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Shel Horowitz: Good and bad biofuel models to learn from
By SHEL HOROWITZ
Monday, March 3, 2014
(Published in print: Monday, March 3, 2014)
Those of us who want a greener world can learn a lot from the biofuel
industry. Both positive and negative lessons abound.
The first and perhaps most important lesson is to think things through.
What appears on the surface to be a wonderful solution may not be so
wonderful after all. In the case of biofuels, a lot of the technologies
turned out to be full of unintended consequences.
Two technologies have been particularly troubling: corn ethanol and
burning biomass. Both have turned out to be expensive, polluting,
high-carbon-footprint and resource-consuming. And both have diverted
both land and what grows on the land from their highest potential uses.
Corn ethanol takes prime farmland out of food production and diverts it
to energy. Wood-burning biomass plants lead to forest destruction.
Neither is clean, and with corn ethanol, the ratio of energy consumed to
energy generated is far from pretty. Both worsen the potential for
harmful climate change, and both can lead to problems including
monocropping, drastically reduced biodiversity and wildlife habit and
even higher food prices.
But should we write off biofuels altogether? Not at all.
Many much more promising technologies can actually reduce pollution and
generate energy without interfering with food production or habitat. For
instance: The farm I live on is currently installing a methane digester
that will actually remove greenhouse gases while providing enough
electricity to power 250 homes. Its inputs? Cow manure and food waste!
In Brazil, sugarcane waste underpins a vast ethanol industry,
strengthened by a government requirement to mix ethanol with gasoline
(and government incentives to produce ethanol), all the way back to
1976. As a result, almost the entire Brazilian vehicle fleet runs either
on flex-fuel mixtures of ethanol and gasoline, or on pure ethanol (more
information: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil).
In the United States, where I live, many companies are successfully
harvesting waste frying oil from fast-food restaurants and converting
the waste oil to biodiesel. One particularly spiffy model is Green
Circle North Carolina, which adds some beautiful new pieces to create a
circle of community self-sufficiency: donating a portion of the profits
to the schools, offering restaurants the PR benefits of supporting local
school districts and then selling the biodiesel to those school
districts to power their school buses. When we as green entrepreneurs
create these sorts of win-win-win programs, the whole world benefits.
There have also been many successful experiments generating ethanol with
nonfood crops that can grow on marginal land, such as switchgrass. These
have tended to yield more energy and create fewer greenhouse gases (more
information:
www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=grass-makes-better-ethanol-than-corn).
And then there’s the so-called Q microbe, whose backers claim will
digest far more cellulose and produce much more energy from the same
amount of biomass. However, commercializing the Q microbe, first
identified by researchers at the University of Massachusetts several
years ago, has been off to a very rocky start. Qteros (the company that
has tried to bring this technology to market) has faced many funding and
operational challenges—including changes in ownership and having to
close its plant—and its future is unclear.
From my perspective, the more successful and promising technologies
have something in common. They create energy out of what we’re
accustomed to thinking of as waste: materials that would have either
clogged up landfills or emitted greenhouse gases when incinerated.
Furthermore, they are not the food parts of food crops; they’re either
waste parts of food plants, or plants that are not used for food (and
aren’t grown on prime agricultural land).
In other words, they are part of a holistic approach to thinking about
the integration of our energy and food systems, and not a
poorly-thought-out kludge grafted onto a system not designed to
accommodate it, all too often with disastrous consequences.
In one sense, biofuel is our oldest energy source. When aboriginal
societies first discovered, thousands of years ago, that fire could not
only keep them warm on cold winter nights but could preserve food while
making it both easier to digest and better tasting, they were burning
wood and plant matter. Back then, of course, they didn’t worry about
greenhouse gas emissions.
In short, as with wind, solar and hydro, we can find both right and
wrong ways to develop new energy sources. In tomorrow’s world, sensible
biofuel will be part of the mix.
Marketing consultant and copywriter Shel Horowitz,
s...@greenandprofitable.com, writes a monthly column and is the primary
author of the award-winning and bestselling book “Guerrilla Marketing
Goes Green” (John Wiley & Sons).
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