GoodFuels

UN Report Calls Lifecycle Analysis “Limited”

A new report finds that current methods of determining lifecycle analysis for biofuels are “limited” and “show a wide range of net greenhouse gas savings compared to fossil fuels.”

The report, by the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management, appears to say what the ethanol industry in the U.S. has been saying - there is no consensus in the methodology used to determine lifecycle analysis. The bottom line repeated frequently in the report is that more research is needed and there are a number of unanswered questions that would impact any type of long range predictions based on indirect land use change.

For example, the report says, “So far no explicit projection of global land use change induced by changing food demand seems to be available.” If we can’t even predict how much land may be used for food production in the future, how can we predict how much will be diverted to biofuels? The report also says, “Estimates of land requirements for future biofuels vary widely and depend on the basic assumptions made — mainly the type of feedstock, geographical location, and level of input and yield increase.”

You know what they say happens when you ass/u/me. That is the basic problem with all of these attempts at analysis. They are based on assumptions that will likely never be exact. We can never know what will happen in the future until it becomes the present. But, we still have to keep moving forward or we will never make it there.

Flaws in Indirect Land Use Theory

The study that started all the outcry over ethanol and indirect land use change comes up lacking in the science department.

Two researchers from Sydney, Australia decided to do scholarly analysis of the study by Tim Searchinger et al. and found the science fell far short of acceptable scientific standards. This should actually come as no great surprise, since Searchinger is a lawyer/environmental activist, not a scientist.

In their analysis, Professor John Mathews and Dr. Hao Tan from Macquarie University in Sydney described Searchinger’s study as “more ideology than science and seeking to put biofuels in worst possible light.”

The Searchinger et al. paper is framed in extremely negative terms that depict all biofuel production taking place in the USA and all derived from corn. It calculates land use change effects through the indirect route of assuming that diversion of corn to ethanol in the USA creates a shortfall that has to be made up by farmers planting grain crops in the rest of the world – rather than assuming that farmers are taking decisions to grow biofuel crops around the world using crops adapted to their environment, such as sugarcane in Brazil. The study then deliberately ignores possible trade effects, such as a proportion of this ethanol spike being met by imports from countries such as Brazil. It even ignores the Congressional cap that was placed on US first-generation corn-based ethanol, which was levied at 15 billion gallons (i.e., half the spike used by Searchinger et al.).

“If you wished to put U.S. ethanol production in the worst possible light, assuming the worst possible set of production conditions guaranteed to give the worst possible set of indirect land use effects, then the assumptions would not be far from those actually presented in the Searchinger et al. paper,” commented Dr. Hao Tan. “Frankly, better science upon which to base rule-making is available today.”

All the things the corn and ethanol industries have been trying to point out. Interestingly, the analysis was actually published in BioFPR earlier this year and is just getting a belated, some are calling “mysterious,” PR boost. Regardless, it makes valid points about the assumptions used in the Searchinger model that need to be heard.

Counting Angels on a Pin

It may be easier to count the angels dancing on the head of a pin than to compare the carbon footprints of various fuel types.

That was the conclusion of Ana Campoy writing in the Wall Street Journal blog Environmental Capital about EPA’s methodology in determining the environmental impact of corn ethanol compared to gasoline.

The Renewable Fuels Association, ethanol’s main industry trade group, argues that the corn-based fuel’s environmental credentials should be measured against gasoline made with that kind of oil, not with the lighter and more easily refined crude grades, which are becoming scarcer. That comparison makes ethanol look a lot greener.

“If you’re going to be counting the angels on the head of a pin with ethanol at least take a cursory look at the impacts of petroleum,” says Bob Dinneen, president and chief executive of the group.

The article raises many questions about “how to extricate the real carbon footprint of a fuel from a complex web of interconnections across continents. Where do you begin? Where do you finish?”

In fact, there may be as many variables to the concept of determining the carbon footprint of any one fuel as there are angels on the head of a pin - and just as hard to count.

Deforestation debunked

Worried about Brazilian deforestation? Don’t blame ethanol.

Environmental activists and other anti-ethanol interests attempt to vilify biofuels in part out of their concerns about Amazon deforestation. But is ethanol the real culprit? A recent article from DTN reporter Kieran Gartlan exposes the real factors behind deforestation in Brazil.

Gartlan writes that U.S. corn exports have remained steady, U.S. soybean exports have increased and Brazilian acreage in both crops has remained steady or even decreased. At the same time, “Amazon deforestation has fallen for the past five years, from 10,588 square miles in 2004 to 4,620 square miles last year, according to figures from Brazil’s National Institute of Space Research (INPE).”

Gartlan also reports that “a study carried out by the Soybean Work Group (GTS) earlier this year showed that of 630 samples of deforested areas since July 2006 only 12 had gone to soybeans and 200 to cattle. The remaining 418, or 70 percent, were unused indicating that the main reason for cutting down trees was for timber and land grabbing.”

Clearly, the expansion of the biofuels industry worldwide, let alone in the U.S., has nothing to do with the motives of those clearing Amazon rainforest. Consider this another myth about ethanol busted.

The entire story, courtesy of DTN, can be read here.

Bob Dinneen in Huffington Post

Renewable Fuels Association’s CEO Bob Dinneen in his latest Huffington Post blog:

“As with his cover story last year, with the even-handed headline “The Clean Energy Scam” Grunwald’s (TIME author Michael Grunwald) recent article relies on a theory propounded by a source whom he describes as “Princeton scholar Tim Searchinger.” As Grunwald writes, the thesis that producing ethanol has “indirect effects on land use: when an acre of land is used to grow fuel instead of food, an extra acre somewhere else is probably going to be converted into farmland to grow food.” Moreover, he continues, “that acre may well be an acre of wetland or forest that would otherwise store loads of carbon.”

While he is indeed housed at Princeton University, Searchinger is an attorney by training, not a scientist, an economist, or an agronomist. So his assessment of the likelihood that the increased production of biofuels in the United States will require the despoiling of forests and wetlands which will deposit carbon in the atmosphere and promote global warming is as worthy of respectful attention as the views of any other attorney with a interest in economics, agriculture, and the environment.

Indeed, the EPA examination — and Grunwald’s journalism and Searchinger’s thesis even more so — ignore the actual alternative to biofuels: petroleum products. By exploring the “indirect land-use change” that may be caused by producing biofuels but not the comparable consequences of any other industry, including producing and using petroleum products, these stories and studies offer little illumination for the debates that must be held and the decisions that must be made.”

Dinneen goes in even more detail about the mistruths Grunwald talks about in his article. Definitely worth a read.