In other news - biofuels are a joke

From ClimateSanity:

Nobel Prize winning biochemist says ALL biofuels are �nonsense.�
Hartmut Michel won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on photosynthesis. So, it is fair to say that he knows a thing or two about energy transport and storage in plants. Today he is director of the Molecular Membrane Biology at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysics.

He recently penned an editorial in Angewandte Chemie International Edition in which he hammered the use of biofuels for alternative energy. Note that Angewandte Chemie International Edition has the world�s highest impact factor of all chemistry journals. His simple but pointed criticism condemns all varieties of biofuels and supports my previous posts on this subject.

The problem is the inherent inefficiency of photosynthesis. He points out�

�The photosynthetic pigments of plants can only absorb and use 47%(related to energy) of the light of the sun (�photosynthetic active radiation�). Green light, UV, and IR irradiation are not used�

Photosynthesis is most efficient at low light intensities. It is already saturated at 20% of full sunlight and 80% of the light is not used�In addition, high light intensities lead to photodamage of a central protein subunit of the photosynthetic apparatus�3.5 billion years of evolution have not been long enough to develop a mechanism for preventing the photodamage�

The dark reactions are limited by an insufficient discrimination between CO2 and O2 by the enzyme RuBisCO, which inserts CO2 into ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate. One third of the energy of the absorbed photons is believed to be required to remove the product of the O2 insertion�[and] photosynthesis depends on the availability of sufficient amounts of water, a condition that is not met during much of the day.�

The paper is available here -- The Nonsense of Biofuels, Hartmut Michel, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2012, 51, 2�4 (PDF) The upshot:

For German �biodiesel� which is based on rapeseed, it is less than 0.1%, for bioethanol less than 0.2%, and for biogas around 0.3%.

Rape seed is what us politically correct types call Canola (Canada Oil). Compare this to the average 20% efficiency of a solar installation and you see how silly biofuel is. A true zero-sum game. Nothing more than another opportunity for the politically connected to get even more rich through Federal subsidies (our tax dollars).