by the numbers: biofuel

if you haven’t heard of biofuel, you’re an utter loser and you obviously don’t watch enough television. they’re going to wean us from opec’s teat, save the american farmer, stop global warming, bring peace to the holy land, and solve the jonbenét ramsey murder-mystery, all by next summer. the catholic church recently canonized biofuel based on these three miracles. everyone wants to get in on biofuel. john kerry is considering ethanol as his running-mate for 2008, and george bush recently betrothed his eldest daughter to bio-diesel (although this may simply have been a mix-up with the actor, “vin diesel,” of whom the president is a huge fan).

some things in the last paragraph are exaggerations (i’ll leave it to the reader weed them out), but they capture the spirit of the moment. i think – and i might be all alone on this – but i think that maybe, just maybe, all the biofuel hype warrants some scrutiny.

if for no other reason, we should be suspicious because republicans are on the bandwagon. does anyone really buy a 180° turn within the last year? of course, there is now a (much) stronger argument for independence from foreign oil, but the war was never about oil… at least we’re not supposed to think so.

sadly, the reason that biofuels have political support is that they are effectively massive farming subsidies – political chocolate covered by a thin, environmentally-sound shell.

witness the fact that we’re supporting what are pretty much the worst possible crops for biofuel production: wheat, soy, and corn. the best crops are sugar beet, sugarcane, cassava, and sorghum. unfortunately for us, they come from, respectively, france, brazil, nigeria, and india, none of which is likely to win out over middle-america, in the foreseeable future.

i certainly don’t mean to imply that any of this is new. we’ve been standing in the way of international agricultural trade since the 1930’s. it’s just different, now that politicians can hide behind the mask of environmentalism.

rhetoric aside, what people really want, and need, to know is, are biofuels cheap, and are they clean?

biofuel cleanliness is debatable, but supporters probably have it right. on the upside, their net effect on carbon levels is definitely low because plants take carbon out of the atmosphere as they make biofuel material. on the downside biodiesel currently releases many times the nitrous emissions that gasoline does, but technological improvements can help to bring that down, and other biofuels don’t share that problem.

what does merit close scrutiny is the question of whether biofuels are “cheap” – in the economic sense, as opposed to the price sense.

people are usually only concerned with energy conservation and want to make sure we’re getting more energy out than we’re putting in. but given our propensity for massive resource depletion, we should consider the material resources used in biofuel production.

on a yearly basis, current technology can extract 6 tons of biomass (the stuff biofuels are made of) out of an acre of arable land, which can then be converted into about 400 gallons of biofuel. unfortunately, biofuels will only ever be about 70% as effective as gasoline, turning 400 gallons of biofuel into about 280 gallons of gasoline.

so, all you need to feed our gasoline habit is about 497.5 million acres of land. unfortunately, that’s 108% of the arable land in the united states. so much for self-sufficiency.

i must admit that i’m being a bit pessimistic. if you believe the optimists, we can quadruple the biomass yield and cut our fuel needs in half, taking the amount of land down to 37.9 million acres, or 8% of the nation’s arable land.

i’m a man of science, and i think that productivity miracles can happen, but they aren’t easy. unfortunately, biofuel faces more than an uphill struggle, it’s an uphill struggle in the rain with people jumping on its back and throwing stuff at it.

there are other things that require arable land, like 300 million mouths, a number that keeps growing. oh, and we haven’t mentioned the fact that most parts of the nation are depleting their aquifers at a rate that will halve current irrigated acreage by 2030.

there’s just no getting around the fact that oil is about a billion years of biofuel production, distilled into sweet, sticky alkanes. our energy demand is a rather high hurdle, and the first step to clearing it must be an apolitical, economical approach that weighs the realities of all alternatives. eliminate the subsidies and the barriers to trade, let people decide how scarce oil is and will be, and let entrepreneurs meet demand. that’s what we do best.