Friday, February 08, 2008

Biofuels: Still NOT a Good Idea!

I was always kind of vaguely suspicious of biofuels - the argument has essentially been over which politician can lavish more subsidies on their constituents in the name of "green fuels" - and finally we have some better proof that FlexFuel vehicles = bullshit.

From the journal Science:

New York Times summary of the reports:
Biofuels Deemed a Greenhouse Threat

So basically, when you take into account the carbon dioxide emitted when land is cleared for use in biofuel growth (and eventually, because of substitution effects, some land somewhere is going to get cleared), you put yourself in a deep carbon debt that will take a few generations of using biofuels to escape.

Not to mention the fact that the entire life-cycle carbon cost of biofuels is kind of suspicious as it is. I'm supposed to believe that all of the energy it takes to grow the crops, harvest them, transport them to refineries, and refine them into fuel is less than the amount of energy you get out of the fuel? It's not like I'm breaking new ground in this analysis, check out this article from 2005.

So how much longer do you suppose we'll be hearing from politicians about how important it is to expand federal subsidies for biofuels? I wouldn't expect it anytime soon, if it's one thing that both Republicans and Democrats can agree on, it's that we need to transfer massive amounts of wealth to farmers and agri-business ($618 billion dollars, 2008-2017).

1 comment:

Greg Eckenrode said...

What is this? A post on the economics of biofuels and no mention of the effects on corn prices? Or the resulting economic difficulties in Latin America? For shame!
On the other hand, I think it's also important to point out that the entire concept of biofuels isn't entirely bunk. For example, Changing World Technologies is having a small amount of success converting biological waste products into crude oil. Biodiesel from waste vegetable oil (think fast food fryers) has been viable for years now. Plus, there's always the promise of cellulosic ethanol, in which the entire bulk of some fast-growing plant, like switchgrass, is fermented into ethanol, although that is admittedly not here yet.