“Quo Vadis?: Whither goest thou, biofuels?” An Easter message from Biofuels Digest

“Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?”
Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Rampant bankruptcy among first-generation biofuel producers, combined with ruthless pressure from environmental and meat industry and food packaging firms to back off on the Renewable Fuel Standard, should cause even the most die-hard biofuels supporters to ask “whither goest thou?”

The crisis is caused by a division of interests that were once united.

First-generation biofuels continue to be a means of grain and oilseed price stabilization, economic development and energy security. The benefits are largely felt in the 21 states that have strong “farm patch” economic dependencies.

In those states and in the first-generation ethanol industry, an attitude of eye-for-an-eye defiance has developed in opposing criticism from well-funded lobbies and passionate environmentalists. It shows in press releases from Growth Energy and the Renewable Fuels Association that state the appeal of biofuels in hyperbolic terms. Meanwhile,  an increasingly troubled support base in the scientific and political communities reminds one of the crumbling support for President Nixon in 1974.

The rear-guard smashmouthness amongst first-generation biofuels advocates and shareholders, that led farm economist Tom Elam to brand a recent RFA release “absolute, total BS,” is reminiscent of the Queer Fist demonstrations at the 2004 Republican Convention in New York City.

“We’re here! We’re queer! We’re fabulous! Don’t f*** with us!” the protestors chanted. The delegates were suitably appalled, but the enduring value of the campaign was negligible.

The Fat vs Fuel problem

Meanwhile, the food packaging and meat industries have amped up the dialogue with a well-funded and disingenuous attempt to blame biofuels for rising food prices last summer. If the controversial CBO report that debunked the theory is not enough for many biofuels critics, it should be enough for the person in the street.

The average voter might not have the available bandwidth to grasp the nuances of macroeconomics, but they see that commodity prices have collapsed and food prices remain high. They can see the campaign by food packagers as an attempt to misdirect attention while a stiff price increase was put through in an attempt to raise profits at the likes of Kraft. Kudos to the food packagers for sleight of hand worthy of David Copperfield.

The meat and dairy industries have gone through a rough patch in the wake of high commodity prices — but it should be seen as a long-term step in weaning the American public off cheap meat and cheese that has made the nation fatter and less healthy. Corn prices were flat for a generation. The result? 62 percent of Americans are overweight. 24 percent of the US corn supply goes to ethanol, but more than half goes to support US consumption of meats and dairy.

If the US continues to experience the same increase in meat and cheese consumption (per capita) and population growth tracks Census estimates, we will need an additional 8.6 billion bushels of corn to meet our food needs in 2050. At today’s corn yields, that would require an additional 56.9 million acres of land for corn. The entire maximum US corn ethanol mandate, at current productivity levels, would require 33 million acres. The crisis is in how much we are eating.

Who among food marketers and cattle and dairymen is advising Congress of that?

On the other hand, biofuels have experienced a crisis in the analysis of emissions tracking. If corn and oilseed prices continue to escalate, goes the theory, it will prompt conversion of land to crop production and release stored carbon into the atmosphere. The analysis is based on an unproven and perhaps unprovable theorem that biofuels are causing diversion of land to crop production. But what about the role of overeating and US population growth?

Since the 1950s, average consumption of grain to feed American has risen by billions and billions of bushels. Why are my brothers and sisters in the environmental movement not calling for the closing of McDonalds, Wendy’s and Burger King as a necessary, if painful, step on the road to ending deforestation and mitigating global warming? Increased food intake and dietary change is surely what is causing it.

You might call it “fat vs. rainforest”.

The inconvenient truth of money

The problem is one that Al Gore called “an inconvenient truth,” which is to say that the battle over biofuels in the environmental movement is about money. Biofuels are subsidized, incentivized, mandated, tariff protected, and grant supported. Supporters of solar and wind – which have more substantial environmental gains but do not pencil out in economic feasibility, want more federal, state and local dollars. That is what this is about.

As Deep Throat told Bob Woodward at the height of the Watergate investigation, “follow the money”. Then all becomes clear. And the only solution for biofuels is to clearly establish a path to reducing its dependence on subsidies, mandates, grants, tariffs and incentives.

Among the supports afforded biofuels, local economic incentives and research grants are the subject of the least controversy. Bioenergy is an important science and scientific research is important for the US to maintain leadership in. There’s little dispute about that. Local incentives for job creation can be locally controversial, but are not the issue on the main national stage.

The water bomb

Instead, tariffs, subsidies and mandates are the issue. They offend many environmentalists based on their concerns over indirect land use change, and offend economic liberalists who oppose ag policy in general and government market interventions in bioenergy in particular.

The Renewable Fuel Standard would be less controversial if the “fat vs fuel” issue were better explained, and water consumption in energy crop and biofuels production were limited to rainfall, brackish groundwater or wastewater. A report that biofuels require 2,100 gallons of water for every gallon of fuel (as reported in the April 15th issue of Environmental Science and Technology) is a time bomb with a short fuse.

But the opposition to subsidies and tariffs should be dealt with by a timetable under which they would be swiftly eliminated.  The Congress has taken some steps in this direction, but not enough, not near enough. The crisis in the ethanol industry would not have been as severe if the subsidies had been coming down, because fewer plants would have been built, and overcapacity would be less of an issue.

The agonies of first generation biofuels are making for “unplayable conditions” for advanced biofuels, with too many people tarring all biofuels with the corn and soy brush. Supporters are called “biofools” not “cornfools” or “soyfools”.

A breakthrough ignored – the sign of distraction

Last week in Biofuels Digest, I was astonished to see an important breakthrough almost completely overlooked by the readership. A team of researchers at the Ames National Lab developed a technique for continuous harvest of oils from algae. Huge stuff. In the history of grain agriculture, we have killed the plant to recover its energy for corn flakes, tortillas or biofuel.

This breakthrough, which puts us on the brink of the third generation of biofuels, received one tenth the readership it should have. That is because we are distracted.

The importance of continuous harvest is immense. Consider the price of milk if, every time you milked a cow you had to kill her? Vegetables, fruits and grasses have been harvested this way, but not grains or oilseeds. Now, we have the potential of harvesting oil continuously from algae. The potential is discussed by Ames in terms of 10,000 gallons per acre potentials.

But that is today. Another company that will shortly release its research has found a means of producing (currently at bench level) 12 million gallons per acre per year. That’s today’s US biofuels supply created from 1,000 acres. That’s the US energy supply from 15,000 acres, about 40 percent less than the land at Disney World. Walt Disney, who envisioned EPCOT as a sustainable “community of tomorrow” instead of a sort of permanent world’s fair, would have been fascinated by the potential. It is early  that technology, but it reminds us that we are in the early days of all bioenergy technologies.

If all the energy used today on earth could be contained in a box the size of an iPhone, then the total available supply of energy from the sun would occupy a string of iPhones stretching from Earth to Saturn. We are just at the dawn of a new age of energy, scratching with sticks and crude tools: yet, like the apes fighting to the death over carcasses in 2001: A Space Odyssey, we are fighting over stupidities.

Moving forward with clean hands

The biofuels industry could do its part by proposing a rapid schedule by which subsidies and tariffs will be eliminated. Then, and only, then, can the industry ask the nation to move onto the real issues with clean hands.

So, quo vadis, biofuels: whither goest thou?

Simon Peter first asked the question of Jesus Christ in the days before the crucifixion, and Jesus said “Whither I go, thou canst not follow me now; but thou shalt follow me afterwards.” The day for subsidies and tariffs to disappear may not yet have arrived, but some John the Baptist will have to say where and when it shalt follow. If a John is not available, a Barry Goldwater will do: it is time for a Goldwater moment to realign bioenergy for the important role the fuels and their producers will have to play.

If we are to move the conversation beyond the challenges of first generation biofuels and onto the commercialization of second- and third-generation energy, the biofuels industry must now check into a half-way house with a firm schedule for getting off the dope.

Resurrection of a positive national conversation about the future of bioenergy will surely follow.

Jim Lane is editor & publisher of Biofuels Digest

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