US prof says 'bioelectric' cars much better than biofuel

Still trying to run modern society by burning crops

Are you sure there's enough land, Professor?

Let's hope that Campbell never bumps into Dr Richard Pike, head of the Royal Society of Chemistry here in the UK. Pike is deeply scathing about the idea of using plants to power transportation by any means - electric or ethanol. He notes that you get 2,000 per cent more energy per acre by covering land with solar cells, making Campbell's measly 80 per cent improvement look pretty rubbish.

Solar cells would seem to be conclusively ahead on water use and air pollution, too, as well as transportation and climate. They can also make use of empty land unsuitable for crops, rather than leading to high food prices, starvation and/or deforestation as cropland biofuel - and bioelectricity - inevitably would if they became big factors.

Solar cells by the acre would cost an awful lot, of course; but so would electricity if you had to make it by burning corn or switchgrass. You would normally use up the whole of a country's arable land trying to satisfy even a minor portion of its energy needs using either biofuel or bioelectricity.

This is why proper heavyweight boffins, in trying to construct plans for a reasonably comfortable and wealthy society without fossil fuels, generally assume that the only real purpose for having bio-energy plantations is to allow some aviation to continue. (Aircraft can't convert to electricity the way road transport can: and switching to electrically-made hydrogen may or may not be feasible.) The aviation industry themselves, well aware that they can't remain anything like their present size on cropland fuel, pin their hopes for the future on "second generation" biofuels - ones using algae grown on water, or jatropha nuts grown in deserts.

All these things are well known, so the idea of using decent or decent-ish land to grow energy remains at best marginal, at worst bonkers. You have to wonder why Campbell is still going on about it - he was already famous for claiming that the US could generate six per cent of its energy needs from surplus marginal farmland - and why people are still writing him up. ®