Biofuel: Friend or Foe?

Panel Looks at the Carbon Footprint of Biofuels

Tracy Sutton
Northern Editor

WASHINGTON. —  Biofuels — friend or foe? was the gist of a recent Farm Foundation Forum featuring three eminent supporters of biofuels here at the National Press Club.

Ethanol, in particular, once considered a balm to our reliance upon foreign oil, is now being called into question as perhaps being more harmful than fossil fuels overall, when the environmental  impact of growing corn and putting food and fuel into competition is considered.

Ripple Effects
The U.S. Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 passed last December requires American fuel producers “to use at least 36 billion gallons of biofuel in 2022.” This is nearly a fivefold increase over current levels.

What will be the ripple effect of this mandate? Will it  cause a significant agricultural resource shift away from food production toward biofuels? Have we seen the effects already? Are current grain price increases or the international food riots over the rising costs of food related to biofuel production?

Panelist Brooke Coleman of the Renewable Energy Action Project said  the indirect impacts  of biofuel “are incredibly complicated.”

Asked if biofuels were driving rising food costs, Bruce McCarl of Texas A&M University, dismissed the question as an “oversimplification.”

Other factors were at play, he said. “World demand is shifting” to places like China and India. “We’re exporting food and that is probably leading  to a shortage of corn.” McCarl suggested the need for developing countries to invest in their own agriculture and said that high petroleum prices are to blame, “not ethanol,” the cost of which he noted, has gone down.

Carbon Neutrality
Recent studies and articles in popular media have called into question the carbon neutrality — or size of the “carbon footprint” — of biofuel production.

“Carbon neutrality” refers to the carbon released during fuel use, which is then reabsorbed and balanced by the carbon absorbed by new plant growth. Carbon neutral fuels do not add to global warming.

What scientists and policymakers are now trying to measure is whether the energy consumed during the production of biofuels (such as the fuel used to power machinery, transport crops to and from biofuel processing plants, etc.) outweighs whatever carbon offset there is by using biofuel.

Coleman thinks we are looking at these impacts in a “selective, crazy” way.
No one, he said, is comparing biofuels to petroleum. If they did, “biofuels win.”

While Coleman concedes that Brazil tearing down the rainforest to make more room for biofuel crops is “bad,” we must compare that to the impacts of oil. What are those indirect impacts?

Coleman said that is difficult to gauge the impacts of marketplace supply and demand for biofuels,  (and the resulting impact on world markets) because our ag policies are “polluted” with tariffs and subsidies.

Finally, he said, that tearing up pristine lands — or “carbon death” — as he described it, is not the right way to do biofuel. Studies have not looked at growing biofuel on marginal lands.

Biofuels, concluded Coleman, will play an important role in mitigating global warming.

How They Do Biofuel in Europe
Panelist Laurent Javaudin, of the European Commission to the United States, was on hand to address biofuels’ sustainability in Europe. Europe, he said, was the first market for biofuels and the European Union (EU)  is going about things quite a bit differently.

The EU also has a mandate to convert to 20 percent biofuel by 2020. However, in Europe they already have steep carbon taxes and gasoline is around $8 per gallon.

In Europe, unless the biofuel in question reduces greenhouse gases, it does not count toward the mandate.

There is a ban on biofuel that is produced on land that is biodiverse, such as prairies or forests.

There is a ban on biofuels from rainforests.

In Europe they are diversifying feedstocks from more than just corn.

In short, only sustainable biofuels count toward the mandate. Enforcement of these provisions is accomplished through each member state certifying producers and verifying this certification through international agreement. 

“Concerns must be taken seriously about environmental and market imbalances” as a result of biofuel conversion, said Javaudin.

Convincing the Public
This discussion was opened for questions and answers with former Texas Congressman Charlie Stenholm moderating. Judging by the tenor of the questions, the roomful of reporters was not sanguine about the sustainability of biofuels.

Asked about non-corn based biofuels, or celluosic ethanol, McCarl said that scale of production of switchgrass wasn’t feasible. It would take a pile of “switchgrass the size of this building to run a power plant for 15 minutes.” (The National Press Building is a 14-story building in Washington, D.C.)

One audience member who queried the impact of diverting the supply of corn toward fuel from feed was told by Coleman that he needed to “go deeper,” and was remiss in not looking at the subject more closely.

Further responding to a question of why the United States is making a huge investment in biofuel when the overall economy is bad and the benefits of biofuels are unproven, Coleman replied, that we   need to solve the problem of energy scarcity now. Period.

“We won’t get a consensus,” Coleman said.