Q: My father-in-law says that ethanol
(which he seems to use interchangeably with “biofuel”) is the way of the future.
Can you tell me what it is exactly and if it really is an environmentally
friendly and sustainable alternative to regular gasoline?
A: Biofuel is the term given to any fuel
produced from organic plant matter, rather than from fossil fuels. It can be
produced from specially grown crops, from agricultural waste, by using waste
vegetable oil or even with animal manure. There are a number of different
biofuels, but the ones we hear about the most these days are ethanol and
biodiesel.
Ethanol
Ethanol is a high octane fuel that is commercially produced
by the fermentation of plant sugars. In the United
States and Canada, it is typically made from
corn, while Latin American countries use sugar cane. It can also be produced
from cellulose materials such as agricultural and wood waste (including
cornstalks), fast-growing trees and grasses and crops like barley, wheat, rice,
sorghum, sunflower and potatoes.
In North America, ethanol
is often blended with gasoline at concentrations of seven to ten percent by
volume. All cars built since the 1970s can burn up to ten percent ethanol (E-10)
in the fuel mixture with no modification, no loss of performance and no threat
to vehicle warranties. In fact, ethanol’s
high octane level reduces the need for toxic anti-knock additives.
Ethanol can also be used in much higher proportions - up to 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline (E-85) - but only in what are called flexible fuel vehicles. These vehicles can
operate on straight gasoline or on any proportion of ethanol mixed with
gasoline, up to the 85 percent limit. A limited but growing number of flexible
fuel vehicles are now being produced by auto manufacturers.
The environmental benefits like reduced greenhouse gas
emissions are controversial, with conflicting opinions about just how
eco-friendly ethanol really is. It appears that the combination of ethanol and
gasoline actually results in overall increase in smog-producing volatile organic
compounds. Blending ethanol with a gasoline that has been manufactured to have
low volatility overcomes that problem.
Natural Resources Canada says that on a full cycle
basis, the use of a liter of E-10 fuel instead of straight gasoline can reduce
greenhouse gas emissions by three to four percent if ethanol is produced from
grain, or six to eight percent if it is produced from cellulose. Using E-85 fuel
instead of straight gasoline can reduce net emissions by as much as 75 percent,
according to the government.
U.S.
government research indicates that ethanol yields lower emissions of carbon
monoxide than regular gasoline but higher emissions of nitrogen oxide. Some
sources also claim that E-85 produces higher levels of formaldehyde and other
toxic aldehydes. But ethanol boosters claim that the concentrations are small
and removed by catalytic converters in recent-model cars.
Biodiesel
Unmodified diesel engines can burn biodiesel fuel, which is
commonly made from soybean oil or other vegetable oils or animal fats. The
concept of using vegetable oil as a fuel dates back to 1895 when Dr. Rudolf
Diesel developed the first diesel engine to run on vegetable oil. Diesel
demonstrated his engine at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1900 using peanut oil as fuel.
Biodiesel produces approximately 80 percent less carbon dioxide emissions,
significantly fewer particulates and carbon monoxide than regular diesel and
fewer of the sulfur emissions that lead to acid rain.
Whichever plant is used to manufacture biofuel, the
byproducts are clean, unlike oil refinery waste. The alcohol production process
concentrates and makes more digestible the crop’s protein and non-starch
nutrients, making the residue recyclable as animal feed.
The Downside
However, the production and use of biofuels is also
controversial. Without doubt, the high cost of gasoline and the desire in the United States
to reduce its dependency on foreign oil for security reasons are fueling
increased demand for biofuels. In addition, biofuels are said to create
sustainable jobs in rural areas, a fact not lost on the farm lobby, which has
succeeded in getting the U.S.
government to provide billions in tax subsidies to help the ethanol industry.
In the past, critics of ethanol have said that the cost of
producing it is higher than that of regular gasoline. But today's oil prices have changed that picture significantly. In 2005, the
industry-funded Canadian Renewable Fuels Association said that at a crude oil
price of $54 per barrel, ethanol would become significantly cheaper to produce
than crude. Once the price of oil moved beyond $100 a barrel, there was no
argument in terms of the cost effectiveness.
The process of producing biofuel is another issue
altogether. Corn and soybeans, as currently grown in a chemical monoculture, are
environmentally destructive and susceptible to crippling disease. Corn-based
ethanol production is also energy intensive. Some studies claim that there is
actually a net energy loss in the production of ethanol from corn (including the
energy needed for farming and making fertilizers).
In 2003, well-known agricultural researcher David Pimentel
at Cornell published a paper showing that corn ethanol is an energy loser that
will make global warming (and dependence on foreign oil) worse, not better. The
following year, Tad Patzek, an engineer at the
University
of California at Berkeley, published a paper showing that
growing ethanol from corn was even worse than Pimentel had said it was. Patzek
found that because there is so much petroleum hidden in crops (in the
fertilizer, the pesticides, the energy to make and run the tractors, and so on),
more fossil energy is used than is saved in the ethanol itself. And then in
2005, Patzek and Pimentel argued in a joint paper that it didn’t matter whether
the ethanol was made from corn, wood, soybeans, sunflowers or switchgrass.
Subsequent studies by the U.S. Department of Agriculture
and other researchers have swung this argument back and forth, depending upon
the dozens of variables involved. For instance, a study out of the University of Minnesota, released in 2006 by the U.S.
National Academy of Sciences, claimed that corn-based ethanol produces 23
percent more energy than is required to create it. In the end, the researchers
favored biodiesel made from soy over ethanol, with soy-based biodiesel netting
93 percent more energy than the amount required to produce it in the first
place.
Soybean biodiesel not only yields more energy, it has lower
environmental impacts than corn ethanol, according to the study, leaching 99 percent less nitrogen, 93 percent less phosphorus, and 87
percent less pesticide into drinking water supplies during crop production.
Greenhouse gas emissions from soybean biodiesel are more than three-times lower
than those from corn ethanol.
However, as we first warned in Natural Life magazine in
2006, in spite of these benefits, neither soybeans nor corn should be the
foundation of an alternative fuel industry because their wide-spread use for
fuel has an environmental and social downside.
One of the problems is that clearing land to produce
biofuels releases large quantities of carbon dioxide from the soil. Although
palm oil is a highly productive crop and there are supposedly sustainable palm
oil plantations being developed, the use of palm oil for diesel has led to
increased planting in clear-cut areas, especially in
Malaysia
and Indonesia,
and destruction of peatlands. This reduces the amount of carbon tied up in
biomass, which means a net increase in atmospheric carbon. Additionally, these
clear cut plantations have a short life span due to nutrient leaching and
erosion, leading to additional clear cutting.
Large-scale biofuel production also uses large amounts of
water, a serious concern as the world's fresh water supplies are increasingly under threat. In addition, biofuel
plants need to be powered. In North America,
that is done with natural gas or less
expensive coal. By contrast, Brazil's
widely consumed sugar cane-based ethanol is almost eight times more fossil
energy efficient to produce than the North American corn-based product because
its ethanol manufacturing is powered not by fossil fuels, but by cane-stalk
residue.
But more serious in the short-term is the impact on food
supplies created by industrial production. The Toronto-based investment firm
Sprott Asset Management produced a rather bleak study in 2006 stating that
governments pushing ethanol may create a situation where acreage currently used
to grow food is used instead to grow crops for fuel. "When we take into consideration the potential shortages of food crops that
may result from an abrupt climate change, it is likely that governments will
soon be facing a choice between feeding people and feeding SUVs," they wrote.
Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute concurs. Also in
2006, he wrote in The New York Times: "We're putting the supermarket in competition with the corner filling
station for the output of the farm; the result is that more people will go hungry.” By 2008, those warnings had
proven to be true. In fact, according to a confidential World Bank report
obtained by The Guardian newspaper in the
U.K.
in July of 2008, biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75 percent,
leading to what has become an unprecedented global food crisis. By mid-2008,
rising food prices had pushed millions of people worldwide below the poverty
line, according to the World Bank, and had sparked riots in many countries.
The damning assessment was based on a very detailed
analysis of the food crisis, carried out by internationally-respected World Bank
economist Don Mitchell. It contradicted U.S. government claims that plant-derived fuels contribute less than three percent to
food price increases.
“Without the increase in biofuels, global wheat and maize
stocks would not have declined appreciably and price increases due to other
factors would have been moderate,” says the report. “The basket of food prices
examined in the study rose by 140 percent between 2002 and February [of 2008].”
The report estimates that the growing of crops for biofuels was responsible for
a 75 percent increase in food prices over that time period.
It argues that production of biofuels has distorted food
markets in three main ways. First, it has diverted grain away from food for
fuel, with over a third of American
corn now used to produce ethanol and about half of vegetable oils in the EU
going towards the production of biodiesel. Second, farmers have been encouraged
to set land aside for biofuel production. Third, it has sparked financial
speculation in grains, driving prices up higher.
The report points out biofuels derived from sugarcane, in
which Brazil
specializes, have not had such a dramatic impact.
The UN Commission on Sustainable Development also sees
problems with biofuels, along with the benefits of energy independence and
reduced carbon emissions. While acknowledging that biofuels are more carbon
neutral than fossil fuels, the UN warns that land use, food supply and water
supply issues need to be taken into account when planning for biofuels
production.
Meanwhile, a new group calling itself the
Alliance
for Abundant Food and Energy in
Washington D.C. is spending multimillions of
dollars to promote ethanol production. It was created in 2008 by Archer Daniels
Midland Co, DuPont Co, Deere & Co , Monsanto Co and the Renewable Fuels
Association (www.foodandenergy.org). The group believes that agricultural
innovation such as genetically
modified crops is the best way to
address global hunger, not reducing biofuel production. Decatur, Illinois-based
ADM is one of the world’s largest producers of biofuels, and Monsanto is a
leading producer of genetically modified seeds.
Second Generation Biofuels
The impact on food crops looks quite different when
biofuels are made from agricultural waste or fast-growing crops grown on land
that is unsuited to food crops. David Tilman, co-author of the University of Minnesota
study that favored soybean-based biodiesel over corn-based ethanol, feels that
there is a positive future for ethanol made from fast-growing grass crops,
agricultural waste and wood fiber, since their use wouldn’t impact on food
production.
Since the early 1990s, the Ecological Agriculture Project
(EAP, now Resource Efficient
Agricultural Production or REAP-Canada) out of McGill University in Montreal has been working on bioenergy
development systems that use prairie grasses as densified biofuels and for
bioethanol production. Executive Director Roger Samson believes perennial
grasses are poised to become the largest new renewable energy source for the
industrial and developing world. In late 2008, Samson was lead author on a study
by Canadian and Dutch scientists that demonstrated the efficiency of switchgrass
as an efficient biofuel source. According to the study, published in a book
edited by Cornell researcher David Pimentel called Biofuels, Solar and Wind as
Renewable Energy Systems, the solid biofuel technology using biomass from energy
crops for heat energy developed by REAP-Canada reduces greenhouse gases by as
much as eight times that of soybean biodiesel and corn ethanol.
“Solid biofuels produced from 2nd generation energy crops,
such as switchgrass, effectively blow away liquid biofuels like corn ethanol as
a serious greenhouse gas mitigation option,” says Samson.
Others suggest that growing enough crops for large-scale
ethanol production could be the ideal industry for the world’s poorest
countries, especially those with plenty of land already lost to desertification.
Another argument is that there are worse things than cutting back on sugar and
meat consumption in order to make land available for fuel crops!
Ultimately, Henry Ford may have had the solution. In 1925,
he told a reporter for The New York Times that ethyl alcohol was
the fuel of the future. Except
that he saw it being produce from “fruit like that sumach out by the road, or
from apples, weeds, sawdust – almost anything.” In fact, Ford's
first Model-T was built to run on hemp gasoline, since hemp produces a large amount of cellulose.
The Issue of Scale
David Blume, an organic farmer and permaculturalist who
authored the book Alcohol Can Be A Gas!, has 30 years of hands-on experience
with ethanol production. And he believes in small and medium-scale biofuel
production, demonstrating that it can be produced sustainably and integrated
with food production on organic farms. He says, “Most of the widely publicized
potential problems with ethanol are a function of scale. Once production plants
get beyond a certain size and are too far away from the crops that supply them,
closing the ecological loop becomes problematic. Smaller-scale operations can
more efficiently use a wide variety of crops than huge specialized one-crop
plants, and diversification of crops would largely eliminate the problems of
monoculture.” Blume cites recent studies showing that in a permaculturally
designed mixed-crop alcohol fuel production system, the amount of greenhouse
gases removed from the atmosphere by plants
and then exuded by plant roots into the soil as sugar
can be 13 times what is emitted by processing the crops and burning the
alcohol in our cars. Just our lawn clippings could replace a third of the
automobile fuel we get from the Mideast, he
claims.
Post-consumer food waste is another potential source of
biofuels. In Japan, Tokyo Gas Co., Ltd. has launched a pilot project to recover
bioethanol from food waste generated by schools. In the test area in Tokyo, about 200 kilograms
of food waste from school lunches is generated daily by elementary and junior
high schools. This food waste is delivered to a local processing plant, where it
is broken into pieces and enzymes added to break down the carbohydrates. The
waste is then squeezed to separate liquids and solids. Ethanol is extracted from
the liquid through fermentation, and biogas is recovered from a mixture of the
solid portion and the liquid left over after ethanol is distilled. The ethanol
is used by the schools for transportation and the biogas powers a 9.9 kW
generator and a boiler used to operate the distillation equipment.
Since there is so much doubt on one hand and enthusiasm
from other parties about biofuels, an international task force has been working
on a global sustainability standard for biofuels. In mid-2008, the Steering
Board of the Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels (RSB), hosted by the Energy
Centre at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, produced the first draft of a global
sustainability standard for biofuels.
The standard is intended to be used by investors,
governments, corporations and civil society groups. “With all of the mixed
messages we hear about biofuels, there is a clear need for a standard that can
differentiate the good from the bad,” says Claude Martin, chair of the
Roundtable and former Director-General of the environment group WWF
International.
Over 300 experts from corporations, civil society groups,
academic institutions and government agencies from nearly 40 countries helped
draft the initial version of the standard. It addresses the major issues of
concern regarding the production of biofuels, including their potential
contribution to climate change mitigation and rural development; the protection
of land and labor rights; and their impacts on biodiversity, soil pollution,
water availability and food security.
While all this experimenting is going on, we also need to
get serious about energy conservation, vehicle efficiency improvements, viable
sustainable energy sources, a reorganization of our economies and finding a way
to drive less.
Learn more:
The Alcohol Fuel Handbook
by Lynn Ellen Doxon (Infinity
Publishers, 2001)
Biodiesel: Growing a New Energy Economy [BIODIESEL 2/E]
by Greg Pahl
(Chelsea Green Publishing, 2005)
Biodiesel Power: The Passion, the People, and the Politics of the Next Renewable Fuel
by Lyle Estill (New Society Publishers, 2005)
SVO: Powering Your Vehicle With Straight Vegetable Oil
by Forest Gregg (New Society Publishers, 2008)
From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank: The Complete Guide to Using Vegetable Oil as an Alternative Fuel
by Joshua Tickell (Tickell Energy
Consultants, 2000)
Alcohol Can Be a Gas!: Fueling an Ethanol Revolution for the 21st Century
by David Blume (International Institute for Ecological
Agriculture, California, 2007)
National Ethanol Vehicle
Coalition
Canadian Renewable Fuels Association
This is an expanded version of an article that first appeared in
Natural Life magazine. It was researched and written by Natural Life editor
Wendy Priesnitz.
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