Biofuels – The fuel of the future
Biofuels are the fuel of the future claims the Green Party of Ireland. Let’s hope they’re wrong.
I was heartened to see that the Greens are an influential force in Irish politics. While the latest polls suggest they’ll only get 7% of the vote in the next General Election (probably next year, though theoretically it could be called early), Ireland’s proportional representation system means that they could very well – given current party alliances – find themselves holding the balance of power. Whichever of the major blocs wishes to form a government for the next five years will have to offer the Greens something significant in order to do so. A genuine bidding war between the two major centrist parties over who can offer the most environmentally sound policies would be nice to see.
Hardly revolutionary I grant you. But it’s a step in the right direction.
I just hope the Greens don’t squander the opportunity by demanding support for the biofuels strategy. Environmental organisations in Ireland, and throughout the world, need to be attacking private car use as the absurd and obscene waste of resources that it is. What they shouldn’t be doing is reassuring people that the future can be business as usual, just by different means. It may be a less popular message, but it has the advantage of being the truth.
Though perhaps it’s foolish to believe that should count for anything.
According to Nationmaster (a godsend for those of us who habitually like to pepper our writing with statistics) who cite a 2002 World Bank report, Ireland comes 18th in a survey of car-ownership in developed nations. There are 272 cars per 1,000 people in Ireland which is significantly below the developed nation average of 437.3 per 1,000.
However 272 cars per 1,000 people still amounts to almost 1.1 million cars in a nation of 4 million people. And it’s a pretty small island.
Now, if we are to believe the RAC, the average distance travelled per car per annum in Ireland is 16,000km, with an average engine efficiency of 10.55km per litre. So Ireland’s private automobile fleet gets through – back of the napkin calculation – 1,650,000,000 litres of petrol per year. 1.65 billion litres. Which is a lot of fuel for a pretty small island. And that’s private automobiles (Ireland has 359 motor vehicles per 1,000 people; I’m concentrating only on cars here).
How many litres of biofuels would be required to replace 1.65 billion litres of petrol? And how much arable land would be required to grow all that biomass? Have the Green Party worked out these numbers? I suspect not. Certainly they don’t publish them on their rose-tinted website. And where do the Greens stand on the subject of biodiversity Vs monocultures? Championing biofuels would suggest a side of the fence I’m not comfortable on.
Plus, rather importantly, the ERoEI of biofuels isn’t well-established. There’s been few studies, and fewer still large-scale experiments. David Pimentel (a professor at Cornell) published a study in the Encyclopedia of Physical Sciences and Technology (a peer-reviewed journal) which created significant controversy by claiming that ethanol from corn (one of the most widespread biofuels) has an ERoEI of less than 100%. In other words, claims Pimentel, the planting, harvesting and conversion of corn into ethanol uses more energy than gets generated by burning the end product.
Note: Energy Returned on Energy Invested (ERoEI) is sometimes referred to as Net Energy Ratio (NER). Although the two have slightly different definitions, with one being expressed as a percentage, the other as a decimal ratio; they are nonetheless similar enough to consider them the same thing in all but the most technical of discussions. I’m pointing this out because I’ve noticed both terms beginning to crop up in the mainstream media for the first time, and I figured some of you might want to know that they’re near-as-dammit interchangeable (though I’ve encountered pedantic scientists who fly into quite colourful rages for suggesting such a thing).
Anyways, quite apart from Pimentel’s study – which is still causing some consternation and throws the averages right out the window – I’ve read a few papers on the subject, and even contributed my number-crunching skills to one of them. It wouldn’t be out of order to suggest that ethanol can be generated with an NER of between 1.38:1 and 2.62:1. Plus the US government has a new study underway which it believes will give a return of 5:1 (though it concedes in that case “much of the energy gain comes from generating electricity by burning the co-product lignin, rather than from the ethanol itself”, so it should be discounted as a great leap forward in liquid fuel production).
But let’s say we pretend to be optimists for a moment and take that 2.62 and roll it in a little bit of the US government’s 5.0. Let’s say, given optimum conditions and efficiency, you can regain 3.5 units of energy from ethanol for each unit you input into growing and producing it. That’s still a long way off crude oil’s 40:1 to 100:1 (depending on the well). So far off that I’d hesitate to suggest one as a substitute for the other even without calculating the arable land required. You just know it’s not going to be good, right?
Pimentel’s study suggested that 97% of all of America’s arable land would be required to fuel the private automobile fleet of that country (again leaving aside freight, air travel, military and government usage, etc etc). And while America has a lot of cars… it’s also got a lot of arable land. What would it be like for Ireland?
Well, if you were to do a genuine like-for-like comparison, and insist that the biofuel industry pay for itself energy-wise in the same way as the fossil fuel industry does, then we should scale up the number of litres of fuel required by the same amount as the NER is scaled down, even though the energy contained in the ethanol isn’t necessarily quite that much less than that contained in petrol. In which case, let’s use the government 5:1 (as we can assume that the electricity generated by the co-product can be channelled into biofuel production in some way).
So using the optimistic biofuel NER of 5:1 and the most pessimistic crude oil NER of 40:1, it suggests that Ireland would require the production of 13.2 billion litres of bioethanol to fuel the current private automobile fleet. I’ll also use the most optimistic litres per hectare number I can find (an Indian company, Ammana Bio, has claimed 7,000 litres per hectare from sorghum; far more than the 1,500 litres / hectare that is often quoted when discussing UK / Northern Europe biofuel production) in order to get a highly conservative estimate of 1.88 million hectares.
Again using Nationmaster we discover that Ireland has a total of 1.05 million hectares of arable and permanent cropland. This suggests that if Ireland were to make the transition to biofuels without a significant parallel reduction in car usage, we’d need to dedicate the entire arable surface of the nation to growing high-yield stock for bioethanol, and still import 45% of our fuel. Quite how this squares with the Green Party’s insistence that “the poverty of two-thirds of the world’s family demands a redistribution of the world’s resources” is anyone’s guess.
Let’s stop talking about biofuels. Start talking about fewer cars.
Brilliant post! I’ve been looking for a succinct debunking of the idea of biofuels, and here it is. Great work Jim!
March 26th, 2006 | 9:58pm
by Doormat
Of course your scenario suggests that developed countries would act ethically and produce the stuff themselves. Palm oil bio-diesel from the freshly cut virgin rain forests of South America anyone? Or perhaps some ethically sound (sic) bio-ethanol from exotic Indonesia? Which of course is what is happening with European tax payers cash right now in a vain attempt to fulfill their Kyoto commitments. Which is so deeply ironic and so obviously stupid. This market driven action is likely to cause a net increase the amount of carbon in our atmosphere and destroy very important carbon sinks for the arable land needed.
Just marginally more stupid than making ethanol from corn I guess.
March 26th, 2006 | 11:42pm
by Matt Gahan
Doormat, I should point out that I’m actually in favour of small-scale biofuel production. I believe that we could retain a level of farm mechanisation, as well as running elements of a public transport system on biofuels. Biofuels are fantastic for so many reasons, not least that they can be produced in almost every part of the world that people live.
However, any attempt at large-scale biofuel production… some misguided effort to save car culture… would be a complete disaster.
Do bear in mind Matt that I was addressing Green Party policy, and so assumed they wouldn’t use biofuels from cleared rainforest on principle. Quite where they do expect to get it from though, is anyone’s guess.
I suspect that they may even be aware of all I’m saying, but want to present themselves as a safe vote; not the sort of people to rock the boat by suggesting extreme moves to curb car usage despite that clearly being the only sane approach to peak oil.
Merrick was right in his comment on the Wind Power post… people won’t begin to take action on this until they’re forced to. This is demonstrated by the fact that even the Green Party, the most radical place you can put your vote, aren’t proposing anything truly radical. Sadly it is my belief that it will be too late once circumstances force us to act.
March 27th, 2006 | 12:45am
by Jim
Matt’s right to point to biofuel plantations being away from Europe. Apart from the better yields in hot places, there’s the point made above that we actually don’t have the land.
However, just as we’ve made the poor nations our plantations for fruit and whatnot, so we’ll turn them into our fuel plantations. Today they send us green beans and cut flowers while their people starve; tomorrow it’ll be palm oil.
The first of George Monbiot’s excellent and terrifying articles on biofuels covers this idea. The second alleges biodiesel to be the most carbon intensive fuel on earth.
Matt’s mention of carbon sinks has some relevance, although sinks are only a device for slightly delaying problems rather than solving them.
Fossil fuels add carbon to the atmosphere; sinks such as forests merely store it for a while, then return it when they die.
Oliver Rackham described the idea of telling people to plant trees as carbon sinks as having all the practical effect of drinking more water to keep down rising sea levels.
March 27th, 2006 | 12:59am
by Merrick
Jim: I think I’d disagree about biofuels in general. Given that modern intensive agriculture is very reliant upon oil for both moving massive machines, and for producing fertilizers, pesticides etc., I think there’s a good argument that we’d be better off moving back to older, more labour intensive methods of farming. This would reduce the need for oil in farming, but would also reduce the amount we could grow in a given land area. However, it would also be moving back to a more sustainable farming system, which in the long term is probably inevitable anyway. If we don’t do this, then one could well imagine the silly situation of producing biofuels from one field to provide fuel for the combine-harvester to run in the next field! Of course, the actual numbers involved are important: I guess it’s also very possible to have enough biofuels left over to run some public transport etc. But, yes, cars are on the way out…
March 27th, 2006 | 12:38pm
by Doormat
Doormat, I heartily agree with (almost) everything you say. However you clearly misunderstood me when I argued for retaining “a level of farm mechanisation”. I was by no means suggesting anything approaching “modern intensive agriculture”.
H.T. Odum once quipped that “modern agriculture is merely an inefficient means of converting fossil fuels into food”. Odum is something of a hero of mine. He’s advanced the field of Environmental Accounting more than anyone since The Club of Rome, and was the first person to truly formalise the calculation of ’embodied energy’, or eMergy (and yes, I’m aware how odd it is to have a Systems Ecologist as a hero… though taken on a strictly rational basis, is it any weirder than investing ‘hero’ status in a football player?). Environmental Accounting is not as scary as it sounds by the way… it’s merely the application of rules of systems analysis to ecological issues, and is – I believe – the best way to address many of the problems we face.
So no, Doormat, I’m certainly not suggesting anything close to “modern intensive agriculture”. That just won’t survive peak oil. And nor am I suggesting a scenario where we produce “biofuels from one field to provide fuel for the combine-harvester to run in the next field”. That would indeed be silly. But nor am I proposing some form of luddism, or anarcho-primitivism. In the unlikely event that humanity is to make a relatively peaceful transition to sustainability it may well be through the rejection of industrialisation, but it will not happen through the rejection of technology.
In fact, if we are to find a way to sustainably support 6-10 billion human beings on this planet (an unsettlingly small percentage of whom have even rudimentary agricultural skills… though that will change in the space of a couple of generations), then I rather expect some pretty ingenious uses of technology will be required. I recommend Colin Tudge’s head-spinning wake-up call, So Shall We Reap. Although Tudge pulls up short of drawing some of the more extreme conclusions implied by his work, he effectively demonstrates, beyond any doubt, that large scale intensive farming is one of the biggest mistakes the human race has ever made. However, he also points out that ‘traditional’ farming has never shied away from adopting new technologies.
It’s one thing for a farming community to grow enough biofuels to run a couple of tractors to do the heaviest work. It’s another thing entirely to design farms which require mechanisation to function at all.
On the subject of public transport, I feel very strongly that – if at all possible – people should still retain the ability to travel quickly and easily. There’s no reason why a nation like Ireland could not grow enough biofuels to run an efficient rural bus fleet (with electric trams handling urban travel) and still be self-sufficient in food from small, mixed farms. No reason at all.
That it won’t happen is not because we haven’t been provided with the resources or the know-how.
March 27th, 2006 | 1:29pm
by Jim
A small thing to add about yields in non-industrialised agriculture. Monocultures are actually very intensive for the amount of work they need compared to what we get, it’s just that most of the work is done by gas guzzler mchines.
UN studies show that for lesser industrialised places, small-scale mixed farming is the gets much more food than large monocultures.
Figures for Syria show farms between one and two and a half acres are over three times as productive as farms over 35 acres. A similar study in Nigeria has the small farms over four times as productive. In Mexico the UN found farms of 7-10 acres were over 12 times as productive as farms of 37 acres.
This is not just because it’s usually people who will eat the food farming so they have incentive to do an eficient job, there are systemic reasons. Small farms tend to produce several crops at once, thus reducing nutrient depletion. They’re more likely to compost any waste, they use all the land (e.g. shrimps, crabs, and herbs cultivated in rice paddies, tender green-leaf crops grwon in the shade between rows of taller plants), and a whole load of stuff that agri-business simply cannot effectively do.
Even the World Bank (a key player in this whole World Trade Organisation / corporate domination thing) has recognised this—their study in north-east Brazil estimating that redistribution of land to small-scale units would increase output by around 80%.
So a return to more labour intensive agriculture needn’t be as big a drop in yields as we might at first think.
March 27th, 2006 | 8:03pm
by Merrick
On the subject of whether we’ll manage to do anything about our oil reliance before it’s too late; maybe a massive global economic collapse bought about by peak oil could, by cutting Co2 emmissions drastically, save us from making most of the world inhabitable for humans through climate change?
This is about as optimistic as my politics gets at the moment!
March 30th, 2006 | 8:36am
by Ryan
Ryan, a massive economic cllapse based on energy shortage… fuel bills through the roof… what would you do to keep warm if you lived near some trees?
Then, the phenomenally dirty shale oil tars become an economically viable energy source, coal comes heavily in demand, and we’ve enough of that to hit any number of climate change tipping points.
In short, coming at peak oil whilst still trying to have our energy hungry way of life and keeping hold of the idea of perpetual economic growth will make climate change happen faster and harder.
April 3rd, 2006 | 9:50pm
by Merrick
[…] And in case it’s unclear as to why I found such irony in the juxtaposition of that challenge “to present analysis” with the ‘Biofuels’ image, let me direct you to my previous article (Biofuels – The fuel of the future) where I question the rationale behind viewing biofuels as a substitute for fossil fuels. It is my contention that by putting their modest weight behind Biofuels, the Greens are guilty of exactly the failure to provide analysis they wrongly accuse the Forfás report of. […]
April 21st, 2006 | 12:02am
by The Quiet Road » Blog Archive » Nukes in Ireland