by Robert Bryce
Without butane as an option, de Merode and his team are trying to ramp up the production of biomass briquettes, which they hope will help cut demand for charcoal and therefore slow the rate of deforestation in Virunga. The biomass briquettes are made with grass, leaves, agricultural waste, sawdust, and other material that is fed into special presses and then dried in a greenhouse. He hopes that, eventually, the program will have 5,000 presses, enough, he believes, to supply briquettes for 800,000 people.13 But by mid-2009, progress appeared to be slow.
The plight of the gorillas in Virunga is similar to the loss of tropical forest habitat in Indonesia, where the misguided quest to produce more biofuels has led to rapid deforestation. Since 1996, some 9.4 million acres of Indonesian forest have been destroyed to make way for palm oil plantations.14 And much of that palm oil was aimed at producing biodiesel for export for the European market. The lowland tropical forests in Sumatra and Borneo have been decimated by the quest for palm oil. And as reporter Tom Knudson detailed in an early 2009 story for London’s Guardian newspaper, as the forests have declined, so, too, have the numbers of rare endemic species such as tigers and orangutans. Sumatra, the sixth-largest island in the world, is home to the rare Sumatran tiger. Since the 1980s, the population of Sumatran tigers has fallen by more than 60 percent to fewer than 400 animals. “The tiger is going to go extinct, if we don’t do something,” one Indonesian biologist told Knudson. Indonesia’s orangutans face similar threats. Found only on the islands of Sumatra and Borneo, the great apes are increasingly isolated because of the destruction of their rainforest habitats. On Sumatra, there are about 7,000 individuals.15
The destruction caused by palm oil production in Indonesia and elsewhere is a direct result of the misbegotten policies in Europe and elsewhere that assumed that biofuels were environmentally superior to petroleum. That wrongheaded thinking led to a huge rush to clear large swaths of the tropics in order to produce an energy alternative that has had the exact opposite effect of what was hoped. A 2008 World Bank report estimated that the deforestation in Indonesia—much of it associated with biofuels—had resulted in huge releases of carbon dioxide from the burning of the forest and the release of greenhouse gases from swamps and bogs. Those releases, amounting to some 2.6 billion tons per year, made Indonesia the third-largest emitter of carbon dioxide on the planet, behind China and the United States.16
Although the gorillas, tigers, and apes are important, the most important beneficiaries of more widespread use of oil would be humans. And, to be more specific, it would be the millions of young children and women who are sickened or who die prematurely every year from indoor air pollution caused by the burning of biomass.
In 2007, the World Health Organization estimated that indoor air pollution was killing about 500,000 people in India every year, most of them women and children. The agency also found that air pollution levels in some kitchens in rural India were thirty times higher than recommended and that the pollution was six times as bad as that found in New Delhi. Worldwide, as many as 1.6 million people per year are dying premature deaths due to indoor air pollution.17
About 37 percent of the world’s population relies on solid fuels, such as straw, wood, dung, or coal, to cook their meals.18 These low-quality fuels, combined with inadequate ventilation when the cooking is done inside, often results in the living areas being filled with a variety of noxious pollutants, including soot particles, carbon monoxide, benzene, formaldehyde, and even dioxin.19 Continued exposure to polluted indoor air can result in numerous illnesses, ranging from relatively minor problems such as headaches and eye irritation to deadly conditions such as asthma, pneumonia, blindness, lung cancer, tuberculosis, and low birth weight in children born to mothers who were exposed to indoor air pollution during pregnancy.20
Despite these numbers, the problem of indoor air pollution doesn’t get nearly as much attention as other public health issues, such as vaccination or safe drinking water. One of the most passionate voices proclaiming the need for more hydrocarbon use among the world’s poor is that of Kirk R. Smith, a professor of global environmental health at the University of California, Berkeley.21
In 2002, Smith wrote a piece for Science magazine entitled “In Praise of Petroleum?” in which he challenged the notion that “for the poor as for everyone else, only renewable energy sources qualify as sustainable.” He went on to say, “What possible better use for high-efficiency clean-burning fossil fuels such as LPG [liquefied petroleum gas] than providing high-quality energy services for poor households?”22
When I interviewed Smith in July 2009, he explained that “poor women in rural areas of developing countries are about as low on the totem pole, globally, as you can get.... They don’t have anybody speaking for them. They don’t have their own Sierra Club or whatever.” Smith continues to advocate increased use of oil as a way to help the rural poor. “Even if you were to substitute LPG for all of the biomass used for cooking in the world, it would have very little impact on overall resources,” he told me. “Why ask the poor to take on the need to use fancy, new, novel, untested renewable energy devices when we have something that’s good for them? They have many other needs. And this is a great thing for them.”23
Reducing the amount of biomass used for cooking in the developing world would also reduce black carbon emissions. Soot particles from burning biomass, as well as from other sources such as coal-fired power plants and diesel engines, are the second-largest manmade contributor to global climate change.24 In the polar regions of the Arctic and Antarctic, and in other areas where snow and ice are prominent, deposition of black carbon particles causes the surfaces to absorb more solar radiation and therefore accelerates the melting process. Research has shown that these black carbon deposits may be causing more of the Arctic climatic change than all other manmade causes combined.25
About one-third of all the black carbon emissions on the planet come from inefficient cookstoves used in households in the developing world. By pushing more efficient biomass stoves as well as promoting increased use of stoves that use butane, propane, or other clean-burning fuels, Smith said, those releases could be cut dramatically. And even better, the new stoves would reduce the number of trees being cut to produce charcoal in developing countries like Congo, a process Smith calls “the most greenhouse-intensive fuel cycle in the world.”26
Moving the world’s rural poor away from charcoal to cleaner, denser fuels such as LPG and refined oil products will not only help save the world’s forests and endangered animals, it will also dramatically improve their health and their standards of living. But to do that, we must move past the idea that oil is bad. The reality is that oil is greener than nearly everything else that might replace it. Natural gas is greener still. If we want to improve the lot of the world’s poorest people, and women and girls in particular, we should be using more of both.
CHAPTER 18
Cellulosic Ethanol Can Scale Up and Cut U.S. Oil Imports
FOR YEARS, ETHANOL boosters have promised Americans that “cellulosic” ethanol lurks just ahead, right past the nearest service station. Once it becomes viable, this magic elixir—made from grass, wood chips, sawdust, or some other plant material—will deliver us from the evil clutches of foreign oil and make the United States “energy independent” while enriching farmers and strengthening small towns across the country.
Consider this claim: “From our cellulose waste products on the farm such as straw, corn-stalks, corn cobs and all similar sorts of material we throw away, we can get, by present known methods, enough alcohol to run our automotive equipment in the United States.”
That sounds like something you’ve heard recently, right? Well, fasten your seatbelt because that claim was made way back in 1921. That’s when Thomas Midgley, an American inventor, proclaimed the wonders of cellulosic ethanol to the Society of Automotive Engineers in Indianapolis. Though Midgley was excited about the prospect of cellulosic ethanol, he admitted that there was a significant
hurdle to jump before his concept would be feasible: Producing the fuel would cost about $2 per gallon. 1 That’s about $24 per gallon in current money.
Alas, what’s old is new again. Over the past few years, cellulosic ethanol has been promoted by a Who’s Who of American politics, including Iowa senator Tom Harkin,2 President Barack Obama,3 former vice president Al Gore, former Republican presidential nominee and U.S. Senator John McCain, former president Bill Clinton, former president George W. Bush, former CIA director James Woolsey,4 and Rocky Mountain Institute cofounder Amory Lovins.5 In August 2009, billionaires Ted Turner and T. Boone Pickens added their names to the list of cellulosic boosters when they co-wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, in which they declared that “advanced biofuels from cellulosic material ... can play a key role in reducing the vulnerabilities, emissions and costs associated with imported oil, while also providing new economic opportunities for America’s farm communities.”6
Of the people on that list, Lovins has been the longest-running—and the most consistently wrong—cheerleader for cellulosic fuels. His boosterism began with a 1976 article in Foreign Affairs, the piece that arguably made his career. In that article, called “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?” Lovins declared that American energy policy was all wrong. What America needed was “soft” energy resources to replace the “hard” ones (namely, hydrocarbons and centralized power plants). Regarding biofuels, he wrote that “exciting developments in the conversion of agricultural, forestry and urban wastes to methanol and other liquid and gaseous fuels now offer practical, economically interesting technologies sufficient to run an efficient US transport sector.”
Lovins went on: “Presently proved processes already offer sizable contributions without the inevitable climatic constraints of fossil-fuel combustion.” And he claimed that, given better efficiency in automobiles and a large enough installation of cellulosic ethanol distilleries, “the whole of the transport needs could be met by organic conversion.”7 In other words, Lovins was making the exact same claim that Thomas Midgley had made fifty-five years earlier: Given enough money—that’s always the catch, isn’t it?—cellulosic ethanol could provide all of America’s transportation fuel needs.
Almost thirty years after Lovins made his claims in Foreign Affairs, the United States still did not have a single biofuel company producing significant quantities of cellulosic ethanol for sale in the commercial market.8 And yet, in 2004, Lovins and several coauthors wrote a book called Winning the Oil Endgame that, once again, said that advances in biotechnology would make cellulosic ethanol viable. And in doing so, claimed Lovins and his peers, it “will strengthen rural America, boost net farm income by tens of billions of dollars a year, and create more than 750,000 new jobs.”9 Two years later, Lovins was at it again. In 2006, while testifying before the U.S. Senate, he claimed that “advanced biofuels (chiefly cellulosic ethanol)” could be produced for an average cost of just $18 per barrel.10
Alas, Lovins isn’t the only one drinking the cellulosic Kool-Aid. In his 2007 book, Winning Our Energy Independence, S. David Freeman, the former head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, said that to get away from our use of oil, “we must count on biofuels.”11 And a key part of Freeman’s biofuel recipe was cellulosic ethanol. Freeman claimed that there was “huge potential to generate ethanol from the cellulose in organic wastes of agriculture and forestry.”12 Using some 368 million tons of “forest wastes,” he said, could provide about 18.4 billion gallons of ethanol per year, yielding “the equivalent of about 14 billion gallons gasoline [sic], or about 10% of current gasoline consumption.”13
Cellulosic ethanol gained acolytes during the 2008 presidential campaign. In May 2008, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi touted the passage of the subsidy-packed $307 billion farm bill, stating that it was an “investment in energy independence” because it provided “support for the transition to cellulosic ethanol.”14 Pelosi and her fellow members of Congress are such big believers in cellulosic ethanol that they have mandated that U.S. fuel suppliers blend no less than 21 billion gallons of the nonexistent product into the American gasoline pool every year, starting no later than 2022.15 (That volume of fuel is equal to about 1.37 million barrels per day, which is approximately equal to the volume of oil the United States imported from Venezuela in 2007.)16
Pelosi is just one of many Democrats who love the idea of cellulosic ethanol. In August 2008, Obama unveiled his “new” energy plan, which called for “advances in biofuels, including cellulosic ethanol.”17 In January 2009, Senator Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat who has been a key backer of the corn ethanol industry for years, told PBS that “ethanol doesn’t necessarily all have to come from corn. In the last farm bill, I put a lot of effort into supporting cellulose [sic] ethanol, and I think that’s what you’re going to see in the future.”18
In April 2009, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu wrote an article for Newsweek in which he said the United States “can develop new liquid biofuels that will be direct replacements for gasoline and diesel fuel.” He claimed these fuels could be produced from grasses and “agricultural wastes” and that there was “an achievable strategy” for “using biomass to replace 30% of our transportation fuels.” Once those fuels are ready, he declared, “the importance of oil as a strategic resource will plummet.” 19 In late October 2009, Obama was still touting biofuels. But instead of singling out cellulosic ethanol for praise, he was talking about the need for “sustainably grown biofuels.”20 Exactly what that term means no one seems to know.
Although the hype continues unabated, cellulosic ethanol is scarcely closer to widespread commercial viability than it was when Midgley first began promoting it back in 1921. A September 2008 study on alternative automotive fuels done by Jan Kreider, a professor emeritus of engineering at the University of Colorado, and Peter S. Curtiss, a Boulder-based engineer, found that the production of cellulosic ethanol required about forty-two times as much water and emitted about 50 percent more carbon dioxide per unit of energy produced than standard gasoline. They also found that—as with corn ethanol—the amount of energy that could be gained by producing cellulosic ethanol was negligible.21
The underlying problem with cellulosic ethanol takes us back to the Four Imperatives. Cellulosic ethanol and other biomass-focused energy projects are plagued by their low power density. No matter how much the promoters want to talk about the merits of wood chips and switchgrass, they are fighting an uphill battle, because the power density of biomass production is simply too low: approximately 0.4 watts per square meter.22 Even the best-managed tree plantations can only achieve power densities of about 1 watt per square meter.23 For comparison, recall that even a marginal natural gas well has a power density of about 28 watts per square meter.
Fighting the inherently low power density of biomass production means that entrepreneurs must corral Bunyanesque quantities of the stuff in order to make even a small dent in America’s motor fuel market. Let’s assume that the United States wants to replace 10 percent of its oil use with cellulosic ethanol. That’s a useful percentage, as it’s approximately equal to the percentage of U.S. oil consumption that originates in the Persian Gulf.24 Let’s further assume that the United States decides that switchgrass is the most viable option for producing cellulosic ethanol.
Given those assumptions, here’s the math: The United States consumes about 21 million barrels of oil per day, or about 320 billion gallons of oil per year.25 Ten percent of that volume would be about 32 billion gallons of oil. But remember, ethanol’s energy density is only about two-thirds that of gasoline. Thus, the United States would need to produce about 48.5 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol in order to have the energy equivalent of 32 billion gallons of oil.
So how much biomass would be needed? Cellulosic ethanol companies like Coskata and Syntec have claimed that they can produce about 100 gallons of ethanol per ton of biomass. Therefore, producing 48.5 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol would require about 485 mill
ion tons of biomass. How much is that? If we assume that a standard 48-foot trailer holds 15 tons of material, then we would need 32.3 million trailers to hold that 485 million tons of biomass. That’s a lot of trailers. Arranged in a line, that column of trailers (not including any trucks attached to them) would stretch about 293,600 miles—long enough to reach from the Earth to the Moon and about one-fifth of the way back again.26
But let’s continue driving down this road for another mile or two. Sure, it’s possible to produce that much biomass, but how much land would be required to make it happen? A report from Oak Ridge National Laboratory suggests that 1 acre of switchgrass can produce 11.5 tons of biomass per year.27
Given those numbers, producing 485 million tons of biomass from switchgrass would require 42.1 million acres to be planted in nothing but switchgrass. That’s equal to about 65,800 square miles, an area nearly equal to the size of Oklahoma.28 Now, some wags might suggest that paving the Sooner State with nothing but switchgrass would be a significant improvement. But making room for all of that switchgrass would pinch America’s ability to grow food. The 42.1 million acres needed for the switchgrass would be equal to about 10 percent of all the cropland now under cultivation in the United States.29 Thus, for the United States to get 10 percent of its oil needs from cellulosic ethanol, it would need to plant an area equal to about 10 percent of its cropland in switchgrass.