The European Union (EU) wants to see 10 percent of Eurozone transportation powered by bio-fuels by 2020. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has come out in opposition, claiming biofuels’ ability to tackle global warming is strictly limited. Cooperate and develop this: the organization concludes that biofuels are only economically viable with large state subsidies (surprise!). What’s more, they reckon the mandated European bio-fuel surge could lead to “rising food prices and damage to forests and wildlife.” The OECD wants the EU to rescind its biofuels targets. Their alternative? Legislate energy-saving and more efficient vehicles. “You cannot feed people and soak up carbon and protect biodiversity and fuel cars,” says Brice Lalonde, the former French environment minister who chairs the OECD’s round table on sustainable development. C’est la verite.
Find Reviews by Make:
Read all comments
That’s a surprisingly sane statement.
Using FOOD as a feedstock to produce FUEL is exactly backwards, as US agriculture is (slowly) finding out. Biofuels based on food needs to be ELIMINATED. ASAP. Looking at you, corn ethanol.
There are alternatives. The obvious low-hanging fruit is making fuel from WASTE (who would have thought?). Can be done. Google CHOREN. Google Thermal Depolymerization Conversion Process. Don’t believe everything they say, though.
Unfortunately, the Ag lobby is much more powerful than the waste lobby.
D’uh… recycle WASTE. Don’t use virgin oils for fuel feedstock. Yes, it is harder, but nobody said this would be easy.
Just about every restaurant on the planet throws away enough “fuel” to power 2-12 vehicles every week. I know this because that is how I’m powering my two vehicles.
–chuck
http://chuck.goolsbee.org
A bit of inflation in food prices is actually good for farmers around the world, especially in poor countries.
Additionally, if you listen to biofuel engineers, the picture is a lot less dire.
What these people are working on is:
1. Energy crops with much higher yield per acre
2. Cellulosic biofuel production that can create synthetic diesel, gasoline or ethanol from these energy crops.
This is still in the R&D phase, but in 10 years we might see a lot of fuel production from this, WITHOUT affecting the food supply too much.
So, I think biofuels are a good thing and a useful tool to fight global warming and the OPEC monopoly.
Cellulosic biofuel is the only present hope. That much was pretty much acknowledged when Bush increased the tax credits given to ethanol production a few years back. They set aside a chunk of money in the same bill to organize research for cellulosic ethanol. Waste grasses, wood chips and bio-junk that would be otherwise thrown away is the key.
Ethanol is pretty much a storage technology and environmentally, isn’t much better than reformulated gas when the mpg hit is taken into account.
“Yellow grease” based biodiesel is just a niche product. If all of the SVO from all of the Chinese restaurants were religiously recycled, it still wouldn’t be a drop in the ocean.
I watched this show called “Green Fuels” where a LA-type woman went to Lovecraft Biofuels to convert her old Merc to SVO. Then they showed her how to dumpster dive for used SVO. She wasn’t too enthused by that.
EJ, that’s one way to look at it. Here is another: First the first world dump (look it up) it’s subsidized crops on third world countries. Third world farmers (not protected by helpful congressman, their leaders are too busy funneling money to Swiss bank accounts) can’t compete and go bankrupt. So now everybody depends on the cheap crumbs from the first world table.
Next, the first world decide “wait a minute” we are going to make fuel out of that “excess” food, quickly taking food off the third world’s table.
If you’re a third world farmer, do you mortgage yourself to the chin, or do you say “F-that, once bitten, twice shy”?
In the mean time, the First World is not particularly popular in the Third World. Wonder why?
debushau,
Here’s how I see it. There are three potential feedstocks for biofuels:
1. Food crops.
2. Non-food crops.
3. Wastes
It should be obvious that the best place to start would be with #3, and once you are close to full utilization, you start working on #2. #1 should not even be on the list. So where did our elected leaders start?
The fuel you produce is a totally different issue from the choice of feedstock. The ideal fuel, as I see it, would be completely miscible with existing fuel supplies, i.e. it would have the same energy content, be able to be transported in the same pipelines, etc. Unlike “green” diesel (see CHOREN and TDP) or butanol (Range Fuels) both ethanol and biodiesel fails the test.
Ethanol investors are already getting burnt. And it is only going to get worse…
“Their alternative? Legislate energy-saving and more efficient vehicles.”
Like the VW motor scooter?
Biofuel production has started out with food crops, because it’s easy to do. Obviously, the world needs to progress into the next phase.
I think farmers in Brazil, Malaysia, Guatemala, China, etc., would be very interested in producing energy crops.
We import bananas. Why not biofuel?
Farm Plankton > Feed it to Whales > Turn Whales into oil. Problem solved.
hal, if we did that, where would we get all the seamen for lipstick?
What a schizophrenic government we have here in Nebraska!
One agency says that the ground water supply is being depleted at an alarming rate and wants to curtail irrigation.
Another, says that what’s left of the groundwater is undrinkable by the very young and the elderly unless filtered through an expensive reverse-osmosis process; due to excess levels of nitrates caused by over-fertilization of corn fields.
Yet another agency confounds the other two by pushing the expansion of the ethanol industry–an industry whose viability, despite huge state and federal subsidy, depends upon cheap, heavily irrigated, nitrogen-fertilized corn.
EJ: Biofuel production has started out with food crops, because it’s easy to do. Obviously, the world needs to progress into the next phase.
There’s truth in that statement – but it’s never quite as simple as that, is it? The powerful ag lobby, also had a lot to do with it. If we are trying to diversify our fuel supplies, why would we not import cheap ethanol from Brazil? Or cheap palm oil (for biodiesel) from Indonesia?
At some point the government is going to have to decide whether they are serious about sustainable biofuels, or whether they just want to look for more under the radar ag subsidies. So far they seem to choosing the second option.
It does seem insane for us to try to grow our dependence on fuel from foodstocks.
All we need is one major earthquake, hurricane, tsunami, or volcano in that part of the world, or an infestation or other potato-famine-like event to hit corn or to hit sugar cane or beets, and it’s over with.
We’ll all be poor, sickly, and hungry. But at least we’ll have that I’m-so-self-important E-85 badge on our useless cars in our garages.