These days the really great ideas come in green packages. But what is inside the package does not have to actually be green – it benefits from simple association.
Last year we Oregonians took home a great new green package – House Bill 2210, a.k.a. the 2007 Biofuels Bill. Now the bill’s mandate has begun. By this fall, an Oregon “retail dealer, nonretail dealer or wholesale dealer may not sell or offer for sale gasoline unless the gasoline contains 10 percent ethanol by volume.”
It would seem that Eugene is at the forefront of reducing human impacts on the environment, and Gov. Ted Kulongoski even signed the bill at Eugene’s SeQuential Biofuels station. But the problem remains that we are still approaching this problem one fill-up at a time, as if we can drive our way away from global climate change and petroleum-based foreign policy. The gift inside this green-wrapped bill is still just burning fuel, even if it’s from an alternative source.
There are two big dogs in the alternative fuels revolution, as far as transportation goes: biodiesel and ethanol. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, biodiesel “can help reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil” and reduce “lifecycle greenhouse emissions by more than 50 percent,” as compared to diesel from crude oil. It also offers reduces carbon monoxide, particulate matter, sulfates, hydrocarbon and air toxics emissions.
It really sounds too good to be true, so, consider the fact that as an energy resource, biofuels fall squarely into the same old markets and paradigms as any other energy resource. Sure, the U.S. as a country may become less dependent upon foreign oil, but we are not the only country expanding alternative fuel production and markets, so the biodiesel export plans of Brazil and other countries look only to displace current petroleum consumption – not to create a system in which each country produces and consumes its own supply. Brazil already considers the U.S. and the EU its top two potential biodiesel export markets.
Ethanol is just a higher-octane version of biodiesel, in every way, from its actual octane rating to its increasing presence in fuel blends, legislation and energy trade. According to Eduardo Pereira de Carvalho, president of Brazil’s sugar cane industry (Unica), about 60 percent of Unica’s annual ethanol exports are sent to the US. According to estimates, Oregonians burn about a billion and a half gallons of gasoline each year. Recent estimates show that about 14 million gallons of that mixture was ethanol, but to comply with the new legislation, we will burn about 150 million gallons of ethanol annually.
Oregon’s estimated output from its two ethanol production facilities is about 40 million gallons a year, with the bulk of our ethanol coming from the U.S. Midwest. Once we unwrap the bill this far, a whole new set of questions opens up. We have to consider the tradeoffs of cropland for food or fuel, how many chemicals are used to grow the crops, if they are genetically modified to increase oil content, and the impact of getting them to the pump, as there is not an infrastructure of ethanol pipelines. While some railroad companies are offering price cuts for bulk shipment of ethanol, trucks still move the bulk of it half way across the country – trucks that likely do not run on biodiesel or ethanol.
In the end we always have to consider the bigger picture. Even more so than political stability, the main goal is a less toxic energy cycle with lower greenhouse gas emissions, but the EPA figures that transportation accounts for less than half of the country’s human-related carbon dioxide emissions, with electricity production representing a larger share. Also, carbon dioxide is not the only major greenhouse gas. Transportation accounts for only half of one percent of methane emissions while landfills, natural gas systems and livestock account for 68 percent.
And the reasoning used to encourage biofuels is being increasingly questioned. Jan. 2008 reports in Science Magazine claim that previous studies focused on biofuels’ tailpipe emissions failed to account for land use change, and that developing more land “to produce food-based biofuels in Brazil, Southeast Asia, and the United States creates a ‘biofuel carbon debt’ by releasing 17 to 420 times more CO2 than the annual greenhouse gas reductions these biofuels provide by displacing fossil fuels.” A similar report by many of the same authors claims that “corn-based ethanol, instead of producing a 20 percent savings, nearly doubles greenhouse emissions over 30 years and increases greenhouse gases for 167 years” because of land use impacts.
Unwrapped thus, the Biofuels Bill has a lot of green intentions, but Oregon will only be green on the inside when the state’s focus shifts to conservation, mass transportation and solar power, instead of continuing to encourage burning new fuel in our same old autos.
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