Imagine you have 100 acres growing corn for biofuels, would it be nice to replace these by 99 acres of wilderness and 1 acre of photovoltaics producing the same amount of biofuels?

If your photovoltaics are 100x more efficient to produce your chemicals, agriculture is the dirty way of doing it.

▲

rcxdude 8 months ago | parent | next [-]

We could more or less do that now. In fact we should probably just stop growing corn for biofuel, it's not obvious that it's even energy-positive, let alone a good use of farmland.

	▲	Imustaskforhelp 8 months ago \| parent [-]
		What do you mean by Biofuel? Like getting it from Biomass. I don't understand, can't we get Biomass from like undesirable items like (not to gross anyone out, but feces?) whereas corn still has some value where you can actually eat it.

▲

saretup 8 months ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Does it mention it’s 100x more efficient anywhere? Or is it just an example you’re providing, in which case, why not 1000x?

▲

ZeroGravitas 8 months ago | parent | next [-]

They might be remembering the stat that:

> Looking at land-use efficiency, corn-derived ethanol used to power internal combustion engines requires about 85x (range: 63-197x) as much land to power the same number of transportation miles as solar PV powering electric vehicles.

▲

thaumasiotes 8 months ago | parent [-]

What's that supposed to be relevant to? We don't make corn-derived fuel because it's cost-effective. It isn't. The idea is to give corn farmers something to do, which won't work if you reduce the amount of corn you're growing.

	▲	mapt 8 months ago \| parent [-]
		We make corn-derived fuel in order to power the Iowa caucus. Corn farmers could be doing literally anything else, including a whole variety of things that rebuild soil or capture carbon or generate electricity, and it would be equally effective at powering the Iowa caucus, as long as we pay them to do it. They could even be producing crops organically, producing free-range livestock, or producing different lower-return higher-nutrition types of food, should we ever be interested in changing our diet a little. Deciding to produce the world's largest excess food supply in an industrialized fashion and then literally burning it was maybe a poor use of resources.

▲

joshuaturner 8 months ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> why not 1000x?

now we're talking - can I invest in your company?

▲

spauldo 8 months ago | parent | prev [-]

Corn isn't particularly great for producing ethanol. I'm guessing that a synthetic process won't be able to get close to 100x less land usage, but any improvement would be welcome.

The problem I see is that there's not enough money in in to develop a new process. Cellulosic ethanol outperforms corn on nearly every measure, but there's not enough money in it to pay for the development needed to scale it up to industrial levels.

▲

the_sleaze_ 8 months ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, and don't forget photovoltaics aren't limited to the crust - they can scale upwards, outwards, on top of oceanic deserts and arid lands.

Cover sunny, bleak northern africa in towering photovoltaics panels baby!

▲

shermantanktop 8 months ago | parent [-]

Labeling a massive geographic zone in an underdeveloped, historically exploited area—one which plays a key role in how the climate works—-as useless, and then converting it to an extractive industry…what could go wrong?

I’m as optimistic as the next person about energy tech, but I hope it doesn’t turn out like yet more colonialism.

	▲	linkregister 8 months ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yeah, it would be terrible to offer the citizens of Chad, Mali, Tunisia, Libya, etc an opportunity to get revenue. Only Western democracies like Norway and Australia are allowed to extract substances!
	▲	the_sleaze_ 8 months ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> as useless It's not useless, it's arid. > which plays a key role in how the climate works As does ever other square meter on Earth, and its natural abundant resource could be leveraged to even greater overall good. > Extractive industry ... like yet more colonialism. I'm not sure how we got here, or what your actual concern is.