We've had some interesting comments come through on our recent Biofuel post, and a short follow-up seemed appropriate to highlight a few recent media releases.
Lester Brown, the highly respected President of the Earth Policy Institute, has essentially requested a cessation on further development of ethanol plants, which are currently growing like mushrooms all over the U.S., as it's looking increasingly like demand for corn is already putting vehicles in direct competition with humans for food.
US factories producing ethanol fuel for cars may consume as much as half of the country's corn crop next year -- more than double earlier government predictions -- creating competition for grain stocks that could drive up supermarket prices for cereals, meat, eggs, and dairy products, according to a report released yesterday.Compared to the frantic rush to build ethanol plants, Mr. Brown's "so we can catch our breath..." statement is a calm voice of reason in the midst of a storm of activity. Will it be heard? If there are no guidelines or limits set, then it won't stop as long as there are vehicles to supply - and there's more than just a few of those..."The world needs a strategy to deal with this unfolding competition between automobiles and people for the grain supply," said Lester R. Brown , president of the Earth Policy Institute , a Washington-based advocacy organization that wrote the report. Brown called for a moratorium of ethanol plants in the United States "so we can catch our breath and determine how much we want to harvest our corn for ethanol."
Lester Brown Earth Policy Institute
Democrats in Congress are expected in the next two weeks to begin a major push for alternative energy, including ethanol, as a way of reducing the country's reliance on foreign oil.
Ethanol plants use corn to create a synthetic form of oil. Feedlot owners, who intensely feed corn to cattle and pigs for four to six months before slaughter, have seen their costs rise dramatically because of ethanol production. The growing competition for corn is expected to create price hikes that will be passed on to consumers who buy anything from milk to pork chops, Brown said. - Boston.com
Across the border, in Canada, similar concerns are being aired. Last week's Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced his intentions to snap Canada out of it's green apathy, but when sacking his environment minister, Rona Ambrose, he nobly endeavoured to say something good about her work - her initiative on biofuels being about the only thing he could think of. Mr. Harper may now wish he'd found something else to praise her about...:
Prime Minister Stephen Harper was trying to think up something nice to say about Rona Ambrose last week, while at the same time giving the Edmonton-Spruce Grove MP the boot from her environment minister's job.China seems to be a little ahead on the learning curve. They've recently announced that biofuel pressure on food is getting to a high point, and signalled it's intention to shift priority."Frankly a lot more was done by Minister Ambrose in a year than the previous government in 13," Harper boomed.
But when he got into the details, the best he could come up with was her initiative in biofuels. On Dec. 20 in Saskatoon, Ambrose announced a deal that will require gasoline to contain 5% "renewable" fuel by 2010 (and 2% for diesel and heating oil by 2012).
Rona Ambrose Heading out the door
She described it as "bringing together some of the key hallmarks of Canada," which she fingered as "the rich history of Canada's agriculture, scientific innovation and a no-nonsense business savvy."
Or maybe not. No sooner had a flurry of similar legislation hit the new Democratic-controlled U.S. Congress last week when an alarming study by the Earth Policy Institute surfaced that claimed this North American rush to ethanol might not be such a good thing after all.
Of course, outfits professing "earth policy" are in the business of raising alarm. But even with the torque wrench heavily applied, the document raises some interesting points....
The U.S. is undergoing a biofuel building blitz - 79 plants are under construction, 116 are operating and another 200 are in the planning stages.
That amounts to a lot of corn - 139 million tons, the study estimates. That's half the entire 2008 projected U.S. harvest.
"With the corn supplies tightening fast," the report warns, "rising prices will affect not only products made directly from corn but also those produced using corn." That includes chicken, pork and beef.
"The risk is that soaring food prices could generate a consumer backlash against the fuel ethanol industry," the Earth Policy Institute predicted.
Because the U.S. supplies 70% of the world's corn exports, the price spike could trigger "urban food riots" in Third World countries.
In Alberta, substitute the word "barley" for "corn." - Edmonton Sun
...worried over surging crop prices China is now clamping down on the use of corn and other edible grains for producing biofuel. While it wants to support the growth of alternative energy sources, Beijing says the issue of national food security should take precedence over the country's green agenda.Although the mainstream media is becoming aware of the competition-for-food dilemma, it has yet to recognise the next-stage issue of soil mining and depletion that the large-scale monoculture farming required to feed our vehicles would bring. Somehow this simple and serious fact in the biofuel debate has been overlooked - that the fossil fuels we've been consuming over the last century were the accumulation of billions of liquified plants and animals over millennia. Now that we've peaked in this supply, do we truly expect our land to sustain such a rate of consumption? Are not the eager-beavers in the fuel industry, and political realm, a little out of touch with the constraints of nature?"In China the first thing is to provide food for its 1.3 billion people, and after that, we will support biofuel production," the state-run newspaper People's Daily quoted Wang Xiaobing, an official at the Agriculture Ministry 's crops cultivation department as saying this week. - IPS
When plants grow on soil, they use up the low entropy of the soil as they extract nutrients from the soil. A natural ecosystem is considered sustainable because the plants bring in energy from sunlight to compensate for the entropy they create, and because the dead plants are recycled into the soil. In a natural ecosystem, entropy increases slower than the input of sun energy and the development of new soil from substrate....Sustainable systems are cyclical. This is what makes them sustainable. They do not lose a significant amount of nutrients. And the energy lost to entropy must be more than compensated by incoming solar energy. Industrial systems are linear. They take a resource, and process it into a product which is eventually discarded once it has outlived its usefulness. All well-meaning attempts at recycling notwithstanding, industrial systems are not sustainable.
Unsustainable agri-business now getting pushed into overdrive
Modern agriculture is an industrial system, and as such, it is not sustainable. Nutrients extracted from the soil are removed from the farmland in the form of vegetable matter, and shipped to consumers. After being eaten, the nutrients are excreted as human wastes and then disposed of as sewage. Industrial agriculture breaks the cycle, leading on the one hand to soil and water depletion and on the other to pollution problems with raw sewage. Modern agriculture is a form of soil mining....
In food farming, the plant matter that is not harvested could (and should) be returned to the soil in an effort to help limit soil nutrient depletion, and to help limit erosion. Industrial production of biofuels depends on utilizing everything that can be harvested from the plantation or field. The nutrients removed from the ground in the form of biomass must be replaced with artificial fertilizers. And even then, soil depletion is hastened and the productivity of the crop land diminishes significantly from one generation to the next until it must be abandoned as unproductive. As it is, industrial agriculture has brought us to the brink of an agricultural crisis....
For this reason alone, biofuel production can never be sustainable. And, therefore, biofuels are not renewable. - Oilcrash.com
Prototype of the Solix photo-
bioreactor for algae production |
A New Zealand company, Aquaflow Bionomic, recently demonstrated the successful development of it's B5 Fuel Blend in the country's capital, and Solix in conjunction with the Colarado State University are developing their own Algae-to-Biodiesel process.
With the incredibly rapid rate of construction of new corn ethanol plants, and the great deal of uncertainty (unlikelihood?) that politicians will heed Lester Brown's warnings, could someone please light a fire under these Algae-to-Biodiesel companies?
Oh, did I say a "short follow-up"? Oops.
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