The Agrofuel Aberration

In the industrialized countries almost 30% of all greenhouse gas emissions are dispensed for traffic; and the emissions keep rising (2% per year; except in the last years which have been affected by a temporary economical downturn.). Even though the greenhouse effect is not the only issue of interest in this regard.

While we can also use coal for electricity generation we we do fully depend on oil and gasoline in the sector of traffic and transportation; - and that hooks us to backwardly oriented, politically wicked regimes like the Iran, Saudi Arabia or Russia. While Saudi Arabia kept financing terrorists with their flooding oil revenues the nuclear program of Iran is now increasingly getting into advertence as a threat for Israel and Europe. Up to now the rockets of Iran can already reach the South- and East of Europe. Not just that the Iran has already been supplied with the full technology to produce nuclear weapons, but also that its civil nuclear program may just be an excuse for their military ambitions. This becomes even more plausible as today nuclear power plants are known not to pay off. Existing nuclear power plants in Europe and the US have been built with high subventions. In the US no free commercial contractor has decided to build a single nuclear power plant although the Bush administration has passed a law to foster nuclear energy in combat against global warming. Basically for a country like the Iran there is no necessity to have nuclear energy for means of safety of supply as it has rich fossil resources.

While the oil consumption has sharply risen with the economical catch-up race of emerging markets like China and India, the oil production has on the contrary stagnated and was already partly declining which in a fact lead to new, formerly unimaginable peaks in oil prices. Only the economic downturn has brought down prices to a usual level in the meantime.

With these regards the idea of using agrofuels must have been just too seductive to stay unregarded. Furthermore agrofuels made of palm oil, soy, rapeseed or ethanol made of maize, wheat or sugarcane supposed fast climate political success in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Apart from the fact that energy production out of food crop is far from being unproblematic the desirable climate political effects can even quickly turn into the opposite.

Ethanol production made of maize, as it has been pushed forward in the USA, uses up four fifth of the total energy revenue in advance by mineral fertilisers, pesticides, the operation of agricultural machinery and the heating facilities for ethanol production. Even worse the use of chemically produced fertilisers releases high amounts of laughing gas (nitrous oxide: N₂O) a greenhouse gas that is 300 times more harmful than CO₂.

The cultivation of always merely the same crop for power production fosters monocultures. The abolishment of the land set-aside awards for energy crop production in the EU isn`t unproblematic either because the erosion of the soil is lurking and because precious retreats for partly endangered species drop away. Even chancellor Angela Merkel has demanded a 'more unbiased attitude towards gene technology' in this regard. Genetically modified rapeseeds indeed exhibit a higher oil content. Nonetheless an interbreeding of the artificially imported genes with food crops could never be prevented.

Although the energy balance of German rapeseeds, where the colza cake is used as animal feed and the straw for power production, is far better than with maize-ethanol the undesirable competition with food crop is said to be the worst blemish of agrofuels.

In Mexico the cutback of US-corn-exports as a consequence of ethanol production resulted in the break out of the so called Tortilla crises. This happened after the small family-owned maize production has already had dropped down as a result of export subsidies and a free trade agreement with the USA in the 90ies. That was why the population could not pay for the increased corn prices any more.

Although the world wide rise in corn prices that time had many causes :

• a massive drought in Australia as a consequence of El Ninjo (weather phenomenon occurring with increased frequency because of the greenhouse effect),
• an additional surcharge in prices due to speculations
• risen transport costs due to higher oil prices
• a higher meat consumption mainly in emerging markets like China (1kg meat requires more than 10kg crop)

... the increase of food prices should have been reason enough to abolish the fixed admixture quota of agrofuels to fossil oil as this has been carefully lobbyated by the corporate strategy of crop industry and genetic engineering companies before.

Many economists think that the abolishment of a fixed admixture quota for agrofuels would be sufficient to avoid competition between crop and agrofuel production. Biofuel production does not pay off when crop prices are high so that there will be no agrofuel production unless prices drop below a certain level. With the abolishment of export and price subsidies by the EU and the USA there is no more instrument to balance price fluctuations. However lessening price fluctuations is vital to preventing price raising wheat speculations. Biofuel production on low prices could do this. Notwithstanding the abolishment of export and price subsidies was right since they have caused damage to agricultural sector of developing countries. Nonetheless we must not leave agrofuel production to the free market as then a rise in oil prices would cause much higher food prices which is undesirable.

Another dark side of a fixed admixture quota is that if there should not be much competition with food production then it will nonetheless create an increased pressure to make use of areas which have up to now been left natural and unadulterated. Although Brazilian politicians assure that no primeval forests will be destroyed for the planned doubling in sugarcane production there is pretty good reason to fear that areas for soya cultivation and cattle breeding will then move to the North in the direction of the Amazon. Since a long time Brazil furnishes up to 40% of its petrol demand out of domestic ethanol production whereby this mode of production causes a decrease in 80% of greenhouse gas emissions provided that no new forests are cleared for it. With the usage of fuel cells instead of combustion engines in vehicles the effectiveness could at least be doubled once more.

All of this just as long as no new areas of primeval forest are cleared for it as long as no peasents are fleeced and displaced and no indigenous people out of South America or Asia lose their livelihood. Indonesia f.i. has become the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases behind China and the USA by expanding their palm oil plantations. Palm oil plantations are no more solely used by cosmetics and edible/cooking oil industry but also for agrofuel production. Where the food is not cleared for wood exploitation woods and swamps are set on fire. Thereby forests are lost as valuable CO₂-sinks.

The winners of this developments are merely big concerns, which thereby even though additionally pocket the admixture subventions. However before this fixed admixture quota there has been a totally different agreement on fostering biofuels. Up to the year 2008 they were simply disburdened by the mineral oil tax.

This kind of arrangement has let many medium-sized, middle-class companies emerge which could produce fuel out of organic waste and slurry in local biogas plants. That would be a technology which is already available; in countries like Italy petroleum gas driven vehicles are quite common.

Techniques for ethanol production made of cellulose and other biomass are already put to the test. Up to now this technique is most far developed in Sweden where waste material from wood and paper industries are exploited. The Freiburgian company Choren Industries does already run two BTL (Biomass To Liquid) -plants together with Volkswagen and Daimler.

Concerning the cultivation of plants we do also have some hopeful initiatives. David Tilman form the university of Minnesota experiments with prairie grasses that can also grow on aggrieved soil and do not need much fertilizers. In Germany agronomists experiment with fast growing energy crops that can even be seeded after the grain harvest.

A very promising alternative is the extraction of biofuel out of algae. Alga can grow much faster than usual flowering plants and can directly be fed by the CO₂-rich exhaust air of biomass power plants. A New Zealandian company shows us by calculation that the breeding of alga in wastewater treatment plants could suffice to supply the whole world`s aviation and even more with fuel. Alga store their energy reserves in the form of a oily liquid which can be extracted by a centrifuge.

As our considerations show there would be many solutions to avoid competition between food and biofuel production. Cropping systems would have to precisely adapt the usage of fertilizers to the needs of every plant in order not to harm the climate which could be done by a computer an GPS-supported precision farming. The omission of long transport routes is crucial for a good energy balance.

However the current fixed agrofuel admixture quota forces the import of agrofuel from developing countries and thereby the forest clearance which is so destructive for our climate, people and biodiversity because the artificially created demand can not be fulfilled with domestic means - all other partially dramatic problems included. Without a sufficient wood asset the fight against climate change will be lost. The Biosphere II experiment has ostentatively shown that the atmospheric balance can not be retained if almost all the land is used for agriculture; it had to be canceled because of high laughing gas concentrations. Forests supply us with fresh air and water. There is no succedaneum for primeval forests. Wood plantations can bind up to 80% less CO2 than natural forests.