OK, so maybe it wasn't such a good idea to grow agricultural crops in order to be able to fuel my car. I realise that using agricultural land to grow biofuel does compete with other crops that feed man and beast. Let's call it ILUC (indirect land use change) - and make it very complicated.
What I don't understand is why biofuel crops (oilseed, oil palm, sugarcane and corn/wheat) are the only crops that are unwanted. Cotton you say is OK, because of course we need clothes, but hey we can wear clothes made from woodfibres/viscose or made from crude oil we pump out of the ground aka nylon. No need to wear these agriculturally grown fibres? When we wash our hands or hair in the bath, did anyone ever cry ILUC? As well as for biodiesel the oil crops are also the only feedstock for production of a whole range of soaps, shampoos and technical products that we like to use. We could also use products derived from mineral oil, but we prefer the natural products.
I think it is amazing how the green troops have managed to set the agenda selectively. The reality is that no matter what we do when we try to manage nature, we will get negative side effects.
Let's take a look at the next big thing. Everybody agrees that it would be just wonderful if we could "just" make biofuel from cellulosis and agricultural waste. Has anybody tried to calculate how much wood waste would be necessary to "feed the beast"? Wikipedia suggests that close to 20% of US land (similar to the area used to grow crops) would be needed to cover US transportation fuels from ethanol from switchgrass - quite significant numbers - that will definitely have a significant ILUC effect.
What will happen to the ecosystem and the nutrient content of the soil if much more of the biomass is removed from the land in order to be processed/turned into biofuel? Well - the soil is going to be deprived of organic material, which constitutes an important part of the slow release system for nutrients and water of the soil - also known as humus. Depriving the soil of the organic material will be slowly spoiling the carrying capacity of the soil.
Using wood and forest by-products has similar problems. Enormous quantities are needed, there will be competition with other uses of forest products, from firewood, over cellulosis to fibreboards and construction wood. And the forest is potential agricultural land and vise versa - so also an ILUC effect here. I guess our politicians are in for a tough job to find the "good" solution to our energy and transport fuel problems. Unfortunately they are not going to get any help from the green NGOs.
Update: A German view on the same issue comes to largely the same conclusion.
Showing posts with label sustainable biofuels. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sustainable biofuels. Show all posts
Monday, October 22, 2012
Friday, September 14, 2012
Biofuels in Troubles
Food versus Fuel
The European biofuel market is setting the agenda for the world of biofuels. Biofuels has come under severe attack from many sides again lately. This is nothing new, as we have previously discussed here on this blog. Last time around was back in 2008 when oil prices as well as most agricultural commodities rallied until they collapsed in the summer of 2008. This time around it was the drought in the US and the consequently high prices of corn/maize that started the debate. The debate was started by authoritative UN food agency that called for a suspension of US bioethanol scheme. As roughly 40% of the US corn production is used for ethanol biofuel production, the usual players started the fuel versus food debate. Nestle, Swiss multinational food company issued a statement already back in 2011, but were happy to repeat the message in 2012. European politicians already under financial pressure have already scaled back their support for biofuel. With the introduction of the Renewable Energy Directive in 2009 and introduction of the double counting for waste based biofuels (a programme which makes it easier to meet blend in targets) are now again under pressure to repair the biofuel policy. So it was really no big surprise when on September 10 Reuters could rumour a EU document that spoke about limiting crop based biofuels to 5% of transport fuels by 2020.
Biofuel already under pressure to improve
This EU initiative really should not come as a surprise. It is clear that current 1st generation biofuel will not solve the fuel issue, and biofuel that is either unsustainable or comes at the cost of human starvation is not a long time option. Already the Renewable Energy Directive has some quite ambitious targets, as the green house gas savings requirements rise from 35% over 50% in 2017 to 60% in 2018. Ongoing discussions over the so-called ILUC (Indirect land use changes) have been ongoing for years, and it boils down to the fact that no matter how you look at it, if you grow crops for use as biofuel they will inevitably end up having replaced a food crop and thus potentially contributing to reduction in food supply.
Silence from the industry?
So who is actually standing up for the biofuel industry. Well nobody really. The European Biodiesel Board, the European biodiesel manufacturer's association seeems to so be busy fighting their colleagues in the US, Argentina and Indonesia that they have not had the time to go in and defend the industry.
The future for the biofuel industry
So clearly production of biodiesel from virgin oils and bioethanol from corn and other food crops is not the final solution. However it is an important stepping stone in the search for better and more sustainable technologies. Already in Europe the biodiesel industry is under so much economic pressure that the majority of biodiesel plants are idle, and a large part of the remaining plants are running on used cooking oil, waste animal fats and other low quality non-edible by-product oils. A number of new technologies are under development, where the greatest hopes are tied to the cellulosic ethanol, which as a 2nd generation biofuel with no food versus fuel dilemmas is seen as very green. The hope is that you can really turn low value wood and agricultural by-products into valuable biofuel with clever technology. We are still waiting for the technology improvements that will allow profitable commercial scale production. In the meantime it is important that politicians do not rock the boat so much that all the commercial players will drown. Who is going to invest - next time the politicians want us to be more green?
The European biofuel market is setting the agenda for the world of biofuels. Biofuels has come under severe attack from many sides again lately. This is nothing new, as we have previously discussed here on this blog. Last time around was back in 2008 when oil prices as well as most agricultural commodities rallied until they collapsed in the summer of 2008. This time around it was the drought in the US and the consequently high prices of corn/maize that started the debate. The debate was started by authoritative UN food agency that called for a suspension of US bioethanol scheme. As roughly 40% of the US corn production is used for ethanol biofuel production, the usual players started the fuel versus food debate. Nestle, Swiss multinational food company issued a statement already back in 2011, but were happy to repeat the message in 2012. European politicians already under financial pressure have already scaled back their support for biofuel. With the introduction of the Renewable Energy Directive in 2009 and introduction of the double counting for waste based biofuels (a programme which makes it easier to meet blend in targets) are now again under pressure to repair the biofuel policy. So it was really no big surprise when on September 10 Reuters could rumour a EU document that spoke about limiting crop based biofuels to 5% of transport fuels by 2020.
Biofuel already under pressure to improve
This EU initiative really should not come as a surprise. It is clear that current 1st generation biofuel will not solve the fuel issue, and biofuel that is either unsustainable or comes at the cost of human starvation is not a long time option. Already the Renewable Energy Directive has some quite ambitious targets, as the green house gas savings requirements rise from 35% over 50% in 2017 to 60% in 2018. Ongoing discussions over the so-called ILUC (Indirect land use changes) have been ongoing for years, and it boils down to the fact that no matter how you look at it, if you grow crops for use as biofuel they will inevitably end up having replaced a food crop and thus potentially contributing to reduction in food supply.
Silence from the industry?
So who is actually standing up for the biofuel industry. Well nobody really. The European Biodiesel Board, the European biodiesel manufacturer's association seeems to so be busy fighting their colleagues in the US, Argentina and Indonesia that they have not had the time to go in and defend the industry.
The future for the biofuel industry
So clearly production of biodiesel from virgin oils and bioethanol from corn and other food crops is not the final solution. However it is an important stepping stone in the search for better and more sustainable technologies. Already in Europe the biodiesel industry is under so much economic pressure that the majority of biodiesel plants are idle, and a large part of the remaining plants are running on used cooking oil, waste animal fats and other low quality non-edible by-product oils. A number of new technologies are under development, where the greatest hopes are tied to the cellulosic ethanol, which as a 2nd generation biofuel with no food versus fuel dilemmas is seen as very green. The hope is that you can really turn low value wood and agricultural by-products into valuable biofuel with clever technology. We are still waiting for the technology improvements that will allow profitable commercial scale production. In the meantime it is important that politicians do not rock the boat so much that all the commercial players will drown. Who is going to invest - next time the politicians want us to be more green?
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Neste Oil goes online with 2.000.000 t per year capacity
Neste Oil from Finland has for some years operated a biodiesel plant in Finland employing a unique technology NExBTL. The technology is unlike the normal FAME transesterification and seems to be quite smart. Neste opened in March their new plant in Singapore of 800.000 t/a capacity and a similar plant in Rotterdam is to follow mid 2011. this is on to of the existing almost 400.000 t/a year capacity in Finland. According to Neste the two new plants are to run on a mix of palm oil, tallow and rape oil. But think about the scale of these plants...
2 M t/a of palm oil and tallow, how much is that? annual production of palm oil from Malaysia and Indonesia, the worlds largest producers by far is around 45 M t/a and world production of tallow is appr. 8 M t/y, so Neste will be taking care of a significant chunk of world production. Remember that palm is also an important source of food, feed and feedstock for the oleochemical industry (soap and technical applications) and also tallow is an important feedstock for the oleochemical industry. In my opinion Neste is on the wrong track. They are going to significantly affect the world balance of oil raw material, and good feedstock should not be used for biodiesel, when it can be used for and is displacing other more vital and necessary applications. This is clearly not sustainable.. no wonder Neste is busy claiming how sustainable they will be in the future: http://www.nesteoil.com/default.asp?path=1,41,540,2384,7906,16306 But as we know Jatropha oil is nothing but a future mirage so far, and microbial and algae oil is also still hopes at best. So for the foreseeable future I assume they will stick to palm and tallow. It will be interesting to see if they are able to consolidate these volumes and how this will affect world prices.
Greenpeace have their own way of communicating about the same theme:
2 M t/a of palm oil and tallow, how much is that? annual production of palm oil from Malaysia and Indonesia, the worlds largest producers by far is around 45 M t/a and world production of tallow is appr. 8 M t/y, so Neste will be taking care of a significant chunk of world production. Remember that palm is also an important source of food, feed and feedstock for the oleochemical industry (soap and technical applications) and also tallow is an important feedstock for the oleochemical industry. In my opinion Neste is on the wrong track. They are going to significantly affect the world balance of oil raw material, and good feedstock should not be used for biodiesel, when it can be used for and is displacing other more vital and necessary applications. This is clearly not sustainable.. no wonder Neste is busy claiming how sustainable they will be in the future: http://www.nesteoil.com/default.asp?path=1,41,540,2384,7906,16306 But as we know Jatropha oil is nothing but a future mirage so far, and microbial and algae oil is also still hopes at best. So for the foreseeable future I assume they will stick to palm and tallow. It will be interesting to see if they are able to consolidate these volumes and how this will affect world prices.
Greenpeace have their own way of communicating about the same theme:
Monday, January 19, 2009
Are Bio Fuels Truly Sustainable?
A lot of exiting things are happening in the world at the moment - and I'm not just thinking about the economic crisis. For some years now the climate situation has been on the agenda. The Kyoto Protocol put the negative effect of the increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere on the agenda and several countries committed to reducing carbon dioxide emission. Former vice president Al Gore managed to communicate the consequences of these emissions in his "Inconvenient Truth" in a way that everybody could understand. So now we are at the point where we know that we have to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, but how do we do it?
A number of challenges are facing us.
The clean technology race. A lot of different technologies are now effectively competing against each other for investments and customer attention. Photo voltaics, algae based bio diesel, 2nd generation ethanol from wood and agro waste, wind power and wave and tidal power and many more.
The sustainability dilemma. As it has turned out the initiatives that were taken to act, and to actually shift from petro-fuel to bio fuel ended by being pooh poohed - first by NGOs as the friends of the earth in their campaign against use of palm oil in bio fuels, due to the fact that palm oil plantations are replacing virgin rainforest. - and then at the top of the commodity price hike by the UK Gallagher Review that recommends less widespread usage of bio fuels due to potential negative environment effects, as well as undesirable competition towards food usage and in some cases questionable environmental effects.
It is not difficult to understand that many people are now confused and don't know how to act. We thought bio fuels were the way to go, now we are told that they are bad for the environment. This is however just a classical example of refinement of the solution as time passes.
Bio fuels were never THE solution. There is simply not enough land and resources to allow us to both produce the food that we need for 6 billion people AND at the same time replace all the petro-oil that we consume in the world. But bio fuels are also in the future a part of the solution, if the bio fuels are produced in a sustainable way: sustainable bio fuels are so called 2nd generation bio fuels. 2nd generation bio fuels are produced from what would otherwise be waste. A lot of these 2nd generation bio fuels are already here. They include wood and bark pellets made from sawdust and wood paste after wood processing, other bio material pellets made from various waste from processing of agricultural crops, straw, waste bio oils from industrial processing of food. And then there are the liquid bio fuels that we are all waiting for, because we will be able to run our cars on them: bio diesel from Jathropa oil, bio ethanol from agricultural waste as well as the exiting bio diesel from algae. In the case of Jathropa we are still waiting for somebody to grow the bushes that are going to give the oil, D1 Oils are busy developing this after they shut down their UK operation. In the case of bio ethanol the Danish companies Novozymes and Danisco are both busy developing the killer-enzymes that are going to make them rich. Bio diesel from algae, this is one I'm not so familiar with, however it is my impression that there are still a number of years before we will see commercial large scale plants.
So where is my Modern By-products Group. We are really concerned about the environment and it is our mission to utilise food and agricultural waste/by-products in the best way possible. In many cases the answer lies in bio fuels. We run our trucks on by-product fish oil and ethanol based bio diesel as well as many of our partner's trucks. We sell thousands of tons of 2nd generation liquid bio fuel for heating and electricity generation. We supply bio fuel to a power plant that has achieved the world's toughest ecolabel, the Swedish "Bra Miljöval".Personally I enjoy driving the SAAB 9-5 Biopower, which runs on any bio ethanol and gasoline mix, and actually gets more HP the more ethanol I add.
But as I said - a lot of exiting thing are happening in many different companies. My friend and former colleague Lars Jagd is heading the upcoming technology provider Stirling. Take a look at their offering, as this is really a cool alternative, if you want your own CHP plant. Another friend of mine is busy shaking up the Danish electricity market by offering green electricity, it will be interesting to see if the Danish consumer really cares.
I think that the solution lies in many different ways of intelligently using the resources that are available to us. Different technologies will be used in different regions and existing facilities can be used in new and more environmentally friendly ways.
A number of challenges are facing us.
The clean technology race. A lot of different technologies are now effectively competing against each other for investments and customer attention. Photo voltaics, algae based bio diesel, 2nd generation ethanol from wood and agro waste, wind power and wave and tidal power and many more.
The sustainability dilemma. As it has turned out the initiatives that were taken to act, and to actually shift from petro-fuel to bio fuel ended by being pooh poohed - first by NGOs as the friends of the earth in their campaign against use of palm oil in bio fuels, due to the fact that palm oil plantations are replacing virgin rainforest. - and then at the top of the commodity price hike by the UK Gallagher Review that recommends less widespread usage of bio fuels due to potential negative environment effects, as well as undesirable competition towards food usage and in some cases questionable environmental effects.
It is not difficult to understand that many people are now confused and don't know how to act. We thought bio fuels were the way to go, now we are told that they are bad for the environment. This is however just a classical example of refinement of the solution as time passes.
Bio fuels were never THE solution. There is simply not enough land and resources to allow us to both produce the food that we need for 6 billion people AND at the same time replace all the petro-oil that we consume in the world. But bio fuels are also in the future a part of the solution, if the bio fuels are produced in a sustainable way: sustainable bio fuels are so called 2nd generation bio fuels. 2nd generation bio fuels are produced from what would otherwise be waste. A lot of these 2nd generation bio fuels are already here. They include wood and bark pellets made from sawdust and wood paste after wood processing, other bio material pellets made from various waste from processing of agricultural crops, straw, waste bio oils from industrial processing of food. And then there are the liquid bio fuels that we are all waiting for, because we will be able to run our cars on them: bio diesel from Jathropa oil, bio ethanol from agricultural waste as well as the exiting bio diesel from algae. In the case of Jathropa we are still waiting for somebody to grow the bushes that are going to give the oil, D1 Oils are busy developing this after they shut down their UK operation. In the case of bio ethanol the Danish companies Novozymes and Danisco are both busy developing the killer-enzymes that are going to make them rich. Bio diesel from algae, this is one I'm not so familiar with, however it is my impression that there are still a number of years before we will see commercial large scale plants.
So where is my Modern By-products Group. We are really concerned about the environment and it is our mission to utilise food and agricultural waste/by-products in the best way possible. In many cases the answer lies in bio fuels. We run our trucks on by-product fish oil and ethanol based bio diesel as well as many of our partner's trucks. We sell thousands of tons of 2nd generation liquid bio fuel for heating and electricity generation. We supply bio fuel to a power plant that has achieved the world's toughest ecolabel, the Swedish "Bra Miljöval".Personally I enjoy driving the SAAB 9-5 Biopower, which runs on any bio ethanol and gasoline mix, and actually gets more HP the more ethanol I add.
But as I said - a lot of exiting thing are happening in many different companies. My friend and former colleague Lars Jagd is heading the upcoming technology provider Stirling. Take a look at their offering, as this is really a cool alternative, if you want your own CHP plant. Another friend of mine is busy shaking up the Danish electricity market by offering green electricity, it will be interesting to see if the Danish consumer really cares.
I think that the solution lies in many different ways of intelligently using the resources that are available to us. Different technologies will be used in different regions and existing facilities can be used in new and more environmentally friendly ways.
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