biofuels

America produces a lot of food. So much food, in fact, that it is one of the world’s major food exporters, and so much grain and soy that we turn much of it into ethanol to power our cars.

Even excluding the calories that we export or turn into agro-fuels, per-capita caloric availability was 2,700 calories per person in 2007. That’s plenty of food. [Excel link]. No one should be hungry in a country that produces that much food.

But that doesn’t mean that many aren’t going hungry. The latest USDA survey results show that 14.6 percent of the American population — 17 million households — was food-insecure at some point in 2008. “Food insecure” means that the food consumption of one member of the household, or more, was reduced because they lacked for money or other ways to access food. That number shot up from 13 million households in 2007, 11.1 percent of the population.

If the U.S. government changes nothing about its approach toward energy and global warming, the nation's energy consumption will grow 14 percent by 2035. Fossil fuels will retain a relatively high share of that total, and U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from energy will increase by 8.7 percent.

Those are the latest long-term projections described by the Department of Energy's Energy Information Agency on Monday.

The findings highlight a need for federal regulations if greenhouse gas emissions are to be reduced as Congress is considering and members of the international community are demanding in Copenhagen this week. The findings also suggest that state efforts to increase energy efficiency and renewable energy use will begin to pay off.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency indicated this week that it is leaning toward increasing the biofuel "blend wall," the amount of ethanol allowed to be added to gasoline.

It's still running tests, and it delayed a final decision until summer, but the agency said Tuesday that initial data indicate newer engines can handle more ethanol than the current 10 percent limit.

"It is vitally important that the country increase the use of renewable fuels," EPA Assistant Administrator Gina McCarthy wrote to retired Gen. Wesley Clark, co-chairman of the ethanol trade association Growth Energy, which requested the blend wall be bumped from 10 to 15 percent.

Biofuels have been widely pitched as developed nations’ best hope to cut greenhouse gas emissions and provide energy security. However, as their use has grown, unintended consequences have surfaced, raising questions about just how large a role some biofuels should play.

The United States Navy is taking a big leap forward in "greening" its 50,000-strong, gas-guzzling fleet of vehicles, committing to a 50 percent cut in oil use by 2015, the Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus declared in a speech at the Naval Energy Forum.

That's not all. Mabus said the Navy will attempt to get 50 percent of its total energy from alternative sources by 2020, including its ships, aircraft, tanks, vehicles and bases. Currently, that figure is at 17 percent.

The reason: The Navy's imported oil addiction is socking the service with billions of dollars in losses. The Navy's new "hybrid of the seas," the USS Makin Island (pictured above), is expected to yield $250 million in savings over its lifetime, Mabus said. The ship has an electric motor that kicks in at low speeds. The money-saving hybrid-electric systems will soon be installed on 12 vessels.

The same is true for planes. Improving the efficiency of each aircraft by just 3 percent would save the Navy 127,000 barrels of fuel per plane, per year. That's $15 million per aircraft, annually, at today's fuel prices.

What it boils down is that the geopolitics of petroleum has gotten costly. The numbers don't lie:

It is widely known that corn ethanol is driving the growth of the Gulf of Mexico's "dead zone." Now, surprising new data suggests that switching to non-food cellulosic fuels won't help the problem one bit.

The "dead zone" is an oxygen-starved black hole that swells each spring and summer as toxic nitrogen fertilizer runs off the cornfields of the U.S. Midwest, down the Mississippi River and into the Gulf of Mexico.

The nasty nitrates breed algal blooms on the water's surface, absorbing oxygen and depriving sea dwellers of their prime life source.

The zone has been around for 50-odd years. In 2006, it measured over 6,600 square miles. Last year it grew to 10,500 square miles — the size of Massachusetts. The culprit? The corn biofuel boom that's been spurred along by aggressive U.S. government ethanol mandates.

The result could be a potential ruin of a $3 billion fishing industry and an entire aquatic ecosystem.

And that is why the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has pledged to bring a substantial chunk of the "dead zone" back to life by 2015. But if they're looking to next-gen biofuels to be a magic cure-all, they may want to think again.

When the House Committee on Agriculture opens its hearing on climate legislation this afternoon, its chairman will be pushing another bill aimed at changing the government's biofuel rules. His arguments on behalf of ethanol have drawn the most attention, but the bill would also open federal forests for biomass production.

That effort is pitting agriculture interests against environmentalists – and it could hold up the climate bill.

Representing the environmentalist perspective is the National Resources Defense Council’s Nathanael Greene, who writes that the bill is an attempt by timber and agriculture interests to weaken “the safeguards designed to ensure that we don’t burn irreplaceable forests for energy.”

Despite widespread research indicating that growing biofuels on Africa's 'idle' lands could help to starve the continent, the practice remains rampant, according to a new study.

The report is the work of the Washington, D.C.-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), a research center funded by 64 governments, private foundations and global organizations.

Researchers revealed that foreign companies are buying or leasing vast chunks of land in Africa and elsewhere for their own use. In fact, up to 50 million acres have been sold off or soon will be. That's equivalent to about 25 percent of all the farmland in Europe.

Much of that land is being bought by emerging nations to raise crops for their growing populations. These countries – China, India, South Korea and oil-rich Gulf states – have land and water constraints at home. They got burned by last year’s global food crisis and are turning to Africa as a food security blanket.

The rest of that land, a quarter or more, will be used by foreign companies to grow first-generation biofuels from crops, such as palm oil and jatropha.

The problems with these energy plants are well known.

In 2007, Congress delivered what it thought was a big ticket solution to global climate change: a massive biofuel mandate under the banner of the Energy Independence and Security Act.

It was a gift to agribusiness and the farm lobby in the form of a 36 billion gallon biofuel production requirement that had to be met by 2022.

Since then, corn ethanol has been a boom-and-bust business, with scientific evidence calling into the question its environmental benefits and raising concern about its impact on the global food supply. 

Today, the Obama administration brought intelligence and teamwork to bear on the biofuel mess, for the first time proposing federal rules that consider the impact of U.S. biofuels on the world beyond the agribusiness lobby. And it is acknowledging that while advanced biofuels have great potential, corn ethanol is only tolerable as a bridge to the future.

This week, to coincide with the start of UN climate talks in Poland, scientists from seven nations released a report showing that torching tropical forests to produce palm-oil plantations for biofuel makes climate change worse by killing critical "carbon sinks." From co-author Dr. Neil Burgess of the World Wildlife Fund:

Biofuels are a bad deal for forests, wildlife and the climate if they replace tropical rain forests. In fact, they hasten climate change by removing one of the world's most efficient carbon storage tools--intact tropical rain forests.

The report reveals that it would take 75 to 93 years to save enough carbon emissions to make up for the CO2 released by burning down forests. Researchers also found that it's much worse on peatlands, which are so chock-full of carbon that it would take 600 years before any benefits are seen.

The US corn ethanol industry is struggling, now that Midwest floods have washed out millions of acres of prime cropland, sending corn prices soaring and ethanol profits falling. If this statement by Citigroup is anything to go by, then it could be even worse than feared.

As quoted in MarketWatch:

As a result of the rapid margin deterioration, nearly 120 small to midsize ethanol producers "will be shut down over the next few months," said David Driscoll, an analyst at Citigroup, in a written comment released Thursday. There are currently about 160 ethanol plants in the United States, according to the Renewable Fuels Association.

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