Biofuels are Uneconomical

Biofuels are a sham and a shame.
by Glenn Ashton.

Introduction.
South Africa has begun to invest in biofuel production, joining the rest of the world in movement toward a supposedly sustainable fuel supply. These biofuels are plant-based fuels, produced by either manufacturing ethanol alcohol from crops or crop waste or by extracting vegetable oils from seed crops. They have recently become profitable sources of energy given the high cost of oil and other carbon-based fuel sources.

Biofuels are touted as a green solution, providing energy by sustainably growing our fuel, by reducing dependence on imported oil, in turn growing a new sector within the energy economy. But what appears to be an appealing idea on the surface has profound implications on food security, environmental integrity, agricultural politics and the sustainability of our ecosystem. There is a threat that this new energy dependence may lure our civilisation down the final road to ruin.

Granted, biofuels produce lower amounts of pollutants when burned, especially as far as acid particulates, carbon monoxide and dioxide, soot and ozone are concerned. When added to conventional fuel they reduce total pollution load. When grown they absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, unlike mineral fuels, which simply liberate ancient plant based energy.

Some questions about Biofuels.
But we really need to enquire about the wisdom of use food crops to produce fuel. What are the dangers of a growing reliance on agriculture as an energy supply? Do biofuels supply energy efficiently and sustainably? What about food security and the need to feed the starving people of the world? Endless promises have been made to improve food security for the dispossessed; now they must compete for their food needs against the needs of energy hungry developed nations? Is this not contradictory?

What about the environmental impacts of increased global agricultural production? Agriculture is already cited as one of the most malign environmental influences on our planetary ecosystems. It appears almost insane to shift scarce food resources into energy production. Is there such a thing as green vehicle fuel?

The agricultural industry.
It is perhaps instructive to first examine how the face of international agriculture has changed for the worse over the past fifty years. Globally we have seen small family farms destroyed through state support of industrial farming methodology. This side effect of the so-called green revolution – heavily reliant on chemical and corporate seed inputs – turned farmers into little more than cheap labour. Subsidies, tax cuts, export assistance and other market distorting funds have further eroded the rights of small farmers around the world whilst subsidising corporate agricultural production. The Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development, consisting of the rich, developed nations of the world subsidises its agricultural sector to the tune of almost a Billion dollars per day.

Small farmers have been replaced by industrial farms of ginormous size, where machinery is king, where crops are monitored by satellite and where people are simply a cost component. Farms are fields of uniformity, reliant on an industrial regime of chemical components, most of which depend on fossil fuels as feedstock. Fertilisers, chemicals and seed have all become concentrated in the hands of a narrow group of chemical and pharmaceutical corporations.

Food and grain cartels.
The international grain market lies under the control of politically connected cartels, some of which have been indicted in racketeering and market fixing practices. Companies like Archer Daniel Midland, Continental, Cargill, Bunge and Louis Dreyfuss represent a grain oligarchy, controlling over 90% of the worlds grain trade. They have no national interests; their primary concern is profit for their private shareholders, unaccountable to anybody but themselves. These mega-merchants have cornered the market for the worlds food, we are at their mercy. This is anything but free trade.

The worlds main crops are not grown so much for food but as industrial commodities. Vast swathes of soybean are now cultivated; this crop has exploded in the area it is grown over the past 25 years. Although soybeans yield less than a third of the weight per area than maize does, it is a high protein legume that is farmed for both its oil content – used for margarine – and its protein, fed to livestock, replacing fishmeal after the collapse of the global fisheries in the late twentieth century.

Now soy is proposed to be grown for fuel. It is touted as wonderful symbol of the brave new world of “sun powered energy” as its proponents call it. The fact is that soy has increasingly fallen under the control of one corporation, Monsanto. This company additionally sells the herbicide that kills all other plants that may compete with its soy by genetically engineering in resistance to these weed-killing chemicals.

The rolling plains of the pampas of Argentina are being ploughed under to plant soy. The gauchos ride no more; those that have not retreated to the slums lining Buenos Aries may be lucky to get a job driving a harvester or spraying chemicals in this, the new Soya republic, as it has been termed.

The same is happening in Brazil. The rainforest and now the dry and ecologically sensitive Panatal are being decimated to grow soy on huge ranches owned by the wealthy elite. Every thousand hectares may emply three workers. Monsanto has forced its genetically engineered soy into Brazil against the democratic wishes of its people, just as it has in several other nations. This is the crop now being touted as a replacement for oil, the primary by-products being fodder for fast food burger meat.

GM crops and biofuels.
What has happened with soy, finally and with ineluctable clarity sweeps aside any argument that genetically engineered crops are have anything to do with feeding the world, with using less land to do so, or to save the environment, like some miraculous simulacrum. If anything the truth is diametrically opposed to the outrageous claims of Monsanto and the grain merchants. And as with soy, so too with canola (rape seed), maize and cotton seed oil – all of which are GM crops, leading to further concentration amongst the corporate elite.

Energy returns from food crops.
The energy returns from agriculturally derived fuels are poor. If the USA wanted to supply its energy needs through this means it would have to plant all of its arable land to biofuel crops. Against this we must bear in mind the vast resources of petroleum based fertilisers, pesticides and farm machinery that is needed to produce the crop. More energy is consumed transporting grain and processing it into fuels, then transporting the finished product to consumers (that’s us folks!). Industry sources cite an energy benefit of around 150%, but all environmental costs are ignored. Sceptics claim that it is break even at best, a biological and material deficit at worst.

Beside oil for biodiesel, countries like Brazil and the US produce ethanol alcohol from agricultural crops like sugar cane and maize, which is added to regular gasoline.

New processes are being developed to break down the cellulose in crop residue – corn stalks, wheat straw – and turn this into ethanol, in what is touted as progress, a way to utilise the ‘waste’ from crops. This perspective completely overlooks the importance of returning plant mass to the soil to replace the lost nutrients and materials taken from the earth by our already unsustainably intensive agricultural production methods. Remove the vegetable matter from the soil and you have built in erosion. Is this progress, or is it a race to the bottom, laying waste to the land in the name of cheap energy?

The use of sugar cane for ethanol production, as in Brazil, appears to be the best use of plant crops, considering that sugar is considered a significant health risk in the developed world. But yet again the energy gain is limited and the environmental impacts of this production are extensive.

The impacts on food security.
The most damning indictment of using agriculture to provide an extensive proportion of our ever increasing energy demands is the impact that such a shift in production shall have on the already tenuous food security situation in much of the world.

High oil prices make this a financially attractive proposition. As soon as food crops – or for that matter, the land used to grow them – are deemed to be part of our global energy supply system, it will become increasingly difficult to reverse the absorption of increasing amounts of these into the voracious energy cycle. Once that occurs we are on a slippery slope to both ecological ruin and global food insecurity. On one hand we will have the wealthy, energy consuming classes and nations; on the other we will have the poor and the hungry. The truly powerless.

There is presently adequate food produced globally to provide a healthy diet for every living person on earth. The problem is that far too many people simply cannot afford or access the surplus food. The majority of our food production does not go toward feeding people but toward feeding the animals that feed rich people, again at a far higher level of energy expenditure.

Once food becomes a source of energy, crop commodification will intensify. The poor are faced with a bitter reality; that the energy needs of the wealthy nations will come before their needs for sufficient food security. Is this why the Bush regime has refused to acknowledge the right to food as an unassailable human right? This is worth pondering as investors construct massive infrastructural projects to extract fuel from food crops. Those biofuel plants are going to compete head on, in the free market, for scarce food resources.

A race to the bottom.
Given the marginal energy gain of plant based fuels, coupled to the illogical notion of infinite economic, energy and wealth growth, an inevitable loop of agricultural production will feed upon itself, the end result being another nail in the coffin of our global ecosystem. Planetary feedback systems are already dangerously overloaded by the insanely spiralling increase of atmospheric global carbon dioxide, now at the highest levels since the dinosaurs died.

Using natural systems to provide our energy may appear an elegant solution, but, taken to its logical conclusions this ‘solution’ leads inevitably toward an apocalyptic eventuality. Farmers are driven off the land into slums. Machines clear the land, cultivate it and deliver the energy from a uniform, monocropped world to the power-mongers. More like the mongrels of power if you ask me.

The rule of the market.
We cannot, as rational human beings, sit idly by while market forces devise another short-term solution to the energy crisis. Market forces are incapable of planning more than a few years ahead, at least in environmental terms.
The market simply builds the costs of the destruction of our planet into our collective personal account and externalises this destruction from their profit.

If we allow this ill considered plan of so called green fuels to go ahead without due consideration, we will each be as complicit in the destruction of the global ecosystem as are the powermongers. It is time to call their game. To call this green energy is delusional.

There are just some sorts of energy that are better than others in how they produce and store their potential. Biofuels are at the very best an extremely limited resource and cannot by any stretch of the imagination supply the spiralling needs of our self-destructive civilisation. If we want sustainable energy, then we need to tap into the wind, waves and other solar energy and not fool ourselves that because our car exhaust smells good that we are actually saving the world.

Using old cooking oil is fine but creating a new commodity from vegetable fuel demonstrates clearly that the forces that drive our economies are completely removed from reality.

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