FUEL FOR THOUGHT

Until recently I did not know much about biofuel except it was handy for fish and chip shops because people run buses on their waste cooking oil - and someone up in Queensland was growing stuff to make it on a commercial scale. Something like that. In short it seemed a vaguely good thing, but a recent article in the Guardian Weekly (December 3-9, p. 13) has caused me to ponder that, if used on a global scale, there could be viable objections. In fact the article’s author, George Monbiot argues that ‘the [widespread] adoption of biofuel would be a humanitarian and environmental disaster for the planet’.

On a basic level the idea is to use waste cooking oil etc to run a diesel engined vehicle. It’s not hard to do and it’s a win/win situation: the fish-shop gets rid of used oil, that waste oil does something further that’s useful. No money changes hands. The latter is not necessarily a bonus if you think, as do economists, in terms of economic multipliers. Nor, as presumably does John Howard, if you think of tax collecting. The idea of running vehicles on biofuel is far from new. In fact it’s what Rudolf Diesel had seen as the fuel for his engines: his original motor ran on peanut oil.

Rudolf is probably still revolving in his grave at several hundred rpm following the use of a petroleum product instead (he fell terminally off the back of a boat in 1913). But the biofuel concept has grown way past using waste cooking oil. It can be produced from any number of plants, or even the remaining trees not turned into chipboard. Theoretically it does not add to pollution because burning the stuff merely hands back the carbon extracted in growing it. But I’m not sure how that works out with a diesel in serious need of new injectors.

But it now seems that, like some software, switching to biofuel could cause at least as many problems as it solves. The issue is currently coming to a head in Europe because the European Union is insisting on Britain using 2% biofuel by the end of 2005, increasing progressively to 20% in fifteen years time.

What Monbiot warns is that (using the most probable European source of the rape plant) growing the necessary amount requires huge areas of land (about 10 hectares for every 15 tonnes of biofuel). In fact to run Britain’s vehicles on 100% biofuel requires almost five times the arable land in Britain. And that’s not spare arable land – it’s all arable land. Even producing a 20% biofuel/diesel mix for use in Europe requires more crop land than the entire surface area of that continent. And that’s just the start of the problem.

To eventually have 100% biofuel could seemingly be a global disaster. ‘The impact on global food supply will be catastrophic,’ states Monbiot…‘If, as some environmentalists demand, it is to happen worldwide, then most of the arable surface of this planet will be deployed to produce food for cars, not people.’ A quick and dirty check with a calculator shows Monbiot is not wrong.

Monbiot argues that in our monetary economy there is no reason to believe that food for poor people without cars would take precedence over biofuel and more costly food for rich people with cars.

As Monbiot points out, despite the better part of a billion people being already malnourished, more and more crops are used to feed animals. Why? Because meat and dairy product eaters have more purchasing power than those who live on so-called subsistence crops.

This is not entirely conjecture. Whilst living and working in Libya just prior to the Gaddafi era, I personally saw newly arriving American oil industry employees drive the price of meat from under a dollar a kilo to $30 a kilo within a few weeks. And in so doing totally deprived the poor of the nation (which was then about 99.90% of the population) of their only available source of protein – even though that had been a few ounces a month. Within a month even expatriate Europeans could not afford to buy meat. Monbiot also asks people to consider what farming would look like were it run in the scale and intensity of even today’s oil industry.

Essentially, argues Monbiot, ‘If the production of biofuels is big enough to affect climate change, it will be big enough to cause global starvation. It could of course be argued (but not by me!) that the latter is more favourable as, unlike the former, it could perhaps be reversed. I do not have the background knowledge or facts to comment on Monbiot’s view. But I can find no obvious flaws with his arithmetic.

Hopefully Not an Issue

In practice however, biofuel may not become an issue. It certainly would not become one unless biofuel were to be used on a truly grand scale – and it’s hard to see any serious opposition to using waste oil.

Further, whilst fuel cells at RV level seem to have a great, albeit ever movable, future there is a lot of progress in fuel cell driven (or aided) cars. These are far from fantasy. If they eventuate on a large scale the world is likely to shift progressively to a hydrogen based economy: and hydrogen can be produced in any number of ways including from solar energy.

Hydrogen also offers some of the benefits of biofuel – including that existing engines can be modified to run on it with only minor modifications. And, unlike biofuel, it is virtually pollutant-free when burned. My own guess (and I emphasise it is only a guess) is that biofuel may help solve a short-term energy shortage in an environmentally acceptable way, but that the future lies with hydrogen.

Meanwhile our fish and chip shops can rest assured there will be takers for their by-products – as well as their products. Including one gathers by grey nomads. (I thank the Guardian Weekly for permission to use extracts of the article ‘Fuel for nought’.)

Collyn Rivers, W8054.