Biofuels could be one of the biggest environmental cons because they actually make global warming worse by adding to the man-made emissions of carbon dioxide that they are supposed to curb, according to two new studies published in the journal Science:

• “Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land Use Change“
• “Land Clearing and the Biofuel Carbon Debt“

Timothy Searchinger, the lead author of one of the studies and a researcher in environment and economics at Princeton University explained to the International Herald Tribune:

“Previously, there’s been an accounting error: land use change has been left out of prior analysis.”

Political policies of mandating biofuel usage and offering subsidies to biofuel producers foolishly fail to take carbon management into account.

Here are a couple of excerpts from the abstracts:

• “[Prior] analyses have failed to count the carbon emissions that occur as farmers worldwide respond to higher prices and convert forest and grassland to new cropland to replace the grain (or cropland) diverted to biofuels.* * * Biofuels from switchgrass, if grown on U.S. corn lands, increase emissions by 50%.”

• “Converting rainforests, peatlands, savannas, or grasslands to produce food-based biofuels in Brazil, Southeast Asia, and the United States creates a ‘biofuel carbon debt’ by releasing 17 to 420 times more CO₂ than the annual greenhouse gas reductions these biofuels provide by displacing fossil fuels.”

New research from Australia and the OECD shows the benefits of biofuels in reducing greenhouse gas emissions are insignificant, at only 1 – 4%. And a new report shows there’s also no economic case for mandating the level of ethanol in fuel.

OECD trade and agriculture analyst Martin von Lampe says:

“Governments around the world are putting a lot of hope in a number of areas on biofuels and it seems that many of these hopes are only partially justified. The environmental benefits are much less than they were assumed to be, the savings in fossil energy are much lower than they were thought to be, and, at the same time, the support to biofuels is relatively costly.”

From an article in FarmTalk Online:

“Supplies of nitrogen fertilizers, as well as phosphorus and potassium fertilizers, are tight throughout the United States. . .

“In fact, it is currently difficult to buy fertilizer nitrogen for winter wheat topdressing and/or this spring´s row crops unless the supply has already been lined up—regardless of what the posted prices are . . .

“The sharp increase in price and accompanying fertilizer N shortage is not a sudden development . . . Unprecedented market forces have markedly changed the fertilizer industry over the past decade which has set the stage for the current supply/demand imbalance and resulting high prices . . .

“Over the past decade, much of our fertilizer nitrogen manufacturing capacity has shut down in the U.S. as a result of sharp increases and fluctuations in natural gas costs [etc] . . .

“As a result, more and more nitrogen fertilizer is now imported from countries in the Middle East, South America, the former Soviet Union, and other low-cost natural gas areas . . . More than 50 percent U.S. fertilizer nitrogen supply is imported annually – and our dependence on foreign imports continues to increase.

“Also, global demand for this supply of fertilizer nitrogen continues to increase, especially in countries such as China and India with rapidly expanding economies . . .”

This article brought to mind a piece I read a few days ago in Robert Rapier’s R-Squared Energy Blog on the impacts of biofuel mandates in Wales. I didn’t comment on it then, but it has stuck in my mind. Rapier reports on a farmer’s complaint about fertilizer supplies:

“This weekend I made inquires about ordering this year’s fertiliser for our holding.

“The answer was, quite frankly, shocking. Our local supplier usually has a stock of 4,000 tonnes for local growers (we just want one tonne of that…).

“This year, however, their total allocation is being pegged at 640 tonnes. The rest, it seems, has been shipped to the USA for the biofuel industry. The silos and bunkers are empty.

“And, to add insult to injury, the meagre amount that the supplier has been left with has gone up by £100 a tonne over last year’s price.

“I foresee near riots in the next couple of months at agricultural suppliers across the land.”

University of California scientists are reporting that biofuels are worse than oil because they remove carbon from our soils.

Land is being lost to development, pollution and changing weather patterns. But mostly, global soil loss is a crisis mostly rooted in agriculture. Topsoil is being stripped off faster than it can be regenerated.

Scientists at the University of California at Berkeley’s Transportation Sustainability Research Center told the California Air Resources Board that ethanol could be twice as bad as gasoline, from a carbon-emissions point of view. How? Basically by turning land now covered with trees, grass, and other natural “carbon sinks” into farmland for corn and other crops used for ethanol.

Berkeley profs Alex Farrell and Michael O’Hare summed up the findings:

“Simply said, ethanol production today using U.S. corn contributes to the conversion of grasslands and rainforest to agriculture, causing very large GHG emissions. Even if only a small fraction of the emissions calculated in this crude way [through land use change] are added to estimates of direct emissions for corn ethanol, total emissions for corn ethanol are higher than for fossil fuels.”

Dave Cohen at the Energy Bulletin and ASPO-USA ridicules the politicians’ favorite energy fix:

“[C]orn or cellulosic ethanol, the favored fuel of our politicians, will replace only a very small fraction of American oil consumption by 2022 in the best case. In the meantime, the peak of Gulf of Mexico oil production will have come and gone, U.S. production will have fallen considerably from current levels, Mexico will no longer be exporting any oil, and the OECD nations will be utterly dependent on exports from the unstable Persian Gulf. This is only a partial list of the oil production and export shortfalls Americans can expect to see. These historical circumstances describe a disaster waiting to happen. An authentic understanding of the actual role of cellulosic ethanol and other biofuels as substitutes for oil goes some of the way toward creating the foundation for an appropriate response to our peak oil predicament.”

Using biofuels made from corn, sugar cane and soy could have a greater environmental impact than burning fossil fuels. Even if the fuels themselves emit fewer greenhouse gases, they all have higher costs in terms of biodiversity loss and destruction of farmland.

Determining the “greenness” of alternative energy sources requires a life cycle assessment – consideration not only at the amount of energy that is gained from an alternative source relative to fossil fuels, but how much energy is used and pollution created during formation, operation, and decommissioning of a source.

One study found that wind and geothermal energy are true green resources – and the efficiency of these systems over their entire life cycle is comparable to that of fossil fuels. Solar power, on the other hand, is not as ecofriendly, at least not until economies of scale come into play – but the pollution of solar systems is far, far less then traditional fossil fuels, even though they represent a lower thermodynamic efficiency.

An article in Science discusses a recent study examining the total environmental impact from various types of biofuels. While nearly all crop-derived biofuels emit less greenhouse gases than fossil fuels, whether or not they are better for the environment is still open for debate. It’s still not established that corn-derived ethanol produces more energy than it consumes, when the total impact to the environment is considered. But when biodiversity is taken into account, the scales tip even further away from biofuels being truly green.

And regardless of how effective sugar cane is for producing ethanol, its benefits quickly diminish if carbon-rich tropical forests are being razed to make the sugar cane fields, thereby causing vast greenhouse-gas emission increases.

Another factor that must be considered is trace-gas emissions. Corn and rapeseed require nitrogen fertilizers which result in nitrous oxide emissions. If NOx emissions are included in the analysis, then corn and canola can actually be worse for global warming than burning fossil fuels.

Rep. Roscoe Barnett, a conservative Republican from Maryland, has for the last couple of years been a voice in the wilderness in the House of Representatives, speaking out on the issues surrounding Peak Oil and our nations’ need to change our oil intensive way of life.

He voted against the energy bill that just passed out of the House, citing the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) as the reason for his opposition.

“I welcome the Senate’s addition to strengthen CAFÉ standards to increase gas mileage of new cars and trucks. However, the hype that using food crops for fuel, such as corn ethanol or soy biodiesel and the hope that cellulosic ethanol could achieve independence from imported oil is extremely harmful.”

The RFS would mandate 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2036 – and worse yet, 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol by 2015.

His explanation of his vote pretty well sums up why biofuels are not only a scam – they will end up causing more harm than good.

• Corn ethanol and soy biodiesel can never replace more than a drop in the bucket of our gas and diesel use.
• Corn prices doubled due to the 2005 mandate which harms farmers who rely on grain for feed and low income people who suffer from increased prices of food.
• Mining our soils of organic matter to make fuel is not sustainable.

Barnett does not even get in to the EROEI debate. Biofuels supporters define the boundaries of what is included in EROEI calculations as narrowly as possible to reach positive results – and even then there’s just barely a positive EROEI of about 1:1.2.

PCass recently asked that One Town Square take another look at the biofuels debate.  But except in the halls of state capitals (including Oregon) and Washington, where lobbyists and big money interests hold sway, I think the debate is pretty much over.  This article in Culture Change exhaustively examines why biofuels are unsustainable and a threat to America.

Ron Steenblick at Gristmill nails what’s wrong with our transportation planning. He quotes U.K. environmental expert Clive Bates:

“Instead of asking how to reduce transport emissions from road fuel substitution, we should be asking how to make use of land to tackle climate change in the most effective way possible. In coming up with the biofuels targets, policy-makers have asked, and answered, the wrong question. It’s not hard to see why … transport policy-makers have to find transport policies. The results: waste, damage and lost opportunities to do better . . . “

Bates argues that the best short-term transportation strategies are fuel efficiency and changes in driver behavior. Longer term it’s about mobility demand and the physical layout of our lives.

The few remarks of Bates that Steenblick quotes reveals a much broader concept of “land use” than we’re used to here in Oregon. It’s not just about subdivisions and strip malls – it’s about how we grow crops and trees, and impacts on soils, water, and ecosystems.

Bates identifies two main problems with biofuels:

1. They are a very expensive way of saving carbon, compared to the alternatives (at least 10x the going rate in the EU)
2. There are substantial negative ‘sustainability’ impacts, arising from changes in land use for biofuel production – for example deforestation, water impacts or land shortages.

Bates notes that we seem indifferent to these negative consequences. Despite these weaknesses, we now have extremely powerful and expensive policy instruments devoted to promoting biofuels.

The influential European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) is this week expected to call on the European Commission to reassess its target for ensuring 10 percent of road fuels come from biofuels by 2020.

The EESC has  signaled it will side with environmental groups in taking a “very critical stance” of the Commission’s recent biofuel progress report. The report largely praised moves to promote wider use of biofuels, but the EESC argues it has failed to adequately account for the “manifold problems” associated with wider use of biofuels such as “high production costs and storage problems for bio-diesel and high consumption of water and fertilisers, potentially causing soil destruction, for ethanol… [and] the impact of biofuels on the world market for food”.

Not to mention that the latest studies show biofuels may actually increase in greenhouse gas emissions.

The U.S. craze for ethanol could severely strain the already overexploited Ogallala aquifer, increasing demand for scarce water supplies by more than 2 billion gallons a year.

The Ogallala aquifer is an 800-mile-long underground pool of fossil water that stretches from Texas to South Dakota. The Ogallala feeds one-fifth of all the irrigated land in the United States, and is critical to farmers growing corn, cotton, wheat, soybeans and other crops.

Between three and six gallons of water are needed to produce one gallon of ethanol, potentially increasing demand on the already declining Ogallala by as much as 2.6 billion gallons a year just to process the corn and produce the fuel. Another 120 billion gallons a year could be needed for irrigation to grow more corn in the region.