EPA Hasn’t Told the Whole Story of the Benefits of Biofuels

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July 24, 2018

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by Byron Dorgan (Arent Fox LLP/National Biodiesel Board/The Hill) … A recent Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report released to Congress on the environmental and resource conservation impacts of biofuel production deliberately misses the mark because of what it excludes. The EPA authors note that their report excludes any consideration of biofuels’ reductions of greenhouse gas emissions or the additional environmental benefits of displacing fossil fuels. How can that be excluded if the report is about environmental and resource conservation impacts of biofuels? In fact, those are major advantages of the biofuels industry and the primary measures of environmental success for the RFS. The EPA continues to recognize those same benefits in its other publications.

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Argonne National Laboratory recently published an up-to-date, comprehensive lifecycle analysis of biodiesel. According to the study, biodiesel made from soybean oil reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 72 percent, compared to fossil fuels.

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The U.S Department of Agriculture found that American farmers managed 23 million fewer acresin 2015 than in 2007 — the year the RFS expanded. Globally, total farmland decreased by 60 million acres between 2004 and 2011, while forested area increased by 19 million acres. That means more land became available for other uses, including wildlife habitat and ecosystem services, even while we were expanding a renewable fuels industry.

More than that, U.S. farmers have improved global food security by increasing both crop and animal production. Raising beef and poultry requires protein from crops, the most efficient of which are soy and corn. Raising animals on other feeds requires more land and more expensive inputs than farmers use today.

The corn and soy crops provide more income opportunities for farmers. While they provide protein feed for animals, they also produce an abundance of oil, starch and fiber for biofuels. Those ingredients aren’t efficiently absorbed in the food chain. By creating a market for biofuels, the RFS encourages U.S. agriculture to efficiently meet growing global demand for protein.

Congress should be pushing the EPA to take a broader view of the impacts of the biofuel market on the environment — one that doesn’t cherry-pick the disadvantages while leaving out some of the major benefits. READ MORE

THEIRS: RFS standards deserve support from administration (Rapid City Journal)

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