South Africa’s Biofuels Strategy. Food or Fuel?
by Warren McLaren, Sydney on 05.16.07
South Africa’s government sees much to be excited about in the emerging biofuels industry. They are planning to outline their strategy for the business next month and have taken in over 200 submissions on the subject. A news piece from Business Report says they are investigating the viability of maize, sugar cane, sugar beet, sorghum and wheat as possible biofuel feedstocks. The key challenges the strategy would need to address were the costs of the technology to develop the biofuels and the production plants. Some are wondering if this will have an impact on the price of food normally derived from such crops. "You've got cars owned by wealthy people, competing against the food security of the poor," said one disgruntled environment group. Among many who who are calling on the South African government to set fuel efficiency standards.. Others ponder the effect the global warming will have on agricultural yields if severe droughts continue. But the government is bullish, estimating that the sector could also yield 55,000 sorely needed jobs. One of the policies that may result from the biofuels strategy is that” by 2013 biofuels would constitute 4.5 percent of motor fuel sold, because this fuel would contain either an 8 percent ethanol blend or a 2 percent biodiesel blend.” Via ::Business Report.
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I agree with "disgruntled environmental group." I'd rather concentrate on feeding people and renewable energy like wind, solar, and especially hydrogen, than biofuels. I fear if the market for biofuels takes off, more crops will be grown for fuel, lowering the supply and raising prices of food crops.
Even if it's cellulosic and doesnt *use* edible crops, it seems unlikely that farmers won't be tempted to sow with this new target in mind. Then you're likely using petroleum-based fertilizers to grow something meant to replace petroleum. Not the best idea. Why not focus on hydrogen?
Just a thought regarding all the sudden excitement over biofuels: Maybe these developments aren't breakthroughs in sustainability so much as they are a case of burning the house furniture to keep warm after the firewood runs out.
We're using up the almost-free, pump-it-out-of-the-ground oil, the price is rising, so now we're turning to the next most handy (burnable) feedstock - world-wide biomass. Not exactly a revolution.
Hydrogen is made almost entirely from methane, a mostly non-renewable. In the future nuclear will probably be used, but that has a hell of a lot of problems attached.
That being said, both biofuels and hydrogen are throughly capitalist solutions to a problem the free market CANNOT control. There is no money to be had in improving energy efficiency. And yet it is the only real sollution. The ASES report that came out last Febuary said over half of all carbon reductions needed by 2050 (between 60% and 80%) had to come from improved EE.
hydrogen isnt a fuel source, its a carrier. Like a lead acid battery but with higher power density. You still have to cerate the energy somewhere out of something else with hydrogen.
when people talk about a carbon nuetral hydrogen based energy economy of the future they always seem to forget to mention that creating that still requires a massive investment in the other already existing renewable energy systems like solar and wind generation. or in the case of south africa under their budget constraints they'd produce by burning biomass and then transmit that energy as hydrogen, but hydrogen doesnt solve any of the actual energy creation problems, its just useful in power transportation.
hydrogen isnt a fuel source, its a carrier.
That is a very tiresome cliche. Everything is an energy carrier by the logic which drives such silly cliches.
You still have to cerate the energy somewhere out of something else with hydrogen.
Energy can neither be created nor destroyed.
Does anyone out there happen to know how the efficiency of current hydrogen fueled fuel cells compare to current battery technology - energy in vs. energy out assuming hydrogen produced by electrolysis?
I just posted on this today (sorry for the long cut and paste but it's better than linking to my site which would be bad form, no?:
From George Monbiot’s well-researched and rather articulate new book, “HEAT: How to Stop the Planet Burning”:
“The environmentalists who support the wider use of biofuels picture the crops they like best. They see the nodding heads of sunflowers, or the blue blossoms of the linseed plant. They talk of algae which can be grown in desert ponds, or the use of straw and other wastes to produce ethanol. . . But what they will not see - in fact what they flatly and repeatedly refuse to understand - is that a global commodity market selects not the most satisfying vision, but the cheapest commodity. And at present and for the forseeable future the cheapest commodity is palm oil. What this means is that biofuel production is a forumula not only for humanitarian disaster but also for environmental catastrophe.”
Understand, George wants us to find ‘the answers’ just as much, if not worse, than you or I. However, he very much fears putting efforts into schemes that will only set us back, not just a little but a lot.
“In 2005, Friends of the Earth published a report about the impacts of palm oil production:
Between 1985 and 2000, the development of oil-palm plantations was responsible for an estimated 87 per cent of deforestation in Malaysia.
In Sumatra and Borneo, some 4 million hectares of forest has been converted to palm farms. Now a further 6 million hectares is scheduled for clearance in Malaysia, and 16.5 million in Indonesia. Almost all the remaining forest is at risk . . . The orang-utan is liekly to become extinct in the wild. Sumatran rhinos, tigers, gibbons, tapirs, proboscis monkeys and many other species could go the same way. Thousands of indigenous people have been evicted from their lands, and some 500 Indonesians have been tortured when they tried to resist. The entire region is being turned into a vegetable field.
Before oil palms are planted, vast forest trees, containing a much greater store of carbon than the palm trees will ever accumulate, must be felled and burnt. . . A paper published in NATURE estimates that the fires ignited in Indonesia in 1997, the result of felling rainforest trees, released between 13 and 40 per cent as much carbon dioxide as the world’s consumption of fossil fuels. The biodiesel industry has accidentally invented the world’s most carbon-intensive fuel.
There is a company in South Africa (called De Beers Fuel - no relation to the diamond giant) that is researching the use of oil-rich algae (developed in conjunction with MIT) for use as bio-diesel. The yields are, potentially, almost 1000x higher per acre than palm oil, etc., meaning this might actually be a sustainable solution (ie. it won't compete with traditional food crops and will require a tiny fraction of available space).
The utilization of energy crops produced as a source of renewable fuels is a concept with great relevance to current ecological and economic issues at both national and international levels.
Development of a significant national capacity to utilize forage crops, cereals and some legumes as biofuels will benefit agricultural economy by providing an important new source of income for farmers. Energy production from perennial cropping systems, some cereals and leguminous crops which are compatible with conventional farming practices, would help reduce degradation of agricultural soils, lower national dependence on foreign oil supplies, and reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and toxic pollutants to the atmosphere.