The Biofuels debate

Find another planet and plant it with soybeans

Elliot Wilson

6 October 2007

Elliot Wilson says there isn’t enough arable land in the world to make plant-based fuels a viable alternative to oil

These days, everyone seems to have an opinion on biofuels. Broadly defined as any solid, liquid or gas fuel derived from any biological mass — from palm oil and rapeseed to human waste — the biofuel industry has become a subject as divisive as genetically modified food in the 1990s, or crop-spraying in the 1960s.

Proponents view biofuels as vital both to energy security — because it reduces dependency on Middle Eastern oil and Russian gas — and to energy sustainability. Fossil fuels are finite, but the only limitation on biofuels is the availability and fecundity of land. This side of the argument boasts powerful political and industrial backing. In January 2006, President Bush announced in his State of the Union address that America would replace no less than 75 per cent of the oil it imports from the Middle East with biofuels such as corn-based ethanol by 2025 — there are, of course, lots of votes in corn-growing states. This year he upped the ante, demanding that the US generate 35 billion gallons of alternative fuels per year by 2017.

Not to be outdone, the European Commission voted in March 2007 to generate 10 per cent of the region’s transport power from biofuels by 2020, with most of the ingredients to be sourced from Brazil and Argentina. China in turn set an internal target of 12 million tonnes of biofuels by 2020, mostly by ‘buying’ access to land in neighbouring countries, including Indonesia and the Philippines. Japan, India and Brazil have also set out plans to generate significant portions of their energy needs from biofuels over the next ten years.

The other side of the argument is less well co-ordinated and funded, but all its advocates start from the position that biofuels are a ticking moral and ethical time bomb. Is it really a good thing, they ask, to set aside huge tracts of land to plant crops that will be used not as food, but as fuel for cars and power stations? A single tonne of refined palm oil generates 33 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions — 10 times more than petroleum. Stripping out tropical forests to plant sugar cane for ethanol — of which Brazil plans to double its output by 2015 — only makes the planet’s ecological systems struggle harder to absorb rising carbon dioxide levels.

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David Hutton-Squire

October 10th, 2007 11:01pm Report this comment

In the middle of his article, Mr. Wilson writes: "A single ton of refined palm oil generates 33 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions - 10 times more than petroleum." I should like to know how he arrives at this statement. The chemistry tells us that combining one ton of the carbon in the oil (atomic weight 14) with oxygen (atomic weight 16) would create 3.28 tons of CO2, assuming complete combustion and ignoring production costs, which might be rounded to 3.3 tons. Is this a journalistic slip of a decimal point? A pity that he has used the 33 tons figure to make a strong point against the use of a biofuel oil in comparison with fossil oil. I note that nearly identical articles by Mr. Wilson have appeared in other publications with the same error, so this does not look like a Spectator sub-editing problem. (Pity so few subs study chemistry!) There are plenty of other arguments in the palm oil / CO2 debate which show it is not a satisfactory option. for example see the Guardian report at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/indonesia/Story/0,,2049671,00.html Or just Google: palm oil CO2.

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