Biofuel production is increasing at a rate that is hard to believe. Philip Clarke in Farmers Weekly on 31/08/07 reported that two new massive biodiesel plants have been opened in the US with a combined capacity of 845 million litres. In the US there are now 150 biodiesel plants with 95 under construction and 130 ethenol plants with 98 under construction. AFBF economist Jennifer DuMars estimates that ethenol plants will use 88m tonnes of maize this season, nearly a quater of all output.
Taken together with increased biofuel production in other parts of the world, this is causing a massive loss of land for food production when we actually need more food production. We are now in a very dangerous position and desperately need a good harvest next year with few weather disruptions.
“The European Union said Brazil must protect farms and forests at home to try to open biofuel markets abroad, seeking to prevent a clean-air campaign from causing land damage. Brazil, a pioneer in developing biofuels including ethanol, is counting on export growth as Europe, the U.S. and Asia try to reduce the use of higher-polluting oil. The EU wants biofuels, made from crops such as sugar and grain, to make up 10% of transport fuel by 2020 from a planned 5.75% in 2010.
” ‘We can’t allow the switch to biofuels to become an environmentally unsustainable stampede in the developing world,’ EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson told a conference today in Brussels. ‘Europeans won’t pay a premium for biofuels if the ethanol in their car is produced unsustainably by systematically burning fields after harvests. Or if it comes at the expense of rainforests.’
“Mandelson’s remarks highlight the hurdles to expanding international biofuel trade and the risks of scaling back existing environmental rules in Brazil, the biggest producer of ethanol from sugar cane. Last month, billionaire George Soros, an investor in Brazil’s ethanol industry, said environmental regulation in the South American country would prevent it from achieving a potential 10-fold increase in output.
“‘The 27-nation EU plans to set minimum environmental standards for biofuels as part of draft legislation due later this year on achieving the bloc’s 10% target’, said Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs. ‘Only biofuels that meet these norms would count toward the goal of increasing use of the alternative fuels and be eligible for tax breaks,’ he said.
“”It is, of course, essential to ensure that this increase is fulfilled in a sustainable way,’ Piebalgs said. `We cannot just sit back and assume that this will happen automatically.’”
Nick Louth inThe Daily Reckoning wrote:
“Let’s get back to first principles. The carbon in the atmosphere, which causes climate change, isn’t made or destroyed but liberated or captured by physical processes. It is absorbed by plants during their growth and released when they die and rot. During their lifetime it is stored within them. We humans, like all animals, take in carbon with our food and exhale it as we breathe.Â
The carbon in our cells grows as we do and is released when we die. Carbon in fossil fuel is also stored, but for millennia rather than years, from the ancient algae and bacteria from which it is made. When we use our cars we liberate this ancient carbon, and do so in a microscopic fraction of the hundreds of millions of years that it took to accumulate.Â
“Now the economic underpinning behind biofuels can be expressed like a household budget. The idea is to avoid drawing on our inherited carbon savings (from fossil fuel reserves ) but use our carbon ‘income’ from growing crops to fund our carbon ‘spending’, e.g. motoring, aviation and industry. Clearly that only works when there is a new source of income, i.e. new crops grown, to fund the new
carbon expenditure incurred since the industrial revolution. If you merely divert existing crops into
biofuels, you do not add anything to the carbon income side of the account. We have merely been raiding the kitchen kitty.
“Leaving the world short of grain is merely causing food stocks (a different form of carbon store) to be run  down and prices to rise. The US Department of Agriculture says that world grain stocks have already dropped 5% this year.
“The amount of U.S. corn being turned into bio-ethanol for vehicles has tripled in five years to 50m tonnes in 2006. Corn prices earlier this year reached ten year highs, and at $4 a bushel are 70% above year-ago levels. Wheat prices have now followed suit, reaching an 11-year high in recent days, fanned by bad weather. Because agricultural land can be switched from one crop to another, the demand for corn bio-ethanol has fed inflation right the way through the grains complex.
Soaring animal feed prices are already feeding through to higher prices for meat and milk. The same is beginning to happen in Europe, where edible oils such as rape seed for bio-diesel are the crop of choice. Brewer Heineken has already warned that acreage switched away from barley to
oils is causing prices to rise.
“But surely, for all the expense, we are lowering our reliance on Middle Eastern oils? Not really, because there isn’t enough land to allow us to do so. The OECD has calculated that it would take 70% of Europe’s farmland to supply enough biofuels to save 10% of the oil currently used in transport. The 146.7m tonnes of oil equivalent the IEA expects to be drawn from biofuels by 2030 (on the big subsidy assumption) is just 3.8% of annual global oil consumption.”
Articles like that seem to suggest that the problems are insoluble and we should just admit defeat and let our children face the consequences when, in fact, radical action now is needed.
