Dirty hippies at it again

Another agrofuel protest hits City Hall

Posted by biodiversivist (Guest Contributor) at 1:47 PM on 21 Sep 2007

Read more about: business | biofuels | energy | Seattle

Candace Heckman, writing for the Seattle P-I Big Blog, put up a brief post about the protest yesterday by Duff Badgley and his rag-tag group against local biodiesel-refiner Imperium Renewables. Imperium is getting downright defensive:

Imperium spokesman John Williams said this afternoon that the company is actively looking at "feedstocks" other than palm oil, and that for the next year-and-a-half, the City of Seattle would not be buying biodiesel made from palm.

This blog post "makes it sound like at some point we might sell palm biodiesel to the city. We haven't, we don't and we won't."

Get the violins and hankies out:

Williams said his company is being unfairly targeted ... [ahem] Although, Imperium is not in the position to completely swear off palm as the company grows into a global corporation.

Imperium has no choice. It has to make a profit. It has to try to pay back its investors. It is pointless to harp at Imperium. The power lies entirely in the hands of the consumer who can choose not to purchase food crop based agrodiesel.

The problem is with our local politicians. They have mandated its use, subsidized its profit margin, and to ice the cake, have allowed millions of dollars of retirement funds to be invested in Imperium. This was all done with money taken from consumers via taxes. Adding insult to injury, these same consumers have to buy back this environmentally destructive fuel from the government at whatever cost every time they take a bus or ferry.

Our politicians may have good intentions, but the road to hell is starting to look like a parking lot.

For story: Dirty hippies at it again
15 Comments | Post a Comment

Geez, BioD...

...no wonder you don't like government intervention. The worst part of the tale is putting pensions into Imperium -- I remember many years ago being blown away at the level of resources in pensions (was 1 trillion, now much more), and it seemed to some of us that that money could be best used to resuscitate the manufacturing sector. As it is, I think pension funds have been used mostly to destroy the manufacturing sector, even from industrial union funds, financing the outsourcing process. Looks like Seattle gave our idea a bad name!

by Jon Rynn at 2:10 PM on 21 Sep 2007

Surely farmable land is the critical shortage,

not food crops themselves?

The options of taking farmland and planting Switchgrass,
or mixed prairie plants,
or minimum rotation input-dependent monoculture coppice,
or sustainable moderate rotation polyculture coppice & standards,
all share a crucial weakness:- that of removing farmland from food production.

Yet the last option, Coppice & Standards, as it does not require mechanized treatment or harvesting,
has traditionally been established on land too steep &/or too poor for agriculture.

Given this distinction, the diverse fuels that can be refined from Coppice feedstock
maybe warrant a new and distinct title, being:
"Sylvifuels" ?

Regards,

Bill

by Billhook at 2:40 PM on 21 Sep 2007

Those crazy Seattle-ites

I've done a bunch of work for those people on the waterfront, such as ships and terminal equipment, and Seattle went nuts on bio-diesel. I mean nuts! I tried to lay it out, that there was six or seven kinds of bio-diesel in varying proportions of diesel mixtures, each with different effects on NOx and CO2, but they had no patience. I took my money and ran. Worst client ever. Bunch of crazy assholes, they were. /sammie

Onward through the fog

by Sam Wells at 6:19 PM on 21 Sep 2007

We can't use farmland

Bill's coppice idea has a lot of merit. I'm not sure if you can coppice hazelnuts, walnuts, or beechnuts but any almond orchard is effectively a coppice.

Olives, whose wood is usefull for spoons and tools, will grow on land that would be marginal for any other purpose. Oil used for industrial uses need not be of the first quality. Avacados grow wherever there is little frost and adequate water and soil for them to grow and are mostly oil in the fruits.

This chart might be helpful.

Put the Carbon Back

by Pangolin at 6:38 PM on 21 Sep 2007
[ Parent ]

We can't use farmland

Bill's coppice idea has a lot of merit. I'm not sure if you can coppice hazelnuts, walnuts, or beechnuts but any almond orchard is effectively a coppice.

This chart might be helpful.

Put the Carbon Back

by Pangolin at 6:38 PM on 21 Sep 2007
[ Parent ]

Not altruism, but economics

At the time Imperium was first planning to use palm oil, the price was probably a lot lower than it is now. What has happened over the last 18 months is that not only have the prices of vegetable oils -- all vegetable oils -- skyrocketed, but the prices of lower grade oils, like palm oil, have narrowed the gap with the prices for higher-grade oils, like canola and soybean oil. Here are some numbers, taken from the FAO's "International Commodity Prices" website:

Average prices in 2005 (US$ per metric ton):

Rapeseed (canola) ...... 669
Soybean oil ............ 545
Palm oil ............... 422

Latest prices (average for August 2007):

Rapeseed (canola) ...... 955
Soybean oil ............ 908
Palm oil ............... 821

Note that over this period the relative price of soybean oil has narrowed from 81% to 95% of the price of canola oil, and palm oil has narrowed from 63% to 86% of the price of canola oil.

So for a company like Imperium to now sound less keen on palm oil has as much to do with economics as with community relations.

I use the term "economics" advisedly, of course. Imperium would benefit from a federal tax credit of $1.00 per gallon, as well as a myriad of state-level incentives that benefit producers and merchants of biodiesel and biodiesel blends.

On the other hand, when the price of your feedstock has almost doubled in a year and a half (if you were basing your business on imported palm oil), it is difficult to imagine any biodiesel manufacturer making much of a profit these days.

These are only my personal opinions.

by Ron Steenblik at 1:26 AM on 22 Sep 2007

Correction

In my previous post, I should have added the word "oil" after "Rapeseed (canola)" in the table. That is to say, the prices refer to "Rapeseed (canola) oil", not rapeseed.

These are only my personal opinions.

by Ron Steenblik at 2:12 AM on 22 Sep 2007

Breaking news!

The Times of London has just published an article reporting on the findings of a study soon to be published in the open-access journal, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. Here's a quote from the Times article:

Rapeseed and maize [sic] biodiesels were calculated to produce up to 70 per cent and 50 per cent more greenhouse gases respectively than fossil fuels. The concerns were raised over the levels of emissions of nitrous oxide, which is 296 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Scientists found that the use of biofuels released twice as much nitrous oxide as previously realised. The research team found that 3 to 5 per cent of the nitrogen in fertiliser was converted and emitted. In contrast, the figure used by the International Panel on Climate Change, which assesses the extent and impact of man-made global warming, was 2 per cent. The findings illustrated the importance, the researchers said, of ensuring that measures designed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions are assessed thoroughly before being hailed as a solution.
"One wants rational decisions rather than simply jumping on the bandwagon because superficially something appears to reduce emissions," said Keith Smith, a professor at the University of Edinburgh and one of the researchers.

These are only my personal opinions.

by Ron Steenblik at 2:38 AM on 22 Sep 2007

Wow, great comments, Ron

I'll be adding that study to my growing list.

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

by biodiversivist at 9:19 AM on 22 Sep 2007

Yeah Ron

I been bugging people about that study for a while now :P

It's the N2O factor they underestimated by more than a factor of 2x.

http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/7/11191/2007/acpd- ...
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2007/09/study-n2o-emiss.h ...
http://www.alphagalileo.org/index.cfm?_rss=1&fuseacti ...

Also in other news, looks like the Institute for Policy Studies got around to publishing the official copy of the new Patzek/Pimentel policy paper.

http://ips-dc.org/reports/070915_biofuels_report.pdf

by GreyFlcn at 9:13 PM on 22 Sep 2007

Which of course

Incidentally makes nitrogen fixing plants, and plants with high nitrogen demands automatically a bad idea.

i.e. Practically all of them.

And that includes Jathropha. (Especially Jatropha)

by GreyFlcn at 9:16 PM on 22 Sep 2007
[ Parent ]

Ooh, nifty

Youtube stuff.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgcE8czaMR4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpm3iJsls80

by GreyFlcn at 9:25 PM on 22 Sep 2007
[ Parent ]

You are the King of links, Greyflcn

Especially liked that first youtube link and the one to the paper.

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

by biodiversivist at 10:52 PM on 22 Sep 2007

Of Babies, Bathwater, &c

Pangolin - some good news for you -

Hazel is an excellent coppice tree, and was traditionally the staple material for many vital rural artifacts -
While most deciduous trees will regrow from the stump, some, like Sweet Chestnut, Ash & Hazel do so really well and will gain wood about 20% faster than a normal specimen,
thus improving the methanol + TP-charcoal feedstock yield /acre /year.

We have many Ash & Hazel on the farm here in the Cambrian mountains of Wales,
but the very damaging Canadian Grey Squirrel invaded the UK so we eat rather more squirrel than Hazelnuts.

Hazelnut as a flammble oil source is a novel idea to me, and adds to the goal of eradicating the greys in favour of the native red
(not least to allow the production of Hazlenut butter, which puts peanut butter in deep shade).

It's very good to see that a scientist of Crutzen's renown makes the point of distinguishing between the best and the worst of biofuels :-
"...the production of commonly used biofuels, such as biodiesel from rapeseed and bioethanol from corn (maize), can contribute as much or more to global warming by N2O emissions than cooling by fossil fuel savings. Crops with less N demand, such as grasses and woody coppice species have more favourable climate impacts."

Traditional coppice of course requires no chem fertilizer inputs.

Grey Flcn -

I can't follow your critique of nitrogen fixing plants -
As I understand it, the problem Crutzen addresses is particularly with agricultural fertilizer nitrogen ending up as NO2 outputs.

So how does atmospheric nitrogen being fixed naturally in the soil by plants,
thus greatly reducing or even ending fertilizer demand,
become a problem ?

Many thanks for the link to "Growing Solutions"

Regards,

Bill

by Billhook at 3:16 AM on 23 Sep 2007

Why would

So how does atmospheric nitrogen being fixed naturally in the soil by plants,
thus greatly reducing or even ending fertilizer demand, become a problem ?

It's all the same chemical compound.
Why would the atmosphere treat one or the other differently?

For instance, the USDA model does not include N2O emissions from atmospheric nitrogen fixed by soybeans, while the UCDavis Model does, contributing to an almost order of magnitude greater estimated of Global Warming Impact for soybean biodiesel.
http://greyfalcon.net/n2o.png

by GreyFlcn at 8:46 AM on 23 Sep 2007
[ Parent ]

ADVERTISING POLICY

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