THE FALSE PROMISE OF BIOFUELS

EIGHT BASIC QUESTIONS ABOUT  BIOFUELS

                              

                 IT IS A RARE OCCURRENCE when President Bush, major environmental organizations, the agriculture community various federal and state politicians, and even some “peak oil” educators, appear to agree on an issue. The recent expansion of ethanol from corn production is just such an issue. It is a very attractive idea to think that we can satisfy our voracious appetite for inexpensive liquid fuel from a renewable resource such as corn. But is it justified? Is the large-scale domestic production of corn-based ethanol going to provide “energy independence” from foreign oil as claimed, as well as reduce greenhouse gas emissions, revitalize the farm belt, keep the U.S. economy growing, and replace the global decline in petroleum production with the advent of Peak Oil?

                In 2005, the U.S. Energy Policy Act set the goal of 12 billion gallons of ethanol by 2012. In 2006 the U.S. consumed almost 5 billion gallons of ethanol for transportation fuel (compared to over 140 billion gallons of gasoline).In 2006, corn for ethanol showed a production spike of 50 percent over the previous year, to a level which surpassed corn exports ( USDA, 2007). And there is more to come.

President Bush has called for the annual production of 35 billion gallons of “renewable” fuel by 2017. By the end of 2006 there were 110 ethanol plants in the U.S., many of which are now being expanded, and 73 were under construction. An additional 200 such plants are in the planningstage. This is a very significant commitment, and considerable amounts of taxpayer dollars are now available in various subsidies and energy programs to kick start this wonderfuel. Even General Motors has supported the venture, with its “Live Green Go Yellow” campaign.

                 Some environmental groups hold out the promise that all of the U.S.’s gasoline could be replaced by biofuels by 2050. But there are a variety of reasons to question whether ethanol, or any combination of agro fuels can provide the benefits extolled by so many supporters. The purpose of this paper is to address the matter particularly as concerns large-scale industrial production of biofuels, and to answer the following eight questions:

➣ Does ethanol production actually result in significantly more energy available to do work than the

energy required to produce it?

➣ What impact does the use of corn for ethanol have on the supply and cost of food?

➣ Is there sufficient water available to produce ethanol on a large scale?

➣ What is the impact of ethanol production on soil fertility?

➣ What is the impact of ethanol production on forests?

➣ Does ethanol reduce greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants?

➣ What is the impact of ethanol production on the poor and on indigenous peoples?

➣ Does ethanol production make economic sense?

                   First, some definitions. Biofuels are fuels made from biological materials, or biomass. These include anything from straw wood waste and municipal sewerage to crops such as corn or sugar cane. Ethanol is a type of biofuel derived from agricultural products with high sugar or starch content. While this document will focus on ethanol, many of the points we are making could also be made with minor modification about any of the biofuels, or as we prefer to call them, agrofuels, especially if used on a large scale.

 IS ETHANOL A VIABLE SUBSTITUTE FOR PETROLEUM BASED GASOLINE?

                                    There is no question that ethanol can be used to power an internal combustion engine. It can be mixed in different proportions with gasoline, or used as the sole fuel. In small proportions such as E10 (10 percent ethanol), no engine modifications are required. In larger proportions such as E85 (85 percent ethanol) and above, different engine designs are needed. The two big questions about ethanol as a substitute for gasoline are:

(1) Is the “net energy” from ethanol large enough to justify its production? And

(2) Can it be produced in sufficient volume to make a difference?

WHAT IMPACT DOES CORN FOR ETHANOL HAVE ON FOOD SUPPLY AND COST?

                    The recent interest in corn to ethanol production stems in part from the fact that the U.S. can produce more corn than it needs domestically or than it can export. The U.S. currently produces about 300 million tons of corn and exports about 50 million tons, or 17 percent of its total crop. But these corn exports have remained relatively flat over the past two decades or so and growers have been eager to find new markets. Part of the problem for U.S. producers is that EU and other markets do not want to buy U.S. genetically modified corn (GM) a large percent of current production. Politicians have been eager to help. The result has been a flurry of bills in the U.S. Congress providing incentives for the transition from corn-growing for food, to corn-growing for ethanol. This increased corn and ethanol production has led to a doubling of corn prices over a very short time, and is beginning to affect the entire food chain, from the cost of raising cattle to the price of Mexican tortillas. Even the price of beer is affected as land previously dedicated to barley for hops is converted to corn for ethanol.

                     

                     

                  Many analysts project that the large increases in, food prices over the last few years are directly attributable to the increased use of crops for fuel. These price increases are regarded as permanent due to the new structural relationship between crops and energy. Raising the demand for corn as an agrofuel, thus increasing its price in world markets, creates an advantage for the U.S. which is by far the world’s largest exporter of corn. It is also a way for the U.S. to retrieve some of the dollars sitting in China’s central bank, as Chinese corn production is now in decline, and China is becoming increasingly dependent on U.S. crop exports. But there is a moral issue here as well. Corn is a basic food staple for hundreds of millions of people. Some 2 billion people in the world currently suffer from hunger and even more suffer from nutritionaldeficits. Hunger is as much a political issue as one of food availability. For the billions of poor even a slight increase in the price of food can have dire consequences. And with an expected increase in the global population over the next few decades, in poorer nations competition between food and agrofuels can only intensify.

Can currently uncultivated land be used to grow these agrofuels, so as to minimize competition between food and fuel?

                 Answering this question requires a consideration of several crucial issues: water availability, the impacts from converting forests to agricultural lands, soil degradation, the availability of petroleum based fertilizers, and the impacts on the poor and on indigenous people who depend on these now marginal lands for their livelihoods.

 IS THERE ENOUGH FRESH WATER TO PRODUCE ETHANOL?

               “Humanity is moving into uncharted terri-tory in the water economy. With the demand for food climbing, and with the overpumping of aquifers now common in industrial and developing countries alike, the world is facing a convergence of aquifer depletions in scores of countries within the next several

years.”

                Some two thirds of global water use is for agriculture and as a result, water tables are dropping significantly in some of the most productive areas of U.S. farmland. Corn ethanol is a particularly thirsty crop. The production of 1 gallon of ethanol requires 1,700 gallons of freshwater both for corn production and for the fermentation/distillation processing of ethanol. If  future yields are to increase, even more water will be required as corn production expands to increasingly marginal lands. Already there is pressure from big agricultural growers to use lands currently set aside for water conservation and wildlife habitat. U.S. farm groups are lobbying the federal government to allow them to plant agrofuel crops on lands now protected by the Conservation Reserve Program and the Wetlands Reserve Program. The water

output from corn ethanol is also problematic. A total of about 10 gallons of wastewater must be removed per gallon of ethanol produced, and this relatively large amount of sewage effluent has to be disposed of at great cost in energy, and environmental damage. Furthermore, corn production uses more herbicides, insecticides and nitrogen fertilizer than any other crop produced in the U.S., and these chemicals invade ground and surface water, thereby causing more water pollution than any other crop.

                 

                U.S. corn production also causes more soil erosion than any other U.S. crop. Much of U.S. farm land drains into the Mississippi River and eventually into the Gulf of Mexico. The water runoff from these farm lands already causes eutrophication in the Gulf, and the size of this dead zone is expanding. The dead zone has averaged about 4,800 square miles since 1990; the record of 8,500 square miles occurred in 2002. In 2006 it covered about 6,662 square miles—about the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island together. The dead area may now extend to 30 feet or more above thesea bottom. Within it, nothing lives, as there is not enough oxygen to sustain life.

                    So, water is clearly a limiting factor in any large scaling-up of corn-based ethanol. It is a problem both from the perspective of the volume of water required to produce ever increasing amounts of corn, and because of the erosion and runoff from fertilizers and pesticides which significantly pollute large areas of water, making them toxic to living creatures.

WHAT IS THE IMPACT OF ETHANOL PRODUCTION ON SOIL FERTILITY?

                      “We stand, in most places on earth, only six inches from desolation, for that is the thickness of the topsoil layer upon which the entire life of the planet depends.” Loss of topsoil has been a major factor in the fall of civilizations over the ages, and it could happen again. Fertile soil is far more than dirt. It is a complex substance composed of mineral matter from its parent rock, and organic matter from its living organisms. The organic matter is broken down by millions of micro-organisms per cubic foot in the soil which recycle the nutrients, and create tunnels through which air and water can circulate, making even more nutrients available to the root systems of plants. Soil quality varies greatly from place to place. It takes hundreds of years to form even 1 inch of topsoil. Consequently, good soil is a precious resource and essential for a secure food supply. Unfortunately, both the quantity and quality of soil is now in rapid decline globally. Only 35 percent of global arable land is free from degradation. Studies estimate that approximately 40 percent of the world’s agricultural land is seriously degraded, with significant impacts on the productivity of about 16 percent of agro ecosystems. During the last decade, per capita available cropland decreased 20 percent.

                   The U.S. is not exempt from this destruction of fertile soil. For example, Iowa has some of the best topsoil in the world, but in the past century, half of it has been lost. Productivity drops off sharply when topsoil depth thins to 6 inches or less, the average crop root zone. On over half of America’s best crop land, erosion is 27 times the natural rate of about 400 pounds of soil per acre per year. This is an enormous loss of a precious resource that cannot be easily or quickly replaced.

In addition to degradation of the soil, between 1982 and 2002 an average of 2.6 million acres of U.S. agricultural land was lost annually due to land development.  If this rate of land development were to continue, then all of the U.S. cropland would be gone in 140 years; clearly an impossible scenario. But the threat to agricultural lands from continuing development is clear.

 WHAT IS THE IMPACT OF AGROFUEL PRODUCTION ON FORESTS?

                Forests have provided a wide range of essential resources for human use from earliest recorded history. So dependent are we on forests that the expansion of human civilizations has generally meant the decline of forests; in turn, the decline of forests often sets limits on the development of civilizations. As civilizations declined, the forests tend to return. Today, forests cover roughly 30 percent of the planet’s land surface, but this is diminishing at the rate of 0.2 percent each year. In the past 15 years some 3 percent of primary forests have been lost.

PLANTATION FORESTS

Once the natural forests and their biodiversity are cleared, they are replaced with industrial plantation forests. These are monocrops, and have been shown to have a negative impact on the water cycle, as nonnative, fast-growing trees use high volumes of water. Such monocrops are destroying biodiversity in some of the most biologically diverse areas of the world. High levels of herbicides and pesticides are also commonly used on these plantations to suppress competing growth from other plants and to prevent disease outbreaks, also impacting water quality. In addition to all these environmental impacts, plantation forests offer very few employment opportunities, resulting in a net loss of jobs in areas overtaken with forest plantations.

AGROFUEL SUSTAINABILITY

While there are calls for developing and producing agrofuels “in ways that protect our planet—not in ways that create new risks” (European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso in his keynote speech to the International Biofuels Conference in Brussels, July 5, 2007. This “we can do it all” attitude of business and government officials ignores the biophysical and social realities on the ground. The net energy return from any type of plant matter dependent on solar energy for its production cannot possibly compete with the energy available from fossil fuels. The simple physical principles of thermodynamics preclude the possibility of significant biofuel production from forests or other plant crops.