Climate Progress recently reported on a study that found both economic and environmental benefits if homes in the northeastern United States upgraded older heating systems by moving from heating oil to switchgrass. However, one point to emphasize was the findings were specific to those circumstances — the region, the homes, and that particular use.

Switchgrass was not nearly as good an idea for electricity generation or transportation fuel. Further confirming the need for a diversity of renewable solutions to our energy needs, a recent study determined that electricity generated by solar beats out biofuels for powering cars under myriad scenarios.

The report, put together by a team from the University of California, Santa Barbara and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and published in Enviornmental Science and Technology, compared five different approaches to see what was the most efficient way to power a compact passenger vehicle for every 100 kilometers driven:

1. Battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) run on electricity from solar power.
2. Battery-electric vehicles run on electricity from switchgrass.
3. Internal combustion vehicles (ICVs) run on switchgrass biofuel.
4. Battery-electric vehicles run on electricity from corn.
5. Internal combustion vehicles run on corn-based biofuel.

The analysis considered land-use, greenhouse gas emissions, fossil fuel use, and took into account the production and use life cycles of both the fuels themselves and the vehicles they power.

In terms of land-use, solar significantly out-performed all other options. It performed modestly better than switchgrass in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, and significantly better than corn-based biofuel. Solar was actually equal or slightly worse than switchgrass when it came to fossil fuel requirements over the totality of the life cycle, but it still out-performed corn-based internal combustion. (And, of course, gasoline.)

So all things considered, a pretty clear win for solar-powered electric battery vehicles:

A write up over at Green Car Congress has more details on the assumptions and variables in the study’s modeling.

“PV is orders of magnitude more efficient than biofuels pathways in terms of land use — 30, 50, even 200 times more efficient — depending on the specific crop and local conditions,” Roland Geyer, a UCSB Bren School of Environmental Science & Management Professor, told Science Daily. “You get the same amount of energy using much less land, and PV doesn’t require farm land.” The central bottleneck, as the report notes, is the low efficiency of photosynthesis:

Biofuels for ICVs and bioelectricity for BEVs use photosynthesis to convert solar radiation into transportation services, that is, they are sun-to-wheels transportation pathways. While photosynthesis has a theoretical maximum energy conversion efficiency of 33 percent, the overall conversion efficiency of sunlight into terrestrial biomass is typically below 1 percent, regardless of crop type and growing conditions.

“Today’s thin-film PV is at least 10-percent efficient at converting sunlight to electricity,” Geyer explained — hence solar’s superior performance. In fact, the WWF’s Solar PV Atlas found that as far as land-use goes, solar is so efficient that less than 1 percent of global land areas would be needed to supply all the world’s electricity needs in 2050.

Traditional corn-based biofuels are problematic on all sorts of levels: Carbon emissions from agricultural production over their full life cycle largely wipe out any carbon benefits at the point of actual vehicle use. They compete with human food supplies and food cropland, driving up global prices and contributing to global poverty and instability. And new cropland sequesters less carbon from the atmosphere than the grassland or forest it typically displaces.

Switchgrass and other cellulosic biofuels, while they avoid disrupting food supplies, are not immune to these other flaws either. On top of that, their commercial viability at any time in the near future is far from certain.

For the clean car fleet of the future, electrical and hybrid vehicles relying on a grid powered by solar — and presumably wind, hydroelectric, and such — still appears to be the way to go.

According to a new cost-benefit analysis by the Agricultural Research Service (ARS), a switch from burning oil for heat to burning switchgrass biomass would cut down on both energy costs and carbon emissions for homes in the northeastern United States.

What’s especially significant is that study’s accounting of carbon emissions considered the entire life cycle of switchgrass, from crop planting, to growing, to harvesting and production. It still found switchgrass pellets yield a significant reduction in carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) emissions compared to both heating oil and natural gas, as well as a cost saving of just under $7 per gigajoule of heat compared to oil:

[T]he researchers calculated that using switchgrass pellets instead of petroleum fuel oil to generate one gigajoule of heat in residences would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 146 pounds of CO2e. Using switchgrass pellets instead of natural gas to produce one gigajoule of heat in residences would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 158 pounds of CO2e.

Substituting switchgrass pellets for fuel oil for home heating would also save money. Totaling all costs associated with installing an appropriate residential heating system and fuel consumption, Adler’s team concluded that each gigajoule of heat produced using switchgrass pellets would cost $21.36. Using fuel oil to produce the same amount of heat would cost $28.22. The savings would be less in a commercial facility, because capital costs for a commercial biomass boiler, storage, and fuel-handling equipment are five times greater than the costs for components that use fuel oil.

According to the team’s calculations, heating with switchgrass pellets would continue to be less expensive even if switchgrass production costs rose 200 percent and the price of fuel oil dropped 70 percent.

There some important caveats, to this as Clean Technica points out: First, the cost savings apply primarily to properties that are replacing old and outdated heating equipment, and thus will be investing in new equipment regardless. As noted above, the capital costs will significantly diminish savings for commercial rather than residential properties, though they won’t obliterate them. Second, the point applies to heating oil specifically — replacing gasoline with switchgrass biofuel would be difficult to justify currently, and replacing coal with switchgrass for electricity generation would significantly drive up energy costs. Third, the finding is specific to the Northeast region only.

But for the Northeast specifically, the ARS cites research indicating that by 2022 enough sustainably harvested biomass will be available to compensate for the entire regions demand for heating oil. That would save consumers something in the range of $2.3 to 3.9 billion in fuel costs per year, and cut the region’s carbon emissions by 5 percent. The finding also dovetails with President Obama’s “Better Buildings Initiative,” which aims, among other things, to take advantage of buildings and infrastructure with existing upgrade needs in order to improve energy efficiency and reduce energy bills. Finally, unlike other more widespread biofuels based on corn, for example, switchgrass has the economic and moral advantage of not doubling as a food source for humans.

So those caveats shouldn’t be interpreted to dismiss the importance of ARS’s analysis. The market is a huge and complex system, and how different people in different areas meet their energy needs are organic and myriad — how they move those needs from fossil fuels to renewable sources will be equally diverse. For the American Northeast, switchgrass for home heating looks like a compelling part of the mix. Every bite at the apple counts.

According to a new report from the New York Times, the ongoing drought in the Midwest is causing the American biofuels industry to begin crumbling around the edges.

The United States has mandated for several years that gasoline contain 10 percent biofuel — a requirement generally met with corn-based ethanol. It also maintained a tax credit for ethanol of 45 cents per gallon, though that was allowed to expire at the end of 2011. That led to the establishment of hundreds of ethanol plants throughout the Corn Belt, and communities which in turn heavily rely on those plants for their livelihoods.

But now it looks like the punishment Midwest corn yields took from the drought — one Cairo, Missouri farmer quoted in the piece said his corn crop last year was just 5.5 percent of his usual yield — has driven the price so high that ethanol plants are being forced to shut down:

Nearly 10 percent of the nation’s ethanol plants have stopped production over the past year, in part because the drought that has ravaged much of the nation’s crops pushed commodity prices so high that ethanol has become too expensive to produce.

The other half of this is falling demand for gasoline — a result of both the recession, and a renewed policy push for electric and hybrid vehicles and tougher fuel economy standards. Most cars can only take a fuel blend of only 10 percent ethanol, and most service stations are set up to only handle that amount, resulting what’s referred to as the “blend wall.” The Environmental Protection Agency allows for blends of up 15 percent, but cars that can take that haven’t caught on in the marketplace. Nor have “flex-fuel” vehicles, which can take up to 85 percent.

That’s left ethanol with a smaller amount of gasoline to be blended with, squeezing the industry:

Thousands of barrels of ethanol now sit in storage because there is not enough gasoline in the market to blend it with — and blends calling for a higher percentage of ethanol have yet to catch on widely in the marketplace….

[Demand for fuel] has shrunk to 8.7 million barrels a day from 9.7 million in 2007, said Larry Goldstein, an economist and a director of the Energy Policy Research Foundation. And with corporate average fuel economy rules now in place to double the number of miles that the average car gets per gallon by 2025, “you know we’re on a trend,” he added.

Globally, the combined effect of U.S. and European biofuel policy has been a massive divergence of corn crops into biofuel production, which in turn drove up the price of corn and contributed to global food insecurity. Much of the carbon-reducing benefits of biofuels are diluted if not reversed entirely by the carbon output from the agricultural production required to produce them. Nor does the conversion of more grasslands and forest into biofuel cropland to take advantage of the higher prices help, as those environments actually sequester more carbon that cropland.

Cellulosic biofuels, by relying on crops that don’t double as food, could provide a solution. But whether they can be widely commercialized without requiring high levels of water and land use remains an open question.

All told, our reliance on biofuels as an answer to the challenge of climate change has been an ongoing policy and humanitarian disaster, so there’s a certain irony now that the droughts and extreme weather driven by climate change are starting to eat away at the biofuel industry itself.

Of course, the people paying the price of that irony aren’t the Beltway insiders who developed America’s biofuels policy. They’re the global poor, as well as the everyday working Americans whose communities and towns are being threatened by the loss of the plants. The plant in Cairo, Missouri had been buying 16.5 million bushels of corn per year before it shut down. And the town of Walhalla, North Dakota is bleeding families due to the closure of its plant.

Cellulosic ethanol is a biofuel produced from grass, wood chips, and other feedstocks that don’t double as food. So unlike traditional corn-based ethanol, it promises to avoid encroaching upon and destabilizing human food supplies — assuming it can become commercially viable. And according to a survey by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), that time may come as soon as 2016.

The report found that the costs of enzymes, pre-treatment, and fermentation in the production process have all fallen significantly, and as a result the cellulosic biofuel industry expects its product to be cost competitive with corn-based ethanol and gasoline by 2016. But more ground needs to be covered if that goal is to be achieved. In 2012, cellulosic ethanol production cost $0.94 per litre, compared to the $0.67 per litre cost of corn-based ethanol — which is already competitive with gasoline.

So it’s understandable that Harry Boyle, the lead biofuel analyst at BNEF, is advising caution: “The cellulosic ethanol industry has something of a history of over-promising cost reductions and under-delivering. However, it may be dangerous to assume that it will not become competitive this decade.” And the report found several reasons to think the survey’s prediction might pan out:

The survey found that the largest cost elements for producers in 2012 were project capital expenditure, feedstock and enzymes. The operating costs of the process have dropped significantly since 2008 due to leaps forward in the technology. For example, the enzyme cost for a litre of cellulosic ethanol has come down 72 percent between 2008 and 2012.

Improvements in running costs for cellulosic ethanol plants will turn the spotlight squarely onto capital costs, which survey respondents expected to make up fully 45 percent of the overall expense of manufacturing a litre of cellulosic ethanol by 2016 — with feedstock contributing a further 34 percent. Developers will have to find ways of reducing the initial outlay on the plant, and reducing risk to attract cheaper financing. Boyle said: “We expect therefore to see a shift in focus over the next five to 10 years — from technology enhancements to logistical planning — that in turn suggests the industry is maturing.”

Globally, there are 14 enzymatic hydrolysis pilots; nine demonstration-stage undertakings; and 10 semi-commercial scale plants either announced, commissioned, or due online shortly. Five of the semi-commercial facilities are located in the US, but a swing towards Brazil is expected in the near future, with two announced there so far. Bloomberg New Energy Finance defines a semi-commercial facility as having capacity of 90 million litres per year, requiring an initial outlay of approximately $290 million. By 2016 the second and third tranche of plants will be reaching commissioning, with annual capacities ranging from 90 to 125 million litres. The initial outlay per installed litre is expected to fall from the original $3, to $2, due to economies of scale and a reduction in over-engineering.

If this report proves accurate, it could be a game-changer for biofuels and their role in the climate change solutions mix, given the problems that have so far bedeviled the energy source.

The requirements set by both the United States and Europe that a certain portion of their fuel supply come from biofuels have so far resulted in a huge diversion of corn crops away from use as food and into biofuel production. The increased demand for biofuels also drives farmers to dedicate land that could be used for food to biofuel feedstock production. The resulting spike in food prices and destabilization of food supplies has been disastrous for the populations of many poorer and developing countries around the globe. Most assessments of the 2008 food crisis found that biofuels played a role, compounding the threat of greater food insecurity already posed by climate change — which can in turn ferment geopolitical insecurity and destabilization.

On top of all this, corn-based biofuel use drives the conversion of grasslands and forest into cropland, even though the former two actually do much more to reduce carbon in the atmosphere than the latter. Combine that with the carbon emissions from increased agricultural production, and corn-based biofuel actually negates most, if not all, of its carbon-reducing benefits.

The ramp up in biofuel production has thus far been a major misfire in the fight against climate change. By driving up the price of corn and other biofuel sources, standards passed in the United States and Europe requiring a certain level of biofuel use have encouraged producers to dedicate more corn to ethanol production and less to food supplies.

Meanwhile, production of biofuel crops is displacing production of food crops on available land, and encouraging deforestation in the developing world. All of which in turn intensifies the problem of global food insecurity.

Thanks to a new study from South Dakota State University, we can add another negative from biofuel policy: Accelerated destruction of grasslands in America’s Western Corn Belt (WCB) region — North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Iowa.

According to Christopher Wright and Michael Wimberly, the study’s authors, conversion of grassland to corn and soy production between 2006 and 2011 has proceeded at a pace comparable to deforestation rates in Brazil, Malaysia, and Indonesia. In Iowa alone, the losses are approaching 12 million hectares (almost 30 million acres) of tallgrass prairie.

In sum, we found a net decline in grass-dominated land cover in the WCB totaling nearly 530,000 hectares (approx. 1.3 million acres). This change was concentrated in two states, South Dakota and Iowa, with the majority of grassland conversion occurring in the WCB’s three western states relative to the core corn/soy growing areas in Iowa and Minnesota.

Grassland loss from 2006 to 2011

As Brad Plumer at the Washington Post notes, a number of converging factors are driving this change: Subsidized crop insurance, as well as insufficient rewards for preserving grassland from conservation programs, are contributing along with the price boost in biofuels. But the latter is especially ironic, given that grasslands are themselves able to store carbon from the atmosphere better than cropland. So expanding biofuel crop production into grasslands specifically further dilutes biofuels’ already dubious benefits.

The destruction of grasslands is also part of the poor overall land management and climate change that’s contributing to the threat of “dust-bowlification” in the western and plains regions of the United States. As warming drives higher temperatures, heat waves, and more extremes between deluge and drought, that area of the country is increasingly left drier for longer. The loss of grasslands leave soil more vulnerable to erosion, and less able to hold and buffer water flows. That creates the possibility of a repeat of the Dust Bowls of the 1930s is growing, with all the attendant threats to food security.

In fact, Wright and Wimberly include the ominous note rates of grassland conversion this high “have not been seen in the Corn Belt since the 1920s and 1930s.”

The International Energy Agency concluded that freshwater use is becoming an increasingly crucial issue for energy production around the world in its 2012 World Energy Outlook.

Between steam systems for coal plants, cooling for nuclear plants, fracking for natural gas wells, irrigation for biofuel crops, and myriad other uses, energy production consumed 66 billion cubic meters (BCM) of the world’s fresh water in 2010. That is water removed from its source and lost to evaporation, consumption, or transported out of the water basin — as opposed to water withdrawn, used, and then returned to its source for further availability, which is a far larger amount.

According to figures it shared with National Geographic, IEA anticipates this water consumption will double from 66 BCM now to 135 BCM by 2035 with most of the growth accounted for by coal and biofuels:

If today’s policies remain in place, the IEA calculates that water consumed for energy production would increase from 66 billion cubic meters (bcm) today to 135 bcm annually by 2035.

That’s an amount equal to the residential water use of every person in the United States over three years, or 90 days’ discharge of the Mississippi River. It would be four times the volume of the largest U.S. reservoir, Hoover Dam’s Lake Mead.

More than half of that drain would be from coal-fired power plants and 30 percent attributable to biofuel production, in IEA’s view. The agency estimates oil and natural gas production together would account for 10 percent of global energy-related water demand in 2035….

The surest way to reduce the water required for electricity generation, IEA’s figures indicate, would be to move to alternative fuels. Renewable energy provides the greatest opportunity: Wind and solar photovoltaic power have such minimal water needs they account for less than one percent of water consumption for energy now and in the future, by IEA’s calculations.

This presents a challenge, since river flows, aquifers, and other sources of fresh water are already being strained by the twin drains of population growth and less reliable rainfall due to climate change. The United Nations is projecting that by 2025, 1.8 billion people will live in regions with severe water scarcity, and two-thirds of the world’s population could be living under water-stressed conditions. Given water’s importance in different forms of energy production, this presents a double hit: Less available fresh water for human consumption, plus strained and costlier energy supplies.

IEA sees water consumption for coal electricity shooting up 84 percent, from 38 to 70 BCM per year by 2035. So-called “dry cooling” systems could address this, but the plants cost more and generate electricity less efficiently. Nor is carbon capture and sequestration technology likely to help.

While biofuels’ water consumption will be lower than coal’s — 41 BCM in 2035, up from 12 BCM today — its increase of 242 percent will be much larger. Irrigation requires a lot of water, though estimates vary wildly and the industry claims it’s finding ways to cut back. IEA puts it between four and 560 gallons of water needed to produce one gallon of corn ethanol. Other estimates put it as high as 10,000 gallons of water per one gallon of biofuel. And that’s all bound up with the damaging effect biofuel production is having on world food supplies.

There are solutions, such as moving to less water-intensive methods like pump irrigation, but the trade-off is far more electricity use from potentially unsustainable sources. Cellulosic ethanol, made from non-food sources, is another possibility, but IEA estimates it won’t be commercially viable until at least 2025.

Also, as National Geographic notes, biofuels’ level of water consumption is grossly out of whack with their contributions to world energy supplies: They provide a mere 3 percent of the energy that drives cars, trucks, ships, and aircraft, and IEA projects they’ll increase to just 5 percent by 2035 under current government policies.

As for fracking, IEA’s estimates covered the entire source-to-carrier production process, and under this framework natural gas’ water consumption reach just 2.85 BCM by 2035, or 2 percent of total consumption. Though the concentration of water use at individual fracking projects can still put a strain on water supplies for local commentaries.

The first pilot plant in a program of installations that can sustainably produce crops, electricity, biofuels, and even plants for re-vegetation efforts in a desert environment is now up and running in the Middle Eastern nation of Qatar.

The Sahara Forest Project, which brings outfits from both Qatar and Norway together, uses desert air, sunlight, and saltwater as inputs for a system that aims to be environmentally sustainable, beneficial for local human development, and financially viable over the long term. As the project’s CEO, Joakim Hauge, puts it: “The Sahara Forest Project is all about taking what we have enough of, like saltwater, CO2, sunlight, and deserts, to produce what we need more of: sustainably produced food, water, and energy.” The hope is that the pilot project can be scaled up to installations in drier and desert climates around the world.

Essentially, the plant takes multiple sustainable technologies and integrates their inputs and outputs into a single multistage system, thus minimizing both waste and ecological footprint:

• Standard solar power and concentrated solar power: Arrays of mirrors create concentrated solar power by aiming sunlight to superheat seawater into steam. That steam can then drive turbines to create electricity, and the heated seawater is then used throughout the greenhouse system. Additional sustainable electricity is generated from arrays of standard solar photovoltaic panels.
• Saltwater for fresh water and cool air for greenhouses: Hot desert air is pulled through a flow of seawater as it enters the greenhouses. This both cools and humidifies the air, creating optimal growing conditions for the agricultural crops within. At the far end of the greenhouse, the air is heated by flows of sun-heated seawater and then encounters pipes of cooled seawater, which causes the humidity to condense into fresh water that is then used for crop irrigation.
• Outdoor vegetation: Outside the greenhouses, the seawater passes through further evaporators to create humidity for vegetation sheltered outdoors. These include trees for desert reforestation, local vegetation, various forms of crops and livestock feed, and specific forms of plants naturally adapted to salt water which serve as feedstocks for bioenergy production and other uses. At the end, remaining seawater is collected into evaporation pools for the production of salt.
• Algae biofuel production: Lab-grown algae, which have been shown to generate up to 30 times more biofuel per acre than other plants, are grown in saltwater pools to create biofuels without taking up agricultural land or crops that double as food for humans.

The basic advantage of the Sahara Forest Project is that it doesn’t use any fundamentally new or experimental technology — it merely recombines established technologies in creative ways.

At the same time, at least one of its goals — growing plants for reforestation — may be overly ambitious. “Trying to grow trees in the Sahara desert is not the most appropriate approach,” Patrick Gonzalez, a forest ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley, told National Geographic back in 2010. “I can imagine that this scheme and type of technology in limited cases might work in certain areas like Dubai, where they’re used to making palm-shaped islands and 160-story-tall buildings.”

But for the more modest goal of returning a desert to its natural former ecosystem, “it would be more effective, but less flashy, to work with local people on community-based natural-resource management.”

By redirecting corn, grains, and other food crops to use as an energy source, biofuel policy in the United States and Europe has been driving up the price of food and contributing to ongoing international shortages. Most recently, the New York Times ran an expose on the devastating effects these policies have had on the poor of Guatemala.

Europe in particular has established new standards mandating that all transportation fuels contain 10 percent biofuel by 2020. While amendements have been proposed to limit the biofuels made from food crops or on land previously devoted top food crops to only half of that portion, they remain in limbo.

So it’s encouraging that a new report from the consultancy CE Delft — commissioned by Greenpeace, Transport & Environment, the European Environmental Bureau and BirdLife Europe — is calling for Europe to meet its 2020 goal without reliance on biofuels from food crops, and laying out the steps for how to get there. GreenBusiness has the story:

The CE Delft report argues the targets can be met through greater investment in fuel efficiency measures, waste and residue-based biofuels, and electric vehicles, alongside tighter rules to phase out the use of biofuels made from land-based food or energy crops.

“The EU Commission’s decision to put a limit on the use of crop-based biofuels is a step in the right direction,” said John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace. “The growing use of transport fuels from crops has driven up food prices, led to more deforestation in places like Indonesia to grow palm oil for fuel, and made climate change worse as a result.”

But he warned that the EU’s proposals needed to be tightened to ensure biofuels that contribute to deforestation and food price inflation are phased out.

“The most serious flaw in the new European biofuel policy is that it does not hold biofuel suppliers accountable for the emissions from indirect land use change, where crops for biofuel displace food production and as a result more rainforests and peatland are cleared to grow food crops,” he said. “So fuel suppliers can still use harmful biofuels like palm oil from Indonesia and claim credit for cutting emissions.”

The report recommends that both the EU and member states should act urgently to “phase out direct and indirect support for land-based biofuels and [adopt] a trajectory from current consumption levels towards near-zero use in order to prevent further environmental and social damage”.

It also calls for tougher reporting requirements for biofuel producers covering their impact on land use and more demanding sustainability criteria for both biofuels and bio-gas.

“The EU and member states need to put a robust policy framework into place that speeds up energy efficiency developments, as well as the production and use of biofuels from waste and residues with no alternative uses,” the report concludes. “This biofuel strategy should be part of a broad biomass and bioenergy strategy, as the sustainable feedstock is limited and other applications will also need sustainable bioenergy to meet their climate goals.”

Almost 870 million people around the world were chronically malnourished between 2010 and 2012. Studies of the food crisis suffered around the globe in 2008 determined that western biofuel policies played a role. And while agricultural production is able to keep pace with global demand for food, that balance becomes more difficult to meet once demand for biofuels is added to the mix, especially during years when the weather is less amenable to crops. So the biofuel demands of Europe — as well as the United States — contribute to this problem by both repurposing existing food supplies, and encouraging farmers to dedicate their land to growing biofuel crops rather than food crops as prices for that produce is driven upwards.

Needless to say, a good deal of human suffering can be produced if Europe can move its energy policy away from the use of any biofuel that impinges on peoples’ food supplies.

Related Posts:

• Biofuels May Push 120 Million Into Hunger, Qatar’s Shah Says: “The era of low food prices … is over.”
• The Corn Ultimatum: How long can Americans keep burning one sixth the world’s corn supply in our cars?

A new report in The New York Times highlights how biofuel policy in the United States and Europe has produced a rolling food catastrophe in Guatemala.

The country once enjoyed a nearly self-sufficient level of corn production, but domestic producers were undercut by American corn exports subsidized by U.S. agricultural policy. Guatemala’s domestic corn supplies dropped nearly 30 percent per capita between 1995 and 2005.

In 2007, the United States established its expanded biofuel standards, and began relying on corn to meet them. That drove up demand, and the flow of cheap corn into Guatemala dried up. Meanwhile, larger farms and industrial producers took up much of Guatemala’s available cropland and water supplies to produce sugar cane, vegetable oil, and other crops to meet increased global demand for biofuel, due to European as well as U.S. policies.

The result left subsistence farmers with less and less land to work, and the average Guatemalan — whose diet is heavily corn-based — with no where else to turn for affordable food:

In a country where most families must spend about two thirds of their income on food, “the average Guatemalan is now hungrier because of biofuel development,” said Katja Winkler, a researcher at Idear, a Guatemalan nonprofit organization that studies rural issues. Roughly 50 percent of the nation’s children are chronically malnourished, the fourth-highest rate in the world, according to the United Nations. […]

But many worry that Guatemala’s poor are already suffering from the diversion of food to fuel. “There are pros and cons to biofuel, but not here,” said Misael Gonzáles of C.U.C., a labor union for Guatemala’s farmers. “These people don’t have enough to eat. They need food. They need land. They can’t eat biofuel, and they don’t drive cars.”

In 2011, corn prices would have been 17 percent lower if the United States did not subsidize and give incentives for biofuel production with its renewable fuel policies, according to an analysis by Bruce A. Babcock, an agricultural economist at Iowa State University. The World Bank has suggested that biofuel mandates in the developed world should be adjusted when food is short or prices are inordinately high. […]

In part because [the United Nations World Food Program in Guatemala's] primary food supplement is a mix of corn and soy, it cannot afford to help all of the Guatemalan children in need, Mr. Gauvreau said; it is agency policy to buy corn locally, but there is no extra corn grown here anymore. And Guatemalans cannot go back to the land because so much of it is being devoted to growing crops for biofuel. (Almost no biofuel is used domestically.)

In short, Guatemala is a microcosm for the damage Western food-based biofuels are doing to food supplies for the global poor. The United States is currently on track to devote nearly 40 percent of its own corn crop, and 15 percent of the world’s corn supplies, to biofuels. By 2020, European standards will mandate that transportation fuels contain 10 percent biofuels. (Although the European Commission “recently proposed amending its policy so that only half of its 2020 target could be met by using biofuels made from food crops or those grown on land previously devoted to food crops,” according to the New York Times.)

Most assessments of the 2008 food crisis found that biofuels played a role. Agricultural production is able to keep up with the world’s growing demand for food; however, the growing demand for biofuels make it more difficult to match that demand in years when weather is poor. As global warming continues to raise the odds of extreme weather, less reliable rain, and less reliable growing seasons, the potential to meet that demand diminishes.

At the same time, most studies have determined that because of the carbon emissions involved in biofuels’ agricultural production, their net effect on greenhouse gases is either negligible or negative. More advanced biofuels, such as the ones based on microalgae, could provide a solution, but they have not been fully commercialized. For the moment, we’re causing severe damage to the world’s food supply with no real benefit to the global warming problem.

by Jim Lane, via Biofuels Digest

As people debate the conflict between food and fuel, entrepreneurs and scientists are giving us something even more precious than resolution of that debate: options and alternatives. Here, Biofuels Digest takes a look at 6 technologies and strategies that address food vs fuel, and offer alternatives.

1. Feedstock diversification.

In biofuels, it is more talked about – the push beyond corn starch and cane sugars into corn stover, sugarcane bagasse, woods and forestry residues, animal wastes, algae, municipal solid waste, and energy grasses as well as new inedible oilseed crops such as jatropha, carinata and camelina.

But there are opportunities for food manufacturers as well.

Take for instance Solazyme Roquette Nutritional’s whole algalin flour. According to the makers, it provides “an outstanding solution for improving nutritional profiles in many applications, such as bakery, beverages and frozen desserts. Acting as a whole food ingredient, Whole Algalin Flour is very low in saturated fat, is trans-fat free, cholesterol free, and considerably reduces calories, as well as provides fiber and protein, while providing the same overall mouth feel and consistency as a full fat food.”

Much of the underlying problem of food vs fuel is that multiple sectors have fallen in love with the same feedstock – frankly, that’s Nestle’s problem, and the problem of many biofuels producers. If the US is addicted to oil, many producers are addicted to corn or cane, and both sides benefit from diversifying where possible.

2. Increasing yield per ton.

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