[Oz-envirolink] Biofuel lunacy

[hugh spencer]

Monbiot at his scathing best on the moral bankruptcy of biofuel usage

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/feb/12/biofuels.energy


George Monbiot The Guardian, Tuesday February 12 2008

Apart from used chip fat, there is no such thing as a sustainable
biofuel.Even capitalists now admit the oil crisis is real. But their
solutions border on lunacy as they avoid the obvious answer

Now they might start sitting up. They wouldn't listen to the
environmentalists or even the geologists. Can governments ignore the
capitalists? A report published last week by Citibank, and so far
unremarked on by the media, proposes "genuine difficulties" in
increasing the production of crude oil, "particularly after 2012".
Though 175 big drilling projects will start in the next four
years, "the fear remains that most of this supply will be offset by
high levels of decline". The oil industry has scoffed at the notion
that oil supplies might peak, but "recent evidence of failed
production growth would tend to shift the burden of proof on to the
producers", as they have been unable to respond to the massive rise
in prices. "Total global liquid hydrocarbon production has
essentially flatlined since mid 2005 at just north of 85m barrels per
day."

The issue is complicated, as ever, by the refusal of the Opec cartel
to raise production. What has changed, Citibank says, is that the non-
Opec countries can no longer answer the price signal. Does this mean
that oil production in these nations has already peaked? If so, what
do our governments intend to do?

Nine months ago, I asked the British government to send me its
assessments of global oil supply. The results astonished me: there
weren't any. Instead it relied exclusively on one external source: a
book published by the International Energy Agency. The omission
became stranger still when I read this book and discovered that it
was a crude polemic, dismissing those who questioned future oil
supplies as "doomsayers" without providing robust evidence to support
its conclusions. Though the members of Opec have a powerful interest
in exaggerating their reserves in order to boost their quotas, the
IEA relied on their own assessments of future supply.

Last week I tried again, and I received the same response: "The
government agrees with IEA analysis that global oil (and gas)
reserves are sufficient to sustain economic growth for the
foreseeable future." Perhaps it hasn't noticed that the IEA is now
backtracking. The Financial Times says the agency "has admitted that
it has been paying insufficient attention to supply bottlenecks as
evidence mounts that oil is being discovered more slowly than once
expected ... natural decline rates for discovered fields are a
closely guarded secret in the oil industry, and the IEA is concerned
that the data it currently holds is not accurate." What if the data
turns out to be wrong? What if Opec's stated reserves are a pack of
lies? What contingency plans has the government made? Answer comes
there none.

The European commission, by contrast, does have a plan, and it's a
disaster. It recognises that "the oil dependence of the transport
sector ... is one of the most serious problems of insecurity in
energy supply that the EU faces". Partly in order to diversify fuel
supplies, partly to cut greenhouse gas emissions, it has ordered the
member states to ensure that by 2020 10% of the petroleum our cars
burn must be replaced with biofuels. This won't solve peak oil, but
it might at least put it into perspective by causing an even bigger
problem.

To be fair to the commission, it has now acknowledged that biofuels
are not a green panacea. Its draft directive rules that they
shouldn't be produced by destroying primary forest, ancient
grasslands or wetlands, as this could cause a net increase in
greenhouse gas emissions. Nor should any biodiverse ecosystem be
damaged to grow biofuels.

It sounds good, but there are three problems. If biofuels can't be
produced in virgin habitats, they must be confined to existing
agricultural land, which means that every time we fill up the car we
snatch food from people's mouths. This, in turn, raises the price of
food, which encourages farmers to destroy pristine habitats - primary
forests, ancient grasslands, wetlands and the rest - in order to grow
it. We can congratulate ourselves on remaining morally pure, but the
impacts are the same. There is no way out of this: on a finite planet
with tight food supplies, you either compete with the hungry or clear
new land.

The third problem is that the commission's methodology has just been
blown apart by two new papers. Published in Science magazine, they
calculate the total carbon costs of biofuel production. When land
clearance (caused either directly or by the displacement of food
crops) is taken into account, all the major biofuels cause a massive
increase in emissions.

Even the most productive source - sugar cane grown in the scrubby
savannahs of central Brazil - creates a carbon debt which takes 17
years to repay. As the major carbon reductions must be made now, the
net effect of this crop is to exacerbate climate change. The worst
source - palm oil displacing tropical rainforest growing in peat -
invokes a carbon debt of some 840 years. Even when you produce
ethanol from maize grown on "rested" arable land (which in the EU is
called set-aside and in the United States is called conservation
reserve), it takes 48 years to repay the carbon debt. The facts have
changed. Will the policy follow?

Many people believe there's a way of avoiding these problems: by
making biofuels not from the crops themselves but from crop wastes -
if transport fuel can be manufactured from straw or grass or wood
chips, there are no implications for land use, and no danger of
spreading hunger. Until recently I believed this myself.

Unfortunately most agricultural "waste" is nothing of the kind. It is
the organic material that maintains the soil's structure, nutrients
and store of carbon. A paper commissioned by the US government
proposes that, to help meet its biofuel targets, 75% of annual crop
residues should be harvested. According to a letter published in
Science last year, removing crop residues can increase the rate of
soil erosion a hundredfold. Our addiction to the car, in other words,
could lead to peak soil as well as peak oil.

Removing crop wastes means replacing the nutrients they contain with
fertiliser, which causes further greenhouse gas emissions. A recent
paper by the Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen suggests that emissions of
nitrous oxide (a greenhouse gas 296 times more powerful than CO2)
from nitrogen fertilisers wipe out all the carbon savings biofuels
produce, even before you take the changes in land use into account.

Growing special second-generation crops, such as trees or
switchgrass, doesn't solve the problem either: like other energy
crops, they displace both food production and carbon emissions.
Growing switchgrass, one of the new papers in Science shows, creates
a carbon debt of 52 years. Some people propose making second-
generation fuels from grass harvested in natural meadows or from
municipal waste, but it's hard enough to produce them from single
feedstocks; far harder to manufacture them from a mixture. Apart from
used chip fat, there is no such thing as a sustainable biofuel.

All these convoluted solutions are designed to avoid a simpler one:
reducing the consumption of transport fuel. But that requires the use
of a different commodity. Global supplies of political courage
appear, unfortunately, to have peaked some time ago.

monbiot.com



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