Humanity requires a sustainability revolution to confront the energy needs of a rising population using strained resources, says an American academic.
“We have more people, less time and high risk and I don’t see any way to look at it except that it is the defining challenge of our time,” Lee Lynd, an environmental engineering design professor from Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, told the recent Agricultural Biotechnology International Conference in Saskatoon.
Lynd, who is calling for a massive increase in the use of bioenergy derived from plants, said he hopes to see at least 25 percent of the world’s transportation fueled by bioenergy within the next 40 years.
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Bioenergy’s potential has its critics, and Lynd felt government crop subsidies are largely to blame.
He said subsidies are designed to raise demand for crops rather than produce crops best suited for bioenergy production, which has resulted in crops not ideally suited to energy production.
Lynd said sugarcane is one of the best potential energy sources, and Brazil is successfully using it in vehicles.
However, its biggest drawback is the limited areas where it can be grown.
Lynd said the crop’s yield per acre could easily be doubled if it was grown with energy production in mind instead of sugar production.
Algae is another potential biofuel that Lynd felt was worthy of further study, but he said there are significant difficulties in achieving a desirable cost per gigajoule of energy.
Lynd said bioenergy faced two main obstacles in becoming a significant source of the world’s energy:
• Processing – Breaking down cellulosic plant matter to produce energy on the global scale that Lynd is talking about would be technically difficult and expensive using current methods.
• Land use and availability – Land used to grow plants for energy would not be producing much-needed food. There would also be potential loss of habitat and large-scale carbon emissions if forests were cleared to grow energy crops.
Lynd said political, economic and infrastructure concerns that keep millions of acres of land out of production would have to be overcome to achieve his targets.
