Green Fuel: Are Biofuels Really a “Green” Fuel Solution?

By Glenn Ashton.
October 2005.

Biofuels As An Alternative Green Fuel
The steep increase in the price of oil has seen the field of alternative energy thrown wide open as previously unprofitable methods of energy production become viable. Besides the conventional ‘alternative’ methods of energy production such as wind and various solar panels, one such “green” fuel solution that has been strongly promoted is the use of biofuels.

Biofuels include two primary sources of fuel; alcohol produced from plant material as a petrol substitute and oil from seed crops as a biodiesel, or diesel replacement. Given the present oil price, the production of these two fuels becomes increasingly attractive.

While some countries, notably nations like Brazil, have a long history of generating significant amounts of ethanol from crops like sugar cane, there is a rapid global shift towards these fuels. The USA leads the way, finding a good market for its excess corn supply by recently constructing several ethanol plants, with more proposed.

In a recent talk in Cape Town, the sub-Saharan head of Monsanto, Kobus Lindeque, waxed lyrical about how up to six new ethanol plants are to be built in South Africa to use his companies genetically modified (GM) maize. Beside this, other plants to manufacture biodiesel, using GM soy are being developed.

Lindeque showed how the by-products of the fuel, the so-called distillers grains, can be used as cattle fodder, displaying a photograph of a massive ethanol plant surrounded by 30, 000 cattle in an intensive feedlot. Is this the sort of future we are striving for?

What was not explained was the danger of moving toward a reliance on using food crops to fuel our consumer economy. There are two primary problems; firstly, an increasing shift to reliance on food crops as a fuel source, at the expense of food security. Given the vagaries of agricultural production, coupled to the increasing risks of climate change, it appears that relying on a significant proportion of our food production to fuel our vehicles appears reckless as far as international food security is concerned.

The second major problem is that linking food to the oil price is likely to have a significantly inflationary influence on the cost of food. Given that enough food is already produced globally to feed every human on earth more than a pound and a half of food daily, sufficient to provide a healthy balanced diet, yet one fifth of humanity lives in a constant state of food shortage, the implications of shifting food to fuel production become positively obscene.

It is largely due to the high-energy demand lifestyle of the developed world that developing nations have had both their environmental assets and quality of life undermined. To subvert food security as a substitute for energy security – a vain hope at best - is as shameful an indictment of our stupidity and short term outlook on life as anything could be.

Agricultural expansion possibly the biggest environmental challenge facing our world. It is directly responsible for significant CO2 release into the atmosphere, through soil disturbance alone. Endless tracts of virgin land are cleared and planted to feed the developed worlds hunger for meat, soybeans and maize to feed the cattle, releasing yet more carbon. Erosion, pesticides, chemical fertilisers all impact terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, creating a massive environmental cascade of disasters.

Now we are asked to countenance the production of fuels through our agricultural system, at the cost of global food security. This is not green energy; this is perhaps the dirtiest energy we can possibly produce. Biofuels are environmentally, socially, morally and politically dirty. It creates the space for corporations like Monsanto to consolidate their increasing grip on the global food chain.

And then there is the question of the efficiency of biofuels. The EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) of conventional oil is around 30, at present. The EROEI of bio-diesel is around three. Ethanol has an EROEI of between 2 and minus 6, depending on whom you believe industry or scientific sceptics.

With ethanol, to produce enough fuel for an average car for a year takes around 5 hectares. That area can produce enough food for around 7 people.

Clearly the Monsanto vision for plant fuelled future, as attractive as it is to that corporation, is an anathema. But then companies like Monsanto, and nations like the USA, who would rather produce energy at a loss than acquire it from an increasingly unstable Middle East. But then that is the hole that they have dug for themselves, with lots of help from an ex-Monsanto employee called Donald Rumsfeld.

While there is room for the development of certain types of biofuel production, shifting food production into fuel is a desperate last gasp at attempting to maintain an unsustainable energy system. If we truly wish to shift towards true sustainability, we must at least double energy efficiency every ten years and halve carbon releases at a similar rate. Even then we have problems ahead, but at least we have hope for a solution.

Originally published in Greenprint 2005.
http://www.greenprint.co.za/

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