Biofuels must be sustainable
Last night Parliament was debating the biofuel sales obligation. The Greens pushed hard to get an amendment to the bill to ensure that all biofuel supplies are sustainable. As Jeanette said:
“However not all biofuels are environmentally sound. The Green Party is totally opposed to the clearing of old growth tropical rainforest, the last refuge of many endangered species such as the orangutan, to plant oil palm trees for biodiesel, as is happening in South East Asia.
“We are also deeply concerned at the use of food grains such as corn to make ethanol. This is already forcing up the price of food in poor countries and will lead to even worse starvation in Africa.
The defintion of sustainable will be made by Order in Council and no doubt there will be another arm wrestle about that!
October 17th, 2007 at 4:21 pm
Jeanette’s concern is odd as the biofuel mandate was increased significantly premised on the availability of domestic ethanol, which was promised as coming from corn plantings in the Waikato. Last I heard corn was a food grain. You need to read the submissions and cabinet papers before voting.
“The definition of sustainable will be made by Order in Council “
Does this mean they will make it up after behind the scenes lobbying and without proper discussion and consultation? Sounds a great recipe for policy, particularly when the existing policy appears to already be flawed if there is a need for import protection, and it hasn’t even been implemented.
I thought you guys were in favour of transparency?
Based on previous form it will be a top of mind definition that will effectively be another subsidy to biofuel producers through an import barrier, meaning NZ consumers will pay more while domestic producers will not have the discipline of international competition to keep them honest.
I may have missed it but am yet to read of any significant investment in any production capacity of any biofuel. I mean, how many subsidies do these guys need? They have a guaranteed market due to the mandate, ethanol pays no tax, and oil prices are the highest in a generation. If they still can’t make a business case then you have to ask how sustainable they truly are?
I read in the paper today an oilseed trial in the SI is not going well. They have had to pay a higher contract price than planned and there has been much lower interest in planting.
What does this say? It says local production can’t get going, they are scared of competition so are doing all they can to limit it, which history shows is a charter for higher prices and excess returns for those getting the protection. And all the time a deadline is looming which could be embarrassing if not met. I wonder if the prospect of that embarassment is driving policy.
Good luck getting that trade barrier through in the face of WTO rules and FTAs with Singapore and Australia.
October 17th, 2007 at 6:36 pm
Here’s one of the reasons why there needs to be a sustainability standard for biofuel, including the relative ghg emissions in production v those saved from not buring oil. Separating good biofuel from bad is going to be tricky, but it must be done.
*Many biofuels have more climate impact than oil*
http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSL2790018020070928
October 17th, 2007 at 6:50 pm
Insider, actually one of the barriers to local sustainable biofuel from waste products such as tallow is the subsidies to biodiesel producers in that bastion of the free market, the USA. As I understand it any biodiesel blend for export attracts a massive subsidy, meaning it undercuts local production. This is a massive problem in the EU where biodiesel plants are running below capacity due to the dumping from US markets. http://uk.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUKL1644507520071016
In this instance, what investor would want to create a plant here when they will be undercut by US Government-subsidised biodiesel?
October 17th, 2007 at 10:24 pm
I don’t think the US is a realistic supply source and tehre have been no reports I have seen suggesting it. This article suggests the issue is the double subsidy they get by going to the eu.
The US subsidy is US26 cents a litre. Can’t see that as attractive or competitive to ship it all the way here given the comparitive low volumes in shipping terms.
October 17th, 2007 at 10:45 pm
EU biodiesel is inherently uneconomic anyway. German production units are folding, one after the other, as subsidies are reduced. And that’s a good thing. Biofuels from food crops, in temperate climates, are (in general! there may be exceptions I don’t know about) net energy CONSUMERS, and therefore INHERENTLY only viable under subsidy regimes, whatever the price of a barrel of oil.
Tropical production (e.g. sugar cane or palm oil) is is much better and may even prove to be sustainable in some cases (it helps a lot that it’s typically less mechanised and happens in places where labour is cheap…)
but in general, bio-fuels are a real loser of a concept, mainly because the internal combustion engine is a real loser of a mechanism for turning the energy of sunlight into mechanical motion.
NZ should certainly not be subsidising any biofel PRODUCTION, not with current commercial technology anyway.
The only biofuel technologies that look somewhat promising to me are algae and cellulose. These are probably worth pumping R&D subsidies (but not production subsidies) into. Adding value to wood waste, if it can be converted to fuel, is preferable to letting it rot.
October 18th, 2007 at 12:59 am
There is another issue with biofuel.
Let us assume that biofuel can be produced without any fossil fuel input (not true, but just assume it can for the moment). This sounds good for the environment, but it might displace food crops, resulting in increased food prices, and increasing the number of people suffering from malnutrition and lack of food.
Even in the case of New Zealand, where there is enough food production to meet local needs, would it be better to export food for people to eat, or grow biofuel crops? Personally, I would rather see a world where everyone has enough to eat, than a world where the rich drive biofuel powered cars, and the poor starve.
I’m not totally opposed to biofuel, but I don’t think it is the cure for all our fuel problems.
October 18th, 2007 at 1:36 am
Paradoxically, the boosting of food prices has some positive aspects with respect to sustainability. Food is, globally, under-priced : in addition to various production and export subsidies on industrial agriculture, it is also “subsidised” by the unsustainable use of limited resources : fossil fuel, groundwater, topsoil etc…
Raising the global market price of food is therefore a necessary step on the road to sustainability. Will that lead to famine? Probably. On the other hand, it will also tend to reverse the tendency for subsistence farmers in the third world to abandon their fields and drift to the cities. If they can make a living selling their surplus, which they currently have difficulty doing because of absurdly low commodity food prices, then they will tend to stay put or move home… especially if the lights are going out in the cities because oil is too expensive to generate electricity.
October 19th, 2007 at 11:17 am
Well said Alistair
October 20th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
first of all anyone who claims to be a green and eats meat ought to think about ‘karma’ and consider the huge ‘land’ footprint for meat relative to lentils, chickpeas and hempseed protein (something on order of 8x as much land needed for meat production).
There is plenty of land for food and biofuels if people stop treating animals like they are lunch. They are actually our friends and our job is to steward them, not stew them. One of the best friends I made earlier this year was a bobby calf yearling on a lifestyle block next to the orchard where i was picking apples. he loved the apples and would run over when he saw me.
but my supervisor told me ‘he’ll be in the freezer when yourr back next year’. so i was very sad to say good bye. I have little regard for greenies and the general stupid population who dont consider that meat is VIOLENCE.
furthermore in relation to land demand for biofuel at expense of food: heres the text of an email i sent to National Radio nine to noon a week or two ago when they started parroting the land/biofuel dilemma. (they ignored my feedback of course):
Biofuel or food - how about both - THE HEMP PLANT:
hemp is not on the global menu because of the perverse legal status of marijuana, but hemp seed is great food rich in nutrients, and the rest of the plant fibre is then ideal for conversion to biofuel.
Notice when the experts compare canola oil, wheat, palm, bla bla, they
never include hemp in the comparisom, and yet it is the most efficient converter of solar power to biomass god ever invented
regards
October 23rd, 2007 at 12:18 am
The University of California Transportation Centre’s magazine Access includes this comment on biofuels in it’s discussion From Horse Power to Horsepower and Beyond the Automobile:
“One contemporary British farmer calculated that each horse consumed the product of five acres of land, a footprint which could have produced enough to feed six to eight people. Probably fifteen million acres were needed to feed the urban horse population at its zenith, an area about the size of West Virginia. Directly or indirectly, feeding the horse meant placing new land under cultivation, clearing it of its natural animal life and vegetation,”
http://www.uctc.net/access/access30.shtml
October 23rd, 2007 at 1:51 am
Yes. Roughly speaking, growing biofuels in temperate climates, you get about as much transportation energy as you would get from feeding a horse from the same acreage.
Which means that, if domestically produced biofuels are the way of the future, we’re going back to a time when private transport was reserved for the rich. I don’t want to see that, because that puts an end to the extraordinary individual liberty we have experienced in the past couple of generations. If private transport has a future for the masses, it has to be electric.