Worldwide biofuels are seriously getting in vogue - in fact over the last ten years we've seen a veritable ski-ramp of development in 'clean' fuels and of late we have high-profile types like Bill Clinton and Richard Branson, Prime Minister Tony Blair, and even Prince Charles getting in on the act. As an industry it's full steam ahead - with new biofuel plants popping up like dandelions in the U.S., Canada, India, China, Brazil, and elsewhere.

As our previously enormous supplies of fossil fuels begin to wane - they being the liquified form of ancient forests from yester-millennia - will we now turn to fresh, live, plants instead? And if so, will this solve our problems? When we take into account the scale of our past, present, and future transport requirements - are biofuels going to cut it? Do they hold the promise of securing our futures - nationally, economically, and ecologically?

For many people, the idea of using biofuels for the pick-up didn't immediately conjure up large-scale considerations. Rather - they just happened to have a mate down at the local steak-house or Fish 'n Chip shop, and recycling their used oil was just a way to save a few bucks from the weekly pay-check and contribute to saving the planet. Today, though, things are going a little further, and at breakneck speed.

Grist has an excellent collection of articles on the Biofuel subject that I'd like to draw your attention to. They are written by several different individuals from varied angles, and well worth a look to bring you up to speed on the issue. Given the rate and scale of biofuel developments, I think it's appropriate for me to bring their 'Not so fast: Issues and Implications' section to your notice - as there's no time like the present to consider the consequences of such large scale activities. Just as we cannot automatically assume, for example, that the oil and tobacco industries are working with our best interests at heart, we likewise cannot assume that those that have the most to gain from these enterprises are looking at the situation objectively. The reality is, if there's money to be made in the short term, long term implications get back-pedalled, and, at the end of the day, you as the consumer must have the final say.

The hype over biofuels in the U.S. and Europe has had wide-ranging effects perhaps not envisioned by the environmental advocates who promote their use. Throughout tropical countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Brazil, and Colombia, rainforests and grasslands are being cleared for soybean and oil-palm plantations to make biodiesel, a product that is then marketed halfway across the world as a "green" fuel.

In Southeast Asia, and increasingly in the Amazon, plantations of the African oil palm have become wildly lucrative. After monocropping the palms on recently cleared rainforest land, growers press the palm fruit and kernel for oil that can be used in both food and industrial applications, including -- and increasingly -- as biodiesel.

The palm oil industry is booming: global exports increased more than 50 percent from 1999 to 2004. To meet the growing demand, producers in Malaysia and Indonesia have ramped up production by clearing thousands of square miles of rainforest for new plantations.

In Indonesia, rainforest loss for oil palms has contributed to the endangerment of 140 species of land animals, while in Malaysia animals like the Sumatran tiger and Bornean orangutan have been pushed to the brink of extinction. Fish kills have become common in waterways surrounding plantations and palm-oil mills, as soil erosion from the cleared land and mill effluents have left waterways clogged with sediment and unviable.

The boom hasn't been limited to Southeast Asia. In one of the most disturbing examples of the biofuel hype's hidden effects, right-wing paramilitary groups in Colombia -- a country mired in a four-decade-old civil war -- have in recent years begun planting oil palm plantations over wide swaths of the territory they control. These areas of tropical forest, which lie in the northwestern coastal region known as the Chocó and rank among the planet's key storehouses of biodiversity, have been almost entirely expropriated through violence, including massacres of Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities that have forced those populations out of the region.

Farther south, another biodiversity hotspot is being rapidly cleared to plant a biodiesel crop. Nearly 80 percent of Brazil's Cerrado region -- a woodland savanna mix -- has been cleared for agricultural production, mostly for soybeans, according to a Conservation International report.

Despite being home to thousands of endemic plant and animal species, the Cerrado has been promoted as "the last agricultural frontier" by green-revolution hero and Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug. Low land and labor costs and high yield potential have sent investors from as far away as Iowa scrambling to buy up these Brazilian grasslands, frequently in collaboration with U.S. agribusinesses like Archer Daniels Midland, whose first Brazilian biodiesel production facility is currently in the works.

Tad Patzek, a professor in UC-Berkeley's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering who's known primarily as a critic of corn ethanol, says what's happening in tropical ecosystems is much more serious than the biofuel situation in the U.S. "We've already destroyed the prairie, and the topsoil in the Midwest is going, going, gone," Patzek says. "But the expensive noise we're making here is being translated there into the total obliteration of the most precious ecosystems on earth." - 'What about the Land?'

I'd like to stimulate some discussion on this topic, as it's importance cannot be underestimated. If we are considering using every available piece of land on the planet (and taking down our most valuable forests in addition) to fuel a ballooning population of vehicles, then discussion is the least we can do. Global political and economic realities mean that, despite the best intentions by western consumers, when you go to fill-up with biofuel at your local service station your purchase may not be as 'clean' as you might hope - or it can be downright 'dirty'.

Are we effectively trading wildlife habitat and CO2 absorbing forests for our mobile lifestyle? Are we adding to soil depletion and increasing agricultural CO2 emissions in Europe and the U.S., and through our biofuel imports escalating the same in third world countries? Are we (too) casually taking 'marginal lands', or 'set asides', nature's last line of defense for natural diversity, and adding them back into our agricultural inventory. Are we, with our high-value dollars, creating competition for food that African, South American, and Asian local communities cannot compete with?

These are all serious issues. And, for what? What are the best-case scenarios?

The problem is really one of scale: We use an awful, awful lot of petroleum in the Northwest. Huge amounts. So much, in fact, that there's just not enough cropland for biodiesel to make much of a dent in our petroleum habit.

The average Washington resident uses about 10 gallons of petroleum-based highway fuels each week. There are more than 6 million of us, so all together we burn about about 3.2 billion gallons of gasoline and diesel each year. And that doesn't include the petroleum we use for jet fuel, chemical feedstocks, road oil, asphalt, boats, etc.

How much of that demand could biodiesel meet? Between 2003 and 2004, national production... of biodiesel tripled, from about 25 million gallons to some 75 million gallons, largely because of a $1 per gallon federal tax credit. So the entire annual national output of biodiesel could have fueled the cars and trucks of Washington state for ... wait for it ... about 9 days.

Obviously, current biodiesel production is far lower than its potential. Still, the most optimistic estimate I've seen is that Washington state farmers could produce about 100 million gallons of canola-based biodiesel each year, or about 3 times as much as the renewable fuel standard would mandate. That much biodiesel could offset about 11 days worth of highway fuel use. And producing that much canola oil would take about 880,000 acres -- nearly one-fifth of the state's harvested cropland.... - Biodiesel: The slippery facts

Another way of looking at it:

Anyone who tells you that we can run all our cars on biodiesel or ethanol is out of their minds. The issue is simple arithmetic. Lester Brown points out that the average fill up of a 25 gallon SUV gas tank with ethanol will requires the same amount of grain as it takes to feed a person for year. Every person in the US, man, woman and child, uses 500 gallons of gasoline per year. So, that means that every American would use enough gas to feed 20 people over the course of the year. There are 300 million people in the US, and 300 million people, each using enough food to feed 20 people to run their cars, would require enough grain to feed 6 billion people. Perhaps that number sounds vaguely familiar. Back in 1999, that was how many people were alive on the earth. We’ve added a few since then, of course, but let’s be realistic. A) We don’t have enough grain to use 6 billion people’s food for our cars for a year and b) it would be obscene if we even tried to come close. Billions of people would starve to death because of us, and we’d win the “most immoral society in history” award straight out, if we haven’t already. So realistically, we are not discussing replacing 75% or 50% of our imported oil with biodiesel or ethanol – period. It isn’t possible. And if we are talking about a more realistic number, like 10-15%, that can only happen with policy programs designed to create, encourage, and perhaps require conservation. - Energy Bulletin

If there's not enough land and capacity to fuel our vehicles nationally, what's to stop the continued abuse of land and locals in poorer nations, as they, in a short-sighted rush to grab our hard currency, try to supply our fuel demands? I know it's hard to tell from where we're sitting sometimes, but I'm fairly sure the world still has serious issues with food and water shortages. As it stands, our dietary habits have us using more land per capita than the rest of the world (and not just our own land...). Combine this with the insatiable appetite our vehicles have, and will we not be taking this already out-of-proportion ratio into the realms of the obscene, and absurd?

“The demand for biodiesel,” the Malaysian Star reports, “will come from the European Community … This fresh demand … would, at the very least, take up most of Malaysia’s crude palm oil inventories”. Why? Because it’s cheaper than biodiesel made from any other crop.

In September, Friends of the Earth published a report about the impacts of palm oil production. “Between 1985 and 2000,” it found, “the development of oil-palm plantations was responsible for an estimated 87 per cent of deforestation in Malaysia”. In Sumatra and Borneo, some 4 million hectares of forest has been converted to palm farms. Now a further 6 million hectares is scheduled for clearance in Malaysia, and 16.5m in Indonesia.

Almost all the remaining forest is at risk. Even the famous Tanjung Puting National Park in Kalimantan is being ripped apart by oil planters. The orang-utan is likely to become extinct in the wild. Sumatran rhinos, tigers, gibbons, tapirs, proboscis monkeys and thousands of other species could go the same way. Thousands of indigenous people have been evicted from their lands, and some 500 Indonesians have been tortured when they tried to resist. The forest fires which every so often smother the region in smog are mostly started by the palm growers. The entire region is being turned into a gigantic vegetable oil field.

Before oil palms, which are small and scrubby, are planted, vast forest trees, containing a much greater store of carbon, must be felled and burnt. Having used up the drier lands, the plantations are now moving into the swamp forests, which grow on peat. When they’ve cut the trees, the planters drain the ground. As the peat dries it oxidises, releasing even more carbon dioxide than the trees. In terms of its impact on both the local and global environments, palm biodiesel is more destructive than crude oil from Nigeria.

The British government understands this. In the report it published last month, when it announced that it will obey the European Union and ensure that 5.75% of our transport fuel comes from plants by 2010, it admitted that “the main environmental risks are likely to be those concerning any large expansion in biofuel feedstock production, and particularly in Brazil (for sugar cane) and South East Asia (for palm oil plantations).” It suggested that the best means of dealing with the problem was to prevent environmentally destructive fuels from being imported. The government asked its consultants whether a ban would infringe world trade rules. The answer was yes: “mandatory environmental criteria … would greatly increase the risk of international legal challenge to the policy as a whole”. So it dropped the idea of banning imports, and called for “some form of voluntary scheme” instead. Knowing that the creation of this market will lead to a massive surge in imports of palm oil, knowing that there is nothing meaningful it can do to prevent them, and knowing that they will accelarate rather than ameliorate climate change, the government has decided to go ahead anyway.

At other times it happily defies the European Union. But what the EU wants and what the government wants are the same. “It is essential that we balance the increasing demand for travel,” the government’s report says, “with our goals for protecting the environment”. Until recently, we had a policy of reducing the demand for travel. Now, though no announcement has been made, that policy has gone. Like the Tories in the early 1990s, the Labour administration seeks to accommodate demand, however high it rises. Figures obtained last week by the campaigning group Road Block show that for the widening of the M1 alone the government will pay £3.6 billion – more than it is spending on its entire climate change programme. Instead of attempting to reduce demand, it is trying to alter supply. It is prepared to sacrifice the South East Asian rainforests in order to be seen to do something, and to allow motorists to feel better about themselves. - Monbiot

EU countries are already growing bioenergy crops, mainly oil seed rape; and tax relief and incentives are granted for biofuels in ten or more countries.... The ‘set-aside’ agricultural land meant to protect and conserve biodiversity is likely to be brought back into agriculture to grow bioenergy crops....

A report published in 2002 by the CONCAWE group – the oil companies’ European association for environment, health and safety in refining and distribution - estimated that if all 5.6 million hectares of set-asides in the EU15 nations were intensively farmed for bioenergy crops, we could save merely 1.3-1.5 percent of road transport emissions, or around 0.3 percent of total emissions from those 15 countries.... These and other similarly pessimistic estimates... are fuelling the growth in biofuels industries in Third World countries, where, we are now told, there is plenty of “spare” land for growing bioenergy crops. The sunshine is brighter all year round, so crops grow faster, yield more and labour is cheap. - Biofuels: Biodevastation, Hunger & False Carbon Credits

As I scour and devour information on the net, reading articles, posts, and comments alike, I'm finding many deftly skirt around the issues above in favour of contending over minutiae - arguing the relative merits of one form of biofuel over another due to respective energy input/output ratios, or EROEI (Energy Returned Over Energy Invested) - trying to determine which, if any, actually produce more than they cost. There is considerable uncertainty for an industry that is already well underway, and receiving such high-level support.

Despite what we are being told – that if we just fund research into X or Y project, it will inevitably lead to the creation of X or Y technology that operates precisely as we want it to – that’s simply not how scientific research works. In the case of corn ethanol, we have been funding the ethanol lobby for decades to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, and we still can’t get a definitively positive EROEI. If, as writer Aaron Newton points out, American presidential elections did not begin in Iowa, it is unlikely that we would have invested as much as we have already in what may well be a losing proposition. It is possible that research could improve the energy return of biodiesel or ethanol. It is also quite possible that it cannot. Our use of biofuels must emphasize net energy gains, and before we invest billions, we should be absolutely certain of what we're getting. - Energy Bulletin

In the meantime, biofuel plants are going up everywhere and politicians are setting biofuel quotas into law. I guess I'd like to ask, where are we going with this? Are we not jumping straight from the frying pan into the fire?

Further Reading:

• Biofuels - It's Getting Annoying Now
• As Corn Ethanol Threatens, Algae Makes Promises
• Biofuel Nightmares - Indonesian Palm Plantations
• Energy Bulletin - Ethics of Biofuels
• In Pictures: Rainforest Elephant Patrol in Sumatra
• Biofuel Watch
• Washington Post