ONE TOWN SQUARE: at the intersection of peak oil, climate change, and land use

This is a guest post by John Gear.

A friend recently posed this question:

So maybe using food crops to produce ethanol or biodiesel isn’t such a good idea. What about using grass clippings and other “yard debris” currently trucked to landfills? What about using “crop residue” not used for food? Doesn’t that change the equation?

There’s a seminal article by Alice Friedemann titled Peak Soil: Why cellulosic ethanol, biofuels are unsustainable and a threat to America that answers that question. It is one of the more important articles available on the internet.

Here’s the supercondensed summary:

Just like operating factories need a constant flow of raw material inputs (roughly the same as their productive output + any wastes disposed of externally), soils need constant replenishment in roughly the same mass as is being removed as a crop, plus more because of the time lag for biologic availability (the time needed for materials to break down and be consumed by the microflora and microfauna that form the base of the food web in productive, living soil).

Of course, we should never be trucking clippings and yard debris anywhere – it’s needed where it is, and we’re wasting energy twice by removing the organic matter and then bringing back replacement matter to make up for the removal.

Similarly, there are no “crop residues” that can be safely removed from land intended for steady farming.  Just by taking a crop off the land you are already putting the soil in deficit, which is why you cannot maintain soil vitality without fallow periods and some kind of fertility treatments, such as manures.  The more concentrated and fast-growing the crop, the more the crop consumes the soil, and the more replenishment is needed.

If you remove what you call “residue,” you are simply adding another crop being taken from the same soil at the same time, which means you have to add even more inputs back into it, or exhaust it that much faster.  Mining soil “residues” is simply a way to burn a candle at both ends — it burns brighter, for a much shorter time.

The issue with all agrocrops is not the nature of the feedstock, which is essentially irrelevant. The issue is land, topsoil, water, fertilizers, and energy gain.

High quality land suitable for agriculture is very limited. Agrofuel backers talk about using “marginal land” now that people realize that using cultivated land to grow fuel for cars means that fuel for people has to be grown elsewhere — in other words, you push people into using marginal land or, worse (and this is what actually happens), into converting rainforest to cropland. But you cannot make money trying to crop marginal land, that’s why it’s marginal land. The only way it works is if food and energy prices climb enough to make the expense of cropping marginal land pay off.

This is why all agrofuels end up with a negative effect on climate — the huge amount of greenhouse gases released through land use changes negates any small gains in annual greenhouse emissions (compared to petroleum) from use of agrocrops for decades. We cannot invent a way to make more land, and all techniques for getting more yield from land involve MORE energy inputs, not less. In other words, chasing our tails faster . . .

As for the climate impact, needless to say, we don’t have decades. We have months in which to respond meaningfully — maybe 100 months. Quite possibly less. Releasing massive quantities of greenhouse gases now (that remain in the atmosphere for many decades) for the possibility of a slight annual reductions later is suicide. You cannot both have an uncultivated crop and a cultivated crop.

Agrofuel boosters like to talk about using “weeds” Except that “weeds” is a non-biological label. There are no weeds. There are simply desirable plants and undesirable plants. As soon as you intend to cultivate a weed, you just turned it into a crop. Whether switchgrass or corn (for ethanol) or soy, camelina, palm, or canola (for biodiesel), agricultural use to make motor fuel means intensive cultivation, which means mining the topsoil, removing the nutrients much faster than they can be replaced and destroying the web of microorganisms that make dirt into soil.

Agrofuels are intensive water users. Fresh water is already limited, even in the rainy northwest. We cannot afford to put more fresh water into the service of autos than we already do. As our climate destabilizes further, we are going to see more and more droughts (we already are) intermingled with severe flooding bouts. We cannot afford to use our tiny reserves of fresh water as motor fuel.

Fertilizers and energy gain are really the same issue, since 99% of our fertilizers are derived from natural gas. Many have defined modern agriculture as “the use of land to turn fossil fuels into food” — but at least humans get food from it! If we start cultivating agrofuel crops, then we’ll have modified the saying into “The use of land to turn fossil fuels into fuel for cars, while pushing food crops onto marginal land and starving great numbers of the world’s poorest people through food price hikes (as food prices and energy prices are linked through the gas tanks of our cars).”

As the saying goes, let’s live on the planet as if we intend to stay.  That means taking care of our soil, first and foremost.

Public support for biofuels is costly and has little impact in cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Biofuels also cause high environmental risks, particularly in Latin America and large parts of Africa, and are causing food prices to skyrocket around the world.

So says the EU’s Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Governments are are increasingly doubtful about whether biofuels were as “green” as they claim to be when taking account of the total energy needed to  produce them and the environmental impact of intensive farming and increased land use.  Governments would do better promoting lower energy consumption to fight climate change.

Ron Steenblick at Gristmill writes that converting crop residues into cellulosic ethanol isn’t such a good idea, either. According to respected USDA soil scientist Ann Kennedy, the stems and leaves left over after crops are harvested may have more value if they are left on the ground – especially in areas receiving less than 25 inches of rainfall per year.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week The Guardian reported that a confidential World Bank report concluded that crop-derived fuels have been the ultimate cause of food riots, starvation and high prices around the world.

It wasn’t an anti-biofuels campaigner who arrived at that conclusion. It was Donald Mitchell, an internationally respected World Bank economist with three decades’ experience in tracking commodity markets.

The report argues that production of biofuels has distorted food markets in three main ways. First, it has diverted grain away from food for fuel, with over a third of US corn now used to produce ethanol and about half of vegetable oils in the EU going towards the production of biodiesel. Second, farmers have been encouraged to set land aside for biofuel production. Third, it has sparked financial speculation in grains, driving prices up higher.

The Guardian now has a follow-up article that contains a link to the report.

From Bloomberg.com:

“Crude oil rose to a record above $113 a barrel in New York on supply disruptions in Nigeria and Mexico and rising fuel demand in China.”

And, from CNN one consequence of diverting farm land to biofuels production:

“Riots from Haiti to Bangladesh to Egypt over the soaring costs of basic foods have brought the issue to a boiling point and catapulted it to the forefront of the world’s attention . . . There are riots all over the world in the poor countries … and, of course, our own poor are feeling it in the United States . . . While many are worrying about filling their gas tanks, many others around the world are struggling to fill their stomachs.”

The United Nations is warning that, as food prices continue to escalate worldwide, some of the poorest nations in the developing world are set to explode. In many of the world’s poorest countries, families already spend 50 to 60% of their income on food.

High food prices are one result of high oil prices. Price increases are caused in large part by rising fuel and fertilizer costs and the conversion of food crops to biofuels. Climate change is also a factor, as many countries have suffered from floods, droughts, and other weather conditions that have hurt crops.

“Liberalization” of agriculture over the last few decades, encouraged by international financial institutions backed by rich countries like the U.S. and by the E.U., has resulted in developing countries specializing in exportable cash crops such as coffee, cocoa, cotton, and even flowers. Removal of tariff barriers has allowed a handful of Northern countries to capture Third World markets by dumping heavily subsidized commodities while undermining local food production. As a result, developing countries have turned from net exporters to large importers of food.

The situation has been worsened by the dismantling of institutions such as marketing boards that kept a reserve of commodities to hedge against bad harvests and to protect both producers and consumers against price volatility.

The world has seen an increased demand for food as a result of both increased population and increased income. As incomes increase, people tend to consume more meats than before. Consequently, some food stocks are diverted for animal feed.

An article by Andy Revkin in Sunday’s New York Times notes that recent data show “an unexpected rise in global emissions and a decline in energy efficiency.” Revkin adds that “a growing chorus of economists, scientists and students of energy policy are saying that whatever benefits the cap approach yields, it will be too little and come too late.”

He quotes economist Jeffrey Sachs:

“Even with a cutback in wasteful energy spending, our current technologies cannot support both a decline in carbon dioxide emissions and an expanding global economy. If we try to restrain emissions without a fundamentally new set of technologies, we will end up stifling economic growth, including the development prospects for billions of people.”

In sum, cap-and trade hasn’t worked, as we pointed out in this blog posting. But god forbid we should question our addiction to “growth.” In fact growth is our god, and economists the priesthood.

So what is Revkin – or as he carefully puts it in his article, what do “others” – suggest? A Manhatten Project-like commitment to and investment in “new technologies.”

Joseph Romm says that we don’t have time to wait for some unknown techno-fix and disagrees that we can’t stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide levels at acceptable levels (below 450 ppm) using existing technologies.

Existing technologies – including, for example, solar thermal can provide sufficient energy to support people around the globe at decent and equitable levels of existence. We know from long historical practice – before the auto age – how to construct aesthetically pleasing and equitable communities that don’t rely on ravaging the Earth and poisoning the atmosphere. And we can probably avert catastrophic climate change if we just stop burning coal.

Global warming is a symptom of a too-large ecological footprint.  But it’s not the only symptom. Peak oil, to be followed by peak natural gas and peak coal, are other symptoms. Other resources – soil, water, rare earth metals, forests, fisheries – are reeling from the relentless assault of “growth” as well.

Global warming and other consequences of stress on Earth’s sources and sinks require much more than a technological fix.  They require that we topple the false idol of growth, along with its priesthood.

The solution to global warming isn’t technical – it’s spiritual.

Tom Philpott at Gristmill has a great post on the link between the corn ethanol industry and the meat industry.

The government-mandated spike in ethanol production has resulted in a spike in cattle feed prices. Feedlot operators, to cut costs, are substituting distillers grains – the mush that’s left over from corn after the ethanol process – for corn.

Remember that cows evolved to eat grass, and corn destroys their livers while making their digestive tracts friendly to E. coli 0157, a strain harmless to cows but deadly to humans. It turns out that distillers grains makes cows even more susceptible to E. coli 0157 than whole corn while also causing neurological damage from sulfur poisoning.

Not to mention the phosphorus fertilizers required for corn production, which are concentrated in distillers grains and then end up in our rivers and oceans, killing fish.

And without a use for distillers grains, there’s no longer any argument that corn-based ethanol consumes more energy than it produces.

Corn ethanol subsidies and mandates: now there’s an energy policy we can be proud of.

Quoting verbatim from the February 11 Peak Oil Review:

“US wheat inventories have now reached a 60-year low and wheat prices have risen by 50 percent in the past month. Global wheat stocks are expected to fall to a 30-year low shortly. With global oil production relatively stagnant as the demand for more oil from Asia and the Middle East continues to grow, biofuels production has been plugging some of the gap.

“Food and energy are converging so that to a considerable extent they can be used interchangeably as dictated by market forces. In the last six years, land for biofuels has increased from 12 to 80 million hectares worldwide as subsidies and national policies mandating their use are driving the biofuels substitution for oil. The US is offering subsidies of $.50 to $1 per gallon and the EU is attempting to reach a 10 percent biofuels target in the next three years.

“Many knowledgeable observers are worried and are predicting that famines will break out in the underdeveloped world during the next 18 to 24 months, due to declining availability of grains for export and worsening climatic conditions. The recent snows in China are believed to have caused considerable crop damage and Beijing is becoming increasingly concerned about the prospects for feeding its 1.3 billion people.

“All this suggests that policies mandating the use of biofuels and biofuel subsidies may have a very short half-life as the reality of inadequate food supplies overcomes cries of “energy independence.” The elimination of mandates and subsidies would put more pressure on petroleum products and force prices still higher.”

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the same thing, but more succinctly:

“People literally will starve to death in parts of the world, it always happens when food prices go up.”

Biofuels could be one of the biggest environmental cons because they actually make global warming worse by adding to the man-made emissions of carbon dioxide that they are supposed to curb, according to two new studies published in the journal Science:

• “Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land Use Change“
• “Land Clearing and the Biofuel Carbon Debt“

Timothy Searchinger, the lead author of one of the studies and a researcher in environment and economics at Princeton University explained to the International Herald Tribune:

“Previously, there’s been an accounting error: land use change has been left out of prior analysis.”

Political policies of mandating biofuel usage and offering subsidies to biofuel producers foolishly fail to take carbon management into account.

Here are a couple of excerpts from the abstracts:

• “[Prior] analyses have failed to count the carbon emissions that occur as farmers worldwide respond to higher prices and convert forest and grassland to new cropland to replace the grain (or cropland) diverted to biofuels.* * * Biofuels from switchgrass, if grown on U.S. corn lands, increase emissions by 50%.”

• “Converting rainforests, peatlands, savannas, or grasslands to produce food-based biofuels in Brazil, Southeast Asia, and the United States creates a ‘biofuel carbon debt’ by releasing 17 to 420 times more CO₂ than the annual greenhouse gas reductions these biofuels provide by displacing fossil fuels.”

New research from Australia and the OECD shows the benefits of biofuels in reducing greenhouse gas emissions are insignificant, at only 1 – 4%. And a new report shows there’s also no economic case for mandating the level of ethanol in fuel.

OECD trade and agriculture analyst Martin von Lampe says:

“Governments around the world are putting a lot of hope in a number of areas on biofuels and it seems that many of these hopes are only partially justified. The environmental benefits are much less than they were assumed to be, the savings in fossil energy are much lower than they were thought to be, and, at the same time, the support to biofuels is relatively costly.”

From an article in FarmTalk Online:

“Supplies of nitrogen fertilizers, as well as phosphorus and potassium fertilizers, are tight throughout the United States. . .

“In fact, it is currently difficult to buy fertilizer nitrogen for winter wheat topdressing and/or this spring´s row crops unless the supply has already been lined up—regardless of what the posted prices are . . .

“The sharp increase in price and accompanying fertilizer N shortage is not a sudden development . . . Unprecedented market forces have markedly changed the fertilizer industry over the past decade which has set the stage for the current supply/demand imbalance and resulting high prices . . .

“Over the past decade, much of our fertilizer nitrogen manufacturing capacity has shut down in the U.S. as a result of sharp increases and fluctuations in natural gas costs [etc] . . .

“As a result, more and more nitrogen fertilizer is now imported from countries in the Middle East, South America, the former Soviet Union, and other low-cost natural gas areas . . . More than 50 percent U.S. fertilizer nitrogen supply is imported annually – and our dependence on foreign imports continues to increase.

“Also, global demand for this supply of fertilizer nitrogen continues to increase, especially in countries such as China and India with rapidly expanding economies . . .”

This article brought to mind a piece I read a few days ago in Robert Rapier’s R-Squared Energy Blog on the impacts of biofuel mandates in Wales. I didn’t comment on it then, but it has stuck in my mind. Rapier reports on a farmer’s complaint about fertilizer supplies:

“This weekend I made inquires about ordering this year’s fertiliser for our holding.

“The answer was, quite frankly, shocking. Our local supplier usually has a stock of 4,000 tonnes for local growers (we just want one tonne of that…).

“This year, however, their total allocation is being pegged at 640 tonnes. The rest, it seems, has been shipped to the USA for the biofuel industry. The silos and bunkers are empty.

“And, to add insult to injury, the meagre amount that the supplier has been left with has gone up by £100 a tonne over last year’s price.

“I foresee near riots in the next couple of months at agricultural suppliers across the land.”

University of California scientists are reporting that biofuels are worse than oil because they remove carbon from our soils.

Land is being lost to development, pollution and changing weather patterns. But mostly, global soil loss is a crisis mostly rooted in agriculture. Topsoil is being stripped off faster than it can be regenerated.

Scientists at the University of California at Berkeley’s Transportation Sustainability Research Center told the California Air Resources Board that ethanol could be twice as bad as gasoline, from a carbon-emissions point of view. How? Basically by turning land now covered with trees, grass, and other natural “carbon sinks” into farmland for corn and other crops used for ethanol.

Berkeley profs Alex Farrell and Michael O’Hare summed up the findings:

“Simply said, ethanol production today using U.S. corn contributes to the conversion of grasslands and rainforest to agriculture, causing very large GHG emissions. Even if only a small fraction of the emissions calculated in this crude way [through land use change] are added to estimates of direct emissions for corn ethanol, total emissions for corn ethanol are higher than for fossil fuels.”

Dave Cohen at the Energy Bulletin and ASPO-USA ridicules the politicians’ favorite energy fix:

“[C]orn or cellulosic ethanol, the favored fuel of our politicians, will replace only a very small fraction of American oil consumption by 2022 in the best case. In the meantime, the peak of Gulf of Mexico oil production will have come and gone, U.S. production will have fallen considerably from current levels, Mexico will no longer be exporting any oil, and the OECD nations will be utterly dependent on exports from the unstable Persian Gulf. This is only a partial list of the oil production and export shortfalls Americans can expect to see. These historical circumstances describe a disaster waiting to happen. An authentic understanding of the actual role of cellulosic ethanol and other biofuels as substitutes for oil goes some of the way toward creating the foundation for an appropriate response to our peak oil predicament.”

Using biofuels made from corn, sugar cane and soy could have a greater environmental impact than burning fossil fuels. Even if the fuels themselves emit fewer greenhouse gases, they all have higher costs in terms of biodiversity loss and destruction of farmland.

Determining the “greenness” of alternative energy sources requires a life cycle assessment – consideration not only at the amount of energy that is gained from an alternative source relative to fossil fuels, but how much energy is used and pollution created during formation, operation, and decommissioning of a source.

One study found that wind and geothermal energy are true green resources – and the efficiency of these systems over their entire life cycle is comparable to that of fossil fuels. Solar power, on the other hand, is not as ecofriendly, at least not until economies of scale come into play – but the pollution of solar systems is far, far less then traditional fossil fuels, even though they represent a lower thermodynamic efficiency.

An article in Science discusses a recent study examining the total environmental impact from various types of biofuels. While nearly all crop-derived biofuels emit less greenhouse gases than fossil fuels, whether or not they are better for the environment is still open for debate. It’s still not established that corn-derived ethanol produces more energy than it consumes, when the total impact to the environment is considered. But when biodiversity is taken into account, the scales tip even further away from biofuels being truly green.

And regardless of how effective sugar cane is for producing ethanol, its benefits quickly diminish if carbon-rich tropical forests are being razed to make the sugar cane fields, thereby causing vast greenhouse-gas emission increases.

Another factor that must be considered is trace-gas emissions. Corn and rapeseed require nitrogen fertilizers which result in nitrous oxide emissions. If NOx emissions are included in the analysis, then corn and canola can actually be worse for global warming than burning fossil fuels.

Rep. Roscoe Barnett, a conservative Republican from Maryland, has for the last couple of years been a voice in the wilderness in the House of Representatives, speaking out on the issues surrounding Peak Oil and our nations’ need to change our oil intensive way of life.

He voted against the energy bill that just passed out of the House, citing the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) as the reason for his opposition.

“I welcome the Senate’s addition to strengthen CAFÉ standards to increase gas mileage of new cars and trucks. However, the hype that using food crops for fuel, such as corn ethanol or soy biodiesel and the hope that cellulosic ethanol could achieve independence from imported oil is extremely harmful.”

The RFS would mandate 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2036 – and worse yet, 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol by 2015.

His explanation of his vote pretty well sums up why biofuels are not only a scam – they will end up causing more harm than good.

• Corn ethanol and soy biodiesel can never replace more than a drop in the bucket of our gas and diesel use.
• Corn prices doubled due to the 2005 mandate which harms farmers who rely on grain for feed and low income people who suffer from increased prices of food.
• Mining our soils of organic matter to make fuel is not sustainable.

Barnett does not even get in to the EROEI debate. Biofuels supporters define the boundaries of what is included in EROEI calculations as narrowly as possible to reach positive results – and even then there’s just barely a positive EROEI of about 1:1.2.

PCass recently asked that One Town Square take another look at the biofuels debate.  But except in the halls of state capitals (including Oregon) and Washington, where lobbyists and big money interests hold sway, I think the debate is pretty much over.  This article in Culture Change exhaustively examines why biofuels are unsustainable and a threat to America.

Ron Steenblick at Gristmill nails what’s wrong with our transportation planning. He quotes U.K. environmental expert Clive Bates:

“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 . . . “

Bates argues that the best short-term transportation strategies are fuel efficiency and changes in driver behavior. Longer term it’s about mobility demand and the physical layout of our lives.

The few remarks of Bates that Steenblick quotes reveals a much broader concept of “land use” than we’re used to here in Oregon. It’s not just about subdivisions and strip malls – it’s about how we grow crops and trees, and impacts on soils, water, and ecosystems.

Bates identifies 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)
2. There are substantial negative ‘sustainability’ impacts, arising from changes in land use for biofuel production – for example deforestation, water impacts or land shortages.

Bates notes that we seem indifferent to these negative consequences. Despite these weaknesses, we now have extremely powerful and expensive policy instruments devoted to promoting biofuels.

The influential European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) is this week expected to call on the European Commission to reassess its target for ensuring 10 percent of road fuels come from biofuels by 2020.

The EESC has  signaled it will side with environmental groups in taking a “very critical stance” of the Commission’s recent biofuel progress report. The report largely praised moves to promote wider use of biofuels, but the EESC argues it has failed to adequately account for the “manifold problems” associated with wider use of biofuels such as “high production costs and storage problems for bio-diesel and high consumption of water and fertilisers, potentially causing soil destruction, for ethanol… [and] the impact of biofuels on the world market for food”.

Not to mention that the latest studies show biofuels may actually increase in greenhouse gas emissions.

The U.S. craze for ethanol could severely strain the already overexploited Ogallala aquifer, increasing demand for scarce water supplies by more than 2 billion gallons a year.

The Ogallala aquifer is an 800-mile-long underground pool of fossil water that stretches from Texas to South Dakota. The Ogallala feeds one-fifth of all the irrigated land in the United States, and is critical to farmers growing corn, cotton, wheat, soybeans and other crops.

Between three and six gallons of water are needed to produce one gallon of ethanol, potentially increasing demand on the already declining Ogallala by as much as 2.6 billion gallons a year just to process the corn and produce the fuel. Another 120 billion gallons a year could be needed for irrigation to grow more corn in the region.

Gary Dikkers in a guest post at Robert Rapier’s blog R-Squared relates his personal experience with E10. His conclusions:

Time after time, I have arrived at consistently similar results: When I burn E10, I get about 29 mpg at steady highway speeds, and when I burn straight gasoline, I get about 32 mpg.

That three miles per gallon doesn’t sound like much of difference does it? But let’s try a little thought experiment and imagine a theoretical trip of 320 miles.

• If I use gasoline I would burn 10 gallons.
• If I use E10 I would burn 11 gallons of that fuel.

But 90% of that 11 gallons of E10 would be gasoline. And what is 90% of 11? A: 9.9 gallons.

That means whether I burn gasoline or E10, I would burn almost exactly the same amount of gasoline on that theoretical trip.

Admitting his experience wasn’t scientific, he found a dataset that validated his experience. Read the rest of this entry »