Op/Ed Draft: "Biofuels - size matters" - Christian Casillas

Every time I mention the word ‘biofuels’ it elicits quite a knee-jerk reaction from progressive minded friends. They immediately think about clear cut rainforests and rising tortilla prices. They equate biofuels with large scale mono-cultivations of crops used to supplement northern nation’s bottomless appetite for liquid transportation fuels.
And yes – there are problems with our approach in thinking that the carbon footprint from our current liquid fuel consumption can be reasonably offset with existing cultivations. Millions of acres of rainforest in Indonesia and Malaysia have been clear cut and planted with African oil palm in the last decade. A large proportion of the oil is being used to meet the European Union’s low carbon fuel mandates. Amazonian rainforest has been clear cut in order to meet unfulfilled soybeans demand resulting from American farmers switching to corn in order to take advantage of corn ethanol subsidies. No argument here. These are absurd uses of agricultural land used to meet demand created from poorly formed policies. It is critical to not that the root of the problem is the scale and manner in which the feedstocks are being utilized. It is crazy to think that the best approach to reducing our mammoth-size carbon intake in the transportation sector is with biofuels. But let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. I am continually forced to explain that there is nothing inherently troubling about utilizing biomass based fuels (biofuels) for energy. With almost half of the global population still rural and almost one-third of the global population without access to electricity, biomass derived energy can provide an appropriate and renewable source for many communities – for transportation, electricity and cooking. And there is no need for billion dollar, BP funded, research endeavors. We constantly hear of next generation biofuels – such as algae and genetically modified grasses or microbes used to produce liquid fuels - but there are tried and true, century-old, technologies such as anaerobic digestion, gasification, or the direct use of plant oils. To list a few examples, a small community in Colombia mixes turpentine sustainably harvested from their pine forests with gasoline for their motor bikes as well as with African palm oil for their diesel trucks. The African palms are intermixed with the pine trees. Many projects throughout the world, including the United States, are utilizing forest thinning residues to produce wood gas for electricity generation. I’ve visited projects in Nicaragua and Honduras in which rural farmers are growing oil producing plants on less productive land to produce oil to use directly in their diesel tractors. From rural communities in India to commercial farms in the US, there are economically viable projects which add value to animal and agricultural ‘waste’ streams by transforming them into methane and nitrogen rich fertilizer using anaerobic digestion. So next time your progressive, well-educated friend thumps his or her hand on the table and purports to argue issues of equity and environmental protection because someone mentioned the word ‘biofuel’, I hope you’ll enrich the conversation by pointing out some ways in which small-scale energy systems for rural communities throughout the world may be strengthened through the utilization of biomass based fuels, managed at appropriate scales. And don’t forget to ask how many miles they’ve put on their SUV over the past week…