used to calculate land-use change among other things, is in years out of date and, in some critical factors such as NOx emissions, is as much as 85 percent off. We have previously seen that land-use change models in Brazil were using data from the 1990s, and a recent study on the GHGs from algal production used data from the 1970s.

"The lesson for policymakers," write the Iowa State research team, "is that results from economic models depend heavily on assumptions, and because we are trying to predict long-run human behavior, there can be legitimate differences in these assumptions."

New data is also emerging from D1 Oils on the outlook for jatropha. The company issued an updated trading outlook, and CEO Ben Good confirmed to the Digest in an update of the company's guidance that D1 is expecting to increase its jatropha yields by up to 60 percent based on new varietals that the company expects to release this year, and has confirmed that, with its current plantings, that "the guidance the company issued of around 1.7 tones per hectare - which yields about 200 gallons per US acre - turned out to be good guidance for properly managed land."
The company, which is marketing its expertise in jatropha cultivation following its split with BP, in addition to managing 200,000 hectares of current plantings, said that it has acquired a major European oil & gas company as a client in jatropha development, but declined to reveal the company's identity. The company also confirmed that it has made early progress in developing an acceptable, toxin-free jatropha meal that could realize $250-$400 per tone in income, saying that it had completed successful lab trials with small mammals. D1's trading update is here.

Jatropha - an out-of-this-world feedstock?: For those of you tracking jatropha's every movement, look upwards - literally. Yesterday, the Space Shuttle Endeavour lifted off from Kennedy Space Center carrying jatropha cruces samples - the shuttle's biology team will investigate whether jatropha breeding can be accelerated in space and yields can thereby improved faster.

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Rachel Smolker
Biofuelwatch
Hinesburg, Vermont, U.S.A.
office: (802) 482 2848
mobile: (802) 735-7794
skype: rachel smolker
http://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/

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