Synthesis/Regeneration Winter 2006  [Printer-friendly version]
December 15, 2006

THE REAL SCOOP ON BIOFUELS

"Green Energy" Panacea or Just the Latest Hype?

[Rachel's introduction: The biofuels industry -- typically making
ethanol from corn and biodiesel from soy -- is big business and
getting bigger fast. New research shows that biofuels are far from
environmentally friendly.]

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 U.S.
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 U.S. 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 U.S. corn harvest was used to produce some
3.9 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 diesel use. 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 less than 3% of current gasoline and diesel use. 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
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 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 (To-ward
Freedom, 2004).