Brainpower

Biofuels won’t break our addiction to oil, but they are a start

If a Nebraska farmer plants corn instead of soybeans, does a Malaysian civil servant really get a pay rise? Do Chinese families really pay more for their milk? Does beer really cost more at the Oktoberfest? Yes, yes and yes — and what links them all is surprisingly simple. Calls from Washington for subsidies to increase US production of biofuels by up to 700 per cent in the next 30 years have persuaded American farmers to devote 12 million more acres to ethanol-yielding corn this year than last. That decision has meant a commensurate fall in the global supply of soybeans and wheat, boosting world prices of vegetable oils, livestock feed and food grains. The repercussions are already being felt from Munich to Kuala Lumpur.
Politicians have demanded vastly increased use of ethanol as a transport fuel in the EU as well as the US. In purely environmental terms this could create more problems than it solves. But there will be undoubted benefits in terms of energy security and carbon emissions from road traffic. Most importantly, the rapid response of the farming, energy and auto industries when offered adequate incentives gives hope that their critics’ forecasts of an energy-starved environmental doomsday may yet prove pessimistic.

Yet biofuels are no energy panacaea. Their supposedly neutral carbon equation is unbalanced when anything with a higher carbon-fixing capacity — such as rainforest — is cut down to make way for them, or for the palm and rape seed oil plantations spreading across parts of Indonesia and West Africa to make up for North American cuts in soybean oil supply. The equation is unbalanced further by the process of pulping and distilling biofuel crops. Critics of the process used in the US, where 114 refineries are in operation and 80 more are being built, claim that more energy goes into producing a gallon of ethanol than it gives out in an internal combustion engine.

Biofuels will play a part, but the heavy lifting must be done by technology harnessed to the goal of efficiency. The only power adequate to the needs of the 21st century is brainpower.

The Times