Sound Science and Obama’s Biofuels Working Group

Posted by Don Carr in Biofuels, Featured Articles on February 3, 2010 | 4 responses

By Craig Cox, Environmental Working Group Senior Vice President and manager of EWG’s Ames, Iowa, branch.

On Wednesday (Feb. 3), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)  updated its Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) Rule, known as RFS 2, refusing to shift policy on one of the issues most contested by the ethanol industry, the “indirect land use change” rule. That’s technical jargon for factoring in the climate-damaging gases released when forests or grasslands are plowed under and planted with crops to make up for the corn being used to make ethanol for fuel.

When EPA scientists factor in indirect land use change, as they are required to do by law, it turns out that corn ethanol likely increases, rather than decreases, greenhouse gas emissions. The ethanol lobby fought hard (as their patrons in Congress still are) to remove the rule, but the EPA announced that it will continue to factor in land use change, using the best science available, in its calculations.

Unfortunately, much of the short-term benefit of EPA’s courageous stance is gutted by the cynical and politically driven exemption that Congress gave to the corn ethanol industry when it made sure that 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol will be forced into the gasoline market — even though that won’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Also on Wednesday, in a bit of coordinated media strategy, the President’s Biofuels Interagency Working Group released a broad plan aimed at increasing the amount of biofuels used in American cars, trucks and airplanes. President Obama created the Working Group in May and instructed the energy secretary, agriculture secretary and EPA administrator to lead it.

The Working Group’s report highlighted the contradictions between where it wants to go and where the updated Renewable Fuel Standard is taking us, despite what appears to be the best efforts of the report’s authors to gloss over those conflicts.

The report gets many things right on the current thinking on biofuels. Saying that the “expansion of biofuels industry should focus on advanced biofuels and direct substitute fuels that can leverage existing American multi-trillion dollar liquid fuel infrastructure” is a good signal that the Working Group rightly recognizes the futility of continuing the push to expand corn ethanol that the ethanol lobby and corn growers wish for. The assertion that “past performance and business and usual will not get us there” is heartening as well.

The report also stresses the need to ensure that “economic, environmental and social issues will be addressed up-front for all supply-chain components” and to “avoid serious impacts on existing food, feed and fiber markets and the quality of natural resources upon which we all depend on for clean air and water.” That shows that the Obama administration is right on target in leveling with the American public on ethanol’s many limitations. However, the report’s authors simply ignored key facts about the business-as-usual attitude that is driving the biofuels industry in the opposite direction.

First, corn ethanol can’t be scaled up to the point that it makes any major contribution to reducing dependence on fossil fuels without causing the very economic, environmental and social impacts that the Working Group rightly concludes must be avoided. The report glosses over the urgent need to unwind the mandates and subsidies that are driving an unsustainable and unwise expansion of the corn ethanol industry. We need to swiftly roll those back and refocus policy and resources on achieving the goals the Working Group lays out. Why continue to push expansion of corn ethanol when the Working Group itself states that expansion should be focused on advanced and so-called “drop-in” biofuels that require minimal infrastructure upgrade.

Secondly, the updated Renewable Fuels Standard includes none of the safeguards regarding economic, environmental and social impacts that the Working Group rightly identifies as essential. Adding insult to injury, the standard grandfathers in all 15 billion gallons of Congressionally-mandated corn ethanol, with no requirement to meet any standards for  reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

We simply can’t move in the direction the Working Group recommends without fundamental reform of the current public policy regarding biofuels. Failure to address that need seriously undermines the credibility and impact of the Working Group report.

The biofuels Working Group clearly wants to move on to “drop-in” fuels that don’t require the big investments in infrastructure that “second generation” biofuels like cellulosic ethanol would necessitate. Yet they are still determined to invest in second generation biofuels as a bridge to the third generation. Why not just skip over second generation and invest in getting straight to the preferred drop-in biofuels. Why construct two crumbling bridges to the future — corn ethanol to second generation, and then second generation to drop-in?

Why not just one stable bridge?

The EPA is right to stick with the scientifically sound approach to life-cycle assessment of biofuels and the impact that federal mandates will have on forests and grasslands here in the United States and in the developing world. A comprehensive assessment of greenhouse gas emissions is an essential component of the upfront assessment of economic, environmental and social impacts recommended by the Biofuels Working Group.

Unfortunately, however, the updated Renewable Fuels Standard does nothing to limit the cynical and politically-driven exemptions in the 2007 energy bill that currently allow corn ethanol plants to escape any greenhouse gas reduction requirements, let alone the other economic, environmental or social considerations recommended by the Working Group.

In effect, the 2007 law and the new EPA rule ensure a 12 billion gallon flood of corn ethanol in 2010 in return for a pathetic trickle of 6.5 million gallons of advanced cellulosic ethanol.

  • http://www.ecocommerce.us.com Tim Gieseke

    Indirect Land Use Change applied only to fuels is arbritary. We use land for so many more things. As a farmer I manage my land for both provisional ecoservices (corn, lamb, etc) and regulatory ecoservices (water, soil, carbon, wildlife). Often when I change my land use to improve water or wildlife, I reduce the amount of provisional ecoservices (corn) that I can produce. Applying that ILUC concept, my CRP fields create an ILUC right next to the ILUC that corn-ethanol produces. We can be both agree that the ILUC in foriegn lands is the same. If your ecological argument is that we end up with a greater net ecological gain with CRP, that is fine, but to maintain respectability in your argument, your calculations of CRP EBI’s need to include ILUC. Otherwise the ULIC is applied arbritrarily. If you want my farming business to produce more ecoservices, then you will have to generate a demand for them. I, like you and everyone else, gets up in the morning understanding where society places economic value on our activities, whether that is baling hay or pitching policy. Applying the macro-economic strategy of ILUC to a micro-economic opportunity (land management)does not appear to be the solution to motivate me as a land manage to produce ecoservices. Applying a micro-economic strategy (www.ecocommerce.us.com)to a macro-economic problem (NPS) makes more sense.

  • http://www.biomasse-nutzung.de Ron Kirchner

    Thanks for this inside view of the recent discussions and developments at the biofuel markets in the US. I am an engineer from germany and we also have some problems with the biodiesel and bioethanol industrie right now. The economical production of biofuels in germany is pushed by a special renewable energy law (EEG), which gives the producers of biofuels some planning reliability and the farmers get more selling markets for their products. But the darker side of the medal shows the environmental and moral problems which result out of the nitrogen fertilizers and the cutting of rainforests. Some solutions are already in progress, e.g. certification systems for sustainable produced biomass.

    So I do not believe, that biofuels are able to replace fuels on a fossil basis in the near future, but i do believe, that the decentral and regional production of biofuels of the 2. and 3 generation will make a deep impact on concepts of mobility.

  • Free Ranger

    “Applying the macro-economic strategy of ILUC to a micro-economic opportunity (land management)does not appear to be the solution to motivate me as a land manage to produce ecoservices.”

    So, Tim, the only way you’ll do the right thing is if we pay you?

  • http://www.ecocommerce.us.com Tim Gieseke

    No necessarily Free Ranger, but the only way to garner goods and services to the desired level is to provide a means to compensate people for them. The discussion is not about you and me, but about the millions of people that do not know we are even talking about this subject and act in their own self-interests during their busy, busy lives. Leaving the maintenance of ecological functions up to chance depending on the social, political and economic winds does not seem to be in the self-interests of you and I.