Environmental Impacts of Biodiesel
Biodiesel is renewable, it does not increase the amount of carbon in our atmosphere while using existing infrastructure.
The NSW Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA) and Newcastle council did a study on the emissions from premium diesel or B20 (20% biodiesel 80% fossil diesel) in 2004 (Adobe Acrobat required): Newcastle City Council / RTA Biodiesel Trial Emissions Testing Program
A summary of reports on the macroeconomic and environmental effect of biodiesel as experienced in Europe (requires Adobe Acrobat): Macroeconomic + Environmental Effects
Food versus Fuel
There is no debate at present about the viability of biofuels in relation to
recent food price increases and concerns about the amount of raw food
produced in the world each year. It is taken as a given that biofuels displace food crops.
First consider this. Half of the worlds food crop is fed to cattle.
We can
feed 10 people with the grain the cow eats or 1 person if the grain is
turned into meat. Think about that, 90% of half the worlds food crop is
waisted because we like to eat meat instead of grains.Tell me again how are biofuels starving the world?
If people
really care about feeding the worlds population then go vegan, stop
eating meat, free up cattle food for human consumption.
Grown
Fuel has also over the years been involved in helping farmers stay on
the land by finding a way to make there farms viable so they can
produce food and fuel. We will not produce more food for people as long
as farms are not financially viable.
The Austrian Biofuels Institute produced a paper in 2008 titled “The Sustainability of Biofuels – Issue to consider”. The following points summarise the main findings of this paper:
World agricultural output has exceeded world population increases since 1750 (UN Food and Agricultural Organisation Statistics Authority)
The world’s population increased from under 1billion in 1750, to over 6 billion in 2007 (UN Food and Agricultural Organisation Statistics Authority)
Since 1961 world agricultural output has exceeded population increase during the same period; in 2005 there was 2 ½ times more food produced than in 1961, compared to the doubling of population over this time (UN Food and Agricultural Organisation Statistics Authority)
In 1970 the global area harvested for food production was 700million hectares and in 2005 this had increased to 800million hectares
In 2005 the newly emerging biofuels industry accounted for 1.3% of raw food production
Biofuels may have had some recent impact on the increased cost of food, however there are also other factors involved in this, such as the increase in fuel fertiliser and pesticide costs.
Spikes in agricultural commodities have occurred in the past before biofuels and are likely to continue in the future regardless of the impact of Biofuels, the price of fossil oil has a huge impact.
In 1972 and 1995 agricultural spikes were seen due to poor harvests in 1973 due to the oil crisis
Impacts of drought and foods are unpredictable and the potential increase in occurrence of these weather events due to climate change are important issues to consider in relation to renewable fuel sources – less carbon emissions due to fuel types, as will occur with increased biofuel use may assist in securing food sources by reducing climate change impacts. This however would be negated if further forest clearing is undertaken to grow biofuel crops, such as oil palms (see Choose your feedstock wisely).
Global issues of food scarcity and starvation in some countries is due to economic, free trade, globalisation, the dominance of multinational corporations and political issues, not the amount of food produced in the world.
Choose your feedstock wisely: beware palm oil
Biodiesel has been championed as a means of reducing our carbon dioxide
emissions. However, like many emerging ‘green’ technologies, the
environmental impacts or benefits depend largely on how it is produced;
in particular, where the feedstock comes from.
Biodiesel made from used cooking oil has the least emissions, as you are using what would otherwise be a waste product. Making biodiesel from a purpose grown crop causes some emissions; from the tractor that seeded and harvested the crop, the truck that carted it, processing, fertilizers and pesticides, etc. All considered though, it still stacks up very well compared to fossil fuels.
But what if a rain forest has to be cleared to make room for the oil crop? Not only do we loose the biodiversity, but we loose the CO2 locked up in the soil and the trees. When the forest is burned in the process of clearing, even greater amounts of CO2 are released into the atmosphere compared to using fossil diesel.
Unfortunately, the oil palm grows very well where tropical rainforest used to. Palm oil yields are also the best of any oil crop. For many years, the Indonesia and Malaysian territories of Sumatra and Borneo have been clear fell logged and burned to make room for plam oil to be used in cooking and cosmetics. New demand for biofuels (spurred by mandates in over 30 countries) has greatly increased the demand for palm oil, accelerating the rate of rainforest destruction in Sumatra and Borneo. Similarly, in Brazil, demand for land on which to grow soy is accelerating the rate of clear felling in the Amazon and Cerrado. Biodiesel is only a sustainable fuel if the feedstock is produced sustainably. The UN has named rainforest clearing to produce biodiesel as responsible for 4/5 of the emissions in Indonesia – the 3rd largest climate culprit.
MODIS data
Smoke from agricultural and forest fires burning on Sumatra (left) and Borneo (right) in late September and early October 2006 blanketed a wide region with smoke that interrupted air and highway travel and pushed air quality to unhealthy levels. This image from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite on October 1, 2006, shows places where MODIS detected actively burning fires marked in red. Smoke spreads in a gray-white pall to the north. NASA image created by Jesse Allen, Earth Observatory, using data provided courtesy of the MODIS Rapid Response team.
Buy locally, buy organic
While biodiesel has many benefits over fossil diesel, it will never be
able to replace fossil litre for litre, as there is simply not enough
arable land on earth to meet our current levels of consumption. We must
also avoid fuel crops competing with food crops. The reality is that in
order to mitigate global warming and respond to peak oil, we will need
to decrease our consumption of all fuels.
An intriguing example of how this can be achieved comes from the way in which Cuba responded to its own peak oil crisis in the 1990s. The US trade embargo and collapse of the Soviet Union cut Cuba’s oil imports by half. The small island then had to restructure its agriculture and transport systems, transitioning from a highly mechanized, industrial agricultural system to one using permaculture farming methods and local, urban gardens.
For more information about sustainable biodiesel, see Grown Fuels book Grown Fuel Biodiesel in Practice