The Big Biofuels Blog

I've just been given a salutory lesson in fuel efficiency on my way back from a week's holiday. I took the holiday after filming for a week in the US for my employer ICIS around the NPRA's recent convention in San Antonio, Texas.
You can see the output at ICIS TV.
Granted that I got to travel half way around the world and talk to interesting people about interesting subjects like NASA's need for new space suits and the outlook for M&A in the global chemical industry. There are also interviews with our price reporters for biodiesel and ethanol, which you can see tomorow and Wednesday on this blog. You might think that my life is a holiday. Honestly, journalism feels like work when you do it.

So away for a few days to North Wales. The usual tactic is

Are biofuels to blame for rising food prices? That question was debated for five minutes this morning on the infulential BBC radio 4 programme, Today. A contributory factor, that is making the effects of drought and poor harvests worse, is the gist.

You might like to check out this video of Judith Taylor, one of ICIS professional market watchers talking about the state of the US biodiesel market. Judith was talking just ahead of the NPRA meeting in San Antonio, Texas a couple of weeks ago.

(Disclosure: I work for ICIS.About ICIS)

This is William Lemos, one of ICIS professional market watchers, talking about the state of the US ethanol market.
(Disclosure: I work for ICIS. About ICIS)

William has a good line on the Brazilain view of the US ethanol import tax. He was talking just ahead of the recent NPRA conference in San Antonio, Texas.

Biofuels are involved in a crime against humanity again. Only this time it’s NOT growing biofuels that would be the crime. Confused? World opinion certainly is.
This time its Brazil's president Lula who says that discarding biofuels would be the crime. Lula was speaking at a UN meeting in only days after Jean Zeigler, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food had repeated that growing biofuels amounts to a crime against humanity, on Bayerische Rundfunk. (In German). He made the statement before in October last year, to the chagrin of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisaition and the global biofuels industry.
Lula said he is surprised by the backlash against biofuels:

"The surprise is all the stronger when you see that few of them (critics) mention the negative impact of the high price of oil on production costs, or that very few of them stand up against the negative impact of the subsidies and protectionism in the farm sector."

There is more optimism today on the opportunities for non-food biofuel crops with a number of bloggers outlining the possibilities of non-food crops. Today we have Bobmorris' Politicis in the zeros' blog promising us non-food fuels in the next 15 years. To me though that's quite a long gap, we'll need to do something in the mean time. Perhaps we could use the organic parts of waste to produce biofuels.

I saw this image on Flickr (thankyou Mista Fitz) and thought it was a rather strong image of what many people think is wrong with biofuels at the moment. It may not tell the whole story in terms of the price of food. It's a pretty healthy-looking piece of corn, not a dried-up seed head from a drought-struck crop, and the greenery implies quite a lot of celluosic ethanol. If there were more cellulosic ethanol then the pressure on food prices might be quite a bit lower.

Journeyman TV has a video on YouTube talking about the role of corn ethanol in areas like food prices and US automotive sector. Its worth looking at. I can't embed it, which is a pity.

It will be interesting to see if this FAO "Summit on food security", scheduled for 3 to 5 June 2008 at the FAO headquarters in Rome will get any further towards what to do about food supplies and fuel. Brazil's president Lula will be going now. I wonder if he'll be in the same room as Jean Zeigler the FAO's special rapporteur on the right to food.

Will biofuels marginalise women in the developing world? The FAO thinks that it might. In a rather negative report it concludes that biofuels will be farmed on marginal land, which is currently used by women to farm subsistence crops, it also assumes that biofuels need high levels of highly expensive fertilisers and other scarce inputs. But if plants like jatropha which need minimal levels of fertiliser take off and the price of the oil they produce is linked to expensive oil then it could be a way to break out of a subsistence mindset, which has worked so spectacularly well in Zimbabwe in recent years.

Huffington calls for a boycott of biofuels from food crops on Earth day, in an interesting post by Chris McGowan. He makes a number of useful points and reiterates the dangers to environmental hotspots in the Amazon and other places.
So once again I'm forced to say that perhaps we should be using waste products from timber, food production and domestic waste to make biofuels.

I've been hooking into a couple of other social sites. If you're interested in what I'm doing (I can't see that anybody would be but, I'm prepared to be surprised) you can check me out on Friendfeed which pulls a whole load of the things that I do or that I'm professionally responsible for together in one place. You can get sneek previews of what I'm upto on the blog by subscribing to this twitter feed.

Thinking about my response to the earlier post in Huffington post about using food crops to make biofuels, I started looking at the amount of fuel that could be generated from existing forest materials such as brush wood. There's a paper on Science direct which gives this as the yield from scrub in Galicia (northern Spain).
Bushes occupy around 15% of the forest surface of Galicia [9], approximately 450 000 ha. A rational planning would allow to obtain about 4x 6 ton of forest residues every year.
The thrust of the piece is in terms of electrical energy generation, but this kind of forest waste could be used to make liquid fuels. It could also be generated during forest management that could reduce the level and intensity of forest fires.

Oklahoma to plant 1000 acres with switchgrass to demonstrate whether it is suitable as a cellulosic biofuel. According to PR newswire, the site will be 35 miles from Abengoa's biorefinery in Hugoton, Kansas.

Seeral thoughts strike me. Why not just let 1000 acres revert to prairee and use that instead of going to all the trouble of planting switchgrass. No metion of irrigation. its not clear if the Abengoa plant will use any of the grass, theres an implication that it might, but no concrete statement from the firm and finally, how's the switchgrass going to get the 35 miles to the refinery if it goes to that one?

My verdict: for what its worth. Useful as a demonstrator but probably not as sustainable as it could be.

Check this report from CNN about Dick Bond president and cheif executive of Tyson Foods, one of the US' bigger processed food outfits, he want an end to tariff protection for ethanol in the US. You see the corn price is rising and its hurting his profits. NSS (No organic fertiliser Sherlock)

The New York Times has discovered that you need fertiliser to grow corn. The august organ has also discovered that not all the nitrogen fertiliser gets absorbed by the plants and that it can run off into rivers and cause dead zones where these discharge into the sea. Thanks to uncorrelated.

How much does ethanol cost the US, that's the question on a post from Say Anything. just to remind us the author spells it out like this...

The other think that’s remarkable in this article is just how much the ethanol subisdy is costing us. When we fill up with a gallon of ethanol it’s costing the taxpayer (you and me) $1.90 in addition to the $3.40 we’re paying the friendly guy inside the pump. Plus we’re paying in higher food prices as well

I'm going to ask him if he's for ethanol from sugarcane... that should be interesting

Is the UN's food policy diametrically opposed to the current generation of biofuels? I only ask because Ban Ki-moon, that the UN food task force will chair has decided in Berne

“The first and immediate priority issue that we all agreed was that we must feed the hungry,” Mr Ban said after a meeting of agency heads in the Swiss capital, Bern, according to the Coffee House.

Which should be applauded. The role of food in society is to feed people not to fuel their addiction to driving. It is possible that other technologies such as cellulosic biofuels and turning waste into liquid fuels might do the same job but they need to be pushed as hard as easy ethanol production.