Getting biofuels on the green and narrow path
Posted February 15, 2011 in Moving Beyond Oil, Solving Global Warming
[Author's note: Back in January, the journal Biofuels, Bioproducts and Bioprocessing was kind enough to publish an opinion piece from yours truly called "Getting biofuels on the green and narrow path: why we must get advanced biofuels started and started in the right way." However, since the journal requires a subscription, I thought I'd repackage the thoughts in a shorter, freely accessible blog. So here you go.]
Population growth and rising incomes are driving a massive increase in the demand for transportation energy, making transportation the fastest growing source of the heat-trapping greenhouse gases (GHG) that are changing the global climate[i]. Meanwhile, trillions of dollars in long-term capital investment is ‘locked’ into existing fleets—our cars, airplanes, school buses, construction and farm equipment—all of which will demand liquid fuels for years to come. A low-carbon liquid fuel is therefore critical for mitigating global warming. Our current policies do not, however, require or reward sustainable, low-carbon biomass. We need smart policies that support innovation, guide markets to choose sustainable biomass in sustainable quantities, and help the emerging advanced biofuels industry deliver real economic and environmental benefits. As a first step, NRDC proposes a Billion Gallon Challenge with rich incentives and rigorous sustainability requirements to launch the advanced biofuels industry on the right track.
Sustainable biofuels start with sustainable biomass
Biomass provides the fundamental Btus in biofuels—energy captured from the sun—and draws on limited natural resources—land, water, and soil nutrients—when it grows. No matter how efficient and clean biofuel refineries get, they cannot turn unsustainable biomass into a sustainable biofuel. We cannot afford to wait to develop and commercialize advanced biofuels, but if we bring these fuels to market without the right safeguards in place, the impacts from biomass production will result in more harm than good to our air, water, and landscapes. Does anyone really want the scarcity of these critical natural resources to be the factor that stops biofuels from growing out of control?
Today’s markets and regulations generally operate under the flawed assumption that all biomass is carbon neutral. Some biomass may be carbon neutral or even carbon negative—for example, wastes whose carbon would end up in the atmosphere anyway, or biomass grown on degraded land that restores soil carbon stocks. If demand for biomass increased significantly under today’s regulations, however, much of the biomass that would be used to meet that demand would increase atmospheric GHG concentrations (and a host of other environmental impacts). This biomass contains carbon that was not in the atmosphere before being turned into energy and would have the same warming impact as the fossil carbon released when we burn oil. And the policies that drive these emissions require no guarantee that any of the biomass will be re-grown—ever.
Why we have to try to get advanced biofuels right
Transportation accounts for roughly 30% of U.S. GHG emissions. Fortunately, we have a range of technologies effective at cutting these emissions. We can make our cars and trucks more fuel-efficient, shift to less polluting modes of transportation, create walkable communities, and switch to lower carbon-intensity fuels. All of these solutions are important, but non-biofuels technologies alone will not get us where we need to go in time to avoid the consequences of unabated climate change.
The U.S. could theoretically meet its stated goal—reducing total economy-wide emissions by 80 percent—without biofuels. NRDC’s analysis shows that with all likely non-biofuels technologies commercialized and deployed and both existing and currently debated policies rapidly implemented, we can reduce transportation sector GHG emissions 45% below 2005 levels by 2050. If we also eliminate emissions from the entire rest of the economy, we would reduce overall emissions by 85%. This is possible but improbable. Thus a low-carbon liquid fuel is certainly not a tool we cannot give up lightly and, most likely, a tool we cannot do without.
Better biomass means holistic management
A refinery’s efficiency can be measured fairly easily, but it is much harder to determine if biomass is sustainable because its impacts are generally dispersed over broad areas, making more difficult to measure, price, or regulate. Cultivating sustainable biomass also presents challenges because biomass must be managed holistically as part of a system, balancing fertilizers, soil carbon, water use, and yield. Managing for any one attribute can easily lead to worsening impacts from the others—higher yields can cause more fertilizer runoff; building up soil carbon can lower yields and increase pressure to clear new lands. We have technologies and management practices to reduce the environmental impacts of our agricultural production, but we lack smart, performance-based policies that help farmers identify and develop broadly sustainable biomass production systems and make these better systems economically preferable.
A Billion Gallon Challenge to move us forward
We need lots of truly low-carbon biofuels made from sustainable biomass, but, to produce any significant amount, we first need to overhaul our regulations and incentives for agriculture and forestry. NRDC proposes a modest first step with rich rewards for going in the right direction: a Billion Gallon Challenge with large government incentives for the first billion gallons of biofuels that meet high-bar environmental standards for soil, water, and wildlife protection. Offering a large sum is critical for building first-of-a-kind, commercial-scale refineries and convincing farmers and foresters to provide sustainable biomass. These incentives would speed the commercialization of advanced biofuels and ensure that these technologies are established as models of how sustainable biofuels can be. Having a truly sustainable biofuel to point to would do more to build public support for biofuels, and the policies needed to make them work beyond the first billion gallons, than any promises from industry or exhortations from environmentalists.
Just a fraction of what taxpayers pay in subsidies for corn ethanol, a mature technology with GHG emissions higher than oil and other serious environmental impacts, would pay for the program. The main corn ethanol tax credit—the Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit (VEETC)—cost, in 2010 alone, enough to put $2 per gallon toward building the necessary refineries and offer farmers and foresters more than $45 per dry ton for all the sustainable biomass needed for 5 years of operation. Ending any number of oil subsidies would also save taxpayers more than enough to cover our proposal’s modest price tag.
[i] Arndt DS, Baringer MO and Johnson MR (eds), State of the Climate in 2009. Bull Amer Meteorol Soc 91(6): S1–S224 (2010).
Comments are closed for this post.
Comments
James Thurber — Feb 16 2011 08:00 AM
The cultivation of sustainable, low carbon, biomass feedstocks could be commercialized right now with existing technology by simply burning the biomass to generate electricity, displacing natural gas that could be used for transportation. This would be much cheaper and easier than attempting to produce commercial liquid fuels from biomass. This could reduce oil consumption in the United States alone by about 2 million barrels per day, without increasing natural gas consumption.
The implementation of this would require subsidizing the purchase by utilities of the biomass. This could be funded by eliminating the VEETC for ethanol and imposing a rather small excise tax on gasoline, diesel, and natural gas that are used for transportation.
There are those who object to this, becuase it involves continuing to use a fossil fuel for transportation, but this objection overlooks the fact that the natural gas is simply being used as an intermediate step to displacing gasoline with biomass. The total consumption of natural gas does not increase, it is simply diverted to transportation rather than electricity generation.
Should environmentally acceptable commercial methods for converting biomass to liquid fuels be developed, then the biomass could be diverted to liquid fueld production rather than electricity generation at that time.
BILL BRANDON — Feb 16 2011 11:46 AM
@James Thurber - I don't know a single engineer in the biomass/energy space that agrees with your premise. Converting natural gas to a liquid fuel is pretty much what corn ethanol is doing. Little petroleum oil is used. I don't know what "environmentally acceptable commercial methods" means to you but you should recognize that four commercial MSW to ethanol facilities are now under construction. I think that qualifies, but the bad mouthing some in the environmental community have been giving the ethanol molecule has not been helpful. The effort used to discredit ethanol should be directed to establishing its highest and best use which is replacement of diesel. The use of ED95 has been around for 25 years and is beginning to get some significant build out in Sweden and elsewhere. Realizing equal or higher thermal efficiency from a two carbon molecule over a 16 carbon molecule should be a no-brainer.
Bill Brandon — Feb 16 2011 12:44 PM
Nathanael - I believe we are more similar than different, but some of your takes and wordings are irritating to me. Like your statement that our transportation needs to be more fuel efficient. This lets the door open to the nonsense arguments about energy density. Our transportation needs to be more ENERGY EFFICIENT. As stated in my comment to James Thurber above, ED95 has great advantages (depending on conversion technologies) over other molecules (read drop in fuels). Biofuels are going to be around for a long time, especially for heavy transport including railroads and trucking and we should get it right for them.
You state "A (petroleum?) refinery’s efficiency can be measured fairly easily". So can a biorefinery's efficiency be easily measured. It is all of the pre-refinery costs and impacts that are difficult; difficult for both petroleum and biofuels. The pre-refinery costs of exploration, extraction shipping and maintaining shipping channels and access are seldom addressed in comparing biofuels to petroleum. For those who think electricity will be the silver bullet, those technologies are very capital intensive. (I feel like shooting the next person I hear say solar and wind are 'free'.) Sending our money overseas for petroleum is just the same as sending our money overseas for capital. We must slow this economic hemorrhaging if we are going to have a chance on developing a new fuel paradigm. Even imperfect biofuels do a better job on this than other 'more perfect' technologies.
Your ideas are a bit too intellectual for me sometimes. What does "The main corn ethanol tax credit—the Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit (VEETC)—cost, in 2010 alone, enough to put $2 per gallon toward building the necessary refineries and offer farmers and foresters more than $45 per dry ton for all the sustainable biomass needed for 5 years of operation." mean anyway? Please put some practical flesh on this statement.
MSW followed by forestry wastes are the immediate available biomass sources and converting them to fuel is better that burying them or directly burning them which is what we do now. While always looking for a holistic future of resource utilization, I will be happy if we can stand up an industry utilizing these wastes and that does not advance long carbon chain molecules as a preferable fuel.
James Thurber — Feb 16 2011 01:08 PM
@Bill Brandon
"I don't know a single engineer in the biomass/energy space that agrees with your premise." Exactly what premise is it with which you don't agree?
"Converting natural gas to a liquid fuel is pretty much what corn ethanol is doing. Little petroleum oil is used." Yes, that is what corn ethanol is doing. And it does it extremely inefficiently in terms of both EROEI and net energy yield per unit of land, and per unit of water. In addition, the intensive corn cultivation involved incurs tremendous environmental damage because of extensive nitrogen fertilizer use and aquifer depletion.
"I don't know what "environmentally acceptable commercial methods" means to you but you should recognize that four commercial MSW to ethanol facilities are now under construction." That's fine, but the output is insignificant in terms of the annual consumption of 180 billion gallons / yr of gasoline and diesel in the US alone.
"I think that qualifies, but the bad mouthing some in the environmental community have been giving the ethanol molecule has not been helpful." I don't know of many who badmouth the ethanol molecule, but I know of plenty (including me) who badmouth producing it from corn.
"The effort used to discredit ethanol should be directed to establishing its highest and best use which is replacement of diesel. The use of ED95 has been around for 25 years and is beginning to get some significant build out in Sweden and elsewhere. Realizing equal or higher thermal efficiency from a two carbon molecule over a 16 carbon molecule should be a no-brainer." That is fine on in limited applications if you can produce the ethanol comercially in an environmentally acceptable manner. Also, the energy density of a two carbon molecule is too low for it to replace a sixteen carbon molecule to any significant extent. If, however, it can be used in specialized applications, more power to it.
The bottom line is that there is no known method other than sugarcane ethanol to produce liquid fuel from biomass to displace significant quantities of gasoline or diesel with biomass commercially and in an environmentally acceptable manner. That is the reality.
C02Pirate — Feb 23 2011 02:54 AM
Biofuel is NONSENSE based on junk science and flawed and bias research - just as this piece is NONSENSE.
There is NO MENTION of the horrific downside of biofuel so lets just take a look at a couple.
1.) Biofuel takes food straight out of the mouths the hungry. It is a FACT that due to the food shortages and huge price hikes CREATED by this idiotic biofuel lunacy that PEOPLE ARE NOW DYING because of it.
2.) Any MORON who knows anything about this issues knows full well that BIOFUEL is DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE for clearing huge amounts of land for growing biofuel type crops.
3.) Biofuel will destroy normal internal combustion engines. Even just 5% ethanol will begin damaging engine parts - any more than 10% ethanol will significantly shorten the life of any engine. Once again this is a false economy.
Biofuel is based on the false premise that it is C02 neutral it isn't.
If you take into account all that biofuel encompasses - it is by far the most environmentally damaging, inefficient, wasteful and most expensive method to produce fuel - this isn't even counting the human cost .
Environmentalist who actually care about the environment should be at the forefront of this issue protesting AGAINST IT.