After Geoengineering

by Holly Jean Buck

  But in most cases, there was no evidence that these deals had actually resulted in any cultivation whatsoever. The journalists I drank with that night in Addis had experience on the ground investigating one of the most notorious deals: the lease of 300,000 hectares by an Indian firm called Karuturi. Karuturi had hoped to grow and process corn, sugar, and palm oil. This was the largest deal, and the one that glossy NGO reports profiled in their sidebars; the poster child for a land grab. In fact, the lease was renegotiated down to 100,000 hectares, and just 5 percent of that new lease had been developed when we spoke back in 2013. There were all kinds of problems, including the fact that the leased land was on a floodplain.

  Given the failures of so many of these schemes, I asked one of the weary correspondents: At what point does the government say this isn’t working, we’re not doing this anymore? He replied that the government would never give up, because these are long-term projects, and they have a long-term vision. Certainly, the government was interested in getting foreign cash; the large-scale land leases were a way to do this. But the Ethiopian government is also quite canny, and they weren’t just giving out land wildly. The leases had stipulations about actually putting the land into production and not just speculating on it.

  While in Ethiopia, I talked with several experts—an agricultural researcher here, a young former McKinsey consultant there—who told me of the difficulties of actually setting up a large-scale enterprise in a landlocked country with poor infrastructure. Outsiders tended to blame the people, government, and the land itself for the failures of these ventures. They just don’t want to weed. They did all the wrong spacing. The soil is deficient in six micronutrients. It also turned out that crops like castor, a spiky oilseed plant that grows like a weed and is famous for requiring little water, are only truly profitable if you irrigate them. The main thing frustrating the ambition of biofuel production, though, was the reprise of an old story: oil prices went back up. In short, in a landlocked country without the necessary infrastructure, few or none these companies had managed to produce abundant commodities. A few years after our conversation, in 2015, Karuturi’s lease was canceled. And in a 2017 letter, the company stated: “We stand tired and defeated and wish to exit Ethiopia.”15

  Failed deals don’t mean that “nothing happened,” though; speculative “phantom commodities,” as social scientist Benjamin Neimark and colleagues have dubbed them, can shape the landscape and social fabric for years to come, even though they were never planted.16 In developed countries, ethanol has continued strong, but companies who had reaped millions through investment in advanced biofuels, like algae, started to pivot to manufacturing other products. One designer of algal bioreactors for fuels is now in the business of “heirloom cannabis varietals.”17

  Biofuels were not an utter bust worldwide: indeed, biofuel production and use targets were met in some countries, reducing import dependence and substituting for demand for fossil fuels in Brazil, the United States, and Thailand.18 Plantation jobs for labor-intensive crops appeared in some sites, generating income for some smallholders. But in general, biofuels have not met expectations around creation of long-term, high-quality jobs, alleviation of poverty for the most disadvantaged farmers, or improvement to energy access in remote rural areas.19 In the commercial palm oil plantations of Indonesia, anthropologist Tania Li writes, there emerged a routinely violent and predatory system for capturing plantation wealth, in which regulations, rather than protect, served as points to extract further tolls.20 In short, for biofuels thus far, the benefits have not been spread around, and the harms run rampant over many forms of life.

  The scarcity of land—real or even just perceived—can transform lives and livelihoods. This is the first reason why BECCS systems for carbon drawdown seem unfeasible—land for feedstock cultivation could require 500 million hectares, an area one and a half times the size of India.21 Dedicated bioenergy crops also require substantial use of inputs like water and fertilizers, implying both conflict over resources and increased water pollution from fertilizer runoff. And there are still more challenges with BECCS systems. Bioenergy with CCS would be competing with natural gas with CCS, since the CCS technology and costs are the same for these two fuels.22 Moreover, with BECCS, you need to grow biomass near a place that the carbon can be stored. This is more than a minor logistical point: Biomass feedstocks are bulky, with relatively low energy density, and it’s expensive and inefficient to transport them all over the place. And geological sequestration opportunities are not found everywhere. Thus, any such scenario assumes a massive, sprawling transportation infrastructure for biomass and for carbon dioxide. And finally, there need to be experts to cultivate the biomass—farmers who are motivated to grow those feedstocks over other crops. Farming is an art and science, and expertise and interest on the part of farmers is crucial to commercial viability.

  The design choices in a BECCS system are everything. It is fiendishly difficult to grow biofuels in a carbon-neutral way when commodity chains are designed for low costs rather than low carbon. The concept behind bioenergy is that plants absorb carbon as they grow, which is then released when they are burned: So isn’t that carbon neutral? Alas, biomass as a fuel source is not inherently carbon neutral, and can even be worse than fossil fuels. To calculate whether biofuels are carbon neutral, you have to account for (1) how much carbon was lost by cutting down whatever was there before; and (2) indirect land use changes (i.e., if a farmer decided to grow biofuels, and then a forest elsewhere got converted to food production). In general, it takes biofuels a very long time to pay back this initial cost, to make up for the loss of carbon that was in the landscape before the biofuels were planted.23 Here’s an example of poor system design: trees from North Carolina and other southern US states are shipped to the UK and burned, because wood has been designated a carbon-neutral fuel by EU regulators. In theory, the trees grow again. But some research has shown that wood-burning plants can have higher net carbon emissions than comparable coal plants for their first four or five decades of operation.24 Investing in one energy source, like wood pellets from another continent, risks missing out on opportunities to invest in something better. To be clear, though, BECCS would likely have a better life cycle analysis than a typical biofuel plant, because the former captures the carbon dioxide emissions for storage elsewhere—tipping the analysis toward carbon negative.

  Taken together, these issues make management of the earth’s carbon cycles through crop cultivation seem like a dismal prospect—at least under the current unsustainable system of industrial-capitalist agriculture. Moreover, to some tech analysts, the failure of advanced biofuels to develop at scale and the prospects of the vehicle fleet electrifying make biofuels seem like a dated idea. So why does this concept still have any life in it? Possible answers include (1) that because it was the powerful farm lobby that posited them, biofuels have become a lumbering machine, an institution that simply stumbles on; (2) that modelers needed a fix for the models, and BECCS seemed the most plausible; and (3) that “drop-in” fuels—those that can be switched out for fossil fuels—remain something of a holy grail, and biofuels are the most familiar of these (as opposed to newer synthetic alternatives).

  These twin canvases are the backdrop against which BECCS emerges: first, one of hope for the bioeconomy, to which BECCS could give certain life; and second, a backdrop of broken remnants, of inefficient and harmful biofuel experiments in places like Ethiopia and beyond. It is a strange, dissonant place to work from. Given this dim picture, to imagine BECCS seems, on one hand, an exercise in self-delusion. Indeed, many civil society groups have tagged BECCS with labels like “myth” or “fantasy.” On the other hand, is it possible that this first generation of biofuels could be followed by second, third, and fourth generations of a different nature? Fostered by different forms of social organization, could such “Cinderella” biofuels bloom, marrying CCS in some kind of union that enables a stable climate?

  Rebooting biofuels<
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  Cyanobacteria were the first life-forms to convert sunlight into energy. They were also the perpetrators of the most significant mass extinction in history so far: the oxygen crisis 2.4 billion years ago. These little creatures are truly standout organisms. Called “blue-green algae,” they’re not actually plants—they’re bacteria that photosynthesize, making their own energy and exchanging CO2 for atmospheric oxygen. They manufactured about 30 percent of the oxygen you inhale.25 They also have their own circadian clock, meaning they experience their own version of jet lag if you transport them across time zones. The wonder doesn’t stop there. Scientists are engineering them to fix more carbon, thus making them a more efficient source of biofuel. And cyanobacteria are just one of many varieties of new-wave biofuels that could potentially be used for a BECCS with fewer negative impacts.

  New technologies could, in fact, improve the picture for BECCS (though I will argue that we need both new technologies and new forms of organized production to make BECCS actually possible). You may have heard of “waves” or “generations” of biofuels (first, second, third, fourth), which refer to innovations both in feedstock and in processing technologies. First-generation feedstocks, such as sugarcane and vegetable oils, competed with food crops. BECCS in model simulations is assumed to rely on second-generation energy crops, which include nonfood plants. For example, grasses like Miscanthus, trees like willow or poplar, and crop residues like wheat straw or woody biomass are all second-generation feedstocks. These advanced fuel crops often contain more energy, and they can grow on “marginal” land. Some of them are “cellulosic” biofuels, meaning combustibles can be produced from cellulose, the fiber of the plant.

  The world has been waiting for these cellulosic biofuels for years. There are a handful of cellulosic biorefineries in development, and they’ve received tax credits and infrastructure grants. Official targets have reflected high expectations for cellulosic biofuels in the United States: when a 2007 law mandating them was passed, it established a target of 11 billion liters per year. The Environmental Protection Agency has been steadily revising these targets downward. How much cellulosic ethanol is the United States actually producing? In 2015, it managed just 8.5 million liters—a far cry from 11 billion.26

  One senior scientist I spoke with explained that research into cellulosic ethanol started twenty or thirty years ago, but it only became clear in the late 2000s that cellulosic ethanol was going nowhere, even after a billion dollars was poured into research in just five years. Why have cellulosic biofuels been so slow to materialize, despite this billion-dollar effort? One easy answer, again: cheap fossil fuels, braced in part by the rise in hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” Another point is that it’s simply very challenging to engineer these fuels. Plants are designed to stand up; thus, their cell walls have a tough polymer called lignin. To make fuel out of a woody plant, you need to be able to break down the lignin. You can do this using a thermochemical process (extreme temperatures, high pressures) or biochemically, with enzymes. But these enzymes that are quite expensive. It is therefore very hard to produce these fuels cheaply.

  What about third-generation fuels? In some instances, “third generation” includes any biofuel designed or tailored for higher efficiency, such as low-lignin trees. In other instances, “third generation” refers specifically to algae, which gets its own category because of its higher yields, and its versatility. Algae have rich genetic diversity: there are between 1 and 10 million algal species to explore. They’re also twice as efficient at using sunlight as many other crops, and up to half of their biomass is lipids (i.e., they are high in oil). When algae get contaminated, a crop failure only lasts a matter of days. Industry enthusiasts portray algae as “sunlight-driven cell factories” that convert carbon dioxide to potential products such as pigments, fine chemicals, bioactive molecules, biofuels, and more. One way to think about algae biofuel research is as domestication of wild species. Traditional selection took thousands of years, but now we can do this in years, going from “fit for purpose” to “design for purpose” crops—part of a “brand-new agriculture” offering food, fuel, nutraceuticals, and more.27 And the terrain has barely been touched—right now, only about fifteen of those millions of known microalgal species are cultivated in some form, and only a few of these “domesticated” algae are cultivated at large scales.28 So this is often posited by entrepreneurs as a new project (despite it also being a 1970s project). Algae cultivators find it exciting to basically get to do agriculture again from scratch, and by design. Algae could also be used with second-generation biofuel feedstock carbon capture in an integrated BECCS system. For example, one study proposed replacing soybean fields with algae and eucalyptus forests planted together: the biomass from the eucalyptus would provide the algae with heat, carbon dioxide, and electricity, with the remainder of the carbon stored. The system as a whole would produce more protein than soy does, with no increase in water demand.29

  With fourth-generation biofuels, the generational terminology starts to break down. To some, “fourth generation” refers explicitly to the goals of carbon capture—either in the engineering of the feedstock, or that of the processing technology. One approach is to engineer biofuel feedstocks to make them more efficient at capturing sunlight, and eventually at producing fuel. This generally involves (1) improving photosynthesis, either by increasing light-gathering capacity or by extending the range of the light spectrum the organism can utilize; (2) improving carbon fixation; or (3) increasing oil content. For example, a collaboration between Synthetic Genomics and ExxonMobil made headlines in 2017 for using the gene editing tool CRISPR to modify an algae strain to enhance the oil content from 20 percent to above 40 percent, accomplished by fine-tuning a genetic switch that regulates the conversion of carbon dioxide to oil in Nannochloropsis gaditana.30 To be clear, these aren’t carbon removal techniques unless the carbon is sequestered and stored, but it’s possible to imagine BECCS plants that use genetically modified algae as the feedstock.

  Another conception of “fourth generation” fuels incorporates synthetic biology—the design and construction of new biological entities. One approach is to engineer microbes to produce biofuels without feedstock—going straight from microbes to fuel. For example, photosynthetic microbes can be engineered to excrete biofuel or biofuel precursors. Startup accelerator Y Combinator recently issued a request for proposals from carbon capture startups working on enzyme systems that don’t involve organisms, known as “cell-free” systems, which would be engineered to synthesize carbon dioxide into other compounds without the construction of a new species.31 Cleantech company LanzaTech aims to turn “our global carbon crisis into a feedstock opportunity” by engineering a bacteria called clostridia to make fuels out of carbon dioxide. Clostridia, which is found in rabbit droppings, can fix carbon from carbon dioxide and feed on it. (Synthetic biology also has applications for non-biofuel-based carbon removal; for instance, scientists have just begun looking at how engineered bacteria could be placed into CCS sites to speed up the conversion of captured carbon into calcium carbonate.)32 Synthetic biology approaches to carbon removal that are effective and rapidly scalable may have the potential to circumvent the aforementioned constraints of BECCS. Perhaps these technologies would even become successful enough to obviate consideration of solar geoengineering.

  Through exploring these ideas of better and more efficient, we have traveled several levels of abstraction away from the bioeconomy. Biological approaches for problems like climate change and energy are not so easy or elegant after all, given that they involve reining in the messiness of life. Interestingly, there isn’t a popular umbrella term, movement, or unified field around engineering a better photosynthesis or a biosynthetic fuel—it just seems to be something increasing numbers of scientists in both academia and the private sector are interested in, even after the algae boom-and-bust. The key thing, though, is that much of this engineering is being done simply to get around these constraints of
profitability, to become cost competitive with fossil fuels. What if those constraints were changed?

  What would biofuels look like without capitalism?

  It is clear that new biofuel technologies—whether they be cellulosics, algae, or solar fuels—are not going to “naturally” replace first-generation fuels. Substantial social and political pressure would be necessary to develop biofuels for carbon removal, and their deployment at climate-significant scales would be a massive feat of social engineering. This is implied in a reading of the scientific literature. For example, environmental scientists Mathilde Fajardy and Niall MacDowell state that the sustainability of BECCS relies on intelligent management of the supply chain. In a sober, not-at-all politically inflected article, they identify five key levers to make BECCS actually carbon neutral or negative: “(1) measuring and limiting the impacts of direct and indirect land use change, (2) using carbon neutral power and organic fertilizer, (3) minimising biomass transport, and prioritising sea over road transport, (4) maximizing the use of carbon negative fuels, and (5) exploiting alternative biomass processing options, e.g., natural drying or torrefaction.”33 These five levers each imply a truly progressive politics, and without movement on these levers, BECCS would never be climatically significant. But it is possible to imagine moving the levers by bringing a different politics into the picture. If production were in the hands of the people who live on and work the land (managed, for instance, via agricultural collectives rather than exploitative contract-farming arrangements), and if the people owned the resources for production (the seeds as well as the cultivation and processing technology), they could choose to use them on lands that they know are actually neglected or marginal, as well as intercrop these lands with food crops. There’s plenty more to say on this, but one point is key: to be truly carbon negative, BECCS would require a totally different social logic.