Still waiting to hear President Obama’s plans for the new
“green” economy? Well, it arrived yesterday in the form of the
“National
Bioeconomy Blueprint,” released with great fanfare by the White
House. It’s all there — the Age of Fossil Fuels is on its way out,
the Age of Biofuels has begun.
Now to be fair, there’s a lot of good stuff in this 84-page
report, in terms of medical advances, agricultural innovation, and
new industrial technologies. Since the decoding of the DNA molecule
in 1953, the biological sciences have made extraordinary progress
and continue to do so today. Whereas the 17th and 18th century
could be called the Age of Physics and the 19th and early 20th
centuries the Age of Chemistry, we are now living in an era when
biological research is the cutting edge.
To be fair again, all this happened long before Barack Obama
arrived in the White House. In declaring government support for the
Bioeconomy, the President and his Administration are essentially
running to the head of a parade. True, there’s going to be lots of
government funding to hand out and true, to this point the
biologists have felt somewhat neglected. “Some people in the
biotechnology industry have grumbled that the White House’s idea of
innovation focused on electronic devices, social media and solar
energy,”
reports the New York Times. Yet ever since the
Egyptians, priests and politicians have been claiming credit for
every natural occurrence, from the rising of the sun to the
blooming of crops, so there’s nothing new in this Administration
claiming to make it all happen, either.
What is unique about the new Bioeconomy is that the
Administration has taken this opportunity to trumpet the idea that
in addition to medical, agricultural and industrial advances, the
Era of Biology will be a time when we “grow our own fuel” and begin
substituting “biomass” for the conventional fossil fuels that have
powered the Industrial Era since the 17th century. Says the
report:
The current backbone of our energy and chemical industries is
carbon-based fossil fuels. Today we rely primarily on oil, coal and
natural gas to run our cars, heat our homes, and provide the raw
material for a wide range of products from drugs to plastics to
fertilizers.… Now technologies are advancing to better harness the
potential of microorganisms and plants to produce fuels,
intermediate chemicals (e.g., the precursors for plastics), and
other biomaterials.
This is an idea that does not appeal
to a lot of people — including biologists, agronomists,
ecologists, industrialists and some scientists. Instead, the
enthusiasm is limited to a peculiar breed of semi-literate people
known as “environmentalists.” Without giving it much thought,
environmentalists have declared that the dirty, nasty world of
“hard” energy is about to be replaced by a soft, green world of
biotechnology. In truth, if this ever happens, it will be the
biggest requisitioning of nature for human purposes in the history
of the planet.
The idea that we could do away with fossil fuels by substituting
crops and other biologically based sources has been around since
the 1970s when we seriously thought we were running out of oil and
gas. In his 1976 book, Soft Energy Paths, Amory Lovins
first suggested we could replace one-third of our oil consumption
by building a biofuels industry only ten times the size of the beer
and wine distilleries. Unfortunately, he never bothered to
calculate the amount of land that would
be required. That was easy enough. From Lovins’ own figures, it was
clear that growing crops to replace one-third of our oil
consumption would mean cultivating an area three times the size of
the continental United States.
Nevertheless, Jimmy Carter, who had read Soft Energy
Paths, became an enthusiast and persuaded Congress to adopt a
4 cents-per-gallon tax credit for ethanol after the second “gas
shortage” of 1979. The 4 cents a gallon eventually grew to 46
cents-per-gallon and as a result, 40 percent of our corn crop now
goes into the nation’s gas tanks. Ethanol just passed cattle silage
as the principal use of corn and each year we devote 100,000 square
miles — the equivalent of Iowa — to its cultivation. Still, the
dimensions of the problem have barely improved. In 2006, James
Jordon and James Powell, two research professors at Polytechnic
University in New York,
wrote in the Washington Post:
It’s difficult to understand how advocates of biofuels can
believe they are a real solution to kicking our oil addition.…
[T]he entire U.S. corn crop would supply only 3.7 percent of our
auto and truck transport demands. Using the entire 300 million
acres of U.S. cropland for corn-based ethanol production would meet
about 15 percent of demand.… And the effects on land and
agriculture would be devastating.
What keeps the advocates of biofuels going is the expectation
that some miraculous breakthrough will change all this. For decades
the Holy Grail has been “cellulosic ethanol,” a process that would
use the stems, leaves, and other non-edible portions of the plant
instead just the sugars and starches that are easily converted to
alcohol. Breaking down cellulose is tough, however, and can only be
accomplished in two ways: 1) heating the material in a way that
consumes more energy than it produces, or 2) employing enzymes
produced by bacteria that live in the guts of cows and termites.
But duplicating the environment of a cow’s or termite’s stomach is
very difficult. Although it’s been accomplished occasionally in the
laboratory, every attempt to ramp up to an industrial scale has
been a failure.
In 2007, a company named Range Fuels claimed to have finally
mastered the process. For this it won the 2008 North American Fuels
Technology Innovation Green Excellence of the Year Award before it
had ever produced a gallon of fuel. Backed by $156 million in
grants and loan guarantees from the federal government, Range Fuels
opened its first plant in Georgia in 2009, promising to deliver a
significant portion of the 100 million gallons per year of ethanol
mandated by President George W. Bush. By 2010 the mandate had been
scaled back to 6 million and Range was discovering it couldn’t
deliver that. In 2011, after making one test run, the company
closed its doors and declared bankruptcy. (The test run allowed it
to fill requirements of the loan guarantee so that investors were
reimbursed while taxpayers were left holding the bag.)
Advocates of “biodiesel” often talk about using other existing
sources of organic material such as restaurant wastes and cooking
grease as raw materials, so let’s look at that. The U.S. consumes
18 million barrels of oil per day, enough to cover 220 football
fields to a height of ten feet. The EPA estimates that the nation’s
restaurants produce 300 million gallons of waste oil
per year. That’s one gallon for every
American. There are 15,000 McDonald’s restaurants in 80 countries
on six continents. If we made the wild assumption that each one of
them produced five barrels of waste cooking oil a day, that would
mean 75,000 barrels, which would be enough to replace 0.4 percent
of our daily oil consumption.
Every other scheme to harvest supposedly useless organic
materials such as forest or crop wastes quickly runs up against the
same obstacle. There simply isn’t enough of it around. Moreover,
biofuels have very low energy density and are widely scattered.
Just harvesting and transporting them would consume massive amounts
of energy. Economically, it would never make sense — which is why
it is not already being done. That’s why President Obama has now
set his sights on yet another miracle — algae. It’s the only one
left.
*****
ETC is a non-profit in Montreal dedicated to protecting the
rights of peasants and tenant farmers in the developing world.
Originally founded by Eleanor Roosevelt, the initials stand for
“erosion, technology and concentration” — the last being the
concentration of economic power in the hands of international
corporations. “Our mission is to monitor the impact of new
technologies on the lives of indigenous peoples around the world,”
says Jim Thomas, ETC’s project research manager. “We’re hardly the
tool of the oil companies.”
Nonetheless, ETC has emerged as one of the leading critics of
algae and other biofuels, mainly because of the anticipated impact
on Third World agriculture. “The problem with biomass is that it
has very little energy density,” says Thomas, who works out of
Montreal. “It doesn’t even compare well with solar, which is very
dilute. Photosynthesis is only 1 percent efficient at turning
sunlight into useful energy while a solar thermal plant can manage
about 20 percent. The big problem with algae is that you can’t grow
it more than one or two inches deep or else you lose the sunlight.
So it’s going to require ridiculously large quantities of land. In
order to match the output of a single oil refinery, you’d need to
cover an area the size of San Francisco.”
With this kind of land requirements, the only place where
biofuels are going to make any kind of sense is in the developing
world. “The cheapest biomass will inevitably be grown in the
forests of Brazil and Central Africa,” said Thomas. “It’s already
happening. Right now the search for biofuels by investors is the
largest land grab of the last 300 years. Peasants are being pushed
off their land. There are conflicts and battles going on and people
are even being killed over this issue. Any technological advances
are only going to make it worse. Switching from fossil fuels to
biofuels is essentially an appropriation of the biological
resources of the developing world by the developed world.”
So there you have it, Obama’s brave new world of soft, green
energy.
In truth, the current era will probably be looked back upon as a
brief episode when crackpot ideas gained the upper hand — when we
ruined whole landscapes by littering them with useless windmills
and solar collectors and took the preliminary steps toward
dragooning the entire world’s biological resources in trying to
replace the more dense and useful resources of oil, gas and the
atom that nature has offered us. Hopefully, it won’t last long.
