Do Biofuels Harm the Planet More than Gasoline?

Rowena Lindsay (Christian Science Monitor) A new study suggests that biofuels can mitigate only 37 percent of the CO2 released by burning the biofuel. -- That's a flawed premise, argues Daniel Schrag, a geology professor at Harvard who advises the EPA on bioenergy climate impacts. He says that biofuels don't have to be carbon neutral to be an environmentally preferable alternative to petroleum gasoline.

“For about 10 years there have been very careful studies of corn ethanol and all of the fossil carbon that is used to make it ... and those studies have gotten a range of answers, but it is about a 20 percent reduction of net emissions relative to gasoline,” says Professor Schrag in an interview with the Monitor. “Nobody ever thought corn ethanol was carbon neutral, because there are lots and lots of fossil inputs to it.”

DeCicco ( University of Michigan Energy Institute researcher John DeCicco) explains that as cropland once used for food is transferred to fuel use, food must be produced elsewhere, meaning that more grasslands and forests are converted to production. However, grasslands and forests can neutralize more carbon dioxide than crops, he says.

Schrag says that this ignores the long-term perspective, when biofuels make up for carbon loss from forests.

“In their approach time scale does not come into it,” he tells the Monitor. “They are looking at crop yield data and assuming that you should balance the carbon cycle based on how much crops you produce.”

Michael Wang, a researcher at the Argonne National Laboratory, tells the Monitor that he also questions the study's carbon accounting, arguing that the study does not properly account for the carbon uptake or that corn production for both ethanol and for food increased over the period of the study.

“The carbon uptake by the US farming systems is calculated based only on grain harvest," Dr. Wang tells the Monitor. "Carbon uptake embedded in above- and below-ground biomass is ignored in the paper with a simple assumption that carbon in these biomass sources are oxidized back to the air."

DeCicco says that the solution is not to make biofuel more efficient, but to invest in reforestation.

“We should not be trying to make biofuels at all, any time soon,” DeCicco tells the Monitor. “It is much better to reforest and restore ecosystems.... Reforestation is a much better way to remove CO2 than anything we can do with biofuels.” READ MORE and MORE (MichBio) and MORE (Renewable Fuels Association) and MORE / MORE (Michigan Live) and MORE (The Hill) and MORE (Road Show) and MORE (Telegraph) and MORE (AutoBlog) and MORE (Phys.Org) and MORE (Biofuels Journal) and MORE (International Business Times) and MORE (Climate Central) and MORE (The Global Warming Policy Forum) and MORE(National Biodiesel Board) and MORE (Energy.AgWired.com) and MORE (Environmental Leader) Abstract (Climate Change)

Excerpt from Energy.AgWired.com: Dinneen (Renewable Fuels Association President and CEO Bob Dinneen) also added, “The truth is, biomass crops used to produce energy act as temporary carbon sinks. During growth, they quickly absorb CO2 that was just in the atmosphere. The same amount of CO2 is then returned to the atmosphere when the carbon in the crop is combusted for energy. In this way, the use of biomass for energy recycles atmospheric carbon as part of a relatively rapid cycle. In contrast, the use of fossil fuels adds to atmospheric CO2 by emitting carbon that was previously sequestered deep underground for millions of years.”

He continued, “According to researchers at Duke University, the University of Minnesota, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory: ‘A critical temporal distinction exists when comparing ethanol and gasoline lifecycles. Oil deposits were established millions of years in the past. The use of oil transfers into today’s atmosphere GHGs that had been sequestered and secured for millennia and would have remained out of Earth’s atmosphere if not for human intervention. While the production and use of bioenergy also releases GHGs, there is an intrinsic difference between the two fuels, for GHG emissions associated with biofuels occur at temporal scales that would occur naturally, with or without human intervention. …Hence, a bioenergy cycle can be managed while maintaining atmospheric conditions similar to those that allowed humans to evolve and thrive on Earth. In contrast, massive release of fossil fuel carbon alters this balance, and the resulting changes to atmospheric concentrations of GHGs will impact Earth’s climate for eons.’”

Click here to read a more detailed statement from RFA. Click here to view a technical response sent March 2015 from a handful of other researchers to the previous DeCicco paper. READ MORE