by Robert Bryce
Kiefer (who retired from the Navy in mid-2013) explained that biofuels have “an anemic power density of only 0.3 watts per square meter.” For comparison, modern solar photovoltaic panels are about 6 watts per square meter, or 20 times more; an average oil well producing 10 barrels per day is 27 watts per square meter, and an average nuclear plant is more than 50 watts per square meter.45
The low areal power density of biofuels cannot be overcome. That low power density is due to the limits of photosynthesis, and despite decades of trying, we haven’t been able to improve on it. Chlorophyll remains the preeminent converter of sunlight into energy, but it does so at its own pace.
The low power density of biofuels means that vast amounts of land are needed to produce even small quantities of fuel. For example, if we wanted to replace all of the oil used for transportation in the United States with corn-based ethanol, writes Kiefer, it would require about 700 million acres of land to be planted in nothing but corn. That would be “37 percent of the total area of the continental United States, more than all 565 million acres of forest, and more than triple the current amount of annually harvested cropland.” Do you like biodiesel better? Kiefer calculates that relying on soy biodiesel to replace domestic oil needs would “require 3.2 billion acres—one billion more than all US territory including Alaska.”46 Kiefer’s thirty-eight-page paper includes more than one hundred footnotes and a half dozen charts or tables.
The Obama administration’s response to Kiefer’s assault consisted of two bland documents posted on Strategic Studies Quarterly’s Web site, neither of which addressed any of his arguments.47 Rather than deal with critics like Kiefer, the Obama administration just keeps ladling out pork to the biofuel sector. Just two months after Kiefer’s piece was published, the Obama administration announced—on a Friday afternoon, just before the 2013 Memorial Day weekend—that the Department of Defense was giving contracts worth a total of $16 million to three biofuel plants located in Illinois, Nebraska, and California.48
Kiefer’s shootdown of biofuels was among a string of devastating investigations into the biofuels business published in recent years. Before looking at those, let’s recall some of the whoppers that we’ve been told over the last few years about biofuels.
The biggest of them all was likely uttered in 2011, when President Barack Obama declared: “We can break our dependence on oil with biofuels.”49 That statement is consistent with Obama’s political career, which has been notable for his unstinting support of biofuels. In 2006, Senator Obama, along with four other farm-state senators, sent a letter to President Bush asking him to ignore calls to reduce tariffs on Brazilian sugarcane-based ethanol. Lowering the tariff, they said, would make the United States dependent on foreign ethanol. “Our focus must be on building energy security through domestically produced renewable fuels,” they wrote.50 A few months later, Obama and two other farm-state senators introduced a bill that would promote the use of ethanol, mandate the use of more biodiesel, and create tax credits for cellulosic ethanol production. They called their bill the “American Fuels Act of 2007.”
In 2008, after Obama was elected president, one of his first moves was to appoint former Iowa governor and longtime biofuels booster Tom Vilsack as his secretary of agriculture. Vilsack, Obama said, would be part of the “team we need” to strengthen rural America, create “green jobs,” and “to free our nation from its dependence on oil.”
In 2006, an arm of the Center for American Progress, a leftist think tank, launched a campaign called “Kick the Oil Habit.”51 The group’s lead spokesman was actor Robert Redford, who appeared on TV talk shows and wrote opinion pieces in which he said America should quit using oil altogether so that it can get away from “dictators and despots.” The Sundance Kid’s solutions? Ethanol, biofuels, and hybrid vehicles.52 That year, during an appearance on CNN’s Larry King Live, Redford said that he supported corn ethanol production because “it’s cheaper. It’s cleaner. It’s renewable. And you know what? It’s American because we grow it.”53
In a 2006 speech at the University of California–Los Angeles, former president Bill Clinton provided the Butch Cassidy to Redford’s Sundance by repeating the spurious claim that oil is directly linked to terrorism. Clinton asked the students at UCLA: “Aren’t you tired of financing both ends of the war on terror?” And he added that students should be worried that the money sent to oil-producing nations “might be diverted to destructive purposes.”
Or consider Silicon Valley multimillionaire and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla. In 2006, at the same time that he was investing in various biofuel companies, Khosla claimed that making ethanol from cellulosic material was “brain-dead simple to do” and that commercial production of cellulosic ethanol was “just around the corner.”54 A few months later, Khosla was again hyping cellulosic ethanol, saying that biofuels could completely replace oil for transportation and that cellulosic ethanol would be cost competitive with corn-ethanol production. That same year, Khosla and former Senate minority leader Tom Daschle wrote an op-ed for the New York Times touting Brazil’s “energy independence miracle.” They said that Brazil proves that “an aggressive strategy of investing in petroleum substitutes like ethanol can end dependence on imported oil.”55
In late 2011, one of Khosla’s ventures, Range Fuels, a Georgia company that claimed it could profitably turn wood chips into ethanol, defaulted on an $80 million loan that was backed by the federal government. A few months later, Range, which had also received a $76 million grant from the Department of Energy, declared bankruptcy.56 Khosla refused to comment on Range’s bankruptcy.
Al Gore was yet another biofuel booster. After his 2006 movie, An Inconvenient Truth, was released, the former vice president promised that cellulosic ethanol would be “a huge new source of energy, particularly for the transportation sector. You’re going to see it all over the place.”57
Among the biggest—and most hawkish—promoters of biofuels has been James Woolsey, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency. In 2007, during a speech to the Virginia Soybean, Corn and Grain Association, Woolsey said, “We must move from a hydrocarbon-based society to a carbohydrate-based society.” Woolsey was among several defense hawks who frequently conflated oil and terrorism. During that same speech, Woolsey said, “The next time you pull into a gas station to fill your car with gas, bend down a little and take a glance in the side-door mirror. What you will see is a contributor to terrorism against the United States.”58
Woolsey was part of a group called Set America Free, comprising a who’s who of the military-agricultural-industrial complex. Created in 2004 and dominated by a group of neoconservatives who advocated for the Second Iraq War, the group frequently endorsed biofuels as a way toward realizing the delusional concept of “energy independence.” In a 2008 editorial in the Chicago Tribune, one of the group’s founders, Gal Luft, and his fellow traveler, Robert Zubrin, an author who advocates colonizing Mars, declared that “farm commodity prices have almost no effect on retail prices.” The two concluded their May 6 screed by saying that the goal should be to “take down” the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and that “rather than shut down biofuel programs . . . we need to radically augment them.”59
While Obama, other politicians, and actor/activists have been consistent—and consistently wrong—about the ability of biofuels to make a significant dent in our energy diet, the most persistent cheerleader for the biofuel insanity has been Amory Lovins, the cofounder of the Rocky Mountain Institute and a longtime ally of the bloggers at the Center for American Progress. In 1976, Lovins wrote an article for Foreign Affairs in which he claimed 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.” Given better efficiency in automobiles and a large enough installation of cellulosic ethanol distilleries, he claimed that “t
he whole of the transport needs could be met by organic conversion.”60
Ever since 1976, Lovins has been promoting biofuels. In 2011, Lovins and a group of coauthors published Reinventing Fire. In an info-graphic promoting the book, Lovins and his colleagues claim that by 2050, the United States will be getting 23 percent of its total energy from “non-cropland biofuels.”61 This is ludicrous beyond language.
Proving that point requires only some elementary math. Let’s assume that in 2050, the United States is still using about the same amount of primary energy as it does today, which is about 45 million barrels of oil equivalent per day.62 Thus, Lovins claims that the United States will be producing about 10.35 million barrels of oil equivalent per day—which is 3.77 billion barrels per year—from biofuels by 2050.
Stick with me here as we walk through the numbers. Cellulosic ethanol companies like Coskata and Syntec have claimed that they can produce about 100 gallons of ethanol per ton of biomass. Recall that 100 gallons of ethanol is equal to about 66 gallons of gasoline, or about 1.57 barrels of oil. For simplicity, let’s assume a ton of biomass can be turned into 1.5 barrels of oil equivalent.
The next question is the productivity of the land. Oak Ridge National Laboratory says that an acre of switchgrass can produce 11.5 tons of biomass per year.63 Therefore, an acre of switchgrass can produce 17.25 barrels of oil equivalent per year. Remember that Lovins and his coauthors claim we can produce 3.77 billion barrels of oil equivalent from biofuels per year. Now we need to divide that quantity by the 17.25 barrels of oil equivalent per acre per year that we got from Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Simple division shows that the United States would need to set aside about 219 million acres of land in order to grow enough biomass to produce the amount of energy (10.35 million barrels of oil equivalent per day) that Lovins and his pals are claiming in Reinventing Fire. That 219 million acres is roughly equal to 342,000 square miles or about 886,000 square kilometers. That’s a land area the size of Texas, New York, and Ohio, combined.64 To produce enough biomass to meet Lovins’s claim that biofuels will be supplying 23 percent of US energy by 2050 would require cultivating a land area nearly three times the size of Italy.
Amory Lovins’s Vision for Biofuels: Producing 23 Percent of US Energy by 2050 from Plants Would Require Three Italys of Land
Source: Author calculations, based on land-productivity calculations for biofuels published by Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
The absurdity of Lovins’s claims are obvious. Yet, he’s been lauded like few other Americans. In 2007, when I was working on a profile of Lovins, he volunteered his bio, which claimed that he has worked in more than fifty countries and that he has been awarded the “Blue Planet, Volvo, Onassis, Nissan, Shingo, and Mitchell Prizes; the Benjamin Franklin and Happold Medals; nine honorary doctorates, honorary membership in the American Institute of Architects, Life Fellowship of the Royal Society of Arts, and the Heinz, Lindbergh, Time Hero for the Planet, and World Technology Awards.” He’s also received a “genius” grant from the MacArthur Foundation. Despite those lofty credentials, it appears that Lovins has never bothered to use a calculator to see just how his biofuel plans pencil—or rather, how they don’t.
Whether the salesman was Obama, Clinton, Gore, Woolsey, Khosla, or Lovins, one thing has become stunningly obvious: we’ve been had.
Biofuels, we were told, were the magic bullet, the energy-independence-punish-the-Arabs-anti-terror-better-than-standard-diesel-fuel miracle elixir. It wasn’t true. It’s never been true. Despite tens of billions in taxpayer money that have been thrown at corn ethanol, soy diesel, algae, and the rest, the US economy, and more particularly, the US military, has gained nothing from its biofuel dalliances. And it won’t gain anything in the future because biofuels can’t overcome basic math and physics. Nevertheless, the Obama administration continues to ladle subsidy gravy on nearly any hillbilly who can swear—cross-his-heart—that he has a recipe for spinning oil out of sawdust.
But enough about Lovins, Obama, and their ilk. Here are a few snippets from the more than two dozen studies done in recent years that have exposed the dark side of biofuels.
Let’s start by looking at the US Environmental Protection Agency’s own data, which shows that increased use of corn ethanol in gasoline means worse air quality. In 2007, the EPA determined that increased use of ethanol in gasoline would increase emissions of key air pollutants like volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxide by as much as 7 percent. In a fact sheet regarding the Renewable Fuel Standard, the agency said, “Nationwide, EPA estimates an increase in total emissions of volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxides (VOC + NOx) [of] between 41,000 and 83,000 tons.” It went on, saying “areas that experience a substantial increase in ethanol may see an increase in VOC emissions between 4 and 5 percent and an increase in NOx emissions between 6 and 7 percent from gasoline powered vehicles and equipment.”
The corn ethanol scam not only worsens air quality, it also makes food more expensive. In 2008, Mark W. Rosegrant of the International Food Policy Research Institute, a Washington, DC–based think tank whose vision is “a world free of hunger and malnutrition,” testified before the US Senate on biofuels and grain prices.65 Rosegrant said that the ethanol mandates caused the price of corn to increase by 39 percent, rice to increase by 21 percent, and wheat by 22 percent. He estimated that if the global biofuels mandates were eliminated altogether, corn prices would drop by 20 percent. Rosegrant added: “If the current biofuel expansion continues, calorie availability in developing countries is expected to grow more slowly; and the number of malnourished children is projected to increase.”66
Also in 2008, an internal report by the World Bank found that grain prices increased by 140 percent between January 2002 and February 2008. “This increase was caused by a confluence of factors but the most important was the large increase in biofuels production in the US and EU. Without the increase in biofuels, global wheat and maize [corn] stocks would not have declined appreciably and price increases due to other factors would have been moderate.”67
In 2011, Tim Searchinger, a research scholar at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, further clarified the link between biofuels and food prices.68 In a June 16, 2011, article in Scientific American, Searchinger stated, “Since 2004[,] biofuels from crops have almost doubled the rate of growth in global demand for grain and sugar and pushed up the yearly growth in demand for vegetable oil by around 40 percent. Even cassava is edging out other crops in Thailand because China uses it to make ethanol.”69 The global push for biofuels, he wrote, requires us to consider the “moral weight” of what we are doing. “Our primary obligation is to feed the hungry. Biofuels are undermining our ability to do so. Governments can stop the recurring pattern of food crises by backing off their demands for ever more biofuels.”70
In April 2013, the British think tank Chatham House released a blistering report on biofuels, which said the use of biofuels “increases the level and volatility of food prices, with detrimental impacts on the food security of low-income food-importing countries.” It went on to say that due to land use changes, emissions from the production of biodiesel made from vegetable oils are “worse for the climate than fossil diesel.” Finally, it says that the current 5 percent mandate for biofuel use in the UK will cost the country’s motorists “in the region of $700 million” in 2013, and that the costs are likely to increase to $2 billion per year by 2020.71
At the outset of this chapter, I made it clear that I’m partial to Ike Kiefer’s critique of biofuels. But when it comes to a guns-blazing, raging-with-fury analysis, few write-ups can match the one done by Jean Ziegler, a former member of the Swiss Parliament who served as the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food from 2000 to 2008. In August 2013, Ziegler published Betting on Famine: Why the World Still Goes Hungry. (Disclosure: I read an advance copy of the book and provided a blurb for it.) Ziegler’s book seethes with anger. He describes visits to biofuel plantation
s all over the world, and in each location he finds similar stories: exploited workers and expropriated land. Ziegler writes that the companies that produce biofuels have succeeded at convincing the public and politicians in Western countries that “energy from plant sources constitutes the miracle weapon against climate change. Yet their argument is a lie.”72
Between 2006 and 2011, global biofuels production doubled. Ziegler reports that in 2011, global biofuels output totaled 600 million barrels, or about 1.64 million barrels per day. But ethanol contains only about two-thirds of the heat energy of oil. Therefore, the actual energy produced from biofuels in 2011 was closer to 1.2 million barrels of oil equivalent per day.73 Ziegler reports that producing that volume of fuel required 100 million hectares of land.74
Let’s put those numbers into perspective. Global energy use from all sources is currently about 250 million barrels of oil equivalent per day.75 Therefore, biofuels are providing less than one-half of 1 percent of world energy needs. In doing so, they are requiring 100 million hectares (247 million acres).76 That’s a land area more than twice the size of California, or nearly twice the size of France.77
This is madness—the kind of madness that meets insanity coming the other direction. In order to produce about one-half of 1 percent of world energy needs, the biofuels sector is cultivating a land area nearly twice the size of France—or an area about half the size of all American cropland.78 And yet, the president of the United States is claiming that biofuels can replace oil? It’s difficult to imagine a bigger—let’s call it what it is—lie.
Ziegler’s blistering take on biofuels is equal parts travelogue and outraged screed. One of his stops is the sugarcane fields of Brazil, where he visits Father James Thorlby, better known as Father Tiago, a Scottish priest who has become an ardent defender of Brazil’s exploited farm-workers. Ziegler doesn’t mince words. After visiting the forlorn camps that house the workers who cut the sugarcane, which is used to produce ethanol for motor fuel, he writes that the workers have no choice but to accept “low wages, inhumane work hours, nearly nonexistent accommodations, and work conditions that approach slavery.”79 Ziegler visits other countries, including Colombia, Cameroon, and India, and in each location he finds similar stories: exploited workers, expropriated land, and a subsidy-hungry agri-business sector eager to divert farmland so that it can be used to feed the world’s hunger for motor fuel. Ziegler’s outrage reaches a crescendo when he declares that “biofuels are catastrophic for society and the global climate . . . On a planet where a child under age ten dies of hunger every five minutes, to hijack land used to grow food crops and to burn food for fuel constitutes a crime against humanity.”80