Apart from used chip fat, there is no such thing as a sustainable
biofuel
Even capitalists now admit the oil crisis is real. But their
solutions border on lunacy as they avoid the obvious answer
George Monbiot
Tuesday February 12 2008
The Guardian
Now they might start sitting up. They wouldn't listen to the environmentalists
or even the geologists. Can governments ignore the capitalists? A report
published last week by Citibank, and so far unremarked on by the media,
proposes "genuine difficulties" in increasing the production of crude
oil, "particularly after 2012". Though 175 big drilling projects will
start in the next four years, "the fear remains that most of this supply
will be offset by high levels of decline". The oil industry has scoffed at
the notion that oil supplies might peak, but "recent evidence of failed
production growth would tend to shift the burden of proof on to the
producers", as they have been unable to respond to the massive rise in
prices. "Total global liquid hydrocarbon production has essentially
flatlined since mid 2005 at just north of 85m barrels per day."
The issue is complicated, as ever, by the refusal of the Opec cartel to raise
production. What has changed, Citibank says, is that the non-Opec countries can
no longer answer the price signal. Does this mean that oil production in these
nations has already peaked? If so, what do our governments intend to do?
Nine months ago, I asked the British government to send me its assessments of
global oil supply. The results astonished me: there weren't any. Instead it
relied exclusively on one external source: a book published by the
International Energy Agency. The omission became stranger still when I read
this book and discovered that it was a crude polemic, dismissing those who
questioned future oil supplies as "doomsayers" without providing
robust evidence to support its conclusions. Though the members of Opec have a
powerful interest in exaggerating their reserves in order to boost their
quotas, the IEA relied on their own assessments of future supply.
Last week I tried again, and I received the same response: "The government
agrees with IEA analysis that global oil (and gas) reserves are sufficient to
sustain economic growth for the foreseeable future." Perhaps it hasn't
noticed that the IEA is now backtracking. The Financial Times says the agency
"has admitted that it has been paying insufficient attention to supply
bottlenecks as evidence mounts that oil is being discovered more slowly than
once expected ... natural decline rates for discovered fields are a closely
guarded secret in the oil industry, and the IEA is concerned that the data it
currently holds is not accurate." What if the data turns out to be wrong?
What if Opec's stated reserves are a pack of lies? What contingency plans has
the government made? Answer comes there none.
The European commission, by contrast, does have a plan, and it's a disaster. It
recognises that "the oil dependence of the transport sector ... is one of
the most serious problems of insecurity in energy supply that the EU
faces". Partly in order to diversify fuel supplies, partly to cut
greenhouse gas emissions, it has ordered the member states to ensure that by
2020 10% of the petroleum our cars burn must be replaced with biofuels. This
won't solve peak oil, but it might at least put it into perspective by causing
an even bigger problem.
To be fair to the commission, it has now acknowledged that biofuels are not a
green panacea. Its draft directive rules that they shouldn't be produced by
destroying primary forest, ancient grasslands or wetlands, as this could cause
a net increase in greenhouse gas emissions. Nor should any biodiverse ecosystem
be damaged to grow biofuels.
It sounds good, but there are three problems. If biofuels can't be produced in
virgin habitats, they must be confined to existing agricultural land, which
means that every time we fill up the car we snatch food from people's mouths.
This, in turn, raises the price of food, which encourages farmers to destroy
pristine habitats - primary forests, ancient grasslands, wetlands and the rest
- in order to grow it. We can congratulate ourselves on remaining morally pure,
but the impacts are the same. There is no way out of this: on a finite planet
with tight food supplies, you either compete with the hungry or clear new land.
The third problem is that the commission's methodology has just been blown
apart by two new papers. Published in Science magazine, they calculate the
total carbon costs of biofuel production. When land clearance (caused either
directly or by the displacement of food crops) is taken into account, all the
major biofuels cause a massive increase in emissions.
Even the most productive source - sugar cane grown in the scrubby savannahs of
central
Many people believe there's a way of avoiding these problems: by making
biofuels not from the crops themselves but from crop wastes - if transport fuel
can be manufactured from straw or grass or wood chips, there are no
implications for land use, and no danger of spreading hunger. Until recently I
believed this myself.
Unfortunately most agricultural "waste" is nothing of the kind. It is
the organic material that maintains the soil's structure, nutrients and store
of carbon. A paper commissioned by the
Removing crop wastes means replacing the nutrients they contain with
fertiliser, which causes further greenhouse gas emissions. A recent paper by
the Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen suggests that emissions of nitrous oxide (a
greenhouse gas 296 times more powerful than CO2) from nitrogen fertilisers wipe
out all the carbon savings biofuels produce, even before you take the changes
in land use into account.
Growing special second-generation crops, such as trees or switchgrass, doesn't
solve the problem either: like other energy crops, they displace both food
production and carbon emissions. Growing switchgrass, one of the new papers in
Science shows, creates a carbon debt of 52 years. Some people propose making
second-generation fuels from grass harvested in natural meadows or from
municipal waste, but it's hard enough to produce them from single feedstocks;
far harder to manufacture them from a mixture. Apart from used chip fat, there
is no such thing as a sustainable biofuel.
All these convoluted solutions are designed to avoid a simpler one: reducing
the consumption of transport fuel. But that requires the use of a different
commodity. Global supplies of political courage appear, unfortunately, to have
peaked some time ago.
monbiot.com
Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited 2008
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