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THERE are, in my view, two defects in our biofuel
policy.
First, it competes with food
production. And second, it increases pollution.
Ethanol and biodiesel will be
produced from corn, sugarcane and coconut. Not only are these basic
foods, they are cultivated on prime arable lands. Their production
requires fertilizers, pesticides and other chemicals. They also need
to be irrigated. If new areas such as second growth forests or
uplands are to be opened for biofuel production then biodiversity is
threatened.
There was surprisingly no
discussion in the House of Representatives and the Senate on the net
contribution of ethanol and biodiesel to the total energy
requirement of the country.
Since both will be used mainly as
transportation fuel, there is no record in the debate on whether or
not ethanol and biodiesel emit greenhouse and other noxious gases.
They are both carbon-based and therefore emit CO2 when burned. But
how much? The legislators did not know or perhaps did not want to
know.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not
knocking the government’s biofuel program. Its central aim—to
reduce the country’s dependence on imported fossil fuel—is
politically sound.
What I want to put across is
there should be more research into biofuels to establish their
economic and scientific limits.
In the US, at the University of
Minnesota, an ecologist, David Tilman and an economist, Jason Hill,
have been working for about 10 years on some of these problems.
They are experimenting on the
production of biomass on soils that are not suitable for crop
agriculture.
Part of their work also is to
determine the energy content of the grasses and shrubs that thrive
in unirrigated, nitrogen-poor and unfertilized soils.
And these two scientists also
want to find out if the plants that they have selected
“sequester” carbon in their roots and stems.
In brief, their research program
deals with “biofuels derived from low-input high diversity (LIHD)
mixtures of native grassland perennials [that] can provide more
usable energy, greater greenhouse gas reductions, and less agrichemical
pollution per hectare than can corn grain ethanol or soybean
biodiesel,” to quote from the abstract in the December 8, 2006,
issue of Science.
I suggest strongly that the
Departments of Energy, Agriculture and Science and Technology
undertake similar research using perhaps Tilman’s research design
but adapted to the tropics.
Global demand for both food and
energy will double in the next 50 years. To use food crops to
produce transportation fuel is not a rational tradeoff. Biodiversity
must not be sacrificed to produce both food and biofuels. If it can
be shown that LIHD biomass is feasible economically in the
Philippines then biofuel production need not compete with food
production for scarce arable and fertile lands nor cause ecological
destruction.
Tilman and Hill want to
collaborate with other scientists to “explore more widely” the
potential of LIHD for biofuels.
We should take them up on their
offer. They can be reached by e-mail at tilman@umn.edu.
Correction and amplification. In
my January 14 column (“Desperately seeking the Higgs boson”) I
said that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will commence full
operation in 2007. I was wrong. According to Science, the LHC might
be switched on by the end of this year but its full operation has
been reset to 2008.
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