The Biofuels debate

Find another planet and plant it with soybeans

Elliot Wilson says there isn’t enough arable land in the world to make plant-based fuels a viable alternative to oil

‘Biofuels?’ Ricardo Leiman gives an imperious snort, his eyebrows wobbling. ‘Bio­fuels?’ he repeats in an offended tone, as if asked to perform a lewd act. ‘There’s about 20 million tonnes of processed edible oil on the planet right now — not enough to fulfil 5 per cent of Europe’s energy needs, let alone any of the huge demand in the US, China, India or anywhere else.’

If Leiman doesn’t believe that biofuels are a viable solution to our energy needs, one wonders why anybody does. As chief operating officer of Noble Group, a Hong Kong-listed trading giant that crushes and refines close to 2.5 million tonnes of soybean and vegetable oil each year — much of it destined to fuel hybrid cars and buses — Leiman has much to gain from the budding industry. Noble posted revenues of £5 billion in the first half of 2007, up 60 per cent on 2006.

These days, everyone seems to have an opinion on biofuels. Broadly defined as any solid, liquid or gas fuel derived from any biological mass — from palm oil and rapeseed to human waste — the biofuel industry has become a subject as divisive as genetically modified food in the 1990s, or crop-spraying in the 1960s.

Proponents view biofuels as vital both to energy security — because it reduces dependency on Middle Eastern oil and Russian gas — and to energy sustainability. Fossil fuels are finite, but the only limitation on biofuels is the availability and fecundity of land. This side of the argument boasts powerful political and industrial backing. In January 2006, President Bush announced in his State of the Union address that America would replace no less than 75 per cent of the oil it imports from the Middle East with biofuels such as corn-based ethanol by 2025 — there are, of course, lots of votes in corn-growing states. This year he upped the ante, demanding that the US generate 35 billion gallons of alternative fuels per year by 2017.

Not to be outdone, the European Com­mission voted in March 2007 to generate 10 per cent of the region’s transport power from biofuels by 2020, with most of the ingredients to be sourced from Brazil and Argentina. China in turn set an internal target of 12 million tonnes of biofuels by 2020, mostly by ‘buying’ access to land in neighbouring countries, including Indonesia and the Philippines. Japan, India and Brazil have also set out plans to generate significant portions of their energy needs from biofuels over the next ten years.

The other side of the argument is less well co-ordinated and funded, but all its advocates start from the position that biofuels are a ticking moral and ethical time bomb. Is it really a good thing, they ask, to set aside huge tracts of land to plant crops that will be used not as food, but as fuel for cars and power stations? A single tonne of refined palm oil generates 33 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions — 10 times more than petroleum. Stripping out tropical forests to plant sugar cane for ethanol — of which Brazil plans to double its output by 2015 — only makes the planet’s ecological systems struggle harder to absorb rising carbon dioxide levels.

To be fair, both sides of the argument contain elements of reason. No one denies that energy sustainability is a pressing issue — and that wind, wave and solar energy, though theoretically unlimited, will only get us so far. Besides, biofuels have been around for centuries. They first appeared in Britain in the 1630s when farmers set aside land to grow hay to feed drayhorses raised to pull canalboats. The first cars, ironically, were designed to be powered by biofuels — the German inventor Rudolf Diesel designed his eponymous engine to run on peanut oil, while Henry Ford wanted his Model T to run on ethanol. Then huge petroleum reserves were discovered in the US, and biofuels were largely forgotten.