A bad habit in the making: using coal to produce biofuels

Imagine a company in Europe or North America jumping on the biofuels opportunity. It uses expensive, scarce land to grow crops such as corn and rapeseed to make green fuels. The resulting biofuel is highly inefficient, because the producer puts almost as much energy into making it, than he gets out of it (a marginally positive energy balance). Moreover, the feedstocks he uses are heavily subsidized because they cannot compete with raw materials produced in the global South (earlier post).

The government of the country where the biofuel producer operates also protects its market with trade barriers of all sorts, in order to prevent farmers from the South to sell their much more competitive feedstocks and fuels. Add that the producer get tax breaks and that consumers are told that the 'green' fuel is good for the environment by helping in the fight against climate change. So far, nothing new.

But the worst is yet to come. For the producer to be competitive, he must use a primary energy source to power the operations at his biofuel plant. He doesn't have that many choices: he will choose the cheapest fuel, which is most often coal. Indeed, coal. The most climate destructive of all fossil fuels. And yes, a new report by researchers of an Ames company states the obvious: such coal-powered biofuel plants release enormous amounts of CO2, almost negating the carbon savings made from burning biofuels in a car. The analysis shows that a coal-powered plant that would produce 50 million gallons (182 million liters) of ethanol would release as much as 207,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year. There goes the 'green' as in 'climate friendly, good, clean, green fuels':
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Especially in the U.S., where there are no laws and regulations on carbon emissions, the problem is turning into a bad habit. Biofuel producers there want to lower the costs of their production factors, as any business would, so they choose to burn the most climate destructive fossil fuel to make 'green fuels'. More and more people are now calling for the use of biomass as a primary energy source to power the biofuel plant. But this would make uncompetitive US/EU biofuels even more expensive.

Now move to Brazil or any country in the Southern hemisphere. There, biofuels producers use crops - such as sugar cane - that result in fuels with a highly positive energy balance. After extracting the fuel from the biomass, a large amount of green residues remains. In the case of cane, it is called bagasse. Part of this bagasse is turned into fertilizers and industrial fibres. But there is in fact so much bagasse left, that it can power the entire biofuel production plant. The biomass is burned to produce steam and electricity, which is used as a power source. So in fact, the biofuel that comes out of the factory has never seen a single input of fossil fuels. What's more, most Brazilian ethanol makers produce so much power from this green fuel, that they are able to feed excess electricity into the national grid.

Anyone understands the differences between biofuels produced in the North and those produced in the South. As Claude Mandil, chief of the International Energy Agency, recently said: for all these reasons, the US and the EU must get serious and start importing biofuels from the South, instead of wasting tax payers money and fossil fuels on producing their own uncompetitive fuels that don't really contribute to fighting climate change.

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