Biofuels had a difficult 2012.

In the United States, Energy Information Administration data show production through November fell compared with the same period the previous year, putting the industry on track for the first annual drop since 1996.

That followed a crippling drought which raised corn feedstock prices.

In the European Union, the executive European Commission proposed effectively to freeze crop-based biofuel consumption at around present levels, halving a previous 2020 target.

Biofuel demand critically hinges on government targets.

In setting targets, policymakers have so far weighed the possible benefit of biofuels towards carbon emissions cuts and energy security against an impact on food prices.

Regarding emissions cuts, it is now clear, depending on where the boundary is set in life-cycle estimates of carbon emissions, that some biofuels offer limited or no benefits compared with conventional gasoline.

Regarding energy security, one issue which is not formally accounted for by policy is energy return. If biofuels yield little more than the energy used to make them then they will ultimately fail to replace conventional fossil fuels, especially given growing indigenous U.S. production of oil and gas from shale deposits.

Energy return

U.S. Air Force (USAF) analyst Captain T.A. Kiefer examined biofuels through their contribution to energy security in a paper published recently in the USAF Research Institute’s Strategic Studies Quarterly.

Kiefer presents a strong opinion, as indicated by the headline of his expanded, full report, “Twenty-First Century Snake Oil: Why the United States Should Reject Biofuels as Part of a Rational National Security Energy Strategy,” published as a discussion paper at the Canada-based Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation.

The paper is a deeply researched and referenced discussion of the net energy of biofuels.

Energy return on investment (EROI) is one measure of the total energy available in a fuel as a proportion of the energy used to produce it.

A value of one, or unity, implies a hand-to-mouth existence.

Diesel and gasoline have an EROI of 10 times or more, according to Kiefer, reflecting low crude oil extraction and refining costs, while corn ethanol is around 1.3, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

Corn ethanol is a poor performer partly because of the energy intensity of corn cultivation, where farmers use fertilizer manufactured from natural gas to boost yields.

The EROI concept should be handled with care, to compare like with like.

The Department of Defence’s deputy director for technology strategy Adam Rosenberg issued a formal rebuttal of Kiefer’s article in the same USAF journal.

Rosenberg pointed out that coal-fired power was also very inefficient, but the point perhaps is that coal is cheap to extract compared with its energy content, unlike a fuel which consumed lots of natural gas in its manufacture and was then burned in place of coal.

Energy security?

The present U.S. biofuels program was expanded under the U.S. Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 through a renewable fuel standard which mandates blend volumes of biofuel.

The standard is formally introduced in the act as “Energy Security Through Increased Production of Biofuels,” nailing its purpose to boost energy security by supplying an indigenous alternative to imported crude oil.

From an energy security perspective, it might be argued that a corn ethanol EROI close to one is enough, provided the high energy input is domestic natural gas, since that would still see ethanol displace imported crude.

Such a country would inflict self-harm, however, by draining its indigenous natural gas rather than produce less energy-intensive gasoline from imported crude.

It is an obvious but important idea that a country must get significantly more energy from its fuel compared with the effort in making it, if it wishes to run all the energy-hungry processes of an industrialized society.

Kiefer cited studies that an EROI below six is consistent with recession, in other words a minimum threshold for a modern, energy-intensive quality of life.

The bare minimum is three, according to a 2009 study published in the journal Energies by researchers at the State University of New York, called “What is the minimum EROI that a sustainable society must have?”

“Of course the 3:1 minimum ‘extended EROI’ that we calculate here is only a bare minimum for civilization. It would allow only for energy to run transportation or related systems, but would leave little discretionary surplus for all the things we value about civilization: art, medicine, education and so on,” the authors said.

EU and U.S. policy-makers see second-generation biofuels made from waste and woody cellulose, rather than intensively cultivated food crops, as the future of the biofuel industry, while Brazilian sugar cane is also less energy intensive.

However, there are at least three problems with cellulosic biofuels.

First, U.S. production levels shows that it is still uneconomic. The Environmental Protection Agency downgraded last year’s blending requirement to just 10.45 million ethanol-equivalent gallons, nearly 490 million gallons short of the 500 million mandated volume.

Second, these biofuels may have the same problems regarding greenhouse gas emissions as regular biofuels, if the boundary in life-cycle carbon emissions includes land use change.

Third, given the lack of actual production, there are no data yet to reliably estimate its energy return.

Choices

Biofuels seemed to make sense when the United States introduced its renewable fuel standard in 2007, and when the EU approved its biofuel target the following year.

So far the European Commission has proposed effectively to halt industry growth pending better understanding of its wider impacts. It has proposed limiting the contribution of crop-based biofuels to five per cent in 2020.

In the latest data available from the European Environment Agency, crop-based biofuels already accounted for 4.3 per cent of transport energy consumption in 2010, at 14 million tonnes of oil equivalent (mtoe) compared with a sector total of 322 mtoe.

Meanwhile, the United States is already nearing a plateau in its mandate for first-generation biofuels (including corn, excluding sugar cane ethanol), at 15 billion gallons annually every year from 2015, compared with 13.9 billion in 2011.

A halt in expansion of the global industry makes sense while policy-makers assess performance, where energy return should be a part of the discussion.

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To halt or reverse a $22-billion European biofuel industry requires a sound justification.

The problem with biofuels is that calculation of the full environmental impact of their production involves incredibly complicated, tortuous calculations using so-called life cycle assessment.

Probably the best course is to halt growth in the conventional biofuel industry, which produces fuel from food crops, pending better understanding of their full environmental and food price impacts.

That is broadly what the European Commission recently proposed, halving its target for crop-based biofuels to five per cent of road fuel in 2020, equivalent to present production levels.

But problems lurk.

The commission now says some biodiesel is as polluting as Canadian tarsands, which could lead to legislation banning those types of biodiesel. The commission wants to drive a switch to non-food sources for advanced biofuels, but kick-starting this fledgling, alternative industry risks repeating the original errors in supporting conventional biofuels.

Assessment

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is used to measure the full environmental impacts of economic activity.

The idea is to measure the environmental and other negative impacts of all stages in the production and consumption of goods, as a step towards paring these. In the case of conventional biofuels, the aim is to measure the full carbon emissions from production.

Life cycle stages include cultivation, harvesting and transport of crops and subsequent extraction of sugar for refining into fuel, and, most difficult to measure, the indirect emissions of displacing food crops onto other land, potentially adding to deforestation.

Uncertainties in such assessment include how far higher yields (from farm intensification using more fertilizer, labour and capital) can avoid land use change, including deforestation, as farmers try to produce food displaced by biofuels.

Nigel Mortimer, an LCA practitioner who leads the British consultancy North Energy Associates, says he considers the commission’s latest proposed indirect land use change (ILUC) estimates to be premature.

“Despite many valiant attempts, no such model has yet gained universal acceptance,” he stated.

Even the experts used by the commission acknowledge the complexity of such analyses.

Non-food

Hiking incentives for non-food biofuels also rely on complex accounting.

For example, the commission would allow straw to count four times the equivalent crop-based biofuels.

The justification is that straw is a waste product (or “agricultural residue”) which therefore requires no land in its production and so causes no indirect emissions. But straw is not waste, instead a byproduct of cereal production which has an economic value as animal bedding.

Energy crops such as miscanthus grass count twice, even though it uses land and so potentially displaces food crops in exactly the same way as conventional biofuels.

The result is inconsistent, an attempt both to be science based and at the same time to support advanced biofuels.

That juggling may be the best the commission can do to put the biofuel industry on a sounder footing, but it creates uncertainty, will scare investors and risks repeating mistakes.

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Tackling high food prices among the leading G20 nations has so far bent on fixing demand issues, including grain trading, export bans and the role of biofuels in consuming corn.

Strangely absent is a concerted focus on the role of more frequent severe droughts in constricting supply.

That new focus could include a shift from a tiresome debate about human attribution in global warming, all but proven, to pinpointing local and regional impacts, plus turbocharged plant breeding to shorten a decades-long path to market.

Two heat waves illustrate the threat.

The Russian drought and wildfires in 2010 saw temperatures more than three standard deviations beyond historical data, in general exceeding 99.9 per cent of observations, according to a vivid paper by NASA scientist James Hansen last year.

A price spike followed when the country banned wheat exports.

The present U.S. Midwest event has been equally intense and sent corn prices soaring. A Texan heat wave in 2011 was also beyond third standard deviations, but more local.

Clearly, it is impossible to predict an extreme event at any given location in any year.

But NASA’s Hansen showed how average summer temperatures were one standard deviation higher globally in the last decade compared with 1951-61, in a consistent trend towards higher summer mean temperatures and more frequent extremes.

Events

The Russian summer in 2010 was the hottest in 130 years of records, and July rainfall in western Russia as little as four per cent of the monthly norm, according to the U.S.-based National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

More than 20 per cent of the country’s harvest was destroyed, and economic losses from lost crops and wildfires amounted to $15 billion, it said in its 2010 “State of the Climate” report.

The cause was the same stable, high-pressure blocking system which had caused previous heat waves, bringing hot air from central Asia.

It was the severity of the heat wave, not the weather pattern, that was exceptional.

Texas last year endured its driest ever summer, with just 62 millimetres precipitation compared with the previous driest summer in 1956 of 88.4 mm.

This year, U.S. crops have withered in the worst drought since 1956. The January-June period was the warmest on record across the United States, where scorching temperatures have broken scores of individual station records.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture earlier this month cut expected corn yields by 12 per cent, and FAO revised its expected global cereals harvest.

Entrenched minority

Part of the problem is climate research which still dwells on attribution in a largely settled debate which long ago ran into the sand with an entrenched minority refusing to believe.

Farmers need specific regional and local information about possible projected temperature ranges, in the day and night, given the specific survival thresholds for individual crops.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) earlier this year seemed to take a step in the right direction, in its report “Managing the risks of extreme events,” which largely sidestepped attribution, focusing on the problem.

But it wrote in sweeping terms and strangely missed impacts on food production, spending just two out of 594 pages dealing with food security, with no link to agronomic research.

The IPCC’s main mandate is to publish a blockbuster report once every six years, split three ways between documenting the physical understanding of climate change, including cause, and a third each spent considering impacts and a human response.

Such an encyclopedia is worthwhile but a luxury when so little is understood about systemic food risks.

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Heating plants such as farm waste or wood in airtight conditions produces a high-carbon substance called biochar, which can store the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide and enhance nutrients in the soil.

Plants absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they grow. Subsequently storing that carbon in the soil removes the gas from the atmosphere.

“I feel confident that the (carbon storage) time of stable biochar is from high hundreds to a few thousand years,” said Cornell University’s Johannes Lehmann, at an event on the sidelines of UN climate talks in the Polish city of Poznan.

Lehmann estimated that under ambitious scenarios, biochar could store one billion tonnes of carbon annually – equivalent to more than 10 per cent of global carbon emissions, which amounted to 8.5 billion tonnes in 2007.

Under a conservative scenar io the technique could store 200 million tonnes of carbon annually, he said. That would still require heating without oxygen – called pyrolysis – some 27 per cent of global crop waste and plowing this into the soil.

Lehmann cited experiments on 10 farm crops suggesting biochar can also increase yields by up to three times, because the organic matter holds on to nutrients.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) said in November that global greenhouse gas emissions were so out of control that avoiding more dangerous levels of climate change depended on creating negative emissions later this century.

The energy adviser to 28 industrialized countries cited biochar as one way of achieving that.

The technique rings alarm bells among some environmentalists worried it could spur deforestation, but its chief problem may be that it is barely proven on a commercial scale.

“It will remain theoretical without making demonstration plants on the ground,” Lehmann said.

Soils containing biochar made by Amazon people thousands of years ago still contain up to 70 times more black carbon than surrounding soils and are still higher in nutrients, said Debbie Reed, director of the International Biochar Initiative (IBI), in Poznan to lobby for research funding.

Lehmann emphasized that the technique was not a substitute for fighting climate change by curbing man-made greenhouse gas emissions, especially carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels.

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