Fidel Castro and the economist agree: Beware of Biofuels
Biofuels is being touted as an oil alternative by some, but others believe it will destroy more than it saves.
It’s a rare event when the right of centre, pro-capitalist magazine The Economist finds itself in agreement with Fidel Castro. But when one of the last of the old-style communist dictators rose from his sick bed last month to write two scathing articles about the Bush administration’s enthusiastic embrace of biofuels, The Economist said it couldn’t agree more.
Biofuels - a category that encompasses fuels created from plants such as corn and sugar cane (ethanol), palm oil and other vegetable and animal oils - have been touted as a major panacea to the world’s reliance on the diminishing reserves of crude oil.
However, concerns over the consequences of diverting food crops for fuel, the energy required to create certain types of ethanol, and the destruction of forests and habitat for palm oil plantations, has many wondering whether they will do more damage than good.
The world’s largest producers have grouped together to create a sustainable business model, particularly regarding palm oil plantations, which are forecast to triple to 20 million hectares by 2010. Environmentalists want a moratorium while the technology, and the consequences, are refined and understood.
Castro’s outburst followed news that the US had mandated a target of 133 billion litres of biofuels by 2017, or nearly 10% of its total gasoline use - an initiative welcomed by farmers, oil companies and politicians. But Castro’s concern was that agricultural land will be used to feed cars rather than people.
In the US, subsidies would see farmers getting more money for fuel than food and rising prices for both corn and meat. In poorer countries, crops could be diverted to fuel cars in richer nations.
Meanwhile, in Malaysia and Indonesia, environmental groups fear oil-palm planting - to meet an expected huge demand from Europe - is running virtually unchecked, resulting in the cutting down of millions of hectares of forests, the release of hundreds of millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide from peat burning, and the threatened extinction of major wildlife species, including the orang-outang and the Sumatran tiger.
Oil palm is highly productive, yielding five tonnes of crude oil per hectare and generating internal rates of return of 26% per annum, according to several international studies, but it also generates significant waste products. Many plantations use petroleum-based pesticides and fertilisers that add further to greenhouse gas emissions, leading some groups to describe such biofuels as a disaster in the making.
While the US and the EU have set 10% targets for biofuels in cars, Australia has a far more modest target of 350 million litres by 2011, or less than 1% of total fuel and diesel use. Greenpeace and the Australian Conservation Foundation argue that firm controls have to be established before new targets are set.
“The biodiesel industry lacks a certification scheme to ensure that it does not present more problems than it causes,” says Greenpeace energy campaigner Mark Wakeham. “We’ve got to make sure we don’t make a headlong rush into biofuels without being clear on what trying to achieve.”
The Australian biofuels industry is represented by a disparate group of entrepreneurs seeking to exploit opportunities offered by the use of sugar cane, corn, canola, soya, imported palm oil and other products such as tallow (animal fat from livestock industry) and used cooking oil as feedstocks.
According to Barry Murphy, who has been working to create a single industry body and will be the inaugural chairman of the Biofuels Association of Australia, the industry already has a capacity of some 400 million litres a year, but much of this is going untapped because of poor consumer demand.
Murphy, a former executive chairman of Caltex Australia, also chairs the company Natural Biofuels, which imports palm oil from Indonesia for its newly commissioned plant in Darwin. He says his company has joined the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, a group established by WWF and comprising major multinationals, to address those concerns.
“We will not sanction the displacement of wildlife and native people,” he says. “There are always costs with these things, but we are trying to do this in the right way.”
Source: http://bulletin.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=261345
