A sign outside of the SeQuential Biofuels retail fueling station in south Eugene reads “fight global warming.” But recent studies and media reports have increasingly questioned biofuel’s side in that and another life-and-death planet-scale fight.
As food riots erupt across the globe, researchers and analysts have been scrambling to explain why food prices have exploded in recent months, and the crosshairs are increasingly focused on corn-based ethanol biofuels.
According to recent reports in The Economist and The New York Times, the main offenders include climate change and drought resulting in low rice-crop yields, millions of people in China and India with new money to spend on food, the rising price of oil and the flagging strength of the dollar. But groups like the International Food Policy Research Institute and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations are pointing to ethanol production for biofuel as responsible for between 10 and 30 percent of the rise in food costs, The New York Times has reported.
Additionally, recent journal articles in Science have questioned whether the production of ethanol from seed to gas tank is any better for the environment than traditional fuels, given the large amounts of oil necessary for harvesting, transportation and refining.
“Whether biofuels are better than petroleum-based fuels depends on the energy used in where those fuels come from,” said professor Ronald Mitchell of the University’s environmental studies program.
As far as biofuels’ effect on the global food crisis, Mitchell said as the demand for corn increases, the price will increase accordingly.
“The question then becomes how that increased price of corn influences the price of other commodities (particularly rice) and how those price impacts influence the quantity available of these basic foods,” Mitchell said.
Alan Twigg, retail manager of SeQuential Biofuels, said his company is attempting to produce its fuels “as locally and sustainably as possible.”
As far as the food crisis, Twigg said the other recognized causes – specifically the price of oil and its integration into every stage of food production from the field to the market to the kitchen- have a much bigger impact on food prices than does corn harvested for ethanol.
Ethanol accounts for about two-thirds of SeQuential’s sales, Twigg said. The ethanol comes from a plant in northeastern Oregon that uses corn from the Midwest. The other third of the business, biodiesel, comes from a Salem plant that refines it from used cooking oil from restaurants and local canola and camelina oils, which do not take field space away from food crops.
Despite the recent criticisms and the rise in gas prices, business has been steady, Twigg said.
And despite the criticism, ethanol is only getting bigger in Oregon. By the fall, all gas stations will be legally required to sell E10 gasoline, which is 10 percent ethanol.
Lou Torres, a spokesman for the Oregon Department of Energy, said “at least half of the registered cars” in Oregon have run on ethanol, which is already legally required in some counties. He said ethanol is very environmentally sound and emits less pollutants than regular gasoline.
Asked if those emissions took into account emissions in production, Torres said ethanol is “not a panacea by any means,” but “we do consider the very beginning of the process to the very end of the process.”
Ethanol has been “kind of getting a bad rap right now,” Torres said. “It’s kind of unfair.”
As corn has pushed other crops like soy off American fields, heightened demand for them has spawned more farms that cut into rainforests. This and the biofuel production that uses large amounts of petroleum are overseas problems, Torres said, and “we can’t legislate what goes on in Brazil.”
As far as the United Nations reports tying the production of corn for ethanol to the rise of global food prices, Torres said “they don’t even know to what extent that is happening,” and that different members of the UN have contradicted each other, some saying biofuels affect food prices, some saying they don’t.
“We’re not saying that ethanol is the answer to everything,” Torres said. “It’s just one tool in the toolbox.”
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