Article by
Jim Rowland
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CLIMATE CHANGE EXCLUSIVE!!
With biofuels widely blamed for the food crisis,
what is their proper place?
JIM ROLAND explores.
As I write, an anxious public debate has broken out over the role of biofuels in the unfolding world food crisis. Recent food price rises, which mean a pricier shopping basket for you or I, have meant cutting back to one meal a day, or less, for many in the developing world. With food riots from Mexico to Indonesia, and a suspension of food rations for many in North Korea, there are fears for the well-being of hundreds of millions as well as the stability of some democracies. It has been estimated that 25,000 people die every day of hunger or hunger-related causes, in terms of children one every five seconds. Those figures are certain to rise sharply this year.
The World Bank estimates that the caloric intake of the poorest falls by half a percent with every one percent rise in food prices. They now believe current food price rises will have the effect of reversing development in poor countries by seven years, considering also other effects on like overall health, and education.
So what role have biofuels played, and where does this leave efforts to introduce cleaner alternatives to fossil fuels? By "biofuels" I mean here liquid, organic fuels made from recently living plant or animal sources. Ethanol, or pure alcohol, made from grains or sugar can be blended into petrol (in which it is a good oxygenate additive); biodiesel is made from vegetable oil (or animal fat), chemically refined to run smoothly in diesel engines. Usually blended with diesel, it can also replace diesel where used in home heating. There has also been a fashion for smaller power stations in Europe burning vegetable oil directly, as pre-industrialised societies have used such oils for lighting since ancient times.
The United States, European Union and various other countries have enacted targets for blending biofuels into vehicle fuels. These mean that the fuel sold in forecourts in the UK or America is mostly blended with at least a small proportion of biofuel, usually made from a foodstuff, to meet a government target. Some of these rules are very recent; the UK's Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation required that, as of this month (April), 2.5% of all forecourt fuel must be biofuel, rising to 5% by 2010. These targets have come about for a number of reasons: a desire to increase homegrown alternatives to imported crude oil; to create jobs in rural areas (and keep rural voters sweet) while cutting back on direct farm subsidies; and to give the appearance of making transport greener.
I say "give the appearance" because scientists have known for years that most biofuels are not carbon-neutral. That is, firstly, considerable fossil fuels are used to power the farm equipment, irrigation, fertilizer making and processing to make them. Then there is the issue of 'land-use change' emissions. Somewhere between 20% and 40% of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions come from our conversion of land: CO2 and other gases are released when vegetation is cleared and carbon-rich soils are ploughed or drained. To produce biofuels on a significant scale a lot of land is needed, which means in general terms, extra grassland or forest is likely to be cleared somewhere in the world to make up for the extra land that is turned over to producing biofuels, and scientists say that the land-use change emissions from doing so generally take decades or centuries to repay, meaning the benefits in combating climate change are often very questionable.
It is not just a matter of emissions. The expansion of monocultures (whether biofuels or other crops displaced by biofuel planting) in developing countries often comes at a cost to local communities and wildlife. Communal lands are often earmarked by government officials for corporate takeover, and communities often have no choice but to co-operate and have little practical legal protection. In Indonesia, oil palm plantations are sterilising the forest homelands of hundreds of thousands of people, as well as displacing precious jungle wildlife, with Sumatran orang-utans, tigers and rhinoceroses now critically endangered. In Tanzania, 11,000 villagers are being displaced for a scheme to plant jatropha, another oil crop, for a British company. Although some intensification of agriculture in developing countries is inevitable, what is most shameful is the way it is, in effect, now forced on the poorest countries by the demands of the more prosperous.
Back to the current food crisis. The Food and Agriculture Organization has estimated that the diversion of food for fuel is 30% to blame for recent food price rises. Other causes include failed harvests in different parts of the world caused by increasing extreme weather (floods and droughts), rising fuel oil and fertilizer costs, and rising appetites for meat by the newly affluent urbanites of China and other emerging economies, meat requiring more land than plant-based foods when all the feed is considered. But even if 30% of the cause, biofuels' actual difference to prices as a 'last straw' could be considerably greater.
What is immediately obvious from the food crisis, and should have been realised years ago, is that it was fundamentally wrong to set targets for biofuel production. Biofuels should be considered low in the list of priorities for potential land use, others being feeding everyone, preserving rainforests, wetlands and untilled pasture, and forestry, whether for timber, paper pulp or woodfuel.
You will read of various suggested instances in which biofuels are claimed to be 'better' or 'good'. One is if biofuels are 'certified' according to their supposed carbon savings. This is the most suspect, since how can you quantify the land-use emissions caused by displacement, or account for fewer people being fed or wildlife lost? Major studies for the Swiss government and European Commission advise that if everything is accounted for, most biofuels from crops do more harm than good, if it could all be costed.
Another is 'second generation' biofuels made from straw, tall grasses or wood. By and large, the fallacy here is that you are often still competing for resources with animal grazing or fodder, so displacing that elsewhere, or cropland, or more cost-effective ways to use wood, which locks up carbon from the atmosphere anyway when it is grown.
One of the world's longest established and well-reasoned biofuel programmes is that of Brazil which runs many of its cars on a mostly ethanol-blend biofuel from sugar cane. Although the crop requires a lot of water and fertilizer, sugar cane ethanol does achive one of the highest performances in terms of energy from land of any biofuel, and Brazil does have a lot of land per capita. It still needs to be asked whether there are better ways to use the same land, such as forestry or more food production. It is also another matter if Brazil were supplying ethanol to the rest of the world. Brazil has already seen a major upsurge in deforestation with the start of the food commodities shock last year, and the Amazon and other very special wild places are still threatened there.
The fundamental problem with most biofuels is that they need far more land for each unit of energy delivered than almost any other energy technology (apart from the worst hydro dams), as well as needing productive land, water and fertilizing. Ultimately, the world has far less available land and water resources than can grow biofuels to power all the world's road vehicles, ships and planes, and increasingly, the more biofuels are produced, the fewer people (or rare wildlife) the earth will be able to support alongside.
We are left with two potential sources of biofuel that could work in temperate countries and be an effective use of resources. One is the re-use of waste cooking oil and various industrial organic wastes, such as from paper mills.
The other, with by far the highest potential fuel yield of any biofuel crop, is the growing of algae in sunlit tubes or covered ponds, assisted by piped carbon dioxide from a power station or cement works. However it remains to be seen if a cheap workable apparatus for this can be brought to market; and if it did, the attraction of getting 'double value' from fossil fuel power stations in this way would further complicate efforts to control fossil fuel emissions.
To make our road transport truly sustainable, we need to transform to much wider use of electric technology, including battery-powered cars and trolleybus systems, and develop sufficient renewable energy and storage devices to power it. It will mean a bit more quarrying, a lot of new vehicles, and more infrastructure. But it will be money very wisely spent. Most other alternatives to petrol and diesel are a distraction and storing up trouble.
Ships and planes? Well, I'll have to leave that for another time.
Jim Roland is a moderator of the Campaign against Climate Change activists' portal..
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