The Mexican Dilemma: Biofuel or Food?

Street vendor in Mexico City. Critics of biofuels say they push up the cost of food.
Mexico's gamble on biofuels
By Alberto Najar / June 26, 2009

Mexican authorities intent on tackling the issues surrounding the production of biofuels are faced with one fundamental question. Should they have clean air, or cheap food to feed the country's poor?

In a country where, according to official estimates, 40 million people live in poverty and 30% of the maize consumed is imported, the answer not straightforward.

On the one hand there is the international commitment the government has made to promote the use of renewable fuels and to fight climate change.

On the other, environmentalists warn that producing raw materials for ethanol and biodiesel displace production of basic grains, especially maize, the staple of the Mexican diet.

"We could lose the ability to produce our own food," says Raul Benet, a spokesman for the activist group Rostros sin Voces, or Faceless Voices.

But the undersecretary of agriculture, Francisco Lopez Tostado, flatly rejects that there is any kind of conflict.

And if there was, he tells BBC Mundo, "food would definitely prevail".

Second generation

Mexico has produced legislation to restrict the use of maize in the production of biofuels.

The grain can only be used if there is a national surplus and domestic demand has been met.

But those are conditions that have yet to be satisfied, acknowledges Mr Tostado.

So, faced with a collapse in its green energy strategy, the government has made changes that they hope will make it possible to both comply with its international commitments regarding biofuels and feed its poor.

One of those commitments is that by 2011 it will replace 2% of hydrocarbons used in three of the country's main cities - Guadalajara, Monterrey and Mexico City - with green alternatives.

Instead of maize, officials are looking to produce ethanol from sugar cane or sea weed, for example, and biodiesel from palm trees or castor oil plants.

Experiments have been made with sweet sorghum, cassava and jatropha (or physic nut), that could be applied in the production of so-called second generation biofuels.

This is when vegetable waste is recycled to make the biomass used in the first stages of production.

There is a total of 145 projects being carried out to find the optimum raw material for the production of biofuels, according to Mr Tostado.

But environmentalists fear that a new Biofuels Bill, which is yet to become law, could risk opening the door to the inclusion of maize in the production of biofuels.

The undersecretary of energy, Jordi Herrera, dismisses that possibility, as the use of maize as raw material for biofuels is banned in Mexico.

"Nothing and nobody can be above the law", he tells the BBC.

Since last year, the government has stopped financial support to projects that would be using maize in biofuel production.

In the north-eastern town of Sinaloa, two plants had already been built for that purpose. Now they will have to adapt so they can use different raw materials such as sugar cane.

So alternatives to maize are the key.

If Mexico succeeds in making fuel from these alternatives it may well manage to have it all: green energy and food for its poor.

Source / BBC News

Thanks to Deva Wood / The Rag Blog

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The Big Green Bus: Ex-Diesel Goes Veggie

'Spreading the green gospel'
By Patrick Pfeiffer / July 27, 2008

"Either you're on the bus or you're off the bus," was the hackneyed statement proposed to me by three members of Dartmouth College's Big Green Bus; an ex-diesel goes veggie 37' foot school bus. My hometown San Francisco weekend was just beginning as I emphatically accepted the invitation to climb aboard and clock some miles with the 12 Dartmouth students on a mission to educate Americans about climate change through the use of this high profile 'green' machine.

A tour by resident Andrew Zabel (Dartmouth Class of 2009 and the bus' leader) begins at the flap doors, in which the crossing of this threshold transports you into a funky retrofitted living space complete with bunk-beds, a library, multiple couches, a flat screen TV, a refrigerator, and a plethora of everyday comforts and necessities. A stroll along the central walkway brings you to the rear of the bus, to an oblong machine, complete with PVC piping, tubes, and everything else needed to take veggie oil and turn it into primo fuel. The ability of the Big Green Bus to run, relies on the ability of its team to track down ample amounts of spent deep-fryer oil from locations all across the country. The 70 gallons of McChicken grease that I witnessed came from a restaurant close to Shoreline Ampitheatre, the Saturday night Big Green Bus destination. The careful navigation of the bus down the restaurant's narrow back ally and the subsequent assembly of the veggie oil pump to the gas tanks, serves to note the difficulty and time taken to refill the bus. At 7 miles per veggie-gallon, this fill would be enough to take the bus and its crew north to Oregon; stop number 27 of 43.

In ascertaining what the hardest part of the journey has been, Bennet Meyers (Dartmouth Class of 2009) complains of "California". He then goes on to explain that because of "California's environmental progressivism and forward-thinking population; it is extremely difficult to find any spent veggie oil in the state, for it has all been accounted for". Whereas in the past burger joints and restaurants would have to pay a third party to remove this waste, they are now selling it to aggregators.

Within the past year, there is no doubt that the use of alternative fuels, especially biodiesel (made from veggie oil and other grades of diesel fuel) and ethanol have been on the front burner as a way to both help reduce our climatic impact and curb our dependence on foreign oil. However, the recent ramping up in production of biodiesel and ethanol has brought forth some bad rap to the alternative fuels world.

The negative side to increased biodiesel and ethanol production includes: an increase in food prices, an increase in land degradation (to grow the fuel stock) , and some experts even report that biodiesel and ethanol use leads to a net positive increase in carbon dioxide emissions (the most common of the greenhouse gasses).

Veggie oil is different however; the carbon impacts are net negative from a business-as-usual baseline. The oil used to power the Big Green Bus, would have been created anyways, and no additional cropland was used to create the stock. Furthermore, the use of veggie oil has been approved by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change as an approved avenue to generate carbon credits (UNFCCC). Such credits, known as CERs (Certified Emission Reductions), are being traded at around $30 per metric ton. Even though the Big Green Bus is not eligible (the U.S. is not a signatory to the Kyoto protocol) to generate carbon credits, their carbon reductions and further, ability to affect change is priceless.

My weekend on the bus is one to remember. The ability to combine an environmental message with the fun of the bus is sure to inspire those who read about, saw, and/or toured the Big Green Bus. Whether it be Newman's Own, Timberland, or Waste Management (3 of the bus' biggest sponsors), corporations and individuals alike are hoping on this big green machine, helping to spread this green gospel.

Source / The Huffington Post

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From Garbage to Gas Tank: Trash as Biofuel

Good for Something?With national gas prices topping $4 per gallon, bioethanol from alternative sources -- including trash -- is becoming increasingly feasible. Now companies say garbage-based fuel could be commercially viable within two years. Photo from Getty Images.
Trash talk that makes sense
By Jessica Marshall / July 23, 2008

Within the next two years, some of us may be running our cars on trash.

Two companies -- INEOS bio of Lyndhurst, U.K., and Coskata of Warrenville, Ill. -- claim to be within reach of producing ethanol from garbage on a commercial scale.

INEOS bio announced this week that they plan to produce commercial quantities of waste-derived ethanol within two years. Coskata plans to have a commercial demonstration facility by mid-2009.

The companies use similar processes to turn municipal waste into ethanol. The first step is gasification, in which the waste is heated with limited oxygen to create carbon monoxide and hydrogen.

"It's a very different process from incineration, where you completely combust in excess air," which results in carbon dioxide and water, said INEOS bio's Graham Rice. "We're trying to go halfway and produce carbon monoxide, which still has a lot of chemical energy."

The carbon monoxide and hydrogen mixture is then fed to bacteria, which convert the mixture into ethanol. The ethanol is then purified and blended with fuel.

"It's a process which can take any form of carbon waste," Rice said. Coskata's Wes Bolsen agreed. "It might be trash. It might be tires. It might be biomass."

Importantly, none of these starting materials is used for food, so this process sidesteps concerns over diverting food crops like corn into biofuel production.

The process also uses less than half the water needed to make ethanol from corn, Bolsen said. It uses as little as a quarter of the water that might be required to make ethanol from waste biomass or grass crops by digesting the plants' cellulose and converting it to ethanol -- seen as the next generation in biofuel production.

"The analysis we've done is that the greenhouse gas emissions we'd expect would be a 90 percent reduction compared to petrol [gasoline]," Rice added.

INEOS bio's commercial facility in Fayetteville, Ark., will use green household waste, including compostable household clippings, food waste, mixed waste paper and cardboard. The company estimates that biodegradable household waste in the United States alone could make five billion gallons a year of ethanol, which is more than half of the current U.S. ethanol demand of nine billion gallons.

Coskata plans to run five different materials through their commercial demonstration plant: wood chips, sugar cane waste, municipal waste, natural gas and a potential energy crop such as switchgrass.

"We're looking at one dollar a gallon production cost," Bolsen said, "which competes directly with [the cost of ethanol from] Brazilian sugarcane, and we can do it here in the U.S."

"Wherever there are people, wastes are generated," Rice said. "What I'd like to see is every community converting its waste into renewable transport fuel."

Source / Discovery News

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Biofuels - Still Very Problematic

A handful of corn before it is processed. Photograph: Charlie Neibergall/AP
Secret report: biofuel caused food crisis
By Aditya Chakrabortty / July 4, 2008

Internal World Bank study delivers blow to plant energy drive

Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% - far more than previously estimated - according to a confidential World Bank report obtained by the Guardian.

The damning unpublished assessment is based on the most detailed analysis of the crisis so far, carried out by an internationally-respected economist at global financial body.

The figure emphatically contradicts the US government's claims that plant-derived fuels contribute less than 3% to food-price rises. It will add to pressure on governments in Washington and across Europe, which have turned to plant-derived fuels to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and reduce their dependence on imported oil.

Senior development sources believe the report, completed in April, has not been published to avoid embarrassing President George Bush.

"It would put the World Bank in a political hot-spot with the White House," said one yesterday.

The news comes at a critical point in the world's negotiations on biofuels policy. Leaders of the G8 industrialised countries meet next week in Hokkaido, Japan, where they will discuss the food crisis and come under intense lobbying from campaigners calling for a moratorium on the use of plant-derived fuels.

It will also put pressure on the British government, which is due to release its own report on the impact of biofuels, the Gallagher Report. The Guardian has previously reported that the British study will state that plant fuels have played a "significant" part in pushing up food prices to record levels. Although it was expected last week, the report has still not been released.

"Political leaders seem intent on suppressing and ignoring the strong evidence that biofuels are a major factor in recent food price rises," said Robert Bailey, policy adviser at Oxfam. "It is imperative that we have the full picture. While politicians concentrate on keeping industry lobbies happy, people in poor countries cannot afford enough to eat."

Rising food prices have pushed 100m people worldwide below the poverty line, estimates the World Bank, and have sparked riots from Bangladesh to Egypt. Government ministers here have described higher food and fuel prices as "the first real economic crisis of globalisation".

President Bush has linked higher food prices to higher demand from India and China, but the leaked World Bank study disputes that: "Rapid income growth in developing countries has not led to large increases in global grain consumption and was not a major factor responsible for the large price increases."

Even successive droughts in Australia, calculates the report, have had a marginal impact. Instead, it argues that the EU and US drive for biofuels has had by far the biggest impact on food supply and prices.

Since April, all petrol and diesel in Britain has had to include 2.5% from biofuels. The EU has been considering raising that target to 10% by 2020, but is faced with mounting evidence that that will only push food prices higher.

"Without the increase in biofuels, global wheat and maize stocks would not have declined appreciably and price increases due to other factors would have been moderate," says the report. The basket of food prices examined in the study rose by 140% between 2002 and this February. The report estimates that higher energy and fertiliser prices accounted for an increase of only 15%, while biofuels have been responsible for a 75% jump over that period.

It argues that production of biofuels has distorted food markets in three main ways. First, it has diverted grain away from food for fuel, with over a third of US corn now used to produce ethanol and about half of vegetable oils in the EU going towards the production of biodiesel. Second, farmers have been encouraged to set land aside for biofuel production. Third, it has sparked financial speculation in grains, driving prices up higher.

Other reviews of the food crisis looked at it over a much longer period, or have not linked these three factors, and so arrived at smaller estimates of the impact from biofuels. But the report author, Don Mitchell, is a senior economist at the Bank and has done a detailed, month-by-month analysis of the surge in food prices, which allows much closer examination of the link between biofuels and food supply.

The report points out biofuels derived from sugarcane, which Brazil specializes in, have not had such a dramatic impact.

Supporters of biofuels argue that they are a greener alternative to relying on oil and other fossil fuels, but even that claim has been disputed by some experts, who argue that it does not apply to US production of ethanol from plants.

"It is clear that some biofuels have huge impacts on food prices," said Dr David King, the government's former chief scientific adviser, last night. "All we are doing by supporting these is subsidising higher food prices, while doing nothing to tackle climate change."

Source / The Guardian

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Liposuction: The Key to Energy Independence

Living off the fat of the land
By Barbara Ehrenreich / June 24, 2008

Everyone talks about our terrible dependency on oil -- foreign and otherwise -- but hardly anyone mentions what it is. Fossil fuel, all right, but whose fossils? Mostly tiny plants called diatoms, but quite possibly a few Barney-like creatures went into the mix, like Stegosaurus, Brontosaurus and other giant reptiles that shared the Jurassic period with all those diatoms. What we are burning in our cars and keeping our homes warm or cool with is, in other words, a highly processed version of corpse juice.

Think of this for a moment, if only out of respect for the dead. There you were, about 100 million years ago, maybe a contented little diatom or a great big Brontosaurus stumbling around the edge of a tar pit -- a lord of the earth. And what are you now? A sludge of long-chain carbon molecules that will be burned so that some mammalian biped can make a CVS run for Mountain Dew and chips.

It's an old human habit -- living off the road kill of the planet. There's evidence, for example, that early humans were engaged in scavenging before they figured out how to hunt for themselves. They'd scan the sky for circling vultures, dash off to the kill site -- hoping that the leopard that did the actual hunting had sauntered off for a nap -- and gobble up what remained of the prey. It was risky, but it beat doing your own antelope tracking.

We continue our career as scavengers today, attracted not by vultures but by signs saying "Safeway" or "Giant." Inside these sites, we find bits of dead animals wrapped neatly in plastic. The killing has already been done for us -- usually by underpaid immigrant workers rather than leopards.

I say to my fellow humans: It's time to stop feeding off the dead and grow up! I don't know about food, but I have a plan for achieving fuel self-suffiency in less time than it takes to say "Arctic National Wildlife Refuge." The idea came to me from reports of the growing crime of French fry oil theft: Certain desperate individuals are stealing restaurants' discarded cooking oil, which can then be used to fuel cars. So the idea is: why not could skip the French fry phase and harvest high-energy hydrocarbons right from ourselves?

I'm talking about liposuction, of course, and it's a mystery to me why it hasn't occurred to any of those geniuses who are constantly opining about fuel prices on MSNBC. The average liposuction removes about half a gallon of liquid fat, which may not seem like much. But think of the vast reserves our nation is literally sitting on! Thirty percent of Americans are obese, or about 90 million individuals or 45 million gallons of easily available fat -- not from dead diatoms but from our very own bellies and butts.

This is the humane alternative to biofuels derived directly from erstwhile foodstuffs like corn. Biofuels, as you might have noticed, are exacerbating the global food crisis by turning edible plants into gasoline. But we could put humans back in the loop by first turning the corn into Doritos and hence into liposuctionable body fat. There would be a reason to live again, even a patriotic rationale for packing on the pounds.

True, liposuction is not risk-free, as the numerous doctors' websites on the subject inform us. And those of us who insist on driving gas guzzlers may soon start depleting their personal fat reserves, much as heroin addicts run out of useable veins. But the gaunt, punctured, look could become a fashion statement. Already, the combination of a tiny waist and a huge carbon footprint--generated by one's Hummer and private jet -- is considered a sign of great wealth.

And think what it would do for our nation's self-esteem. We may not lead the world in scientific innovation, educational achievement, or low infant mortality, but we are the global champions of obesity. Go here and you'll find America well ahead of the pack when it comes to personal body fat, while those renowned oil-producers -- Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Iran -- aren't even among the top 29. All we need is a healthy dose of fat pride and for CVS to start marketing home liposuction kits. That run for Mountain Dew and chips could soon be an energy-neutral proposition.

Source. ZNet

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Pesky Kudzu Fuels Speculation

Good for Something? The kudzu vine, also known as "the plant that ate the South," was brought from eastern Asia in 1876, can grow more than 6.5 feet a week. Because of its high biomass and resilience, kudzu is being considered by some researchers as a potential biofuel. Photo from Getty Images.
Kudzu Gets Kudos as a Potential Biofuel
By Jessica Marshall / June 16, 2008

As concerns rise over corn ethanol creating competition between food and fuels, ethanol made from one of the country's most invasive plants -- kudzu -- could be part of the solution, according to Rowan Sage of the University of Toronto and colleagues at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The kudzu vine, also known as "the plant that ate the South," was brought from eastern Asia in 1876 and can grow more than 6.5 feet a week. Its starchy roots plunge deep into the soil, and just a fragment of the plant remaining in the ground is enough to allow it to come back next season.

"Kudzu is just a large amount of carbohydrate sitting below ground waiting for anyone to come along and dig it up," Sage said. "The question is, is it worthwhile to dig it up?"

His team gathered samples of kudzu from different locations in the south at different times of year and measured the amount of carbohydrate -- which can be converted into ethanol by yeast -- present in leaves, vines and roots.

The roots were by far the largest source of carbohydrate in the plant: up to 68 percent carbohydrate by dry weight, compared to a few percent in leaves and vines.

The researchers estimate that kudzu could produce 2.2 to 5.3 tons of carbohydrate per acre in much of the South, or about 270 gallons per acre of ethanol, which is comparable to the yield for corn of 210 to 320 gallons per acre. They recently published their findings in Biomass and Bioenergy.

Crucial to making the plan work would be figuring out whether kudzu could be economically harvested, especially the roots, which can be thick and grow more than six feet deep. To balance this expense, Sage said, the plant requires zero planting, fertilizer or irrigation costs.

Even if equipment could harvest the roots, a large fraction of kudzu vines blanket steep hillsides and would be difficult to access. The team estimated that about one-third of kudzu plants would be harvestable. If so, they calculate that kudzu could offer about 8 percent of the 2006 U.S. bioethanol supply.

"It's not going to solve anybody's energy crisis, but it would be a useful supplement," Sage said.

"You could use it to get rid of the kudzu," he said, "or, alternatively, you could let it regenerate naturally, and just walk away and then come back and do it again in a few years."

"There is a conundrum there," said Irwin Forseth of the University of Maryland in College Park. "Unless you're going to let it come back and devote some land to cultivating it, it wouldn't form a stable source. You wouldn't want to put in a stable infrastructure and work out how to extract it from roots to have it go away after three years."

However, if existing corn ethanol manufacturing plants could be used to process kudzu, too, then the approach might be feasible, Forseth said.

Bob Tanner of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., proposed using kudzu for energy in the energy crisis of the 1970s, but he now suggests that the starch, which is used as a gelling product in food in Japan, carries a higher value as a food product.

He advocates using the starch for food and converting the cellulose -- the woody, fibrous carbohydrate that gives structure to the stems and leaves -- into ethanol once processes under development are commercially available.

The fibers also make fine textiles, Tanner said. "My suggestion is, be creative. Don't cuss at it. Use it creatively."

Source. / Discovery

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