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

Using arable land to grow biofuel crops also pinches global food supply, pushing up the prices of everything from Mexican tortillas to British pork and Japanese curry. Corn prices alone have doubled since mid-2005. Rabobank estimates that to produce enough corn-based ethanol to meet just 10 per cent of all global energy demand, we would need to plant one-third of all of the world’s farmland with corn. That rises to 91 per cent of all available land for rapeseed oil (one of Europe’s few home-grown biofuels) and an impossible 200 per cent for soybeans. In other words, you would need to find another, identical Earth and plant all its usable farmland with soy, just to satisfy one tenth of current global energy demand.

Mitigating this gloom is, as always, technology. A group of financiers led by the venture capitalist (and founder of Sun Microsystems) Vinod Khosla has been pumping money into cellulosic ethanol, a fuel produced from the stalks and stems of any cellulose-based plant. Cellulosic ethanol generates twice as much ethanol per acre of land than corn, in part because it uses the entire plant. Companies across the world are racing to become what one analyst calls ‘the Google of cellulosic ethanol’. Among the contenders are Mascoma and Celunol, two small firms based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Dutch chemicals maker DSM, and — guess who — our own Sir Richard Branson. Yet cellulosic technology is years from being realised — and it would still demand very extensive use of arable land to grow crops destined to be burned in automobiles and power stations.

Biofuels, love them or loathe them, are here to stay. Yet the industry’s future remains a black box even for the people who work in it. Noble Group’s Ricardo Leiman suggests his own, rather alarming theory. ‘If we want to make biofuels work at all, we need to tear up all the wheat in Canada and blanket the country in canola oil,’ he says. ‘Then we transfer all of Canada’s wheat production to Russia, Kazakhstan and the Ukraine.’ Most disconcertingly, he says it all without a trace of a smile.

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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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