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More Bad News for Ethanol
Keith Johnson, Energy Roundup (Wall Street Journal)
Another brick in the wall against ethanol. Academics tasked with plotting California’s transition to a low-carbon fuel have delivered more bad news: Ethanol appears to come with a higher greenhouse-gas price tag than previously thought – higher, indeed, than fossil fuel.
California has long been a little wary of ethanol. They worry that adding ethanol at low blends to gasoline producers higher levels of certain air pollutants. But now that the Golden State is trying to tackle greenhouse-gas emissions from the transport sector, first-generation ethanol-the only kind that is actually commercially viable today-pops up as a repeat offender. That raises the question of how to actually make the transition to cleaner-burning transport fuels in the near term.
The University of California at Berkeley’s Transportation Sustainability Research Center told the California Air Resources Board that ethanol could be twice as bad as gasoline, from a carbon-emissions point of view. How? Basically by turning land now covered with trees, grass, and other natural “carbon sinks” into farmland for corn and other crops used for ethanol.
…The Berkeley team warned about the land-use-change bogeyman (”LUC” in shorthand) in a pair of lengthy reports submitted to California authorities last year. But only this month did the team report the startling, if preliminary, numbers. Current wisdom in California says gasoline produces about 92 grams of carbon dioxide for every megajoule of energy produced; ethanol is reckoned to be slightly cleaner at 75.9 grams. But the land-use penalty alone from growing more biofuel crops could add as much as 140 grams/MJ-a “really enormous” number, professors Farrell and O’Hare wrote.
(23 January 2008)
Biofuel production may worsen water, food problems in Asia: study
Associated Press
An international research group has warned in a recent study that continued rapid growth in biofuel production may worsen already serious water resource and food problems in Asia.
The International Water Management Institute said in its report that “Ambitious plans in China and India to greatly increase domestic production of biofuels derived from crops will put greater stress on these countries’ water supplies, seriously undermining their ability to meet future food and feed demands.”
(21 January 2008)
Why ethanol production will drive high food prices still higher in 2008
Lester Brown, Earth Policy Institute (emailed press release)
WASHINGTON, DC — On Thursday, January 24th, environmental analyst and author Lester Brown will hold a telephone briefing to discuss how the United States is generating global food insecurity on a scale never seen before. In a misguided effort to reduce its oil insecurity by converting its grain into fuel for cars, the United States is driving up food prices worldwide.
Brown — president of the Earth Policy Institute and a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship recipient — will discuss how even as financial markets are melting down, the world is facing the most severe food price inflation in history with wheat, corn, and soybean prices at or near all-time highs. A front-page New York Times article this weekend described the result: economic chaos and even riots caused by rising food prices.
As wheat, corn, and soybean prices climb, prices of the food products made directly from these commodities such as bread, pasta, and tortillas, and those made indirectly, such as pork, poultry, beef, milk, and eggs, are everywhere on the rise. In Mexico, corn meal prices are up 60 percent. In Pakistan, flour prices have doubled. China is facing rampant food price inflation, some of the worst in decades.
Unlike previous grain price increases that were weather induced, Brown says this increase is policy induced and therefore can be dealt with by policy adjustments. U.S. taxpayers, by subsidizing the conversion of grain into ethanol, are in effect financing a rise in their own food prices. Brown recommends that the United States abandon the ethanol subsidy before the deteriorating food situation spirals out of control.
(23 January 2008)
