The demystification of the biological information system - no lasting contribution to energy technology
The history of technology shows: Nuclear power for energy supply is a hopelessly outdated technology / Episode 6/12
The previous episodes of this 12-part series first dealt with the groundbreaking advance of science into the world of atoms at the beginning of the last century, the resulting discovery of nuclear fission and the subsequent history of its peaceful use in nuclear power plants. Then it was shown how new methods for exploring the atomic nano-cosmos first revolutionised the material sciences, paving the way for microelectronics and digitalization. These have far-reaching consequences not only for information processing and communication but also for energy technology. The present episode is about the consequences of the nanoscientific revolution in biology, which, however, can hardly be used for technical energy supply.
Before I go into the history of the energetic use of biomass, which today must also largely be regarded as an outdated, harmful technology, I would like to briefly show how profoundly the nanosciences have changed biology, medicine, food processing and the chemical industry with novel biotechnological methods.
The discovery of the biological information system and its use in medicine
In 1953, one year after the first electricity was produced with nuclear energy, Watson and Crick decoded the basic structure of the DNA molecules in which the genetic material of living beings is stored. In 1990, scientists began to systematically analyse the code of the human genome, which consists of 6 million "base pairs", using automatic sequencing machines. It is written in an alphabet of only four "bases". The essential parts were available in 2001, but the complete code was not decyphered until 2022. However, the roles the code is playing in the complex communication within and between living beings, and what it means in different contexts, is only understood to a small extent.
Today, it is estimated that 20 to 100 million people worldwide died from the Spanish flu in 1918/19, far more than in the First World War, which had just ended. In the turmoil and hardship of the time, people were not immediately aware of this and there was not much they could do about it. Without the rapid development of mRNA vaccines, we would probably have seen something similar in 2020/21. Thanks to the new methods for studying molecular structures, after the Second World War the biological information systems for heredity and immune defence could gradually be partially decoded. Therefore, it was now possible, within a few months, to analyse the virus in detail, to develop an appropriate biological warning code for the immune defence system and to administer it to billions of people providing synthetic messenger substances in nanocapsules that were injected to those accepting the help.
The advance into the nanocosmos since the Second World War has opened up completely new dimensions in biology and medicine – not only concerning genetic engineering and in immunology. The entire field of biochemistry, the analysis of processes in tissues and membranes, medical analysis and surgical technology, and even 3D printing of tissues have also benefited from the new nanosciences.
Overall, we can state here that in all of this, the importance of the aspect of information has increased tremendously, and that by discovering processes at the nano level, many previously mysterious macroscopic processes in biology have become more understandable – arguably more so than in the inanimate world.
Nanosciences potentiate the possibilities for producing high-quality biological products
Advances in molecular and microbiology and, building on this, in biotechnology and agricultural technology have had a huge impact on the supply of food and basic chemical substances. Without them, it would be almost impossible to feed eight billion people. But this also revealed considerable risks: interventions in elementary mechanisms of life can destabilise complex ecological relationships that we are still far from understanding. In view of the complex dynamics of the diverse life on earth, cautious probing is necessary. Crude genetic engineering interventions in misunderstood interrelationships have not fulfilled the economic hopes placed in them.
However, a better understanding of the interplay of biochemical processes and genetic information has been used even more extensively in bacteria, plants and animals than, as mentioned above, in humans: for disease prevention, improved metabolic processes and nutrition. And then also for the optimised processing and use of biological products in complex biotechnological processes...
Biotechnological methods were already developed thousands of years ago, e.g. for the production of wine and beer with yeasts, or the processing of milk into cheese or yoghurt with microorganisms found by chance and then carefully bred. The new findings with the help of nanosciences have not only put these approaches on a scientific basis and made them more efficient, but have also expanded them dramatically. Today, not only the food industry and many methods in the food crafts, but also large parts of the chemical industry are hardly conceivable without the achievements of biotechnology. Bioreactors, in which microorganisms and enzymes effect chemical transformations, are used today in a wide variety of production processes.
However, supplying people with high-quality biological products and information, with food and medicine is not the central theme in this series on the role of atomic energy in the history of technology - even though it is also about the relationship between (highly complex) matter, energy and information.
Photosynthesis is too inefficient for technical energy supply
The classical physical-technical energy supply, for which also the peaceful use of nuclear energy was conceived, is about the provision of heat, kinetic energy, and later also, electricity as soon as electrical devices have been available. Historically, humans largely depended on biological sources for this "external" technical energy supply: mechanical energy was often provided by oxen, horses and donkeys, heat was generated by burning biomass. The breeding of optimised animals for the production of mechanical energy has long been abandoned. Many still hope for a process for efficiently generating electricity from biomass, by optimising biomass growth and passing through subsequent conversion steps to heat, mechanical energy and electricity – in vain.
So far, the revolution in biology has only had a very limited impact on the supply of energy in the form of heat, electricity and mechanical drive. All attempts to generate macro-technically usable energy from biological raw materials have proved inferior to other approaches. Photosynthesis in plants practically converts only about one to two percent of the incident solar radiation into chemical energy. Theoretically, the maximum is 11.6%. With genetically modified algae, it is hoped to achieve up to 20%. In the value chain up to technically usable fuel, further losses occur. When the fuel is converted into electricity, again, half of the energy gets lost. In contrast, today's low-cost photovoltaic modules can convert 18 to 24% of sunlight directly into electricity.
Billions of subsidies have been spent on the development and production of biofuels. Since 2020, 10% of biofuels must be blended into petrol and diesel in the EU. In the USA, petrol must contain 10% to 15% bio-ethanol. For these quantities, energy crops are grown on a large scale on land that would also be suitable for food crops. When the Indian government recently wanted to enact a regulation to blend 20% ethanol in petrol, a renowned institute calculated that for the distance an electric car could drive with the electricity from one hectare of photovoltaics, a combustion car of the same size powered by ethanol would need 187 hectares of cultivated corn or 251 hectares of cultivated sugar cane. The losses in the successive transformation stages are multiplied. Bioethanol for normal cars is a gigantic waste of land and resources.
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The USA's global liquid fuel consumption share is a good 20%. To run all the world's cars entirely on PV electricity would therefore require a quarter of the area currently used to produce a 10% admixture of bioethanol for US cars alone.
In the EU, three times more biodiesel is consumed than bioethanol. In both cases, a good 14% of it is imported ready-made. Above all, however, more than half of the agricultural inputs for biodiesel produced in the EU come from imports. For one fifth of European bioethanol production alone, or 4.9% of EU biofuel production, 10,000 tonnes of wheat are consumed every day - the equivalent of the bread consumed by 60 million average Europeans. In mathematical terms, the agricultural products consumed for EU biofuel blending could cover half the calorie needs of the European population.
Biofuels are an outdated technology too
Biofuels have been around since the invention of the combustion engine. After extensive experiments, Ford temporarily saw ethanol as the fuel of the future. But then cheap petroleum dominated the fuel business. In Brazil, ethanol made from sugar cane had been added to petrol since the 1920s. During the war years, an admixture of 50% was prescribed for a time. On the other side of the war front, technologies for producing fuels from biomass were also developed in Germany. After the war, petroleum again dominated. Under the impact of the oil crisis and then the climate debate, interest in biofuels grew. Since the mid-1970s, Brazil has improved and constantly expanded its production methods. Between 1975 and 2004, it tripled the yield per hectare (from 2024 to 5917 litres of ethanol), using advanced biotechnological methods among other things. In 2008, ethanol supplied more than half of all transport fuels in Brazil.
Compared to other biofuels, Brazilian sugarcane ethanol is highly efficient: photosynthesis reaches 2%, one of the highest efficiency values among plants, one third of the energy extracted is in the sugar, and the industrial sugarcane utilisation is a highly integrated process in which the waste is used to produce electricity. The energy balance (energy yield divided by the energy invested in the process) of up to 10 is much better than the extraction of ethanol from maize in the USA, which provides only slightly more energy than the (often fossil) energy input.
Because of the negative effects of land use, to which attention has only gradually been drawn, the CO2 balance looks much worse. According to a 2008 study by the British government, the CO2 emissions of ethanol from American corn or Ukrainian wheat are much higher than those of petrol or diesel.
After the turn of the millennium, biofuels and biogas were still considered ecologically desirable alternatives. Although doubts grew, massive investments were made in industrial-scale production. Even then, it was foreseeable that the ecologically more advantageous photovoltaics would also catch up economically. The subsidised sales prices of ethanol producers in Brazil fell by an average of 5% annually from 1980 to 2004, first faster, then slower. From 2004 onwards, ethanol was able to compete with petrol. In the meantime, the cost-cutting potential of mechanical and chemical processing of huge areas and quantities of materials has been largely exhausted. The actual production costs of biofuels are difficult to determine, as they are produced in an environment conditioned by diverse subsidies, political frameworks and highly fluctuating costs of fossil fuels. In 2013, a study concluded that biofuels are not only questionable in terms of climate policy but also harmful to the national economy: In 2011, subsidies for biofuels in the EU amounted to more than half of the industry's turnover and were higher than investments in production facilities from 2004 to 2011.
Since the turn of the millennium, the cost of photovoltaics and electricity storage has fallen dramatically and continues to fall. As we will see in detail in the next episodes of this blog, they not only enable a much more energy-efficient use of land than biofuels, but have also become the cheapest way to generate electricity. With the availability of competitive electric vehicles, biofuels - except in niche areas - have become an outdated, harmful technology from both an ecological and economic perspective.
The same applies to biogas, which experienced a boom after the turn of the millennium due to subsidies, especially in Germany, until it was realised that the targeted cultivation of biomass for gas production is problematic. The mass replacement of coal in British coal-fired power plants with wood chips from America is also more beneficial to the cosmetics of the national climate balance sheet than to the global climate or the national economy.
Only biomass that is already a residual material should be used for energy purposes. And even here, the question arises whether, as a first step, a material utilisation would not make more sense. After all, the chemical industry today uses fossil raw materials to produce plastics, which are usually incinerated after use. Converting the aviation industry to biofuels, of which huge quantities would be needed, cannot, therefore, be a solution either. Used cooking oil will not be enough.
The modern history of the use of biomass for energy is a sad example of how much ecological and economic damage can be done by a misunderstood, nostalgic longing for closeness to nature in alliance with a ruthless (agricultural and chemical) lobby if political decision-makers do not dare to think in the long term and are not prepared to do the math.