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From The Sunday Times

June 10, 2007

Top scientist says biofuels are scam

Jonathan Leake and Steven Swinford

THE government’s policy of promoting biofuels for transport will come under harsh attack this week from one of its senior science advisers.

Roland Clift will tell a seminar of the Royal Academy of Engineering that the plan to promote bioethanol and biodiesel produced from plants is a “scam”.

Clift, professor of environmental technology at Surrey University, sits on the scientific advisory council of Defra, David Miliband’s environment department.

He will tell the seminar that promoting the use of biofuels is likely to increase greenhouse gas emissions.

Clift’s comments will amount to a direct challenge to Miliband, who has published a strategy promoting biofuels. It coincides with a surge of anger among environmentalists over the weak pledges on climate change that emerged from last week’s G8 summit.

The audience on Thursday will also include Howard Dalton, Miliband’s chief scientist at Defra, who is expected to speak in defence of biofuels.

Clift said: “Biodiesel is a complete scam because in the tropics the growing demand is causing forests to be burnt to make way for palm oil and similar crops.

“We calculate that the land will need to grow biodiesel crops for 70-300 years to compensate for the CO2 emitted in forest destruction.”

Clift will also condemn plans to produce British biodiesel from rapeseed, pointing to research showing the crop generates copious amounts of nitrous oxide – an even more powerful global warming gas than CO2 The attack comes as the government increases its support for biofuels. Next year it will introduce a requirement for 3% of all fuel sold on UK forecourts to come from a renewable source.

Across the EU the renewable transport fuels obligation will increase this to 5% by 2010, with the British government pushing for a target of 10%.

Miliband wants British farming to diversify into biofuels. “It is an important part of our vision for a diversified farming sector,” he said in a recent speech.

The UK Biomass Strategy published last month is, however, also critical of turning crops into transport fuels, pointing out that this is the least efficient way of using them. It says that it is most efficient simply to burn them.

Clift is not the only government science adviser calling for a rethink on biofuels. Roger Kemp, who advises the Department for Transport on energy use in transport, told a conference last week that using biofuels in transport would have no impact on cutting emissions.

In his submission to the Institute of Engineering and Technology’s climate change committee he warned that Britain produced 200m tonnes of CO2 a year in transport emissions.

On current trends that will double by 2045 – whereas the government has pledged to reduce transport emissions to around 90m tonnes by that date.

“We would need to plant a land area twice the size of Britain to get enough biofuel crops to halve our emissions,” said Kemp, professor of engineering at Lancaster University. “The numbers simply do not add up.”

Kemp and Clift point out that the surging global interest in biofuels derives from a “false belief” among politicians that there must be a technical solution to climate change.

Kemp said: ”Underlying all this is the assumption that we have to preserve the mobility and freedom to travel that we now enjoy at all costs.

“However, when you look at the science of climate change it is clear there are no such simple solutions. Humanity has to accept that.”

A similar message was this weekend emerging from environmentalists as they denounced the G8 industrialised nations for failing to take action on climate change at last week’s summit.

Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth, accused the G8 of being little more than a “talking shop”. He said: “The G8 has a record of putting the short term interests of rich countries before those of the environment and developing countries and this year was no exception.”

FACTS OF ‘GREEN’ FUEL

What are biofuels?

Biofuels come from plants: bioethanol from sugars and starches, biodiesel mainly from rapeseed and palm oil. They are blended with normal fuels, making up about 5% of the product.

What are the benefits?

The carbon in biofuels comes from the atmosphere so when they burn that carbon is simply rereleased and there is no increase.

What are the concerns?

Biofuel crops take land from growing food and create pressure for deforestation. Burning forests generates vast amounts of CO2.

Man made Global warming is one big con.
It is sponsored by politicians who use it to raise taxes, by scientists who make a good living out of it and by the same kind of sheep who have followed various religous leaders for over 4000 years.
For heavens sake, get real and start solving real problems, not making more up.

tony, birmingham, uk

I live in Brazil where the ethanol from sugar cane programme is now over 30 years old and, after a great deal of technological improvement, now seems to be viable. Most cars here are now able to and do run on ethanol.. Initially I was against the programme but now believe it to be viable. It is, in any case, a huge "field test" available to be evaluated by any interested government/party. It is not true that this programme, based almost entirely in Sao Paulo state, affects the Amazon jungle nearly 2000 miles away. Competition with food production is also not an issue as Brazil feeds itself and exports massive amounts of food grainsÂ´products (in spite of EU/US barriers). Not convinced? Sends the boys here to check it out!

William Bolster, Sao Paulo, Brazil

Hey, all the hype about Co2 emissions, biofuels, carbon foot prints, ECT. I get totally fed up with it. The world has for millions of years gone through many temperature cycles; from extreme cold to very high temperatures and over the long term there is not a thing we can do about it. We should not be destroying rain forests to produce crops for biofuels, the forest are the lungs of the world . Most modes of transport rely on the internal combustion engine, be-it piston or jet. The best they achieve is 30% efficiency, which means 70% of the fuel used is ejected out of the exhaust. How many millions of tons of fuel have we just thrown away over the last 100 years? This must be addressed to improve the efficiency to at least 90%. It is quite feasible to achieve 800BHP from 1000cc engine with radical re-design of a technology that basically has not changed for 100 years, then we can start looking at alternative fuels.

Gerry Archer, Bedford, UK

The best cure for the environment is nature itself, using fertilizers to produce green fuel is like throwing petrol on a fire. Millions of tree's each year are being burnt to produce crops for ethanol. basic biology tells you that trees help the environment they don't need fertilizers to grow and aid the environment.

we build windfarms for power, the masses complain that they spoil the view, we use solar power, the masses complain that the panels are an eyesore. we attempt to harness wave power this is also ridiculed.

thousands of disused open cast mines lie dormant where trees could be planted. thousands of miles of unused land could be converted for windfarms. thousands of miles of unused coast lines could harness wave power.
One solar panel fitted to a each roof could heat enough warm water and save tonnes of fossil fuels being burned, electric cars may not sound sexy, they would make an impact, limiting outpout of co2 is only the start. changing public opinion is the answer

Bill Wallace, North Ayrshire, Scotland

Oh stop moaning. It's not a hoax - global warming is happening and you're giving US citizens a bad name by moaning about it. You're welcome to argue whether it's our fault or not, but the evidence is too strong to deny that global warming is happening.

Tom, Cambridge, UK

A recent comment by the South African Petroleum industry indicates that 3-4% of gasoline is lost when blending with ethanol and, I presume some Ethanol. How are these losses factured
into comparisons between mineral fuels and biofuels, and how can such losses be justified when the overt rationale for biofuels
is to extend our stock of mineral fuels?

Tony Garcia, Johannesburg, RSA

There are no free lunches when it comes to concentrating energy from the sun on the scale that is being contemplated for transportation fuels. Oil and natural gas are re-newable too, just on a 100 million year time scale. The oil, coal and natural gas reserves our industrial society have been burning through for the last 150 years has been an incredible gift, a one time gift that is now
being rapidly depleted. Expectations of what life should be like or more specifically what is now viewed as being entitled it to be will be forced to change by the geophysical realities of slowing and declining world daily extraction rates of petrochemicals. We live in challenging times...

jake, Houston, Texas

Yes, I agree that biofuels are not a global solution. They can help only a little owing to land limitation. (Now reduce world population by 75%, then there is some merit to using more land.) Let me add that the global warming issue is a collosal hoax. This is based on science! If we don't see this, it will end up costing all of us trillions of dollars, leading to poor living conditions for many.

Jacques Guertin, Ph.D., Newark, California

Lets all pray ...amen

paul, bergen, norway

Biofuels is about reducing carbon emmissions not as a total replacement for oil. It is typicle of the miss information that so called experts put out there. Biofuels can never replace oil but can be added to our fuel to make cleaner driving. Nor will growing crops for Biofuels take away from food supplies. Farmers will start to farm more intelligently to produce more yield, and maybe rather than pay farmers not to grow crops{set aside land}.Farmers will get a decent return for their efforts. Very little land in Europe is farmed efficiently through use of the sort of modern techniques used in countries like Australia.Much land in European is constrained by politics and lack of investment in modern infrastructure and techniques.These issue need to be quantifed.

elaine nicholas, Poole,

Whatever requires massive subsidy to survive is most likely a Scam. Windarms are another example says David Bellamy. James Lovelock thought they would not save CO2.

And there is no evidence that anthropogenic CO2 causes climate warming -mere hypothesis. Data tend to negate the hypothesis. Kyoto may be considered a scam in retrospect. Carbon markets already are. No evidence of global warming since 1998 and some think the next ice age is on its way.

alister, Cambridge, UK

Everyone is always on about carbon (when they mean carbon dioxide) but nitrogen oxides, especially nitric oxide, are incredibly powerful GHGs, 300 times as powerful in the case of nitric oxide. Biofuels are great for politicians, but that's all, with the possible exception of some relatively small (on a global scale) examples such as sugar cane for Brazilians.

Jon Cooper, Bishops stortford,

alister, Cambridge, UK

Promises of biofuels and alternative technologies yet to be developed, mislead the public into believing that they need make no real personal effort in the fight against climate change.

Here in Dorset it is probable that the Government's line on climate change and the environment will prove to be yet another lie on all levels as a new bypass around - cutting through an AONB and associated ancient woodland, SSSIs, and a housing estate - is predicted by its planners to increase CO2 emissions. Disingenuously, those same planners now suggest that they cannot control who uses the road, so the CO2 issue is therefore beyond their control.

Supporters of the project - which a Government Inspector previously dismissed as being of no economic benefit, and environmentally unacceptable - argue that technology (including biofuels) will solve the CO2 issue.

The Government is reluctant to upset potential voters, but when is to going to provide moral leadership on this issue?

John, Weymouth, Dorset

I am sure that if Mr. Roland Clift is a top environmental scientist, he will be able to give a viable contribution to elaborating Life Cycle Analysis / Sustainability Certification criteria for biofuels, as many of us, less “top”, are doing. Everybody knows that deforestation has to be stoped and that fertilizers can pollute..

And, by the way, we are already supporting the production of veggie oils along such criteria, in many developing countries. With a strong “poverty reduction” effect, too…

Arrigo della Gherardesca, Milano, Italy

prius more harmful to enviroment over it's lifetime than locally produced small diesel car - the prius is shipped from japan (2 -3 week sail time) on a boat that burns 55 tons of fuel a day, plus the nickel mining for the batteries is causing serious acid rain in the local area around the mines. Think the point is being missed, Biofuels are about what we are going to use once the oil runs out, the original idea was NEVER about cutting c02, it's just been warped that way

dirty pig, lins,

Biofuels even so called third generation can only be regarded as transition towards a more sophisticated use of biomas.

There is promising news from Virginia Tech. US.

Dr. Yi-Heng Percival Zhang, assistant professor of biological systems engineering at Virginia Polytechnic US a promising research is taking place whre biomas is converted to hydrogen by a novel artificial enzymatic pathway that can convert abundant polysaccharides (starch and cellulose) plus water to net hydrogen and carbon dioxide.

More can be read at Virginia Techs website.

Kurt Birkedal, Ebeltoft, Denmark

Kurt Birkedal, Ebeltoft, Denmark

The modern world seems to suffer badly from the ‘One Size Fits all’, ‘All or Nothing’ syndrome, where centrally based legislators and policy makers make these broad brush decisions without first looking deeply at the wider implications, common sense goes out of the equation and corporate greed and ecological vandalism take over. In Riau province in Sumatra in 1998, I was driven for four and a half hours mainly along the crests of hills where almost as far as the eye could see in most directions was charred virgin rainforest, deliberately burnt to re-plant palm oil. There were widespread problems in Singapore and Malaysia with air quality, people dying with breathing problems and an aeroplane crashed in Medan.However there is a considerable amount of marginal land in the developing world (including contaminated land, mine tailings, spoil tips, etc) where suitable hardy oil crops, such as Jatropha, may be one of the few things that will grow and communities could be developed around growing them

Clive Walter, Essex, UK

What about creating biofuels from used vegetable oil? Instead of turning food crops into fuel crops, recycle the used oil. This will be ok for diesel, petrol its another thing.

The problem is that change is required, some people find change hard. The whole fuel idea needs to be re-thought in a big picture form not little snapshots.

Roy Parvin, L'ton, Sussex, England

The benefits of bio fuels are suspect. They still produce CO2 (and other noxious emissions) when burnt but the savings are claimed to arise from the CO2 absorbed by the crops when they are grown. But if the land wasn't used for bio fuels the crops that would be grown there anyway would still be absorbing CO2 so there is no gain. Bio-fuels are only beneficial if they are replacing conventional fossil fuels rather than increasing the supply of fuel into the market (as they currently are) which only encourages people to continue to make unsustainable vehicle / travel choices and undermine the demand for developing more fuel-efficent technologies which would be more viable if fuel prices were higher. It's time that politicans & the auto industry stop looking for quick and easy 'greenwash' fixes and start facing up to the real issues.

Matt , Bristol, UK

We just have to get it through to everybody that if we carry on raping the planet as we are, whether that be through deforestation or burning oil or biomass or whatever, there will no longer be the resources available to keep us all in the manner to which we have become accustomed. That includes the starving, developing and third world nations. The population of our species is already too much for our planet. It's blindingly obvious, but no-one seems to be saying it in the media. I don't know what we do about it, as capitalism seems to have no brakes, and people seem to want to reproduce whatever the cost. I think we need a new space race in order to find new sources of resources on other planets. It's our only hope.

Sam, Woking, UK

Let them make biofuels. The planet is fubar anyway.

Notice that the water-car has never ever been discussed as a viable alternative in the mainstream either - yet I've seen plans and videos of it running.

Ironically enough the inventor died under mysterious circumstances after he refused to sell it to Oil people.

It is safe to say that this comment will never see the light of day. Viva freedom of the press, viva.

Lucy Rothman, Atlanta, USA

There are no free lunches when it comes to concentrating energy from the sun on the scale that is being contemplated for transportation fuels. Oil and natural gas are re-newables too, just on a 100 million year time scale. The oil, coal and natural gas reserves our industrial society have been burning through for the last 150 years has been an incredible gift, a one time gift that is now
being rapidly depleted. Expectations of what life should be like or more specifically what is now viewed as being entitled it to be will be forced to change by the geophysical realities of slowing and declining world daily extraction rates of petrochemicals. We live in challenging times...

jake, Houston, Texas

All of the above could be true for these crops - BUT the best crops for fuels aren't the same as for food use! Jatropha will open up new scub land as being 'arable' in developing economies, algae has ten times the oil density of standard crops. Think oustide the box!..
and if you forget the nasty chemicals needed to create biodiesel or bio-ethanol (and throw away the major energy molecule as glycerin in the process) - you end up with Pure Plant Oil - just as Mr Diesel himself intended.

Roy Williamson, Crawley, UK

If the entire record-breaking US corn crop of 2004 was made into ethanol, it would only have made about 33 billion gallons; the energy value is equal to only about 22 billion gallons.
Cellulosic ethanol won't cut it either. IOgen claims 100 gallons per ton of biomass. The USA now generates about 700 million tons of waste biomass per year, so the ceiling is roughly 70 billion gallons of ethanol (energy equivalent to about 47 billion gallons of gasoline).
This sums to 69 billion gallons-equivalent. The USA burned 140 billion gallons of gasoline in 2005, and another 60 billion gallons of "distillate" (diesel and fuel oil). We are NOT going to replace petroleum with ethanol, period.
What we WILL do is make ADM execs and some other people very rich, and the rest of us poor.
Electric cars (plug-in hybrids to start) are the way to go. Electricity costs about 70 cents per gallon-equivalent. Demand that your next car have a plug!

Engineer-Poet, Wilson, North Carolina, USA

the high prices in mexico have nothing to do with the use of corn in bil fuel production in the states because the type of corn grown in Mexico that is used for tortillas is a diffrent one than what is used in the states. Furthermore Mexico has strict restrictions on the importation of corn to "protect" the noisy riotious farmers around Mexico City.

We have millions of vacant acres of land in the usa. Most of it just waiting for the plow. Too bad Hollywood has made it a sin to till the earth for a living and portraying those who do as backward idiots or worse.

Yuma, TIkrit Army Base, Iraq

Biofuels are a "now" very successful attempt by companies such as ADM to raise the price of farm commodities.

In the US the price of corn has already skyrocketed because of this.

The victims are the foolish public who go along with any ridiculous govt. proposal on these matters.

If it comes from the govt. it is probably wrong.

MB Greenley, Abq., NM USA

Biofuels made by fermenting the sugars in plants is archaic. That’s basically the same process as making beer. Since World War II there has been a tremendous amount of research in making fuels. In the 40s Germany used the Fischer-Tropsch process to produce its fuel because they had no fossil fuel resources. Destec Energy (a Dow Chemical subsidiary) makes syn gas through gasification. A new process called Catalytic Depolymerization is being used by a new company called Alphakat. Both gasification and catalytic depolymerization can use ANY biomas in their process. This means all solid waste, agricultural and forest waste for example can be converted into methanol, ethanol, biodiesel, etc. It seems almost comical that someone from Royal Academy of Engineering would argue that bio fuels are not a viable solution. Could this be a political statement and not a scientific one?

Bill, Flagstaff, Arizona, USA

Has anyone got numbers on how much oil we would save if everyone drove a prius??? I keep hearing that driving SUVs is the reason for high oil prices.

I understand Oil is a commodity but why are we paying 65-70 a barrel that cost $5 to get out of the ground in Saudi??

tp, Mem, tn

We are running into the same problems with biofuels in this country. Too many people are jumping on this bandwagon of biofuels before looking at the long term. The price of corn will rise dramatically as more farmers switch their planting for biofuels rather than food production. Already there are serious social costs in countries like Mexico where corn is a staple of their diet. They will not be able to compete in price if this valuable resource is increasingly being used as an energy source. Ive read that if we converted all our farmland to biofuels it would only decrease our dependence on oil by only 10%. Not much of a trade off when u factor in the increasingly higher costs of food.
Theres no denying we have to decrease our dependence on countries who use their energy resources as a club to beat us over the head with. But lets be smart and look at the total picture and not wind up starving the poor just to keep us in our SUV's.

Garry, Christiansburg, USA