Feature2 – BioFuels
The federal government has primarily used biofuels as a way to boost the rural economy. What’s more surprising is that it was a wise move.
September’s Science Cafe in Calgary was an odd one for me. The topic that evening was biofuels, and their role in our economy and ecology. As a mild supporter of alternative fuels, I was hoping the two speakers would offer a few tantalizing developments that could turn me into a true believer.
Instead, all stressed that biofuels were a small part of our CO2 reduction plans. There are simply too many problems, and too many inefficiencies to be solved.
Richard Gibson even started his speech on that note. He holds the title of Business Development Manager of Industrial Bioproducts, for the Alberta Research Council, and provided most of the science that night. David Layzell, Executive Director of ISEEE (the Institute for Sustainable Energy, Environment, and Economy), focussed more on what will be possible and brought up the trendy topic of “energy security.” The moderator, Adam Gagnon, spent most of his nine minutes giving ideas about what to talk about during the ten-minute break. Honest! His day job is the Program Manager at Climate Change Central.
Returning to what I learned, transportation is one problem with biofuels. Most of them must be grown in wide-ranging fields, scattered across the country. Gathering up all that material for processing takes a lot of energy. There’s also the cost to grow biofuels. You need a small army of machinery to gather all this material up, and they don’t run on sunshine and smiles. Oil does not need to be fertilized or sprayed with pesticides, either.
Even if you could solve the above problems, biofuels would still be less efficient to process. If you want numbers, the most effective methods to generate biofuels run at 50% efficiency, but the overall average is closer to 25%. In contrast, oil refineries return 80% or more of the energy they need to create diesel or gasoline.
There are advantages, of course. Mixing wood, straw, pellets and char in with coal cuts down the total amount of CO2 emitted. Insert some of the coal industry’s latest carbon-capture technology, and you could actually become carbon-negative for a tolerable cost. Creating Ethanol from wheat and corn is inefficient, as it currently stands, but if farmers start planting more cellulose-rich crops, and we can perfect newer processing methods that use the entire plant (and not just the starches), that gasoline additive will be much easier to stomach.
Speaking of which, there’s no need to remove food crops to make way for fuel crops. Machines don’t care what sort of soil their fuel was grown in, so marginal or fallow fields can be reserved for that purpose. This keeps biofuel and food crops separate, and gives farmers an extra income.
And yes, by combining biofuels with other concepts we can throw more money back to the rural crowd. A spider-web of processing centers could be set up across the country, churning out building materials and animal feed as well as biofuels. It brings jobs to areas that are desperate for them, and partially solves the transportation issue mentioned above.
It just doesn’t solve the environmental crisis we’re in. While biofuels are the easiest way to cut CO2 emissions, and have been doing this for decades, they are too expensive and ineffectual to be our primary method of doing so.
(by hj hornbeck)
