[FLPERMACULTURE] "Green Energy" Panacea or Just the Latest Hype?

Fri Dec 1 08:18:16 PST 2006

THE REAL SCOOP ON BIOFEULS

"Green Energy" Panacea or Just the Latest Hype?

by Brian Tokar, WW4 REPORT

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
virtually 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 June 25, 2006 that some 40 new
ethanol plants are currently under construction in the
US, aiming toward a 30% 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 most
impressive biofuel success story, is using half its
annual sugarcane crop to provide 40% of its auto fuel,
while accelerating 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
recent studies 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—those currently in use as well as those under
development—produce 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 25, 2006 edition of the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
concluded that ethanol production offers a modest net
energy gain of 25% over oil, 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 is on land use. The Minnesota
paper reports that in 2005, 14% of the US corn harvest
was used to produce some .9 billion gallons of
ethanol, equivalent to 1.7% of current gasoline usage.
About 1 1/2 percent of the soy harvest produced 68
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 picture becomes worse still. It
requires roughly eight units of gas to produce 10
units of ethanol, and five units of gas to produce 10
units of biodiesel; hence the net is only two units of
ethanol or five units of biodiesel. Therefore the
entire soy and corn crops combined would really 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 2005, 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, on 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."

The Cornell/Berkeley study has drawn the attention of
numerous critics, some of whom suggest that Ted
Patzek's background in petroleum engineering
disqualifies him from objectively assessing the energy
balance of biofuels. Needless to say, in a field where
both oil and agribusiness companies are vying for
public subsidies, the technical arguments can become
rather furious. An earlier analysis by the
Chicago-area Argonne National Laboratory (once a
Manhattan Project offshoot) produced data much closer
to the Minnesota results, but a response by Patzek
pointed out several potential flaws in that study's
shared assumptions with an earlier analysis by the
USDA. In another recent article, Harvard environmental
scientist Michael McElroy concurred with Pimentel and
Patzek: "[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 eight 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 Brazilís 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 spur
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
mega-convention in 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 (Sept. 8, 2006). 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 the 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
(Toward Freedom, 2004).

RESOURCES:

"Supermarkets and Service Stations Now Competing for
Grain" Earth Policy Institute, July 2006
http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/2006/Update55.htm