Asking the wrong questions

An alternative view on biofuels, from a Briton in Sudan

Posted by Ron Steenblik (Guest Contributor) at 12:22 AM on 24 Nov 2007

Read more about: energy | climate | biofuels

I've just discovered a great blog maintained by Clive Bates, a self-described "selfless public servant, amateur chef, novice mountaineer, lawless cyclist, overweight runner and occasional optimist." He is being modest: he's the former head of ASH (Action on Smoking and Health) in the UK and more recently the Head of Environmental Policy at the UK Environment Agency.

Over the last two years, Bates has written extensively and persuasively on a wide range of topics, particularly on environmental and energy policies, and climate change.

In his latest post, about biofuel policy, Bates states:

Instead of asking how to reduce transport emissions from road fuel substitution, we should be asking how to make use of land to tackle climate change in the most effective way possible. In coming up with the biofuels targets, policy-makers have asked, and answered, the wrong question. It's not hard to see why ... transport policy-makers have to find transport policies. The results: waste, damage and lost opportunities to do better ...

He starts off:

There are two main problems with biofuels:

(1) they are a very expensive way of saving carbon, compared to the alternatives (at least 10x the going rate in the EU ETS) -- see chart and click to view in detail;

(2) there are substantial negative 'sustainability' impacts, arising from changes in land use for biofuel production -- for example deforestation, water impacts or land shortages.

Beyond rhetoric, we appear almost indifferent to these. Despite these weaknesses, we now have extremely powerful and expensive policy instruments devoted to promoting biofuels.

In the chart above (click here for a full-page version), Bates put together data from Table 30 of the UK government's Biomass Strategy "Working Paper 1 - Economic analysis of biomass technologies" (PDF), from May of this year. It shows that the government's Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO) is focused at the most expensive end of the range of biomass options. "In fact," he writes, "these are at the expensive end of all carbon abatement technologies -- perhaps 10 times the going rate in the EU Emission Trading Scheme.

He then asks:

Why, you might well ask, is the government acting so irrationally? Forcing very large sums into inefficient policy instruments for little environmental gain. I think this illustrates an important failing of climate policy. Obviously this has its origins in the EU (in which the UK is an accessory to poor decisions taken by the Council), where the biofuel targets have been set at arbitrarily high levels. I suspect the idea of biofuels targets have come from policy-makers asking the question: "how do we reduce the emissions from transport?" They conclude that fuel substitution is one of the best options they have then designed a mechanism to make that work -- but by indiscriminately subsidising a change of land-use in Europe and beyond. Perhaps they feel an implicit sectoral burden sharing regime at work ... that transport must somehow take its "fair share" of the reductions compared to power station, chemical plant and homes. Of course, the climate is indifferent to burden sharing ... it doesn't care where the reductions come from. Reading the Energy White Paper [Transport section], you can feel the implicit burden sharing in the text:

For transport to reduce its climate change impacts we need to enable smarter, more energy efficient use of transport and we need to reduce carbon emissions by bringing about changes in the types of vehicles and fuels we use.

The biomass strategy goes further [UK Biomass Strategy p7] -- it recognises that transport biofuels sit at the expensive end of a hierarchy of biomass options, but then concludes it would be simplistic to think about it like that ...

... despite their higher cost of carbon, transport biofuels are essential to carbon savings in the transport sector for which there are few other options in the short to medium term.

But this is the simplistic thinking ... we should get the emissions reductions where lowest cost and least damaging overall. The issue is that no-one has the policy brief to optimise these resources: but there is plenty of muscular transport policy-making going on -- trying to do the wrong thing well, and establishing a meaningless policy priority.

Bates then goes on to argue for looking at land from the perspective of how its management contributes to climate change, rather than from the narrow perspective of how it can serve an arbitrary set of biofuel targets.

There is more to his argument, but I'll leave readers with one of my favorite passages:

[T]he stand-by excuse of technology-promoting scoundrels everywhere is that we need big subsidies now to prepare for the brave new dawn tomorrow. I agree you need an innovation system -- but it's not obvious that you get to cheap second-generation biofuels via lavish subsidies for a very large uptake of expensive dead-end first generation biofuels. For now, the best transport responses are fuel efficiency and changes in driver behaviour. Longer term it's about mobility demand and the physical layout of our lives. [my emphasis]

By the way, Clive Bates is about to become the Head of the UN Environment Programme in Sudan. I hope he still finds time to maintain his blog.

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Yesterday and Tomorrow

I drove by an abandoned interurban railway, electric generating station. Very small and elegantly designed. Within a mile was a test tower for a proposed wind generating farm. Kind of a vision there. Wind moving people.

"mobility demand and the physical layout of our lives" INDEED

by justlou at 3:10 AM on 24 Nov 2007

Question for Justlou and Friends

Dear Justlou,

Are the following questions on a track that could somehow be reasonably and sensibly opened for consideration?

What is happening in our world?

Why do we keep doing what we are doing now, with the understanding that we will keep getting what we are getting now?

When will we change our ways of living in this world from "what is patently unsustainable" to "what is ecologically sustainable"?

What is to become of our children if it turns out that we are leading them down a primrose path?

Are we witnessing something odd and unfortunate: an unforeseen loss of courage in the family of humanity that is reflected in both the absence of a sense of urgency by our leaders and the lack of an insistent expression of outrage by the public regarding the potentially dangerous, human-forced predicament in which we find ourselves in these early years of Century XXI?

Steven Earl Salmony, Ph.D., M.P.A.
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/

by stevenearlsalmony at 4:14 AM on 24 Nov 2007

Just Another Big Reckoning

on the earth's timescale. We just happen to be in position to view another great one approaching -- the first to be generated by a single species on a planetary scale but one of among many civilizational collapses. After this episode there won't be many Noahs fitting through the needle's eye. History has dealt us an ugly hand and most will conform to play it out within the rules and borders prescribed by the dominant world view.

by justlou at 4:52 AM on 24 Nov 2007

Graphic Limitations

While I applaud the author's strong critique of the present irrational support for agri-biofuels,
the chart posted does itself need some critique to avoid some misleading implications,
specifically as regards the "abatement costs" of forest energies.

For instance, it's worth noting that

1/. The chart apparently reflects UK production costs which, for sylvi-biofuels in developing countries may be an order of magnitude cheaper due to better growth rates and harvesting by machete rather than by huge specialist machinery.

2/. SRC (aka Short Rotation Coppice) requires fair arable land, plus heavy annual chemical inputs, plus grubbing up and replanting after 20 years, none of which applies to traditional moderate and long-cycle coppice, for which no costs are shown.

3/. Domestic heating with local firewood is costing the UK's country people only around £80 T C "abated."

4. The idea of Carbon Abatement, that one tonne of fossil fuel carbon is not emitted because I burn two tonnes of firewood, is a delusion.
All I've done is to leave the fossil fuel on the market for someone else to buy and burn.
Only by means of more Govt.s' accepting Convergence to per capita parity of national emission entitlements
to succeed in negotiating a global Contraction of net GHG emissions
under a UN "Treaty of the Atmospheric Commons"
will such "abatement" become anything more useful than unilateral personal restraint.

Regards,

Billhook

by Billhook at 6:22 AM on 24 Nov 2007

Yesterday and Tomorrow Revisited

Illinois electric interurban railway history and video:
http://will.atlas.uiuc.edu/index.php/prairiefire/segment/ ...

Ron, sorry to hijack the biofuel thread but I think you can see the link. Interesting to see how transportation and electrical distribution were united at one time.

by justlou at 6:58 AM on 24 Nov 2007

Dear Justlou, with thanks to you and Friends,

Perhaps your view of our distinctly human-driven predicament is correct; there may be little we can do about the predicament; however, I am one who believes the human species can do a great deal to preserve biodiversity and the environment and protect the integrity of Earth and itself. In order to accomplish such goals, it seems to me that we many need to make some new and different choices so that the currently gigantic and rapidly enlarging "footprint" imposed on Earth by certain endlessly growing activities of the human species is brought into balance with Earth's finite capacity to sustain life as we know it.

As many have incisively pointed out repeatedly, in the face of certain barely visible global challenges looming ominously before humanity, the economic powerbrokers, their bought-and-paid-for politicians and their minions in the mass media in my not-so-great generation could need even more than Mr. Tom Brokaw's recommendation of a six-month supply of hoarded rations and supplies to weather the coming "storms." Leaders of my "What's in it for Me" Generation could choose to think about long-term human wellbeing, not only about themselves?

The IPCC Report makes clear that dire consequences will be potentiated if humankind chooses to "stay the course" marked by endlessly growing the artificially designed, manmade global economy and by fecklessly increasing per capita consumption without regard to the biological and physical limits to this unbridled growth. UN Secretary-General Mr. Ban Ki-Moon says that climate change is a problem for the human community now. The time is coming, I suppose, when we choose to "center" our attention on the good scientific evidence from no less than 2000 IPCC scientists so that the family of humanity can determine how we are going to proceed in order to make some new and different, ecologically sustainable choices regarding our ways of living in this wondrous world God blesses us to inhabit?

What kind of a future do we intend for our children? If we keep doing what we are doing now, we could end up leaving our children a world that is unfit for human habitation. The integrity of the Earth and and life as we know it could become dangerously undermined and irreversibly diminished by our current unrelenting efforts to endlessly increase human consumption, production and propagation activities on a relatively small, finite, noticeably frangible planet the size of Earth. Perhaps all of us and our leaders will at least consider that these distinctly human overgrowth activities could be changed by choosing to do less per human consuming, big-business producing and species propagating.

Sincerely,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony, Ph.D., M.P.A.
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001

by stevenearlsalmony at 7:09 AM on 24 Nov 2007

I have finally realized that here in the US

most people support biofuels because they have been convinced they will lead to either energy independence (the patriots) or peace (the dirty hippies). Global warming is still considered a controversial topic, along with the theory of evolution :(

In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world

by biodiversivist at 6:58 PM on 24 Nov 2007

Biofuels Stink

Replace that with a stronger word. The world is facing disruptions to agriculture from American Sponsored Global Warming at the very time that population will be approaching its peak.

While diverting agricultural land from food to biofuels may benefit some farmers, as a global policy it is immoral.

Biofuels are a distraction, and a very bad one.

Biofuels are the enemy of the human race.

patrick in beijing

by bookerly at 7:05 PM on 24 Nov 2007

Speaking of biofuels and finding new blogs

Speaking of biofuels and finding new blogs
Any thoughts on this Steenblik?
http://algae-thermodynamics.blogspot.com/
http://algae-thermodynamics.blogspot.com/2007/03/how-can- ...

I'd hate to believe this is "seeing what I want to see", but Algae really seems to be what is "Keeping hope alive" for biofuels.

If Algae were to fall, then the premise of biofuels in entirety would probably go with it.

by GreyFlcn at 10:47 PM on 24 Nov 2007

Where Biofuels can be useful

Whilst i agree with this post, Biofuels can play an important role in certain situations where waste residues from agriculture can be salvaged. A good example is some small pacific island nations that have existing palm oil plantations and oil production facilities. These facilities generate a waste stream that in most third world nations is disposed of in a local water way with no regard for surrounding ecosystems. The waste stream from these facilities could be processed to produce biofuel and clean water for a local community. The Biofuel processing facility would need to be "black boxed" such that the technology could not be abused and used for the production of Biofuel from non-waste material.

by ThomC at 11:45 PM on 24 Nov 2007

Well I do agree

BioFuel production from raw sewage, and thins that would otherwise end up in a landfill I'm okay with.

But don't be so fast and loose with what you classify as "waste".
http://greyfalcon.net/peaksoil

And make sure to quantify it.
http://venturebeat.com/2006/11/05/why-cellulosic-ethanol- ...

Also I wouldn't really give much credit to palm oil production.
http://greyfalcon.net/palmoil
http://greyfalcon.net/peat
http://greyfalcon.net/ran

by GreyFlcn at 12:10 AM on 25 Nov 2007
[ Parent ]

Questioning everything

Dr. Salmony and all,

These are the important questions in my view. I recently started a blog of my own titled: Question Everything. The purpose is to explore these big questions and do so by generating further questions in a top-down manner of analysis.

My first question was: Why is the world the way it is?

The blog grew out of my experiences teaching a Global Honors course titled Global Challenges at the University of Washington Tacoma. It was a seminar course covering many of the issues covered here in Grist. The methodology of exploration of these issues was to ask questions. I even insisted that students offer their ideas about solutions as questions since the complexity of these issues preclude anyone having a specific answer at some high level of analysis. Rather, the method seeks to break big problems down into their components in parallel fashion. The belief is that at a small enough scale, the sub-problems become solvable and the sum of solutions to smaller problems results in solutions to larger problems.

I invite all to visit:
Question Everything and pose your questions.

Regards
George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

by gmobus at 8:18 AM on 25 Nov 2007
[ Parent ]

Dear George Mobus

Your "Question Everything" blog is terrific. Thank you for it and for all you are doing.

Among other important topics, your blog makes reference to "treating people." This is a matter of special concern to me. But rather than comment on my perspective at this moment, I will pass on to the work of a colleague of mine in the field of psychology as well as ask you to consider that before we "treat people" we need to understand their problem. That is to say, before treatment can begin we need an adequate diagnosis of the problem.

For the sake of taking one small step forward here, I would like to invite you and Friends to review an article from a fine psychologist. Perhaps her uncommon perspective, with its remarkable explanatory power, will help all of us share a deeper understanding of what is happening with regard to the "people problem."

http://www.energybulletin.net/37091.html

Discussion of "treatment options" will follow, I suppose.

Always, with appreciation for efforts like yours,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony, Ph.D., M.P.A.
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/

by stevenearlsalmony at 8:58 AM on 25 Nov 2007

Coming back on topic

Billhook's points are all well taken. Yes, growing sylvi-biofuels in developing countries should be cheaper than in developed countries. And I agree with ThomC that biofuels can play an important role in certain situations where waste residues -- true waste residues -- from agriculture can be salvaged.

But I agree also with Patrick Bookerly that biofuels are a distraction. Too many politicians have latched onto them as their main policy for addressing climate change and petroleum dependency.

I thank GreyFlcn, with his ever-growing list of good web sites, for pointing me to one that provides an excellent exposé on the thermodynamics of algal biodiesel. I wish those working on this technology luck and success, but neither should the world be holding its breath that it will provide a cheap and clean source of energy any time soon.

These are only my personal opinions.

by Ron Steenblik at 1:49 PM on 25 Nov 2007

Little correction (?)

Very not important, but Sudan shall be getting a UN Peacekeeping Force, the UN Environment Programme would be headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya - it sounds like those two got mixed up?

Dr. Gerald Schmidt Positive Ecology Project www.positive-ecology.org

by GSchmidt at 9:00 PM on 25 Nov 2007

In answer to Gerald Schmidt

Um, I think Mr. Bates knows where he'll be working. UNEP has local offices in many countries.

These are only my personal opinions.

by Ron Steenblik at 9:10 PM on 25 Nov 2007
[ Parent ]

Biofuels are stupid

I have read that photosynthesis is at best 6% efficient. That is, plants convert 6% of the suns energy incident on them into plant material.

Only a small fraction of the plant material is usable to make biofuel; Sugar for alcohols or oils from seeds etc to make biodiesel. So this probably drops the overall efficiency to 0.6% (I'm guessing).

Even if ethanol can be made from the entire plant structure (cellulosic ethanol) the pathetic 6% efficiency remains. It's probably much less factoring the conversion to ethanol...An overall efficiency 3% is probably optimistic.

Concentrating solar thermal / photovoltaic efficiency is approaching 30% conversion of incident solar radiation to electrical power. Storage in batteries and conversion to kinetic energy for electric vehicles is what, 50-60% efficient?

So here's the comparison for 100 units of solar radiation:

Concentrating solar power delivers 30 units of electricity, these 30 units then convert to 15 units of movement in an electric vehicle.

Photosynthesis delivers 6 units of energy stored in plant material. Converting usuable oil/sugar to biofuel delivers 0.6 units. Burning this biofuel in a 20% efficient internal combustion engine delivers a final 0.12 units of movement in a biofuel powered vehicle. At best cellulosic ethanol might delivers 0.6 units in a biofuel vehicle.

These calculations are pretty rough, can someone prove that making biofuel to move a vehicle from A to B is not incredibly stupid when compared to electricity generated from solar power?

How much more stupid does it sound when biofuel crops require a bunch of water and presumably must displace food production - concentrating solar power requires neither.

Biofuel from waste is great, but diverting farmland from food production to auto fuel production is a crime against humanity.

by elbarto at 9:28 PM on 25 Nov 2007

Well the math I've seen

Well the math I've seen is somewhere along the lines of

6% photosynthetically active radiation captured
32% fischer tropsch diesel formation
88% transportation losses
40% diesel engine

For a grand total of 0.676%

Where you cut that in half for a gasoline engine

And you cut that in half again, when you compare the yearly solar activity between temperate and tropical latitudes.

So more like 0.169% if it's done "American style"

It pretty much gets into the pitiful range.

by GreyFlcn at 12:10 AM on 26 Nov 2007
[ Parent ]

This is so Elbarto, Greyflcn

Ron's post here points out that replacing liquid transport fuel with industrial agrofuels is also the "most expensive" thing you could do to reduce carbon. They are robbing the global warming coffers. That thought had never crossed my mind.

In other words, not only is the burning of biofuels in cars the most energy inefficient use of solar energy you can imagine, it is also the "most expensive" thing you could do to reduce carbon.

Plug-ins are attacked by biofuel proponents as being pie-in-the-sky future technology. Why count on them when you have diesel engines on the road?

We now have another answer. Using liquid biofuel in your 80% efficient home oil furnace instead of burning it in your car would triple efficiency and cut cost by just as much. Instead of promoting use of biofuels in cars politicians should be making it illegal to waste it in cars.

In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world

by biodiversivist at 7:45 AM on 26 Nov 2007

ADVERTISING POLICY

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