Biodiesel is the wrong answer
So says George Monbiot in an editorial published in the Guardian December 6.
Perhaps best characterized as an environmental activist, Monbiot writes a weekly column for the Guardian and
is currently visiting professor of planning at Oxford Brookes University.
In his article "Worse than Fossil Fuel," Monbiot maintains that biodiesel has an environmental impact worse than the
fossil fuel it replaces - he calls it the world's most carbon-intensive fuel.
The problem is that producing enough biodiesel to fuel a significant fraction of the world's vehicles will require oil
from palm trees - the most efficient oil producing crop in the world. Unfortunately, clearing tropical lands for oil
palm plantations requires burning off vast areas of forest, and draining and drying of tropical peatlands, both of
which release enormous quantities of carbon.
With the EU pushing for biodiesels as the feel-good answer to transportation fuel, and millions of hectares of
tropical forest being cleared to meet the demand, Manbiot is harshly critical of the U.K. government - "It is prepared
to sacrifice the South East Asian rainforests in order to be seen to do something, and to allow motorists to feel
better about themselves."
His arguments are interesting and well-reasoned.
Check it out. Also see his earlier
article on the same subject here.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
mpeng 10:50PM (12/18/2005)
then why doesn't he offer a viable alternative?
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Matt 10:50PM (12/18/2005)
The same arguement is made against ethanol too. The brazilians burn down rainforest to grow sugar cane.
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John Riley 10:50PM (12/18/2005)
OK I am too lazy to read the article, but from the item about palm trees, I am wondering if the author isn't a bit behind on the latest theories about possible sources:
http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html
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Joe 10:50PM (12/18/2005)
"The problem is that producing enough biodiesel to fuel a significant fraction of the worlds vehicles will require oil from palm trees - the most efficient oil producing crop in the world."
Requires? I have read elsewhere that the "best" source of oil for Biodiesel is algae. Even if Palm trees are the best source, it doesn't mean we have to use them. No matter what "bio" fuel we go with, if we go that direction, its likely to require dedicated farms, somewhere.
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MikeGR 10:50PM (12/18/2005)
There are many ways to make biodiesel and the process is still being improved.
Making sensationalistic broad statements might get readers attention, but it is dangerous.
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Sean Flanagan 10:50PM (12/18/2005)
Option 1:
1. Look for oil
2. Drill
3. Pump
4. Process
5. Run out
6. Go back to 1
Option 2:
1. Replace 100 acres of tropical plants to grow other tropical plants (?)
2. Harvest
3. Process
4. Re-plant
5. Go back to 2
Option 3:
1. Build algae growing facility on 10 acres
2. Manufacture algae
3. Process
4. That's it
Cost not being a factor, I like algae.
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md 10:50PM (12/18/2005)
Frankly, there is currently only one viable mass marketable fuel available for motor vehicles: petroleum.
We should stop poo-pooing every new alternative that is presented, it will take time and resource to perfect another fuel source, which is something we need to do. Of course hyrdrogen and biodiesel are not viable at this time, we have to work to make them viable. Right now petroleum is the easiest, but at what point will people be willing to fill up with something other than gas or diesel?
We can't just suck every last drop of oil out of the ground for our cars, remember there are tons of petroleum products other than fuel that we use every day, and I think it would be nice to have those resources available for future generations, and developing a viable fuel source for our vehicles will help ensure that.
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Sigivald 10:50PM (12/18/2005)
1) Monbiot is a complete idiot on every subject I've ever read him spout off about.
2) He's right, except that he's wrong: if the world was going to go to biodiesel, it wouldn't plant palms, it'd far more likely go to floating algae farms, precisely because nobody wants giant palm farms anyway.
There are palm farms now, IIRC, because the EU made some stupid requirements or incentives and the rush to meet them/take advantage of them is pushing a convenient but non-scaleable solution.
That has no bearing on what would/would not work for a worldwide conversion. (Though I don't see that coming as either forced, or all-at-once.)
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Brian 10:50PM (12/18/2005)
Mr Monbiot has not shown that biodiesel is a bad idea, or that it is the "worlds most carbon-intensive fuel". He has only said that large scale deforestation of rainforest to grow biodiesel crops is not a good idea.
And who is disagreeing with him? Even the most strong proponent of bio would not endorse the destruction of forests to grow oil crops. They would never promote it to the point that it causes more enviromental harm than it prevents. Only those driven purely by profit motive would support this.
The core of the biodiesel movement is driven by concern for the environment and would never promote its production at the expense of rainforest.
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rip 10:50PM (12/18/2005)
I'm a little confused as to why the growing regions would have to be confined to rainforests in southeast Asia. Is the palm they use some sort of indigenous plant that can't grow elsewhere? Last I heard, palm trees seem to grow pretty well in California...
I think his issue has more to do with the government practices in Borneo, Sumatra, etc. Clearcutting is bad. But I believe that if it wasn't palm oil, it would be some other crop. Isn't there some issue in Madagascar regarding deforestation for planting of some specific crop? Cloves, I believe.
He is clearly spewing inflammatory rhetoric, blaming biodiesel for carbon dioxide release from deforestation when in fact it is at best an indirect cause. Using his reasoning, one could just as easily argue that Frito-Lay is practically the grim reaper of the environment.
I think Mondiot would be better served trying to rectify poor economic conditions in southeast Asian countries rather than throwing out inflammatory doublespeak on biodiesel.
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Rastus 10:50PM (12/18/2005)
Why do we have to cut down the rainforests? Has not this guy ever heard of the American Southwest? We have desert galore...just add water and you have an instant plantation.
Ok, I can hear it now, the envionmentalists will say (and probably rightly so) that we don't have that kind of water to waste.
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marijke 10:50PM (12/18/2005)
a maybe-short-term solution:
get legislation pertaining importation of europe's tiny cuties (agila/ twingo/ panda etc.) changed. they'll run 60mpg. some are dual-fuel equipped: use lpg/ propane + regular gas. they are not expensive, more space inside and would cut down on present high fuelconsumption in north america. i'd drive one here (live in the back 40's of bc, canada) as soon as they could be legally imported and driven! marijke
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TrollHouseCookie 10:50PM (12/18/2005)
Read about this and threw a Caesar salad into the gas tank of my
Frazer Manhattan.
It stalled and won't start.
Now what?
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brandon 10:50PM (12/18/2005)
the point of biodiesel is not that its good for the environment
the point of biodiesel is that its a RAPIDLY RENEWABLE RESOURCE
thank you, that is all, move along, nothing to else to see here
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Bill 10:50PM (12/18/2005)
In his defense, he does seem to be aware that bio diesel can come from a wide variety of sources including algae, so he doesn't seem blind to that. So one could argue that he is worried about what bio-diesel is doing to the environment right now as opposed to in 20 years when algae based bio-diesel would be a mature technology.
The unfortunate thing is that he seems to believe that the only solution is massively scaling back the consumption of energy by our society; I am not sure he quite realizes how much scaling back would be necessary in the first world or the measures that would be necessary to achieve it (either energy rationing or massive, massive taxes... $20 a gallon for regular anyone?). Such a reduction of energy use, even if accomplished over 20 years (or a hundred) would essentially spell the end of capitalism as we know it. Futher how do you get the entire world on board? Going to tell China and India just as they are starting to get some economic momentum going that they have to stop using the driving force of that momentum?
The fact is that there are lots of potential energy sources out there that we can successfully and in all probability safely exploit if we think clearly about them. There are potentially forms of nuclear power that avoid waste products that remain lethal for 10s of thousands of years (google Thorium Energy Pumps for more info), bio-diesel, exploitation of other things like geo-thermal, wind, solar, etc. We might be nearing the end of an economy driven by a single fuel source (i.e. fossil fuel) but that might in the end be a good thing.
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Peter 10:50PM (12/18/2005)
Ignore headline, Read the "Fine" Article. What he is saying makes perfect sense.
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Uh Yeah? 10:50PM (12/18/2005)
Lets forget about attaining a significant fraction and just do what works with what we have.....WVO and other waste products not currently being fully utilized. There's not a whole lot out there but enough to allow us a choice whether we harvest or dump it.
I had hoped the economics (environmental and other) for large scale biodiesel production would have worked out better than it seems it has. The equation may change if we look at the problem a little differently...maybe by drastically scaling down production to serve several isolated smaller, much more specific needs or some other way of tweaking a loop that continuously feeds back into itself or feeds off another loop thats already churning, especially where the resource(s) are readily available.
The title ain't all that encouraging but it certainly begs the question about what the questions are and if they are the right ones.
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cmonkey 10:50PM (12/18/2005)
Incidently, I handed in a term paper this morning about this very subject, and cited the Monbiot article. There are problems with every possible energy source.
Petroleum: It's running out... fast. It also happens to be a major cause of global warming.
Ethanol: There isn't enough farmland in this country to fuel all gas powered cars even if 100% of crop producing land was switched to corn for ethanol (which would likely set into motion a series of events that would lead to mass starvation). Some warmer countries where people own fewer cars per capita could potentially run on ethanol from sugar cane.
Biodiesel: Yet again, the farm land problem. Algae looks promising, except for one major item that most people suggesting algae tend to overlook (most likely because you would have to dig into the 300+ page DoE report to find it). Algae farms can't survive on carbon dioxide from air. They require at least 13% CO2 gas to produce an economically useful amount of lipids. That kind of CO2 comes economically only from coal power plant exhaust. There are two problems with that. The first is that the climates that algae grow best in, hot and dry areas, tend to be nowhere near coal deposits. The second is that it is still contributing massive amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere, resulting in global warming. There is a company, though I don't remember it's name, that is attempting to install small scale algae farms in existing coal plants, though the biodiesel output of that is nowhere near large enough to replace petroleum.
Though I haven't done the calculations, I'm guessing it is possible to produce enough ethanol and biodiesel to economically run all of the country on E10 (from corn) and B10 (from waste and soy).
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Jose 10:50PM (12/18/2005)
It'looks like another anti-SUV campaign. The aglae is the best foreseen source for bio-diesel, but biodiesel isn't the only answer, ther is also the mature methanol technology, and in the near furure battey cells on elictric/hybrid cars can store 100 times more power by lb of weight.
And about the Oil, new methods appears to extract Oil from oil shales with efficence, but don't care there is enough oil for 70 year's or more, then gas powered vehicles will be obsolete.
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Bill 10:50PM (12/18/2005)
Pretty much all the complaints about bio-diesel in one form or another would also apply to methanol or ethanol. To the best of my knowledge (Though I will be happily corrected if I am wrong) those products need to be produced from crop sources and there is no algae alternative. As for fuel cells, well that is merely a method of transporting energy, not not a source of energy itself.
Now the oil shales are a good source of energy, but there are some serious environmental issues, even more so than using conventional oil. Still it will likely form an important source of energe at least in the near term.
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