India’s Renewed Biofuels Push to Disrupt Agriculture, Worsen Inequality

D.Raghunandan | 

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Can a country ranked 101 out of 116 on the World Hunger Index talk about a surplus it can use to make biofuels?

Representational Image. Image Courtesy: Flickr

One of the outcomes of the recent G20 Summit in New Delhi was the announcement of the Global Biofuels Alliance with India, Brazil, the United States and other countries taking the lead in increasing the uptake of sustainable biofuels, especially in the transport sector.

Much has been made of this initiative in India as another triumph showcasing the government’s growing global leadership and also as a step towards a big push to the country’s already sizeable and ambitious biofuels programme. The impression is that the Alliance would work towards a transition from “first generation”, or 1G biofuels, to 2G biofuels. Unfortunately, the reality is very different. 

BIOFUELS

The use of biofuels, both ethanol and biodiesel, especially in transportation, is often portrayed as a major measure to move away from fossil fuel-based transport, reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and form an important intermediate step towards complete decarbonisation and renewable energy.

According to this view, biofuels have many advantages: they are derived from a renewable resource, mainly crops such as corn, sugarcane and palm oil; they use the same internal combustion engines as current automotive vehicles, which doesn’t call for major shifts in manufacturing or infrastructure; and have lower emissions than petroleum-based fuels. 

Biofuels can be made in both major engine fuel variants, i.e. ethanol, as a substitute for petrol or gasoline used in internal combustion engines, and biodiesel as a substitute for diesel used in compression-ignition engines. It can also be used in various proportions of blends with their petroleum-based counterparts.

Both bioethanol and biodiesel can be used either by themselves or blended with petrol and diesel, respectively, in various proportions. Normally, ethanol-blended petrol (EBP) with up to 10% ethanol can be used in internal combustion engines without any modifications.

Whereas, EBP20 or higher, which blends with 20% or more ethanol, will require modifications or retuning of engines with higher ethanol blends requiring specially designed “flexi-fuel” engines, calling for major infrastructure investment. 

Many analysts, including this writer, have questioned from the very outset both the very idea and efficacy of these biofuels, classed as “first generation”, or 1G biofuels.

Critical voices have now grown much louder, including in mainstream policy circles. Criticism has been centred chiefly on the negative impact on food security due to the use of food crops for producing automotive fuel (mostly for personal vehicles), diversion of forestland and other land-use changes away from food production, minimal, if any, cost advantage over petroleum-based fuels and only marginal or even negative reduction of GHG emissions. 

Over the years, evidence of these negative aspects have mounted. Yet the push for biofuels continues, driven by continued policy support, industrial interests, especially in specific applications, and hope that technological or other developments would reverse the above trends.

NEGATIVE IMPACT OF 1G BIOFUELS

There is overwhelming evidence that 1G biofuels don’t have environmental benefits over their lifecycle.

One of the major factors is changes in land use in producing the feedstock as demand grows. Either forestland is cleared, as with palm oil in Southeast Asia, or fresh land is converted or brought under cultivation for such feedstock, such as for sugarcane in Brazil and elsewhere in South America and Africa.

These land use changes release stored carbon in the soil and pre-existing biomass, leading to a net negative in the carbon balance. Using nitrogenous fertilisers releases nitrous oxide (N2O), a GHG with 300 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide. Besides, energy is used in transporting feedstock and processing it into biofuel. 

International Council for Clean Transportation estimates show that in passenger vehicles, only a 2% reduction of GHG emissions was observed with petrol blended with 5% (EBP 5) whereas biodiesel blends resulted in three times the emissions! All calculations were over the full lifecycle.

All these and other experiences from different parts of the world had resulted in a raging ‘food vs. fuel’ controversy.

It was argued that if at all crops were to be grown on cultivable land or new lands were to be brought into cultivation, food should be grown rather than crops that yielded fuel. This led to the slogan “Land for food, not for fuel”, especially for energy-guzzling personal vehicles rather than any public good.

Yet driven by market forces and a misplaced ideology that prioritised (supposedly) lower emissions over socio-economic objectives—food security, environmental sustainability and land use for the common good—the demand for 1G biofuels has grown, benefiting the land mafia and the often subsidized biofuels industry.

TOWARDS 2G BIOFUELS

Given the above negative factors, second-generation or 2G biofuels have gained considerable attention. They are differentiated from 1G biofuels by the types of materials used and the technology used to produce them.

As against 1G biofuels, based mostly on food crops, 2G biofuels are mostly made from non-food lignocellulosic materials such as agricultural wastes or residues—wheat or rice straw, sugarcane tops, corncobs, wood chips or even grasses and other such produce normally regarded as weeds or useless and could be grown on degraded or otherwise uncultivated land. Materials whose food value has already been exhausted, like municipal solid wastes or used cooking oils, are also used to make 2G biofuels.

Technologies for 2G biofuels have achieved commercial scale only within the past decade or so with mixed results. Large subsidy programmes have not taken root in the US, the European Union (EU) or other developed countries. Price fluctuations in ethanol, weak or loose mandates for biofuels, in establishing sound supply chains for feedstock such as corn cobs, etc., have all contributed to a slow uptake of 2G biofuels production.

The steady decline in diesel automobiles and the moves by numerous countries to phase out diesel-powered vehicles have left bioethanol as the main player in the game. Global trends of 2G ethanol production are fluctuating. 2G ethanol production is only around 2% of the global production of biofuels mostly in the US, EU and partially in Brazil.

Efforts have also been made over the years to lay down standards for sustainable biofuels using various criteria such as renewability, non-interference with food security, significantly lower emissions, no diversion of forest or food-crop lands, social justice and fair incomes to growers and producers, etc. 

UNVIABLE 2G PLANTS

The government has given a major push to 2G bioethanol. The strategy is to initiate a 2G bioethanol programme through a special scheme for 12 new commercial-scale plants and 10 demonstration-scale plants run by public sector undertakings (PSUs) along with, if they choose, private players with competence in similar industries.

The strategy is being implemented under the new scheme with the unpronounceable and incomprehensible name of the Pradhan Mantri JI-VAN (Jaiv Indhan-Vatavaran-Anukool Fasal Awashesh Nivaran) Yojana.

Most of these plants will be located in areas with generation of large quantities of agri-waste, like rice and wheat straw, in Punjab, Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, which will also tackle some of the severe air pollution caused in winter by stubble burning. The scheme involves substantial “viability gap funding”. or subsidy to the tune of about Rs 2,000 crore. 

Clearly, the government has put the onus for such projects on PSUs—which it otherwise doesn’t support—because the plants are not profitable enough to attract private investment despite the support. In fact, even PSUs seem to be having second thoughts and, after the first few plants, have decided to go slow on starting new ones and set up 1G plants instead at about one-tenth of the cost.

An influential international study has also shown the non-viability of these plants and pointed out that in any case, 2G ethanol thus produced would only meet around 1% of the target for 2030.  

Dangerously, the one plant that seems to be doing reasonably well is the PSU Numaligarh Refinery, Assam, which uses virgin bamboo as feedstock harvested from nearby land, supposedly outside the forest area. The obvious dangers of creeping diversion of forestland—once again causing more carbon debt that many years or decades of ethanol production can repay, as has happened in numerous other such projects in the Northeast, are clearly being ignored.   

One way or another, land use change for production of biofuels is not environmentally sustainable.       

PROBLEMATUC FALLBACK ON 1G BIOFUELS

Notwithstanding these hesitant experiments on diversification to 2G biofuels, the government has decided to double down on 1G biofuels, and has even raised the target to achieve EBP20, or 20% EBP, nationwide by 2025 instead of the earlier target of 2030. 

India has come close to meeting the earlier mandated target of 10% ethanol blending albeit with great difficulty and with many changes of strategy. Use of molasses, a by-product of refined sugarcane, to make ethanol was amended to allow direct use of cane juice by citing surplus production of sugar exceeding domestic consumption.

Yet the government, mindful of sugar prices and inflation, has maintained close control on sugar exports, which have been only around 7 million tonnes (MT) against the production of around 32 MT from about 330 MT of sugarcane.

Sugarcane production is also sensitive to changes in rainfall and temperature variation, both impacted by climate change, and the quantity of surplus is always marginal. Sugarcane cultivation is also highly water-intensive and has had to be restricted in several districts. Besides, there is considerable competition from industries for potable alcohol and other chemicals, which make India a net importer of ethanol.

Despite all these difficulties, the government has further increased its bioethanol ambitions and diversified feedstock to include not just sugar but food grain such as rice and maize with loan interest subvention schemes extended to grain-based distilleries as well. The new biofuels policy goes much further than even its ambitious 2018 policy. 

In the first place, we should note that the programme to achieve 5% blending of biodiesel has virtually been abandoned since production has not even reached 1% as predicted by numerous analysts right at the outset.

The new Expert Committee on Roadmap for Ethanol Blending has a new 2025 target of 13.5 billion litres of bioethanol, roughly 6.7 billion litres from sugarcane and food grains, up from 2.7 billion litres produced in 2021.

It is estimated that this will require 17 MT of food grain, compared to a mere 78,000 tonnes released in 2020-21. With the Food Corporation of India required to maintain a buffer stock of about 13 MT and the current stock being about 23 MT, which can fluctuate considerable, the margin is almost non-existent.

Can a country ranked 101 out of 116 on the World Hunger Index talk about a “surplus” that it can use for making biofuels?

Other studies have also questioned the logic of pushing for such a high biofuels target when weighed against other costs and negative impacts. The above targets will call for bringing an additional 6 million hectares (MHA) under sugarcane and around 5 MHA under maize.

According to these studies, it is senseless from an energy balance viewpoint since around 180 hectares of maize-derived ethanol would be required to annually charge an electric vehicle, which could obtain the same from a one hectare solar power plant. And all this will achieve only 5% reduction in emissions, not counting lifecycle emissions.

The renewed push for biofuels is yet another false solution to climate change and constitutes a needless diversion away from other accelerated efforts towards renewable energy, except perhaps for a very few niche areas where shifting away from petroleum will be extremely difficult, such as large aircraft and long-range diesel trucks.

For the rest, one does not need to go beyond 5% ethanol blending. If India does go down the road called for by the government, it will pay a high price in agricultural disruption, food prices and worsening inequality. Contrary to some pro-biofuel advocates, the food versus fuel debate continues to be relevant. 

The writer is with the Delhi Science Forum and All India People’s Science Network. The views are personal.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for BIOFUEL 

Biofuels may not be as green as we've been told

Are biofuels better for the environment?

Not necessarily.

By Christopher McFadden

Feb 27, 2022

INTERESTING ENGINEERING

LONG READ

Biofuel factory.photosbyjim/iStock

The combustion engine is, hands down, one of the most important inventions of all time. But, it comes with a very high cost to the environment - hazardous emissions.

While many leaps in efficiency and emission control have been made over the decades, we can never fully eliminate the release of emissions like carbon dioxide into the air. But, what if the fuel for these engines could be grown rather than dug up?

And that is precisely the promise that biofuels have made over the last few decades. However, not everything is all that it seems when it comes to this "holy grail" of clean energy.

What are biofuels?

Biofuels, as the name might suggest, are types of liquid and gas fuels created "naturally" through the conversion of some kind of biomass. While the term can be used to encompass solid fuels, like wood, these are more commonly termed biomass rather than biofuel per se.

For this reason, biomass tends to be used to denote the raw material that biofuels are derived from or those solid fuels that are created by thermally or chemically altering raw materials into things like torrefied pellets or briquettes.

YinYang/iStock

Various forms of biofuels exist but are by far the most commonly used today are ethanol (sometimes called bioethanol) and biodiesel.

The former is an alcohol and is usually blended with more conventional fuels, like gasoline, to increase octane and cut down on the toxic carbon monoxide and smog-causing emissions usually associated with combustion engines. The most common form of the blend, called E10, is a mixture of 10 percent ethanol and 90 percent gasoline.

Some more modern vehicles, called flexible-fuel vehicles, can actually run on another blend of ethanol and gasoline called E85 that contains between 51 percent and 83 percent ethanol. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, roughly 98% of all gasoline you put in your car will contain some percentage of ethanol.

Most ethanol for fuel use is made from plant starches and sugars but there are an increasing number of biofuels in development that use cellulose and hemicellulose. These are the non-edible fibrous material that constitutes the bulk of plant matter. To date, several commercial-scale cellulose-based ethanol biorefineries are currently operational in the United States.

The most common plant "feedstock" used to make ethanol, are corn, grain, and sugar cane.

As with alcohol production, as for your favorite beer or wine, bioethanol is created through the age-old process of fermentation. As with alcoholic beverages, microorganisms like bacteria and yeast use plant sugars as an energy source and produce ethanol as a waste product.

This ethanol can then be fractionated off, distilled, and concentrated ready for use as a liquid fuel. All is well and good, but blending with ethanol does come at a cost.

Seanpanderson/Wikimedia Commons

As the U.S. Department of Energy explains, "ethanol contains less energy per gallon than gasoline, to varying degrees, depending on the volume percentage of ethanol in the blend. Denatured ethanol (98% ethanol) contains about 30% less energy than gasoline per gallon. Ethanol’s impact on fuel economy is dependent on the ethanol content in the fuel and whether an engine is optimized to run on gasoline or ethanol."

Biodiesel, the other most common biofuel, is made from vegetable and animal fats and is generally considered a cleaner-burning direct replacement for petroleum-based diesel fuel. It is non-toxic, biodegradable, and is produced using a combination of alcohol and vegetable oil, animal fat, or recycled cooking grease. It is a mono-alkyl ester produced by the process of transesterification, where the feedstock reacts with an alcohol (such as methanol) in the presence of a catalyst, to produce biodiesel and glycerin.

Like ethanol, biodiesel can be blended with regular diesel to make cleaner fuels. Such fuels range from pure biodiesel, called B100, with the most common blend, B20, consisting of 20 percent biodiesel and 80 percent fossil-fuel diesel.

Just like ethanol, biodiesel is not without its own problems when compared to more traditional fuels. For example, it can be problematic in colder climates as it has a tendency to crystallize. Generally speaking, the less biodiesel content, the better the performance of the fuel in cold climates.

This issue can also be overcome by adding something called a "flow improver" that can be added to the fuel to prevent it from freezing.

Another form of biodiesel that is also quite popular is "green diesel", or renewable diesel. Formed by the hydrocracking of vegetable oils or animal fats (or through gasification, pyrolysis, or other biochemical and thermochemical technologies) to produce a product that is almost indistinguishable from conventional diesel.

Vegetable oil can also be used unmodified as a fuel source in some older diesel engines that don't have common fuel injection systems.

razvanchirnoaga/iStock

Other forms of biofuel also exist, including biogas or biomethane that are created through the process of anaerobic digestion (basically rotting) of organic material. "Syngas," another form of biofuel gas is created by mixing carbon monoxide, hydrogen, and other hydrocarbons through the partial combustion of biomass.

Worldwide biofuel production reached in excess of 43 billion gallons (161 billion liters) in 2021, constituting around 4% of all the world's fuel used for road transportation. This is hoped by some organizations, like the International Energy Agency, to increase to 25% by 2050.

Why are biofuels considered green?

In order to fully answer this question, we need to take a little trip back in time. Around the turn of the 21st-century, many governments around the world were scratching their heads trying to figure out ways to combat the amount of carbon emissions their countries were emitting.

One of the main polluting activities happened to be the cars and trucks used to ferry people and stuff around. In fact, this is one of the largest contributing factors to human global carbon dioxide emissions that, according to some sources, account for almost a quarter of all annual emissions around the world.

The transport sector is also one of the fastest-growing around the world, as a result of the growing use of personal cars in many countries around the world. Of these, the vast majority are still combustion-engine vehicles rather than "cleaner" solutions like the growing electrical vehicle market.

Mailson Pignata/iStock

Something, in their view, needed to be done about this and so the concept of biofuels was proposed as a potential "silver bullet".

Since biofuels are formed, primarily, from the growth and harvesting of living plant material rather than long-sequestered hydrocarbon sources like fossil fuels. The main argument is that biofuels draw down as much carbon dioxide, more or less, as they release when combusted. This is because carbon is stored in the plant tissue and soil as plants grow.

They are, in effect, "carbon neutral", and in some cases have been shown to be carbon negative - in other words, they remove more carbon from the atmosphere than is released when they are harvested, processed, and burned/converted.

There are other benefits to biofuel feedstocks too, including, but not limited to, the generation of co-products like protein that can be as animal feed. This saves energy (and therefore associated carbon dioxide emissions) that would otherwise have been used to make animal feed by other means.

To this end, some countries went full-bore with the idea, with countries like Brazil establishing a full-blown bioethanol industry about 40 years ago. Other countries began to follow suit. In 2005, the United States established its first national renewable fuel standard under the "Energy Policy Act". This piece of legislation called for 7.5 billion gallons of biofuels to be used annually by 2012.

This act also required fossil fuel-producing companies to mix biofuels with regular liquid fuels to reduce their long-term impact on the environment. The European Union produced a similar requirement in its 2008 "Renewable Energy Directive", which required EU countries to source at least 10 percent of their transport fuel from renewable sources by 2020.

The stringent requirement has resulted in a huge growth in the biofuel industry around the world. But, how accurate are the claims that biofuels are better for the environment than, say, fossil fuels?

Are biofuels actually better for the environment?

Like anything in life, it is important to remember that there is no such thing as a perfect solution, only a compromise. For all the benefits that products like biofuels yield, they have some very important drawbacks and even environmental impacts that cannot be ignored if we are being truly honest about them.

For example, the widely held claim that biofuels are carbon-neutral, or even negative, is not all that it claims to be. Various studies on this subject have shown that different biofuels vary widely in their greenhouse emissions when compared, like-for-like, with gasoline.

Biofuel feedstocks have many other associated costs with their production, such as harvesting, processing, and transportation that are often not always factored into calculations or are outright ignored. In some cases, depending on the methods used to produce the feedstock and process the fuel, more greenhouse gas emissions can arise when compared to fossil fuels.

Discussion on this topic tends to place the most emphasis on carbon dioxide, but it is but one of the many harmful emissions that can have very serious consequences on the environment. Nitrous oxide, NOx for short, is another.

Not only is NOx an important component for the formation of harmful effects like acid rain, but it also has a very significant so-called "global warming potential" orders of magnitude higher than carbon dioxide - around 300 times in fact. Not only that, but nitrous oxide stays in the atmosphere for far longer - 114 years compared to about 4 years for carbon dioxide.

NOx also happens to be particularly bad for the ozone layer too - which is not nice. And it doesn't end there.

Nitrous oxides are generated at others stages of biofuel production and final use when combusted as an actual fuel on your car.

aydinmutlu/iStock

In fairness, all forms of agriculture release nitrous oxide to some degree, so biofuel production should not be blamed in isolation for any increase in NOx emissions over the last few decades, but since it is promoted heavily by many governments, there is an urgent need for more research to be done on the impact of biofuels on NOx emissions.

Another potentially important difference between biofuels and conventional fossil fuels is carbonyl emissions. Carbonyl is a divalent chemical unit consisting of carbon (C) and an oxygen (O) atom connected by a double bond and is a constituent part of molecules like carboxylic acids, esters, anhydrides, acyl halides, amides, and quinones, among other compounds.

Some carbonyls, like those listed above, are known to be potentially very hazardous to human health. Studies on this subject have found that biofuels, like biodiesels, release considerably more carbonyl emissions like formaldehyde, acetaldehyde, acrolein, acetone, propionaldehyde, and butyraldehyde, than pure diesel.

Yet other studies have revealed that the combustion of biofuels also comes with an elevated emission of some other hazardous pollutants like volatile organic compounds (VOCs), polycyclic aromatic HCs, and heavy metals) have been reported to endanger human health.

Another very serious issue with biofuels is their direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions from land-use changes. For example, land clearance of forests or grasslands to release land for biofuel production has a very serious impact on the environment.

Scharfsinn86/iStock

Some studies have shown that this kind of activity can release hundreds to thousands of tonnes of carbon dioxide per hectare for the sake of "saving" 1.8 tonnes per hectare per year for maize grown for bioethanol or 8.6 tonnes per hectare per year for switchgrass. The land is also converted from growing food for consumption to biomass for use in fuel.

This has been reinforced only recently, with a study on the use of corn-ethanol fuels in the U.S. This study identified that the rise in demand for corn as a feedstock for biofuels resulted in a jump in price and, therefore, incentivize the conversion of land for the cultivation of corn.

Other studies also show a serious "opportunity cost" for using valuable land in this way too. If governments are serious about reducing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, the land, if converted from the forest, for example, should have been left the way it was. A better strategy might be to actually reforest existing farmland that has been converted for biofuel production as well.

The conversion of wild virgin lands for biofuel production also has serious implications for biodiversity and local habitats too for obvious reasons. Research also suggests that the production of biofuel feedstocks such as corn and soy, could increase water pollution from nutrients, pesticides, and sediment and deplete aquifers.

There is another area where biofuels appear to be considerably safer for the environment, however - biodegradation. Various studies have shown that biofuels, neat vegetable oils, biodiesel, petroleum diesel blends, and neat 2-D diesel fuel tend to break down in the environment much faster than conventional petrol or diesel.

Under controlled conditions, these substances are broken down about 5 times faster than petroleum or diesel and also leave far fewer toxic byproducts. This is encouraging and would indicate that events such as oil spills could be less of an environmental disaster if the tanker is filled with biofuels.

So, are biofuels all they are cracked up to be?

In short, yes, but also no. While some biofuels are clearly better for the environment than continuing to dig up and burn fossil fuels, a more all-encompassing view needs to be taken by regulators and decision-makers. Not all biofuels and methods of biofuel production have the same impact

.

BanksPhotos/iStock

We have already covered some of the issues above, like focussing on reforestation instead, but other things can also be done, too.

Energy conservation and improved efficiency are critical factors. The combustion engine, while receiving a lot of bad press over recent decades, is still one of the best machines for converting fuel to do useful work that our species has ever devised.


It has quite literally revolutionized our way of life. If more focus was put on improving their efficiency than outright banning them, significant improvements in emissions could be made over time.

According to some studies, in the United States, an improvement in efficiency by only one mile per gallon for every vehicle has been shown to reduce greenhouse gas emissions more than all "savings" provided by all biofuel maize production. Other incremental improvements are also in development that could further improve the efficiency of combustion engines too.

One example, called Transient Plasma Ignition, is a like-for-like replacement for traditional spark plugs that have been shown to dramatically increase combustion efficiency in combustion engines by as much as 20%. These kinds of spark plugs also benefit from a longer lifespan than conventional ones.


But, such solutions still rely on the digging up and use of fossil fuels. With the drive, pun intended, for the decarbonization of many economies around the world, such technologies only realistically offer a brief reprieve for the internal combustion engine going forward.

But, that doesn't mean research and development in this field should be eased up. Any benefits made to the efficiency of internal combustion can be used to also, albeit indirectly, increase the efficiency of biofuels in combustion engines.

Keeratikorn Suttiwong/iStock

But, there are some areas where biofuels are clearly advantageous. In many cases, biowaste from other industrial processes can be turned into biofuels rather than thrown away. Whether it be digestion of waste food to make biogas/bio-LPG or turning waste products from beer production into biofuel.

And it is this that might, in the end, might be the main benefit of biofuels over their conventional fossil fuel alternatives. If more emphasis is put on using the waste products from existing processes to make biofuels rather than converting virgin land or agricultural land for feedstock crops, we can get all the benefits of biofuels with less of its environmental costs.

That is, of course, as long as our species continues to use combustion-based energy production. Which is likely going to continue for many years to come.

They are, after all, so good at what they do.

Enbridge, Divert break ground on renewable fuel facility in Washington

Story by The Canadian Press •



CALGARY — Canadian pipeline giant Enbridge Inc. and U.S.-based food waste management company Divert Inc. have broken ground on their first joint project to be built under the terms of a US$1 billion infrastructure agreement announced earlier this year.

The two companies are investing approximately US$100 million in the first of what is expected to be several projects across the U.S. that will convert food waste into non-fossil fuel, renewable energy.

The first facility, for which a groundbreaking ceremony was held Thursday afternoon, will be built in Longview, Washington and will be the first of its kind in the state. It will accept wasted food from retail food customers, agricultural food producers, industrial food manufacturers, restaurants and others and convert it into renewable natural gas, or RNG.

"When we started looking at who we wanted to partner with in this space, Divert really stood out because they have kind of mastered ... diverting wasted food," said Caitlin Tessin, vice-president of strategy and market innovation for Enbridge.

"The fact that it doesn't just go into a landfill really attracted us to the Divert partnership because it's not just about decarbonized gas — there's a really strong social and community benefit to what they're doing," Tessin added.

Enbridge, which bought a 10 per cent stake in Divert earlier this year for US$80 million, is one of a number of traditional fossil fuel companies that have been investing in RNG as concerns about climate change intensify.

According to the World Biogas Association, organic waste from food production, food waste, farming, landfill and wastewater treatment are responsible for about 25 per cent of human-caused global emissions of methane, a harmful greenhouse gas.

But it's possible to harness the methane from organic waste to create an environmentally friendly alternative to traditional natural gas that can be used for home heating, cooking, and even fuelling vehicles.

Divert — which uses a patented "depackaging" process and anaerobic digestion technology in its facilities — already operates 10 sites across the U.S., working with nearly 5,400 retail stores to process more than 2.3 billion pounds of wasted food annually.

Enbridge will help to finance the Longview facility, and will transport the fuel produced there to customers in the Washington area via Enbridge's already existing natural gas pipeline network.

"RNG is a drop-in fuel replacement for traditional gas," Tessin said, adding replacing traditional gas with RNG helps to lower Enbridge's overall carbon footprint.

"It (allows us) to utilize the billions of dollars of infrastructure we already have."

The Longview facility is expected to be fully operational in 2024. Enbridge says it will be able to offset up to 23,000 metric tonnes of CO2 a year, the equivalent to removing 5,000 gas-powered cars from the road annually.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 7, 2023.

Companies in this story: (TSX:ENB)

Amanda Stephenson, The Canadian Press

What are biofuels and why is it so confusing whether they are a source of clean energy or not?



BENGALURU, India (AP) — India, the current president of the Group of 20 industrialized and developing nations, has proposed a global biofuel alliance that seeks to accelerate the development of sustainable biofuels to support the global energy transition.

The alliance is likely to get an official announcement at the G-20 summit that opens this week in New Delhi, and it's expected that more than 15 countries will sign up to be part of the alliance.

The United States, Canada and Brazil are among a few of the countries expected to join India in such an alliance.

WHAT ARE BIOFUELS?

Any fuel produced from agricultural produce or organic waste is a biofuel.

Humans have used biofuels since time immemorial — for example, burning wood and manure for cooking, heating and light.

They've gained popularity in recent decades for their potential to deliver cleaner energy than some other sources.

Biofuels are categorized based on their source, with each category known as a “generation.” First-generation biofuels are derived from food crops like corn and sugar cane, second generation from inedible vegetation and agricultural waste and third-generation from algae.

Popular types of biofuels such as ethanol, biodiesel and biogas can be produced from any of these sources and are classified based on the source from which they are produced. For example, ethanol produced from farm-grown corn is classified as first-generation ethanol.

ARE BIOFUELS ALWAYS A SOURCE OF CLEAN ENERGY?


Not always. It depends on how it's produced. A biofuel made from waste or inedible vegetation, with renewable energy to power the production, would have little or no greenhouse gas emissions, making it a clean fuel. But when crops are grown explicitly to produce biofuels — such as making ethanol from corn, soybeans, sugar cane or palm — all the fertilizers and fossil fuels needed to grow, cultivate and process the fuel give it a much larger carbon footprint.

“If you look at the full life cycle of producing biofuels, it’s many times not clean,” said Lydia Powell, an energy policy analyst at the New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation, who has followed developments related to biofuels for over two decades.

Biofuels can also mean land that could have produced food is instead being used for energy. And they can add to deforestation when land is cleared for their production.

Powell noted Europe's imports of palm oil from Indonesia and other East Asian countries to make biodiesel for cars and trucks. Those imports dropped sharply after European Union regulations banned the sale of palm oil and other commodities when they could be linked to deforestation.

"They were destroying natural forests to plant palm trees so you produce oil to export to Europe. When you destroy forests, you destroy large chunks of carbon sinks,” Powell said.

Those issues have clouded the picture of exactly how sustainable biofuels are, and led to skepticism of them as a clean energy option.

WHAT ARE BIOFUELS USED FOR?

Transportation, including passenger vehicles, but also transport — trucking, shipping and aviation.

Once they're made, experts say, biofuels have advantages over pure fossil fuels by contributing little to no emissions at the tailpipe. The same can't be said of the gasoline and diesel they are blended with.

But there's a hope that the biofuels might completely replace fossil fuels in the future in aviation and in certain kinds of ships. And if the biofuels were derived from organic waste and inedible crops grown on wasteland — not on land reserved for food production, or on deforested land — it would be cleaner.

“They are one option among a larger set of solutions,” said Jane O’Malley of International Council on Clean Transportation, a Washington-based independent nonprofit.

O’Malley, whose research includes fuel life cycles and exhaust emissions, said the key is to use the right kind of biofuel for the right purpose. O'Malley said it's essential for countries using biofuels for transportation to move as quickly as possible to producing them with little or no emissions.

Experts say biofuels can also contribute to employment and energy security, especially if the crops used to produce them are locally grown.

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Sibi Arasu, The Associated Press

 

Food vs fuel: Ukraine war increases scrutiny on use of crops for energy

Madeleine Bruder

 

Soaring food prices caused by the war in Ukraine have increased the risk of famine, raising pressure on producers of low-carbon fuels derived from crops and sparking a “food versus biofuel” debate.

Before Russia’s invasion, global biofuel production was at a record high. In the US, the leading biofuels producer, 36 per cent of total corn production went into biofuels last year, while biodiesel accounted for 40 per cent of soyabean oil supplies.

But some food companies and policymakers are calling for an easing of mandates for blending biofuels into petrol and diesel to increase global grain and vegetable oil supplies.

“Now is not the time [for governments] to be encouraging the conversion of food crops to energy through artificial policy incentives or mandatory blending targets,” said the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute.

Between them, Russia and Ukraine produce nearly a fifth of the world’s corn and more than half its sunflower oil, but crop exports from the countries are at a fraction of prewar levels. Hundreds of millions of people are at risk of “hunger and destitution” because of food shortages caused by the war, the UN’s secretary-general warned last week.

The total amount of crops used annually for biofuels is equal to the calorie consumption of 1.9bn people, according to data firm Gro Intelligence, highlighting the volume of agricultural commodities that could be diverted from energy use if the food security crisis worsened.

Do biofuels cause problems in food markets?

Biofuels — ethanol made from corn and sugarcane and biodiesel made from vegetable oils including soyabean oil and palm oil — have been blended into motor fuel since the early 2000s to boost energy supplies and reduce the environmental impact of fossil fuels.

Biofuels were blamed in part for the last food crisis in 2007-08. Studies, including from the World Bank and IMF, suggested that the growth of biofuels contributed 20-50 per cent to the price increase of corn during the crisis. Their rising use was described as “a crime against humanity” by the UN’s then-food rights rapporteur.

But biofuel producers argue they have played a minimal role this time around. “Biofuels didn’t cause this crisis — either the price or the contraction in supply,” said James Cogan of Ethanol Europe, an industry lobby group.

High prices are not about demand but reflect “erratic trading conditions and high energy prices”, he added. Reducing biofuel production “wouldn’t materially ease the price crisis”.

Would limits on biofuels reduce world hunger?

A 50 per cent reduction in the grain used for biofuels in Europe and the US would compensate for all the lost exports of Ukrainian wheat, corn, barley and rye, according to the World Resources Institute, a Washington think-tank.

Although crop production has risen along with biofuel output, meaning the amount available for food supplies has not decreased, biofuel usage cannot rise exponentially without damage to the environment, campaigners said.

“In a world that is food insecure, we need to be thinking really critically about these limited resources as we try to feed the world and solve the climate crisis,” said Oliver James, a researcher at Princeton University who helped compile the WRI data.

Maik Marahrens, of Brussels-based environmental campaign group Transport & Environment, said that in the EU, about 10,000 tonnes of wheat, equal to 15mn loaves of bread, are burnt daily as ethanol in cars.

The ethanol industry says such comparisons are unfair. Most of the grain used to produce fuel is feed wheat, which goes into animal food, rather than milling wheat, which is made into bread, the industry has argued.

Biofuel sector executives said the amount of wheat used for biofuels was negligible — about 2 per cent of the total crop, according to industry association UFOP.

“In that context, it’s a bit surreal to be elevating wheat ethanol even to a topic of conversation in the current crisis about bread,” said Eric Sievers, director of investments at ClonBio, which owns Europe’s largest grain biorefinery, located in Hungary, as well as at Ethanol Europe.

A Russian missile in a winter wheat field in Soledar, in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region © Gleb Garanich/Reuters

Would it be more harmful to limit biofuels?

Industry executives argue that biofuels create efficiencies that nourish animals and, indirectly, humans.

The industry is a significant producer of animal feed since the process of turning grains into ethanol creates protein and fat by-products that are fed to chickens, cows and pigs.

Citing the impact on the EU alone, Cogan said limits on biofuel production “would result in lost renewable energy, lost energy independence, lost jobs, lost farm income security, increased fossil fuel imports, increased carbon emissions and increased soy meal imports [for animal feed] from the Americas”. 

Are biofuel policies changing?

In the EU, Belgium and Germany are considering easing biofuel blending mandates to address food security.

The International Energy Agency cut its biofuels growth forecast for this year by 20 per cent, forecasting global demand to increase 5 per cent from 2021 to 8.5bn litres.

In the US, where cheaper corn-based ethanol is the main biofuel, Washington has tried to tamp down rising gasoline prices by allowing the higher blending level, normally cut during the summer months because of polluting concerns, to temporarily continue.

But government incentives for biodiesel and the decline in global exports from Ukraine have added to competition for soyabean oil, squeezing supplies for US food groups.

“[Soyabean oil suppliers] can’t give me a [price] quote because they can’t take my business. There’s not enough oil to go around,” said Ed Cinco, purchasing director at Schwebel’s, a bakery in Ohio.

While China has warned ethanol producers that it will “strictly control processing of fuel ethanol from corn”, India is pushing ahead with targets to raise blending quotas. Prices for sugar, the country’s main bioethanol feedstock, have increased less than other crops.

Although co-ordinated action on food security has moved swiftly up the agenda, there has been little debate on limits to biofuels at an international level.

Instead, countries using biofuels must balance food security and sustainability with energy costs and independence, said Nicolas Denis, a partner at McKinsey. Governments need to decide “what sustainable use of land looks like, given the different priorities”, he added.

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Biofuels are accelerating the food crisis — and the climate crisis, too

It’s crazy to put more food in our fuel tanks when there’s a war on. Or when there isn’t.

19 April 2022

(Patrick Pleul/Picture Alliance via Getty Images)

Michael Grunwald

CANARY MEDIA

Ukraine has stopped exporting its grain because it’s at war. Russia’s customers have stopped buying its grain because it started that war. Famine is stalking East Africa, where a brutal drought has ravaged harvests — and now the region can no longer supplement its production with Ukrainian and Russian imports. Drought is also parching farms in the United States, especially in the West and the southern Plains — another contributor to higher food prices and growing food shortages.

The United Nations was warning even before the war in Europe’s breadbasket that the world faced ​“unprecedented catastrophic levels” of food insecurity, and now that global food prices have reached an all-time high, we’re facing the worst food crisis since 2008. It’s a weird time to divert more grain from the food supply to fuel tanks.

In Washington, though, it’s always time to divert grain from food to fuel. President Biden visited Iowa corn country last week to announce he’s allowing more corn ethanol to be blended into gasoline this summer, a move designed to save drivers 10 cents per gallon at a time of painful prices at the pump. It will also make food more expensive at a time of painful prices at the supermarket, but it will surely please a lot of farm lobbyists and Midwestern politicians.

The amount of corn it takes to fill an SUV with ethanol could feed a person for a year, and the U.S. and Europe could immediately replace the lost grain exports from Ukraine’s breadbasket by cutting their biofuel production in half. So it’s pretty obvious why this food crisis is a dumb time to accelerate biofuel production. In fact, a bunch of studies have confirmed that biofuel mandates were a leading driver of the 2008 food crisis, driving up prices by driving up demand for grain and vegetable oil.

The thing is, the reasons biofuels are dumb when the world is freaking out about its food supply are the same reasons most biofuels are always dumb: Land is much more efficient at growing food than growing energy. Using land to grow fuel induces the clearing of additional land to grow food, wiping out forests and other carbon sinks we need to save the climate. And for the foreseeable future, the world should always be freaking out about its food supply.

This was the theme of my first Eating the Earth column about food and climate, and fair warning: It’s going to be a recurring theme. No matter what ends up happening in Ukraine, the world will still face a long-term food crisis after the guns go silent. Farmers will need to grow 7 quadrillion additional calories every year by 2050 to feed the growing global population, and they’ll need to do it on a smaller agricultural footprint to avoid accelerating our long-term climate crisis. But humanity is currently on track to tear down another 14 Californias’ worth of forests to provide the farmland we need to grow the food we need.

In other words, our food and climate crises are largely land crises. We need the limited land on earth to produce massive amounts of food and store massive amounts of carbon. But thanks to misguided government policies, of which Biden’s latest agri-pander is a relatively innocuous example, we’re using more than 30 million acres of U.S. cornfields, almost an entire Iowa worth of incredibly productive land, to grow modest amounts of fuel.

Meanwhile, the European Union is pushing new climate policies that would devote as much as 20 percent of the continent’s farmland to growing crops for fuel and electricity, an area larger than Poland. The math just doesn’t pencil out. It would take about 30 percent of the world’s crops to provide just 2 percent of the world’s energy, which would drive up food prices, speed up deforestation and ratchet up carbon emissions. The only thing most biofuels do well is funnel extra cash to farmers.

Let’s be honest: What Biden is doing is not an economic or environmental catastrophe. He’s suspending a rule so that U.S. filling stations can sell gas with 15 percent instead of 10 percent ethanol for a couple of months, which might create a bit more smog, food inflation and natural destruction. But it’s just a temporary tweak.

The real catastrophe is the world’s broader commitment to farm-grown energy, embodied in the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard, which mandates that 15 billion gallons of ethanol be blended into fuels each year, as well as Europe’s push for even more ambitious bioenergy mandates. If we were really serious about our long-term food and climate crises, we wouldn’t keep using productive land to grow fuels that make both crises worse.
“You come out against ethanol, you are dead meat”

Ethanol is the most common form of alcohol, the fermented magic in beer, wine and liquor. It’s also a functional automotive fuel that powered the first prototype of the internal combustion engine and was once touted by Henry Ford as the future of transportation. He was wrong — gasoline turned out to be much more efficient. But over the last few decades, corn ethanol has carved out a modest role in U.S. fuel markets because powerful politicians have seen it as a miracle elixir for agricultural prosperity.

Farm-state congressional leaders such as Bob Dole (R) of Kansas, Tom Daschle (D) of South Dakota and former House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R) of Illinois — who became an ethanol lobbyist before he went to jail over a sexual abuse scandal — repeatedly pushed through protective tariffs, tax breaks and lavish subsidies for ethanol. And presidential candidates have sucked up to ethanol interests during Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses so shamelessly and predictably that an entire episode of The West Wing lampooned the quadrennial spectacle.

“You come out against ethanol, you are dead meat,” political aide Josh Lyman warned future president Matt Santos. ​“Bambi would have a better shot at getting elected president of the NRA than you’ll have of getting a single vote in this caucus!”

Santos thought ethanol was ridiculous, but he supported it publicly, and so has every nonfictional president since Jimmy Carter. George W. Bush enacted and expanded the Renewable Fuel Standard. Barack Obama of corn-rich Illinois preached the biofuels gospel too. Donald Trump pandered even harder to his farm-state supporters, approving year-round 15 percent ethanol (the new standard was eventually struck down in court). Biden and his ethanol-loving agriculture secretary, former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack, are just following tradition.

Even environmentalists initially supported the Renewable Fuel Standard. ​“Renewable” sounded sustainable, and biofuels seemed like the only viable alternative to gasoline. There were no electric vehicles on America’s roads in the Bush years, and the future prospects seemed so bleak that a 2006 documentary was titled Who Killed the Electric Car?

Today, of course, electric vehicles are almost universally acknowledged as the real future of transportation. Even many boosters who once dreamed that biofuels would provide all transportation fuel now focus more on serving the hard-to-electrify aviation and shipping industries.

The question is whether biofuels are any greener than fossil fuels. They’re certainly not more efficient. Fossilized plants from millions of years ago have much higher energy density than fresh plants, and the corn ethanol production process uses almost a gallon of fossil fuel for every gallon of gasoline it displaces. Still, even though planting, plowing, fertilizing, harvesting, fermenting and distilling corn produces far more emissions than extracting and refining oil, the prevailing science before 2008 found ethanol to be slightly better for the climate than gasoline because growing corn on a farm absorbed the carbon emitted by burning ethanol in an engine.

The problem was that when cornfields were used to grow fuel, farmers needed to clear more carbon-absorbing natural land to replace the lost food production capacity. A 2008 paper in Science revealed that when this ​“indirect land-use change” was taken into account, corn ethanol and other farm-grown fuels were much worse for the climate than gasoline. That year’s food crisis basically confirmed the findings, as the ethanol boom depressed U.S. corn exports, which encouraged Brazilian farmers to plant more soybeans on former pastures to replace the missing grain, which encouraged Brazilian cattle ranchers to deforest the Amazon at record rates to create new pastures. More recent studies have confirmed that while biofuels made from crop residues or other waste products can help the climate, using productive land to grow fuel is a climate disaster.

The biofuels industry can still point to studies that find climate benefits, but what those studies all have in common is that they downplay the danger of land-use change — by assuming that biofuels will be grown on unspecified ​“marginal lands” that wouldn’t be able to grow food, or that biofuels will somehow inspire farmers to grow so much more food on their existing farms that they won’t need to clear more land, or, ironically, that biofuels will increase food prices so much that the global poor will eat less, a rather ugly source of climate benefits. In fact, the U.S. government’s modeling justifying ethanol as a climate solution generated all of its greenhouse gas savings from reduced food consumption abroad.

In the context of the global land crunch, the science of biofuels is not as complex as some scientists make it sound. The world has committed to ending deforestation by 2030 to help keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius, and there’s a broad consensus that limiting warming to 1.5 degrees would also require a massive campaign of reforestation by 2050. At the same time, the world is already devoting an area the size of Texas to growing fuel, even though more land for farming means less land for forests, wetlands and other natural ecosystems. The twin problems of agricultural expansion and deforestation are currently getting worse, and many nations are planning to use even more crop-based biofuels to meet their renewable energy goals. There’s obviously a Texas-sized opportunity to free up scarce land for food production and carbon-friendly rewilding.

But even the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Nobel Prize–winning gold standard on global warming, has promoted bioenergy as a potential strategy to cut emissions, in part because researchers devoted to bioenergy have had so much sway at the IPCC. Felix Creutzig, a German physicist who oversaw the IPCC’s bioenergy work for its landmark 2014 report, told me ardent bioenergy supporters shot down his efforts to inject words of caution into their chapter. He and other biofuels skeptics on his team had to go to the Journal of Industrial Ecology to publish a critique of excessively rosy bioenergy analyses.

“It’s a huge bias in science: People make a career investment in studying a technology, then they defend that technology,” Creutzig said. ​“It’s a real problem.”

Sticking with bioenergy is easy — and dead wrong

Of course, there’s an even stronger pro-biofuels bias in the political arena. In the U.S., Biden has an opportunity this year to change the rules under the Renewable Fuel Standard, and even though he’s vowed to devote his entire government to climate action, there’s virtually no chance that he’ll try to roll back the ethanol mandate.

In the European Union, the ​“Fit for 55” plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions 55 percent by 2030 depends heavily on growing crops for fuel and burning trees for electricity — even though forest-grown power may be even more damaging than farm-grown fuels. If anything, farm and forestry interests are even more influential in Europe than in the U.S.

It’s understandable that policymakers are grasping for alternatives to fossil fuels during a climate crisis. It’s especially understandable during an energy crisis when renewable fuels can be a four-fer that address public anger about gas prices, reduce demand for Vladimir Putin’s petroleum, subsidize rural interests with outsized political influence, and at least sound like a step toward a greener world. Politically, bioenergy is usually the path of least resistance.

Right now, though, with corn prices up nearly 50 percent since the start of 2021, we’re confronted with the cost of using grain to fuel our cars rather than ourselves every time we buy cereal. And with the latest IPCC report portraying a world hurtling toward calamity, the cost of using land to grow energy rather than food or trees also ought to be starker than ever. Land is the only successful tool we have for growing the food we need to sustain us and storing the carbon we need to save us; fortunately, we now have better ways to produce energy.

Ultimately, the problem of saving the climate while feeding the world will not be solved by following the path of least resistance. We’ll have to do a lot of things that make powerful interests uncomfortable, and maybe some things that make all of us uncomfortable. The earth is our home, the only planet we’ve found with barbecue potato chips, breathable air and the NBA playoffs, and at some point we’ll have to be willing to make a few sacrifices to keep it habitable.

On the other hand: 10 cents a gallon!