Biofuel to burn a planet

In June Oxfam this year launched a campaign to prevent more starvation. The problem that Oxfam’s campaign is highlighting is one that I have written about previously in these posts: growing food for fuel is making some food prices so high as to create more starvation because so much fuel is being sourced from grown food.

Palm oil plantations

Slowly but surely many of the south east Asian rain forests have been chopped down and converted to growing a cash crop –palm oil.

Jatropha – a possible source of bio diesel?

Air New Zealand has been trialling for Boeing and Rolls Royce a mix of traditional kerosene fuel with oil from the Jatropha plant seed (Jatropha Curas) in one of its airplanes. Jatropha oil mixed with kerosene improved fuel consumption by slightly more than one percent, which could lead to savings of four and a half tonnes of carbon dioxide over a typical long haul flight if the plane was powered by a fifty/fifty mix of Jatropha oil and kerosene.

Bio fuels, tropical forests and progress

In our lemming-like rush to find easy and cheap options to replace expensive fossil fuel which will run out one day and to reduce carbon emissions which may overcome us one day people have turned to bio fuels – the growing of crops for the vegetable oils which can then be refined and used as fuels to propel vehicles, vessels and aircraft. The theory postulated by the bio fuel growers, eagerly seized upon by governments desperate for a cheap and quick climate fix, is that the bio fuels are “sustainable”, which in this context means we can keep on growing them and they will not run out like fossil fuel, and “carbon   neutral” which means that the burning of them is replaced by the re-absorption of the carbon dioxide of plants through the process of photosynthesis.

Biofuels – we drive and the world starves

 

Sometimes you can only see a picture clearly if you step back from it, so you can see the whole canvas. So it is with energy. Without any doubt we are heading for an energy crisis. The oil will probably peak – that is to say reach its maximum production in ten years time. Oil companies are discovering smaller and smaller fields – not by chance or by accident or a run of bad luck, but simply because there is less oil in the ground to be discovered.

 

The same scenario exists with coal, natural gas and uranium. These will probably all peak at around the same time (give or take a decade) as developing countries ape the habits customs and lifestyles of the developed countries. With this in the back of some politician’s minds (and in the forefront of others) many developed countries are looking for new sources of energy which are, in the current jargon, sustainable.

 

Biofuels – that is fuel made from growing crops – seemed like a good idea at the time.

Unintended environmental consequences

The law of unintended consequences provides that if you fix one thing you sometimes in fixing it break something else that wasn’t broken. Sometimes it works the other way around – you do something wrong – like Alexander Fleming keeping a dirty laboratory and you end up with penicillin.  Nowhere is this law more inevitably applied but studiously ignored than in environmental matters.

Not everything we do to mitigate climate change has a good effect, not everything that is supposed to be harmful is without a good by product. Take flying – virtually everyone takes flying as a harmful source of carbon emissions high in the atmosphere where they do the most damage. Correct. However flying creates vapour trails which diffuse light, cooling the effect of global warming and probably shielding us from the worse global warming scenarios, for a bit anyway.