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Study Shows Some Biofuels Not So Green

Posted on: Monday, 19 May 2008, 03:00 CDT

By Friedman, Mark

AT FIRST, IT WAS HARD TO FIND anyone against the use of biofuels.

Biofuels were promoted as helping the United States curb its dependency on foreign oil. And they were good for the environment since they were cleaner-burning than petroleum products.

A new study recently published in Science magazine, though, shows that converting land to grow biofuel crops results in major carbon emissions, an effect that isn't helping solve the problem of global warming.

"We analyzed all the benefits of using biofuels as alternatives to oil, but we found that the benefits fall far short of the carbon losses," Joe Fargione, a scientist for the Nature Conservancy, which did the study, said in a February news release. "It's what we call 'the carbon debt.' If you're trying to mitigate global warming, it simply does not make sense to convert land for biofuels production."

The study added ammunition to the poultry industry's claims that using crops for fuel wasn't helping the environment and was causing crop prices to rise at the same time.

Between 1995 and 2005, the price of corn hovered at $2 a bushel. Now, it has jumped to around $6. Corn is used to make ethanol, which is then blended with gasoline. To make biodiesel fuel, soybean oil is needed.

But the days of using corn and soybeans for fuel might be numbered, said Cal McCastlain, CEO of Patriot BioFuels Inc., which makes biodiesel fuel from soybean oil and animal fat at its Stuttgart plant.

The biofuels industry is just stepping into the first stages of development of biofuels, he said. The next generation would probably be cellulosic ethanol, which can be made from organic municipal waste or from the waste from harvested trees.

"There is a world of development out there and improvement that's to come, whether it's in the processes itself for making a fuel or in the particular crop or feed stock that is used to make that fuel," McCastlain said. "We're not at the end point right now. We're at the beginning."

That could he good news for Arkansas, which already has three biodiesel plants, Patriot BioFuels, FutureFuel Chemical Co. of Batesville and Arkansas SoyEnergy Group LLC, which opened a biodiesel plant in DeWitt in February.

Arkansas should be in a position to take advantage of the shift from using soybean oil to cellulose material, said Chris Benson, director of energy programs for the Arkansas Energy Office, part of the Arkansas Economic Development Commission.

"What we're pinning our hopes on is working more in the cellulosic ethanol industry," he said.

The timeline for when the shift will occur is unclear, though.

"You've got to come up with cost-efficient technologies that convert the cellulosic material into fermentable sugars," Benson said. "There's a lot of technology and processes that are under development for conversion, and then there's different production techniques that are being worked on."

Benson said biodiesel fuel that is being produced now is vital to Arkansas' future economy.

"It allows us to get infrastructure set up. It allows us to get policies in place," he said. "And it utilizes what we do best, which is growing stuff. So we're probably one of the top 10 biomass resources in the country."

Tyson Foods Inc. of Springdale also is trying to cash in on the biofuels market.

In December, Tyson and ConocoPhillips started turning beef tallow into biodiesel fuel, according to a Tyson company news release.

Production started at 100 barrels a day, and now 300 to 500 barrels a day are being produced. And Tyson's subsidiary, Dynamic Fuels LLC, will convert low-cost fat, grease and other feedstock into renewable synthetic jet fuel. Dynamic Fuels is building a plant in Louisiana and is expected to begin production in 2010.

The Study

The biofuel industry was already looking for the next generation of biofuels before the report in Science was released, the Nature Conservancy's Fargione told Arkansas Business last week.

The biofuel industry knew that only so much fuel could be extracted from corn or soybeans without affecting the food supply.

"I think our paper provided some added incentive for getting there as quickly as possible," Fargione said.

The study, conducted in concert with the University of Minnesota, disproved the conventional wisdom that biofuels lead to fewer greenhouse emissions.

The previous models for using crop-land for fuel factored in the benefits, but they didn't count the costs, Timothy Searchinger, a visiting scholar at Princeton University, whose group's study was published by Science, told Arkansas Business last week.

The problem was that productive land was already helping to reduce global warming, Searchinger said. But in many cases, forests or grasslands were being converted to plant biofuel food, he said.

If "you end up plowing up that forest or grassland, you get a huge release of carbon," Searchinger said in a February interview with Science. "And that huge release of carbon is carbon that's been stored over decades and, according to our calculations, greatly exceeds the carbon benefit that you get per year of using biofuels."

He said it would take 167 years of using biofuels to pay off that release of carbon from plowing the forest or grassland.

"The problem is, of course, we need to start reducing greenhouse gases today," Searchinger said.

And by planting more corn to be used for ethanol, farmers are using more fertilizer, said Richard Lobb, a spokesman for the National Chicken Council of Washington, D.C.

He said the nitrogen-based fertilizer that Midwest farmers use ends up in the Mississippi River, which isn't healthy for fish.

Unintended Consequences

Another unintended consequence of using food for biofuel is the increase in the cost of corn.

Patriot Biofuels has felt the pinch too from higher prices for soybean oil.

When the Stuttgart plant first started producing biodiesel in 2006, a pound of soybean oil was 23 cents. It hit 75 cents a pound in March, McCastlain said.

And poultry producers said they have been hammered by the rising cost of corn.

Tyson Foods said it paid $300 million in additional grain costs in fiscal 2007. It projected paying $800 million in increased grain and related costs in fiscal 2008. And that's a hit: For the fiscal year that ended Sept. 29, Tyson reported a net income of $268 million on revenue of $26.9 billion.

Since 2006, poultry producers have spent nearly $4 billion on extra feed, Lobb said.

He said he knows that reducing greenhouse gases is important, "but if people starve to death, they are not going to have the opportunity to enjoy a green environment."

The Renewable Fuels Association of Washington, D.C., blamed the price of oil, which hit another record high of $115 a barrel last week, for high food prices.

"While it is true increased ethanol production is creating a real market-driven price for corn, energy prices, not ethanol, are responsible for much of the increase in the price of food," the RFA said in a news release.

Arkansas farmers are trying to reap money from the high corn prices.

In 2007, Arkansas farmers planted 610,000 acres of corn, the most in the state in the last 50 years, said Jason Kelley, extension agronomist for the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture.

If corn is being planted, that means soybeans aren't, he said. In Arkansas, the amount of soybeans fell from 3.1 millionsacres in 2006 to 2.8 million in 2007.

And farmers around the world are taking advantage of the rising price of soybeans. In the Amazon, farmers are cutting down forests to plant soybeans, said Wilham Laurance, a biologist with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.

"When we divert our grain to fuel, we're increasing the demand for that grain, and the price goes up," Searchinger said in the interview with Science.

Forest depletion shouldn't be blamed on the use of biofuels, said Amber Thurlo Pearson, a spokeswoman for the National Biodiesel Board of Jefferson City, Mo.

"Forest depletions have been going on for at least 20 years," she said. "And biofuels have really only been mass produced in the last five years or so."

She said people shouldn't forget all the good that the biofuels industry has done, such as adding jobs to the economy. By 2015, biodiesel is expected to add about 39,000 jobs in the United States.

And the emissions benefit from the 500 million gallons of biodiesel fuel that have been produced is equivalent to removing 700,000 vehicles from the road just last year, Pearson said.

She also said one study showed oil and gasoline prices would be about 1S percent higher if biofuel providers were not increasing their output.

"It's sad that something that is so good for the country has been painted with a wide brush stroke that it has done a bad thing when the facts don't necessarily support that," Pearson said.

Future of Fuel

In December, Congress passed the Energy Independence & Security Act of 2007, which calls for at least 36 billion gallons of renewable fuel to be used annually by 2022. And nearly 60 percent of fuel has to be from advanced biofuels, including cellulosic ethanol.

Researchers found producing biofuels from cellulosic ethanol doesn't contribute to global warming because they don't require the conversion of native habitat.

But even if the goal of 36 billion gallons of biofuel is met, it will only account for 14 percent of the energy needs of the country in 2022, Fargione said.

"It does help to mitigate costs of what you pay at the pump, but it doesn't come anywhere close to eliminate our dependence on foreign oil," he said. "People do need to understand just how much oil we're using."

The U.S. uses 20 million barrels of oil a day, or enough oil to fill about 1,275 Olympic-sized swimming pools each day, according to the National Biodiesel Board. By 2025, oil demand is expected to reach 26 million barrels a day.

Fargione said creating electric cars would be a better alternative than biofuels.

But finding a battery that will work for extended miles has kept the project on the drawing board, he said.

"It's much easier to produce electricity renewably and domestically, of course, than it is to produce fuel," Fargione said. "If we were to take that same biomass [used to produce biofuel] and convert it to electricity, then the car would go farther."

Source: Arkansas Business

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