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November
1, 2006
Running on Hype
The
Real Scoop on Biofuels
By BRIAN TOKAR
You can hardly open up a major newspaper
or national magazine these days without encountering the latest
hype about biofuels, and how they're going to save oil, reduce
pollution and prevent climate change. Bill Gates, Sun Microsystems'
Vinod Khosla, and other major venture capitalists are investing
millions in new biofuel production, whether in the form of ethanol,
mainly derived from corn in the US today, or biodiesel, mainly
from soybeans and canola seed. It's literally a "modern
day gold rush," as described by the New York Times,
paraphrasing the chief executive of Cargill, one of the main
benefactors of increased subsidies to agribusiness and tax credits
to refiners for the purpose of encouraging biofuel production.
The Times reported earlier
this year that some 40 new ethanol plants are currently under
construction in the US, aiming toward a 30 percent increase in
domestic production. Archer Daniels Midland, the company that
first sold the idea of corn-derived ethanol as an auto fuel to
Congress in the late 1970s, has doubled its stock price and profits
over the last two years. ADM currently controls a quarter of
US ethanol fuel production, and recently hired a former Chevron
executive as its CEO.
Several well-respected analysts
have raised serious concerns about this rapid diversion of food
crops toward the production of fuel for automobiles. WorldWatch
Institute founder Lester Brown, long concerned about the sustainability
of world food supplies, says that fuel producers are already
competing with food processors in the world's grain markets.
"Cars, not people, will claim most of the increase in grain
production this year," reports Brown, a serious concern
in a world where the grain required to make enough ethanol to
fill an SUV tank is enough to feed a person for a whole year.
Others have dismissed the ethanol gold rush as nothing more than
the subsidized burning of food to run automobiles.
The biofuel rush is having
a significant impact worldwide as well. Brazil, often touted
as the the most impressive biofuel success story, is using half
its annual sugarcane crop to provide 40 percent of its auto fuel,
while increasing deforestation to grow more sugarcane and soybeans.
Malaysian and Indonesian rainforests are being bulldozed for
oil palm plantations-threatening endangered orangutans, rhinos,
tigers and countless other species-in order to serve at the booming
European market for biodiesel.
Are these reasonable tradeoffs
for a troubled planet, or merely another corporate push for profits?
Two new studies, both released this past summer, aim to document
the full consequences of the new biofuel economy and realistically
assess its impact on fuel use, greenhouse gases and agricultural
lands. One study, originating from the University of Minnesota,
is moderately hopeful in the first two areas, but offers a strong
caution about land use. The other, from Cornell University and
UC Berkeley, concludes that every domestic biofuel source
the ones currently in use as well as those under development
produces less energy than is consumed in growing and processing
the crops.
The Minnesota researchers attempted
a full lifecycle analysis of the production of ethanol from corn
and biodiesel from soy. They documented the energy costs of fuel
production, pesticide use, transportation, and other key factors,
and also accounted for the energy equivalent of soy and corn
byproducts that remain for other uses after the fuel is extracted.
Their paper, published in the July 25th edition of the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences, concluded that ethanol
production offers a modest net energy gain of 25%, resulting
in 12% less greenhouse gases than an equivalent amount of gasoline.
The numbers for biodiesel are more promising, with a 93% net
energy gain and a 41% reduction in greenhouse gases.
The researchers cautioned,
however, that these figures do not account for the significant
environmental damage from increased acreages of these crops,
including the impacts of pesticides, nitrate runoff into water
supplies, nor the increased demand on water, as "energy
crops" like corn and soy begin to displace more drought
tolerant crops such as wheat in several Midwestern states.
The most serious impact, though,
is on land use. The Minnesota paper reports that in 2005, 14%
of the US corn harvest was used to produce some 6 million gallons
of ethanol, equivalent to 1.7% of current gasoline usage. About
1 1/2 percent of the soy harvest produced 120 million gallons
of biodiesel, equivalent to less than one tenth of one percent
of gas usage. This means that if all of the country's corn harvest
was used to make ethanol, it would displace 12% of our gas; all
of our soybeans would displace about 6% of the gas. But if the
energy used in producing these biofuels is taken into account
the fact that 80% of the energy goes into production in
the case of corn ethanol, and almost 50% in the case of soy biodiesel,
the entire soy and corn crops combined would only satisfy 5.3%
of current fuel needs. This is where the serious strain on food
supplies and prices originates.
The Cornell study is even more
skeptical. Released in July, it was the product of an ongoing
collaboration between Cornell agriculturalist David Pimentel,
environmental engineer Ted Patzek, and their colleagues at the
University of California at Berkeley, and was published in the
journal Natural Resources Research. This study found that,
in balance, making ethanol from corn requires 29% more fossil
fuel than the net energy produced and biodisel from soy results
in a net energy loss of 27%. Other crops, touted as solutions
to the apparent diseconomy of current methods, offer even worse
results.
Switchgrass, for example, can
grow on marginal land and presumably won't compete with food
production (you may recall George Bush's mumbling about switchgrass
in his 2006 State of the Union speech), but it requires 45% more
energy to harvest and process than the energy value of the fuel
that is produced. Wood biomass requires 57% more energy than
it produces, and sunflowers require more than twice as much energy
than is available in the fuel that is produced. "There is
just no energy benefit to using plant biomass for liquid fuel,"
said David Pimentel in a Cornell press statement this past July.
"These strategies are not sustainable." In a recent
article, Harvard environmental scientist Michael McElroy concurred:
"[U]nfortunately the promised benefits [of ethanol] prove
upon analysis to be largely ephemeral."
Even Brazilian sugarcane, touted
as the world's model for conversion from fossil fuels to sustainable
"green energy," has its downside. The energy yield
appears beyond question: it is claimed that ethanol from sugarcane
may produce as much as 8 times as much energy as it takes to
grow and process. But a recent World Wildlife Fund report for
the International Energy Agency raises serious questions about
this approach to future energy independence. It turns out that
80% of Brazil's greenhouse gas emissions come not from cars,
but from deforestation-the loss of embedded carbon dioxide when
forests are cut down and burned. A hectare of land may save 13
tons of carbon dioxide if it is used to grow sugarcane, but the
same hectare can absorb 20 tons of CO2 if it remains forested.
If sugarcane and soy plantations continue to encourage deforestation,
both in the Amazon and in Brazil's Atlantic coastal forests,
any climate advantage is more than outweighed by the loss of
the forest.
Genetic engineering, which
has utterly failed to produce healthier or more sustainable food-and
also failed to create a reliable source of biopharmaceuticals
without threatening the safety of our food supply-is now being
touted as the answer to sustainable biofuel production. Biofuels
were all the buzz at the biotech industry's most recent biotech
mega-convention (April 2006), and biotech companies are all competing
to cash in on the biofuel bonanza. Syngenta (the world's largest
herbicide manufacturer and number three, after Monsanto and DuPont,
in seeds) is developing a GE corn variety that contains one of
the enzymes needed to convert corn starch into sugar before it
can be fermented into ethanol. Companies are vying to increase
total starch content, reduce lignin (necessary for the structural
integrity of plants but a nuisance for chemical processors),
and increase crop yields. Others are proposing huge plantations
of fast-growing genetically engineered low-lignin trees to temporarily
sequester carbon and ultimately be harvested for ethanol.
However, the utility of incorporating
the amylase enzyme into crops is questionable (it's also a potential
allergen), gains in starch production are marginal, and the use
of genetic engineering to increase crop yields has never proved
reliable. Other, more complex traits, such as drought and salt
tolerance (to grow energy crops on land unsuited to food production),
have been aggressively pursued by geneticists for more than twenty
years with scarcely a glimmer of success. Genetically engineered
trees, with their long life-cycle, as well as seeds and pollen
capable of spreading hundreds of miles in the wild, are potentially
a far greater environmental threat than engineered varieties
of annual crops. Even Monsanto, always the most aggressive promoter
of genetic engineering, has opted to rely on conventional plant
breeding for its biofuel research, according to the New York
Times. Like "feeding the world" and biopharmaceutical
production before it, genetic engineering for biofuels mainly
benefits the biotech industry's public relations image.
Biofuels may still prove advantageous
in some local applications, such as farmers using crop wastes
to fuel their farms, and running cars from waste oil that is
otherwise thrown away by restaurants. But as a solution to long-term
energy needs on a national or international scale, the costs
appear to far outweigh the benefits. The solution lies in technologies
and lifestyle changes that can significantly reduce energy use
and consumption, something energy analysts like Amory Lovins
have been advocating for some thirty years. From the 1970s through
the '90s, the US economy significantly decreased its energy intensity,
steadily lowering the amount of energy required to produce a
typical dollar of GDP. Other industrial countries have gone far
beyond us in this respect. But no one has figured out how to
make a fortune on conservation and efficiency. The latest biofuel
hype once again affirms that the needs of the planet, and of
a genuinely sustainable society, are in fundamental conflict
with the demands of wealth and profit.
Brian Tokar directs the Biotechnology Project
at Vermont's Institute for Social Ecology (social-ecology.org),
and has edited two books on the science and politics of genetic
engineering, Redesigning Life? (Zed Books, 2001) and Gene
Traders: Biotechnology, World Trade and the Globalization of
Hunger (Toward Freedom, 2004).
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