Sigurdson farms near Swan River, Man., and has researched biofuel for the National Farmers Union.
Biofuels are the most misguided public policy being introduced in Canada that achieves no public policy objective.
The stated public policy objectives of Bill C-33 and the mandating of ethanol and biodiesel are: to provide alternate energy and lessen Canada’s dependence on fossil fuels; to reduce CO2 emissions; and to provide a market for farmers’ grain.
Objective: Reduce dependence on fossil fuels.
Ethanol manufacturing is energy intensive and uses large amounts of fossil fuel to grow the crop, transport it and distill it into ethanol.
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Many world-renowned scientists have confirmed that more fossil fuel energy is required in the ethanol production cycle than the ethanol provides.
David Pimentel of Cornell University concluded that 29 percent more energy is required to produce a gallon of ethanol than the energy that is contained in one gallon of ethanol.
Tad Patzek of the University of California at Berkeley in June 2003 released a comprehensive corn ethanol report that states: “It is shown here that one burns one gallon of gasoline equivalent from ethanol from corn. Then this ethanol is burned as a gasoline additive or fuel. Burning the same amount of fuel twice to drive a car once is equivalent to halving the fuel efficiency of those cars that burn ethanol, and will cause manifold damage to air, surface water, soil and aquifers.”
To replace 10 percent of the fuel now used for transportation would require the entire canola crop of Western Canada for biodiesel and half of Western Canada’s total wheat crop for ethanol production.
This analysis is confirmed in a February 2007 report by Frederic Forge of the Library of Parliament. As an energy policy, he casts doubt on the notion that biofuel production will decrease Canada’s dependence on fossil fuels, pointing out that Canada would have to use 36 percent of its farmland to produce enough biofuel to replace 10 percent of the fuel now used for transportation.
The entire U.S. corn crop would only provide six percent of U.S. energy needs.
Ethanol from prairie wheat is a definite energy loser as is explained by Vaclav Smil, an energy scientist at the University of Manitoba. Speaking at the Frontier Center, Smil described the problems of wheat ethanol, such as low wheat yields, high water requirements and growing wheat in the Prairies, much of which is a semi desert.
Said Smil: “One would simply have to be dumb to attempt to do something like this. This is a criminal public policy.”
Biofuels take more energy to produce than they provide and cannot reduce Canada’s reliance on fossil fuels. Why create the illusion that we can turn food into fuel so someone can drive his or her SUV?
Stated objective: Reduce CO2 or greenhouse gas emissions.
In a recent letter in The Western Producer, federal agriculture minister Gerry Ritz states that biofuels reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent on a life cycle analysis. Ritz gives no source.
Mark Delucchi of the University of California at Davis concludes that corn based fuels (ethanol) emit more CO2 than gasoline or diesel. On release of his report in January 2004, Delucchi stated that the most significant changes regarding CO2 equivalency factors, the life cycle material, and biofuels indicate “that soy and corn based fuels look worse than gasoline and diesel.”
Nobel prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen, in a report for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, said: “For rapeseed biodiesel, which accounts for about 80 percent of the biofuel production in Europe, the relative warming due to nitrous oxide emissions is estimated at one to 1.7 times larger than the relative cooling effect due to saved fossil CO2 emissions. “
A 1999 report from the U.S. National Research Council said the reactivity of the combined exhaust and evaporative emissions using ethanol- blended reformulated gasoline is estimate to be 17 percent larger than using MTBE-blended gasoline.
Gasohol used as an automotive fuel seriously pollutes the air with evaporative emissions. Exhaust has more nitrous oxide, aldehydes and peroxy-acetyl-nitrate.
There are no environmental organizations in Canada supporting grain-based biofuels and the claim that biofuels are cleaner burning is bogus.
Stated objective: Provide market for farmers’ grain.
Canada is an exporter of oil and natural gas to the U.S. while Ontario imports 50 to 100 million bushels of U.S. corn annually for the feeding industry. Manitoba also imports large amounts of corn, so any ethanol production east of the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border will result in more corn imports.
It makes no sense for Canada, an energy exporting country, to export fossil fuels and then import U.S. corn to make ethanol.
The Husky ethanol plant in Minnedosa, Man., receives a mandate and a subsidy of $3 a bushel for every bushel it turns into ethanol. If the objective was to help the farmers, the federal and provincial governments would simply pay the farmers that $3 per bu. directly.
A bushel of canola provides 10 litres of biodiesel so at $15 a bushel, the cost is $1.50 a litre just for feedstock. It is highly unlikely that it would be advantageous for a farmer to invest in a biodiesel plant so he can sell that plant cheap canola.
In fact, Gerry Ritz revealed the government’s policy recently when he stated he wanted barley removed from the CWB so livestock feeders could have cheap barley.
Cheap grain for secondary processing is an ongoing government policy and resulted in removal of the Crow Rate, for example. Biofuel production is based on subsidies, mandates and cheap grain.
Globally biofuels are only manufactured with a mandate and/or subsidy. Biofuel manufacturing is wasteful of fossil fuel resources and cannot be considered renewable energy. Canada’s farmers can’t afford to grow cheap grain for ethanol plants. Canadian taxpayers cannot afford to subsidize biofuel production and drivers can’t afford to burn it in their cars either.
Biofuel manufacturing is a costly misadventure for Canada.
