There are two potential sources of biofuel large enough to fill the cellulosic shortfall, sugarcane ethanol from Brazil, and biodiesel made from vegetable oil or animal fats. On Tuesday I analyzed what it would mean to have sugarcane ethanol fill the void, and today I will cover biodiesel.

Biodiesel: fuel from fat

Biodiesel is produced from a variety of sources of fats and oils, and production has expanded rapidly over the past few years. When made from your local McDonald’s waste French fry oil, biodiesel is a low impact, low-carbon fuel. However, when demand for biodiesel production exceeds the low impact sources of fats and oils, serious problems can arise.

EPA has already expanded the biodiesel mandate for this year, from 1 billion gallons in 2012 to 1.28 billion gallons for 2013. But it looks increasingly likely that biodiesel could exceed the biodiesel mandate to also fill the cellulosic shortfall for the year, primarily because Congress included an extension of the $1/gallon biodiesel tax credit as part of the fiscal cliff tax changes.

EIA Data

Where does the vegetable oil come from?

As the biodiesel mandate has grown, so has the use of food grade vegetable oils such as soybean oil. When added up, food grade vegetable oils account for about two thirds of biodiesel production, with various other fats and oils making up the remainder. According to the projections from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the use of vegetable oil to make biodiesel in the U.S. over the last few years nearly matches an expanding gap between imports and exports, and this is a trend expected to continue (note that 2 million metric tons of vegetable oil is about enough to make about 550 million gallons of biodiesel).

OECD-FAO Data

So if increased biodiesel use is leading to increased reliance on imported vegetable oil, we need to look overseas to see where the real impact lies. And the largest and fastest growing source of global vegetable oil exports is palm oil from Southeast Asia.

USDA Foreign Agriculture Service Data

The long winding road to Southeast Asia

Palm oil is also the cheapest, which makes it highly likely that whether or not it is directly imported into the U.S., palm oil will ultimately make up for the oils and fats used to make biodiesel.

Peat forest cleared or oil Palm, Sarawak Malaysia Flickr/Wakx

The area used for palm oil production has doubled in just a decade. Since palm oil will ultimately be the source of oil that indirectly replaces the oils and fats required to fill an expanded biodiesel mandate, it is likely that expanding the advanced mandate will not meet the 50% GHG emissions reductions requires of advanced biofuels, and may not reduce emissions at all. Palm oil is associated with a host of disquieting problems, mostly about draining peat swamps and cutting down forests to expand plantations, at great cost to orangutans, local people, and the global climate. EPA also assessed the impact of palm oil biodiesel last year, and EPA’s preliminary finding was that the lifecycle impacts of palm oil based biofuels do not even meet the minimum 20% threshold (greenhouse gas reductions compared to gasoline) required for biofuels under the RFS, although I think EPA actually underestimated the impact. In other words, this stuff is worse than corn ethanol.

Before I close I want to reiterate that there are low carbon sources of biodiesel. Displacing fossil fuels with oils and fats recovered from our waste stream is clearly a smart move. At an appropriate scale there may be oil crops that make sense as well. But even the lower mandate levels EPA is considering (what I called the 20BG + RFS in my earlier post) draw considerably against these resources. The low carbon oils and fats are simply not available at a quantity consist with the larger 36BG RFS, and if we ramp up demand too fast, we will draw in damaging resources like palm oil that will undermine the long terms goals of the RFS.

Make your voice heard

Overall, these past couple posts illustrate that EPA faces a critical decision in administering our nation’s biofuel policy. EPA can focus on the 36BG target, regardless of the consequences, or allow the advanced mandate to grow in a manner that adheres to the original goals of the RFS, promoting clean, sustainable biofuel. These three blogs cover much of the substance of comments UCS will be filing with EPA.

You can also help EPA make a smart choice by submitting comments to the rule by going to regulations.gov and submitting comments on Docket ID No. EPA–HQ–OAR–2012–0546 before the comment period closes on April 7th. Together, we can make sure EPA gets the picture. Thanks for your help.

Learn more about the future of biofuels

• The Future of Biofuels in 10 Charts and Maps
• Great Scott! The Consequences of Accelerating the Mandate for Food-Based Advanced Biofuels
• The Food Versus Fuel Fight Is About Much More Than Corn
• The Coming Fork in the Road for Biofuels

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is undergoing a process that will set the volume level for the 2013 advanced biofuel mandate. There are a couple different types of biofuels that make up the advanced mandate: biodiesel, cellulosic (non-food) biofuels, and any other biofuel that achieves 50 percent lower life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions than gasoline.

As I’ve previously mentioned, most of the growth in the advanced mandate was intended to come from cellulosic biofuels – but these have been slower to come online than originally envisioned when the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) was enacted in 2007.  As a result, the EPA now faces a decision over what to do with the cellulosic shortfall. One option is to maintain the level of growth that the RFS initially called for, thereby allowing sugarcane ethanol, biodiesel, and other advanced biofuels to fill the gap left by the cellulosic shortfall.

There are two potential sources of biofuel large enough to fill the cellulosic shortfall: sugarcane ethanol from Brazil and biodiesel made from vegetable oil or animal fats. Today I’ll look at sugar, and will cover biodiesel in a separate post over the next few days.

Sugarcane ethanol is good for Brazil – if it stays there

Traditionally, Brazil has been a big fan of sugarcane ethanol and has the world’s largest fleet of flex fuel vehicles (FFVs) that can run on either gasoline or ethanol, with a fuel distribution system to match. (The U.S. also has several million FFVs on the road, but without coordinated fueling infrastructure, fuel pricing, and driver education, these cars have not used much ethanol to date.) Recently, however, production of ethanol in Brazil has stalled.

Data source: UNICA Data; BG = billions of gallons

Meanwhile, although overall car ownership and fuel use is growing in Brazil, Brazilian drivers have been moving away from ethanol toward gasoline. The reason for this is simple: with demand for ethanol exceeding supply, gasoline has been cheaper. The result is that even though Brazil has infrastructure (cars and fueling stations) capable of running on a high share of ethanol, the percentage of ethanol in the fuel supply has declined from 41 percent in 2009 to 26 percent in 2012.

Data source: UNICA Data; BG = billions of gallons

Now, what does all of this have to do with American biofuel policy? Well, if the EPA decides to stick to its timeline for reaching 36 billion gallons (BG) of biofuel in 2022, sugarcane ethanol is one of the fuels that will need to fill the void in the mandate left by cellulosic biofuel. U.S. demand for Brazilian sugarcane ethanol would increase sharply, leading to us importing more sugarcane ethanol from Brazil while Brazil shifts their vehicles back to gasoline.

It would be a strange future indeed if Brazil, having built out the most flexible fueling infrastructure in the world, moves their fleet of FFVs back to gasoline while the U.S. uses more and more Brazilian ethanol for the purpose of reducing global warming pollution. Since global warming pollution is global, shifting where the sugarcane ethanol is consumed from Brazil to the U.S. will not accomplish anything.

Long-term implications for sugar ethanol

Looking further down the road, the picture gets even bleaker. In a recent paper, Meyer and Thomson looked into the consequences of different EPA decisions on the future of the RFS. Two of the scenarios they modeled track with what I am calling the 36BG RFS and the 20BG+ RFS. The first consequence of the 36BG RFS is enormous growth of sugarcane ethanol imports, primarily from Brazil.

Data: Meyer and Thompson and additional data provided by the authors

By 2021, their analysis suggests the U.S. would need to import more than 10 billion gallons of sugar ethanol. Since Brazilian ethanol production has never exceeded 8 billion gallons, this would require a very rapid growth of the Brazilian ethanol production, and for the U.S. to import a very large share.

In fact, with Brazil exporting so much ethanol, the Brazilians would likely need to import growing amounts of corn ethanol from the U.S. to meet their domestic demand.  The Meyer and Thompson analysis suggests corn ethanol exports would rise more than five-fold.

Data: Meyer and Thompson and additional data provided by the authors

The result for the U.S. agricultural system would be a de facto expansion of the corn ethanol mandate, which is capped at 15 billion gallons to limit the competition between ethanol and other uses of corn, as corn ethanol is exported to Brazil while we import their sugarcane ethanol. Under the more sensible 20BG+ RFS, expanded use of corn for ethanol starts to taper off, which is a good thing.

Data: Meyer and Thompson and additional data provided by the authors

The world is watching

A related analysis was included in the OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook 2012-2021. The fact that the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations devoted an entire chapter of their global long-term outlook to biofuels, and about half of that to evaluating the future of the RFS, is an illustration of how profound the decisions facing the EPA are for the U.S. and the world.

Their analysis suggests that as the U.S. imports more ethanol in a 36BG RFS instead of a 20BG+ RFS, Brazil’s internal use of ethanol will drop by more than 4 BG, and use in the rest of the world will also drop for a total decrease of 4.75 BG. So of 10.6 BG of imported ethanol in 2020/2021, 45 percent of it will be not new production, but ethanol use in other countries, with the shortage made up by increased gasoline use as discussed above for Brazil. With circular ethanol trade between the U.S. and Brazil accounting for much of the remaining ethanol, the net result will be that just a third of the advanced ethanol used in the U.S. will be new advanced ethanol production, and the remainder will be indirectly replaced by gasoline and corn ethanol. If significant indirect impacts are considered, as is required by the RFS, the overall impact of a higher mandate will not meet the greenhouse gas reduction targets required for advanced biofuels.

Fortunately, this is only one possible future.  Congress gave the EPA the authority to choose the 20BG+ RFS route, which is a more prudent path to cutting oil use over the long term than the 36BG RFS trajectory. The sooner the EPA decides to make this course correction, the safer for all of us. The fuels of the future are scaling up now, but without a time traveling DeLorean, it is going to take a little longer than planned to reach our 36 billion gallon goal. Sugarcane ethanol has a role to play in our fuel future, but it is no substitute for cellulosic biofuels.

Tomorrow we will examine whether biodiesel is ready to take up the slack (hint: it’s not).

Learn more about the future of biofuels

• The Future of Biofuels in 10 Charts and Maps
• The Future of Biofuels Part 3: Biodiesel
• The Food Versus Fuel Fight Is About Much More Than Corn
• The Coming Fork in the Road for Biofuels

In emulation of the folks over at Wonkblog, of which I am a big fan, I offer some relevant charts and interpretation, as well as UCS’s view on where we are, and the practical path forward for biofuels policy.

Background – Biofuels Phase 1: 2000 – 2010

US corn ethanol production expanded by more than 10 billion gallons between 2000 and 2010.

Data source: RFA Data; BG = billions of gallons

With this growth, ethanol went from a minor user of corn in the 2000/2001 marketing year– at 6 percent it was smaller than corn used for sweeteners — to the single largest direct user of corn, consuming 40 percent of the crop in 2010/2011.

Data source: ERS Data

The dramatic changes in the size of the U.S. corn crop, along with rising prices of corn and related commodity crops, led to land use changes and food price increases on a global scale, and triggered a global reaction against the wisdom, the environmental efficacy, and even the morality of diverting such a large share of the corn crop to fuel.

The Decade Ahead for Biofuels

Depending on how the EPA administers the RFS going forward, the next decade could bring even larger changes to agriculture and food markets. The RFS mandates are poised to more than double over the next 10 years, growing from 15.2 billion gallons in 2012 to 36 billion gallons in 2022, a rate of expansion approximately twice as large as was observed between 2000 and 2010 (see this fact sheet for details on the complex structure of the mandate).

Renewable Fuels Standard mandates; BG = billions of gallons

The RFS was designed to mitigate the competition between food and fuel by gradually shifting the growth of the mandates away from corn, sugar, vegetable oil, animal fat, and other food-related feedstocks, and toward cellulosic biofuels, made from inedible waste materials, agricultural residues like corn stalks, and environmentally friendly perennial crops.

Less than a quarter of the mandate growth between 2012 and 2022 — just five billion gallons — was intended to be produced from food-based fuels, and the rest was slated to come from cellulosic biofuels.

Renewable Fuels Standard mandates: Food-based vs. cellulosic biofuels; BG = billions of gallons

The Transition beyond Food-Based Biofuels

The importance of transitioning away from food-based biofuels has become increasingly clear. Expanded and more intense corn production results in increased fertilizer runoff, which pollutes surface and ground water throughout the Mississippi River basin and is in large part responsible for the annual Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone (more details in this blog and report).

This map shows where the corn is grown in green, and where ethanol is produced with yellow dots.

Data source: NASS

And this one shows where pollution from fertilizer is heaviest:

Data source: Alexander et al. 2008

The good news is that biofuel production can responsibly continue to grow if we switch from corn to biomass as a source material or feedstock. Our recent analysis confirms that biomass is available within the United States at levels consistent with supplying even more than 16 billion gallons of biofuel, and can do so in a manner that reduces water pollution and greenhouse gas emissions while improving the overall environmental footprint of our agricultural system. The map below (from our report) illustrates the potential abundance of non-food based feedstocks across the U.S.

From building soil carbon to reducing pollution from corn farming, the case for shifting ethanol’s reliance on corn to a system that relies on wastes, agricultural residues, and environmentally friendly perennial grasses gets stronger all the time.

Delayed Commercialization Means the EPA Has an Important Policy Decision to Make

But while the environmental case for cellulosic biofuels is strong, the rate of commercial deployment is trailing the mandate levels by approximately five years.

INEOSBio Bioenergy center in Vero Beach Florida

KiOR Biorefinery, in Columbus Mississippi

The first commercial scale cellulosic biorefineries recently opened, and this is a major milestone, but it took longer than was anticipated in 2007. The delay means that instead of reaching 100 million gallons per year in 2010, which is what was envisioned when the RFS was enacted in 2007, it is likely to be at least 2015 before production reaches this level. The rate of subsequent expansion will depend on the success of these first facilities, investor assessment of the markets and the durability of a supportive policy environment, including the RFS. However, even with robust commercialization of cellulosic biofuels beyond 2015, far less than 16 billion gallons of cellulosic biofuel will be available in 2022.

According to the EIA’s  Annual Energy Outlook for 2012 (AEO2012), actual production levels will be closer to 2.5 billion ethanol equivalent gallons in 2022, leaving a cellulosic shortfall that will grow from almost a billion gallons in 2013 to more than 13 billion gallons in 2022.

Data source: EIA Data

In light of the delayed commercialization of cellulosic biofuels, the EPA faces an important decision. Adjust the overall advanced mandate by the amount of the cellulosic shortfall, resulting in a mandate of 15 billion gallons (BG) of conventional biofuel (mostly corn ethanol), 5 BG for food-based advanced biofuels (primarily sugarcane ethanol and vegetable oil biodiesel), and as much cellulosic biofuel as gets produced (let’s call this the 20BG+ RFS). Or, the EPA can keep the overall biofuel targets fixed at 36 BG, relying on food-based biofuels that qualify as advanced according to EPA’s rules to replace the cellulosic shortfall (let’s call this the 36BG RFS).

The 20BG+ RFS means avoiding additional pressure on food markets, and waiting until cellulosic biofuels scale up to meet make the 36 BG target. Trying to stick to the 36BG RFS means accelerated conversion of food into fuel, making already tight markets for agricultural commodities even tighter.

The Road Ahead, the EPA Holds the Keys…

While the goal of replacing oil with lower carbon, domestically produced alternatives remains as salient today as it was in 2007, a careful examination of the EPA’s choices reveals that in this case, moving faster is counterproductive. In fact, attempting to substantially replace the delayed cellulosic biofuels will make the entire RFS untenable, leading to counterproductive trade flows, indirectly expanding production of food-based biofuels such as corn ethanol and palm oil that do not meet the greenhouse gases standards for the advanced biofuel category.

The decision before the EPA provides the agency with an opportunity to plot a new course forward for biofuels. The EPA must recognize that faster is not always better. Biofuels, especially non-food cellulosic biofuels, can help us to cut projected oil use in half over the next 20 years. But to avoid dead ends on the way, our biofuel policy must consider all the other users of agricultural commodities, starting with food. The EPA’s mandate targets must be based on a thorough analysis of the impact on agricultural trade flows, deforestation, and infrastructure. With smart implementation of existing law, the EPA can navigate these obstacles and set a course for a cleaner future. And that is something even non-wonks can get excited about.

The alternative? It’s grim reading if you care about climate, water quality, or food security. Look forward to a deeper dive into the practicalities of trying to meet the 36 BG target by 2022 in a pair of blogs coming soon.

Learn more about the future of biofuels

• Great Scott! The Consequences of Accelerating the Mandate for Food-Based Advanced Biofuels
• The Future of Biofuels Part 3: Biodiesel
• The Food Versus Fuel Fight Is About Much More Than Corn
• The Coming Fork in the Road for Biofuels

Government mandates in the U.S. and E.U. increase demand for globally traded food crops, leading to food price spikes that hurt consumers in Guatemala and other parts of the developing world. The 2012 drought brought this issue into stark relief here in the U.S. over the summer, where we are now using around 40 percent of our corn crop for ethanol.

I recently wrote a column for the Christian Science Monitor’s Energy Voices blog in which I discussed how the food versus fuel debate is about much more than corn. What I loved about Rosenthal’s story was that it pulls together the impact of all three major food-based biofuels — corn ethanol, sugarcane ethanol, and biodiesel made from vegetable oil — and puts a human face on it. This is an important point I have been trying to make as well, and another Times reporter, Matt Wald, blogged about it here on Christmas Eve.

The food versus fuel debate is about much more than corn. Image: USDA Agriculture Research Service

Food Street or Fuel Avenue?

Corn ethanol production per se is not a major factor in Guatemala. Most of the corn ethanol is produced in the U.S. Midwest, and, as the ethanol industry points out, the corn used for ethanol is a different type than is used to make tortillas in Guatemala. The two biofuel crops more directly impacting Guatemalan farmers are sugar and palm oil, which compete for the land that poor farmers rely on to grow food.

But in the end, because the markets for these crops are global, it makes little difference whose sugar and vegetable oil is used for fuel, and whose for food, or whether ethanol is made from white or yellow corn. The important point is that with so much sugar, starch, and vegetable oil leaving food markets somewhere, it puts pressure on agriculture everywhere, raising land values and food costs at the expense of the poor and also accelerating deforestation.

You may be saying to yourself at this point, wouldn’t it be great if we could wave a magic wand and immediately stop the use of corn, sugar, and vegetable oil for fuel? Not so fast. If we did that, global prices would crash, leading to a whole host of different problems caused by overly low prices, to say nothing of increasing the need for fossil fuels.

As Rosenthal’s story points out, the low price of corn in the 1990s drove a shift in Guatemala away from producing their own corn, in favor of cheaper imports. This legacy makes them more vulnerable now that prices are high. When people are harmed by either low or high prices, the wise path forward is moderation, balancing competing needs and interests.

The Fix: In EPA’s Hands

The challenges facing poor Guatemalan farmers are complex, and there are no magic wands that can immediately solve them. But there are practical steps the U.S. can take to mitigate the negative impacts of its biofuels policy.

There is a major decision looming on the horizon for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that could open the floodgates for much more food-based biofuel in our fuel supply, magnifying the adverse impacts of the policy. We hope the EPA will act to moderate these pressures, and the law actually leaves them considerable discretion. Our fact sheet on the government mandates for biofuels (under the Renewable Fuel Standard) lays out the problem, and I plan to explore the consequences of their decision further in future blog posts. Stay tuned.

Learn more about the future of biofuels

• The Future of Biofuels in 10 Charts and Maps
• Great Scott! The Consequences of Accelerating the Mandate for Food-Based Advanced Biofuels
• The Future of Biofuels Part 3: Biodiesel
• The Food Versus Fuel Fight Is About Much More Than Corn

This summer’s drought and the withering of a corn crop, which now dedicates its largest share to fuel rather than food, has thrown the limitations of corn ethanol into stark relief. Yet for all the negative impacts of corn ethanol — it was never a very clean or low carbon alternative to oil — it is now a deeply rooted part of our fuel supply. Yet rather than continuing to fight yesterday’s battles over corn ethanol, we should focus on another, more significant, decision over the future of U.S. biofuels production.

And this time, we should  nip it in the bud before it becomes as entrenched as corn ethanol.

When Congress set the course for biofuels policy in the heady days of bipartisan enthusiasm for clean energy back in 2007, it set aggressive, progressive targets under the federal Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS): increasing corn ethanol from the previous 7.5 billion gallon mandate to a 15 billion gallon target, and adding 21 billion gallons more in mandates for advanced biofuels from both food crops and nonfood “cellulosic” sources that delivered greater environmental benefits than conventional biofuels by 2022. The first, corn ethanol-focused phase of the expansion is essentially complete, and the second phase, focused on advanced biofuels, is now starting in earnest.

But the commercialization of a cellulosic biofuel industry has proven to be tougher, and slower, than anticipated — partly a result of the terrible investment climate following the financial crisis. We’ve missed the production targets set by the Environmental Protection Agency for several years now.

Fortunately, the RFS contains considerable flexibility, giving the EPA the authority to adjust the mandates to respond to real-world conditions. The EPA has used this flexibility to annually scale back the mandates for cellulosic biofuels — something we expect they will do again in the next few weeks.

And it is here that we see the new fuel-from-food threat. The EPA has been increasing the mandates for fuels like biodiesel made from vegetable oil and sugarcane ethanol to make up for the missing cellulosic biofuels. But the available stocks of sugar and vegetable oil are not nearly enough to meet the growing mandates if cellulosic fuels don’t come on line.

If the EPA keeps substituting food-based fuels for the delayed cellulosic biofuel, we will see a huge expansion of biodiesel and sugarcane ethanol production that will lead to increased deforestation in the tropics and continued pressure on global food supplies.

Our research suggests there is enough nonfood feedstock in this country to meet the total 36 billion gallon biofuel target if we are patient enough to allow the cellulosic industry to develop. To prevent the associated problems to our environment, economy, and climate, the EPA should not increase mandates for food-based biofuels.

It’s tempting to think that the energy policy of 2007 is past its prime and we should forget the whole thing and just start over. But we should remember that the RFS is just one part of a multipronged strategy, along with fuel efficiency and electrification, to help cut our oil use and reduce global warming pollution.

Despite the obstacles to commercialization, the first cellulosic biofuel facilities are coming on line today.  In Florida a company called INEOS Bio is starting up an 8 million gallon-a-year facility, and other facilities are being built across the country. But even with healthy growth and a stronger climate for investment, a bold but realistic target for 2022 is closer to 3 billion gallons than the original 16 billion.

So we must be patient. And realistic.

Next generation biofuels, together with electric vehicles and other advanced technology are going to take longer than we want to deliver the big oil savings and emissions reductions that we need. But they are the vital long-term investments that can help us to cut our projected oil use in half in the next 20 years.

Learn more about the future of biofuels

• The Future of Biofuels in 10 Charts and Maps
• Great Scott! The Consequences of Accelerating the Mandate for Food-Based Advanced Biofuels
• The Future of Biofuels Part 3: Biodiesel
• The Coming Fork in the Road for Biofuels

Nerds have risen to prominence in the past, but always in a quaint and campy way. This is different. The quant revolution, as it is being called, is an illustration of data wonkery cuttting through the  obfuscation that so often clutters our public discourse, finding the signal within the noise to  better inform and serve the public interest.

We at the Union of Concerned Scientists are heavy into this brand of public interest wonkery, and in this role we frequently confront technical arguments made to hide the signal rather than illuminate it. It is all too common to find industry-funded experts throwing up a maze of technical arguments to push for outcomes that would not be supported if the public really understood what was happening.

The latest example of this is occurring in an ongoing debate about the best way to account for  the timing of lifecycle emissions from biofuels and bioenergy.

Accounting for biofuels 101

Accounting for lifecycle heat-trapping emissions from biofuels and bioenergy is tricky, because it is not just burning the fuel that produces emissions, but also the changes in carbon taken up and stored by cropland and forests. Forests in particular absorb and store a huge amount of carbon, and when production of biofuels expand, we need more cropland, which can mean less forest. This needs to be accounted for in determining the lifecycle climate cost of a particular type of biofuel.

The question of timing enters into it because by cutting down more forests to expand production of biofuels, we are increasing emissions now but potentially reducing emissions from fossil fuels over the longer term.  In the long run the emissions avoided by switching to biofuels could theoretically pay back the extra emissions from deforestation, but as a famous economist once said, “in the long run, we are all dead.”  The question is: How long can we wait for the benefits of biofuels to repay the cost of the lost forests?

Playing the waiting game

This question has already been examined carefully by state and federal regulators, as well as the European Union. (I participated as a peer reviewer in the U.S. processes.) They considered timeframes as long as 100 years, and after extensive technical review, they all agreed on a 20-30 year timeframe for assessing the land conversion impacts of biofuels, also known as Indirect Land Use Change.

I think this is reasonable place to end up. It does not prohibit the use of land to produce fuel or energy, but it means we need to be able to see our way to the greenhouse gas (GHG) benefits in the lifetime of the factory we are looking at. It also provides a clear market signal to biofuel or bioenergy producers that they should use land efficiently and look for ways to minimize competition with food production and forest. It is used in the federal Renewable Fuel Standard and California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard.

If it sounds too good to be true…

One new approach  being advanced by the food based biofuels industry is called “baseline time accounting.”  A recent press release claims that this new approach reduces the land use emissions from biofuels by 60-70%. Not surprisingly, this would make food-based biofuels look much cleaner than current methods suggest. The recently published paper describes this new “dynamic” approach to time accounting, and while they do have some interesting insights, they basically just switched from the established 30-year timeframe to 100 years.

They were a little sneaky about how they made this change, obscuring this important policy decision in a maze of explanations and equations. But it is a subject that the authors and I discussed extensively (perhaps exhaustively is the right word) over the course of 2010, when we were on a time-accounting subgroup of the expert work group on indirect land use emissions in California. You can read far more than you would ever want to on this topic here, but suffice it to say that it sounds too good to be true for a reason. When this new approach is compared to existing methods using a consistent timeframe, the changes in the results are much more subtle. And it is hardly a scientific breakthrough that changing the denominator of a fraction from 30 to 100 reduces that number by between 60 and 70%.

What makes folks like Nate Silver and the team over at Wonkblog so impressive is their ability to deal with legitimately tricky technical material, and walk readers through it in a way that provides insight and clarity, finding the signal in the noise. Obscuring important policy decisions in a maze of artificial complexity is much less admirable. The latest effort to use accounting gimmickry to minimize the impact of land use emissions is a predictable, cynical effort by the food-based biofuels industry to walk us back from the established standard in order to re-litigate a debate they’ve lost. Rather than trying to lower the goalposts for food-based fuels, the biofuels industry should focus on meeting the higher standards required for truly low-carbon cellulosic biofuels.

In the age of information overload, often the trick is to find ways of synthesizing data in a way that is helpful and useful. We at UCS would like to think that’s something we’re pretty good at. Last month I completed The Promise of Biomass: Clean Power and Fuel – If Handled Right, a comprehensive assessment of biomass resources in the United States available for sustainable use for clean power and fuel development.

Including sustainability criteria is what sets my assessment apart from those of other experts and agencies. When talking about biomass, it’s important to focus on the right kind of resources, and the scale at which they can be utilized that balances energy and environmental prerogatives.

Lots of potential for biomass

The bottom line of our research: By 2030, nearly 680 million tons of biomass could be made available for fuel and electricity. That is enough to make 54 billion gallons of non-food, cellulosic ethanol, quadruple the amount of corn ethanol produced in this country in 2010. If we use it to make electricity, it could meet about one-fifth of nationwide demand. However you slice it, those numbers suggest biomass resources could make a real contribution towards cutting oil use as laid out in our Half the Oil Plan.

But we have all learned the hard way that bioenergy production can impact food production and forests, so smart bioenergy development must happen in the context of our food production system, our land and water resources, the needs of wildlife, and other benefits incurred from naturally functioning ecosystems. We were very careful to consider this context when developing our assessment.

Making biomass into biofuel

In the months ahead, the EPA will, as it does every year, go through the process of setting volume levels under the Renewable Fuel Standard. And also as in past years, it is a disappointing reality that the mandated volume for cellulosic biofuel will be far lower than the targets set by Congress.

The cellulosic biofuel industry has taken longer to reach commercial scale than the optimistic projections made in 2007 when the RFS passed, creating the need for the annual downward adjustments. But with a slew of commercial-scale facilities coming online between now and the end of 2015 , we are finally making the leap from research to refinery (see our map of cellulosic biorefinery projects across the country for a sense of the scale).

But even under the best of circumstances, cellulosic production will not reach the 16 billion gallons/year by 2022 as called out in the RFS. Ultimately these large targets are going to take a bit longer to hit, and the EPA will need to make adjustments to the mandates for the various types of biofuels defined by law to make sure the policy is grounded in reality.  When they do this, I hope they are not tempted to substitute food-based fuels — corn ethanol or vegetable oil based biodiesel — for truly advanced biomass-based biofuels.

photo: eXtension Farm Energy

Getting their ducks in a row

The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality is poised to adopt the Oregon Clean Fuels Program (CFP), a program that will require fuel suppliers to gradually lower greenhouse gas emissions of transportation fuels 10 percent over a 10 year period.   The CFP is part of Oregon’s goal to reduce greenhouse gasses 10 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 and is a start toward reaching the state’s 2050 goal of reducing emissions 75 percent below 1990 levels.  These targets are consistent with the reductions recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and will ultimately help reduce the consequences of climate change such as sea level rise, extreme weather, and droughts.

Trailblazing the path to reduced oil use

Oregon and the fellow transportation-conscious state of California, are leading the way on promoting the necessary shift in our transportation system away from oil.  Reducing oil use through the use of clean alternative fuels is a large part of the Union of Concerned Scientists plan to reduce oil use in half within 20 years.  For example, according to UCS analysis, a commercial cellulosic biofuel industry can cut U.S. oil use nearly 1.5 million barrels each day by 2035. An increased use of hybrids and electric vehicles can cut it by an additional 1.5 million barrels. The CFP, working in concert with other policies such as the recently finalized national fuel economy standards, will help us meet this ambitious goal.

Fueling local economies

Policies like the Oregon Clean Fuel Program and the California Low Carbon Fuel Standard compliment the federal Renewable Fuel Standard and collectively expand markets for clean fuels.  Expanded markets for clean fuels will spur further investment in the commercialization of better biofuels.  Accelerated commercialization means we will reap the economic rewards of a clean fuels industry sooner as well.  Jack Faucett Associates’ economic analysis found that the CFP will increase Oregon’s economic activity by at least $70 million in Gross State Product over ten years.  The analysis also projected an increase of as many as 29,000 Oregon jobs by keeping the billions spent on fuel at least partially in state.

The oil industry is always trying to persuade us that oil is the only future we need, and it is tempting to just sit back and watch another episode of Battlestar Galactica, but as I recall there were a few good reasons to cut our oil use in half: it’s the right thing to do for our economy, our environment, and our security.  With continued leadership from states like Oregon and California, and regional collaborations in the Northeast, we can clean up our fuel supply, address the challenges posed by continued oil use, and position the U.S. as a leader in transportation technology.  That’s a good reason to get off the couch if I ever heard one.

Photo credit: Flickr/dalvenjah

Federal biofuels policy, called the Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS), mandates the consumption of 13.2 billion gallons of conventional biofuel this year and 13.8 billion gallons next year. Since corn ethanol fills the vast majority of this demand, the RFS  could keep ethanol production high despite record high corn prices. If it does, it will place an even bigger burden on other users of corn. It won’t have much impact on your corn flakes, but you can expect an increase in prices for eggs, milk, and meat.

But for consumers of corn in the developing world, for whom food prices are a big part of their budget, the price impacts can be a lot more severe, potentially causing another global food crisis.

We don’t yet know the final reckoning of the losses from the drought, and it is possible that extra credits from 2011 will cushion the blow, but it is not too soon for the government to commit to being flexible in the implementation of biofuels mandates. The government has the authority to reduce the mandate in the event of economic harm or inadequate supply, but so far has not indicated a willingness to use this authority, instead pursuing a strategy of prayers and rain dances.

Biofuels policies must accommodate both food and fuel

Ultimately, to build a biofuels industry that reduces oil use and global warming pollution, conflicts between food and fuel must be minimized. Short-term adjustment of the mandates can help, but in the longer term we need to transition from depending on corn to more diverse sources of biofuel that look beyond food-based fuels. A more diverse agricultural system would also be better at producing healthy food.

But back to fuels, the RFS already points us in the right direction, requiring that most of the growth in biofuels beyond 2012 come from advanced biofuels, which have lower lifecycle emissions. Only a quarter of these advanced biofuels can be made from food, and the rest, 16 billion of 21 billion gallons, must be cellulosic biofuels made from agricultural waste, fast-growing grasses, and other sources of waste biomass. This transition away from food-based fuels is essential to managing the conflict between food and fuel, and it is why the success of the RFS is so critically tied to the commercialization of cellulosic non-food biofuels.

Fortunately, the first commercial cellulosic biofuel facilities are coming on line this year, with larger ones following in 2013 and 2014. But this is a slower scale-up than Congress called for — even if everything goes well it is likely the industry will produce less than 4 billion gallons in 2022, rather than the 16 billion gallons Congress envisioned when enacting the RFS in 2007. While this is disappointing,  we are still looking at the beginning of something big. Don’t listen to the self-interested whining from the oil industry, the cellulosic ethanol industry is moving fast. It took the corn ethanol industry decades to move from zero to four billion gallons, and the delayed growth of the cellulosic industry is still consistent with the UCS plan to cut our projected oil use in half in 20 years.

But the delayed scale-up of cellulosic biofuel does raise an important question about how the EPA will administer the RFS. The EPA has broad discretion to either reduce mandates for advanced biofuels in line with the delayed commercialization of cellulosic biofuels, or make up for the missing cellulosic biofuel by increasing mandates for biodiesel and other food-based advanced biofuels.

Corn ethanol is not the only food based fuel that impacts global markets, vegetable oil-based biodiesel is also a major concern. If the EPA replaces cellulosic biofuel with mandates for food-based fuels, the demand would grow faster in the next ten years than it has in the last ten. We have learned the hard way over the last four years that U.S. biofuels policy impacts U.S. and global food markets and leads to deforestation from Brazil to Indonesia.

Source: GREG, Wikimedia Commons

Building to weather the storm

Small buildings can be built to resist storms by just over engineering them, with shutters over the windows and extra thick walls. But if you want to make a really big building in a region known for typhoons and earthquakes, like this skyscraper in Taiwan, you need to anticipate the risks and be flexible in the face of a storm (a tuned mass damper also helps).

Similarly, given the scale of the RFS corn mandate relative to the size of the corn market, and world agriculture in general, it is no longer realistic to think that everyone else can adjust while the RFS mandate levels are held firm.

To protect the policy and realize the long-term goals of reducing oil use, reducing global warming pollution, and protecting the food supply, the EPA, the USDA, and the President need to be flexible as we weather this storm, and build flexibility into the future of our biofuels markets.

Movin’ right along

Ineos Cellulosic Biofuel Plant, Vero Beach, FL

Once a laboratory pipe dream, companies are now ready to pump fuels made from municipal waste and fast-growing grasses into the market.  Ineos, for example, is nearing completion of a refinery in Florida that will produce millions of gallons of biofuel from yard, wood, and vegetative wastes. The picture at the right showed what it looked like in April.

Abengoa will begin producing fuel in Kansas from a mix of agricultural waste, non-feed energy crops, and wood waste in June 2013, and POET and DuPont are constructing cellulosic plants in Iowa.

UCS has created an interactive map showing where these multi-million dollar investments have put steel in the ground, created job in rural America, and are on the cusp of producing truly advanced fuels that achieve environmental benefits compared to traditional energy sources. Excited? You should be.