GATINEAU, Que. – Still dusting off the residue from the food vs. fuel explosion, the biofuel industry is bracing for the next wave of bad press.
The 2009 incendiary device is expected to be the indirect land use issue, first brought to the public’s attention in an April 7, 2008, Time magazine story called The Clean Energy Myth.
The article relies heavily on a study published in Science that contends every acre of land grown for fuel requires the destruction of forests, wetlands and grasslands to make room for another acre devoted to food, a practice that releases stored carbon into the atmosphere.
Read Also
Stacking Canada up on gene editing livestock
Canada may want to gauge how Argentina and other countries have approached gene editing in livestock and what that has meant for local innovation.
“People don’t want to believe renewable fuels could be bad,” said lead author Tim Searchinger in the Time article.
“But when you realize we’re tearing down rainforests that store loads of carbon to grow crops that store much less carbon, it becomes obvious.”
Biofuel leaders say the indirect land use issue is as bogus and as potentially damaging as the 2008 food versus fuel debate.
“That is going to be a very serious issue,” Joe Jobe, chief executive officer for the U.S. National Biodiesel Board, told delegates attending the fifth annual Canadian Renewable Fuels Summit.
The U.S. Renewable Fuels Standard, which calls for 136 billion litres of biofuel production by 2022, stipulates that all biofuel must meet certain greenhouse gas reduction levels. A clause within that requirement states that indirect land use must be taken into account when making the calculation.
Jobe said there’s a problem with that clause.
“The science does not yet exist to determine what indirect land use changes are.”
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is experimenting with four different models but none take into account the global scenario Searchinger talks about, where an acre of soybeans grown for biodiesel in the U.S. leads to the destruction of an acre of Brazilian rainforest.
If the indirect land use calculation is national in scope, the biodiesel industry comes out well because the moderate annual increase in the biodiesel mandate will be met by increased soybean yields. If it is global in scope, the numbers don’t look so good.
Jobe thinks the indirect land use issue is part of a growing anti-biofuel crusade.
Bob Dinneen, president of the U.S. Renewable Fuels Association, said there is no doubt the sector was wounded by the food versus fuel debate.
“It is a more challenging atmosphere today,” he told delegates.
But he said the industry has been vindicated by the fact that grain prices have plummeted while ethanol production hasn’t, proving oil prices and speculators were the real culprits behind the runup in grain and food prices.
Dinneen laments that biofuel continues to be held to a higher sustainability standard than other fuel when it comes to indirect land use.
“They’re not applying it to the oil industry at all,” he said.
Gordon Quaiattini, president of the Canadian Renewable Fuels Association, said Canada should come out relatively unscathed in the debate due to 5.8 million acres of summerfallow that could be converted into crop production.
“(Biofuel production) will never stretch that surplus that we have in this country,” he said.
