Oil seems to get preferential treatment over biofuels, even though costs are worse.
Why aren't discussions about energy today more logical? They seem to spiral off into intangible irrelevance faster than the sentences that explain them can be constructed. The article posted here seems to ask a common sense question that should be the center of our energy debate, but we are seemingly lost along a continuum of indirect land use costs and increases in prices at the pump when it comes to the ethanol versus oil debate.
The question posed, essentially asks whether America should be spending its money on biofuel development or on the Canadian tar sands. We know the Canadian tar sands are an environmental disaster; we still are unsure of biofuels net energy gain as well as its overall environmental impact.
Both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Obama recently signed off on a pipeline from the Canadian oil sands to the Midwest U.S. that will deliver up to 800,000 barrels per day of the world's dirtiest, most water intensive, environmentally destructive, and expensive oil that money can buy. HERE is a 60 Minutes segment on the Oil Sands of Alberta.
Meanwhile, the biofuel discussion is bogged down by the concept of indirect land use costs (ILUC). The simplified argument against biofuels states that "cutting down forests to clear more land for growing biofuel crops could double greenhouse gas emissions over the next 30 years", according to Wilson School research scholar Timothy Searchinger. What does importing Canadian oil from the tar sands do?
Critics rush to judgement against biofuels saying that it is not intelligent to spend money in this way, but these sme critics remain silent when it comes to figuring the direct land use costs associated with increasing our oil supply with imports from the Canadian oil sands.
A recent report by WWF highlights some of the direct costs of Canada's dirty oil. Oil sand extraction produces three times the carbon emissions of conventional oil production; oil sands cover 140,000 square kilometers of boreal forest in Canada, which is completely leveled (down to the dirt); three million barrels of Canadian oil per day requires 15 million barrels of water to produce, most of which becomes too toxic after use to be redistributed back into the Athabasca River; unusual incidences of cancer downstream are already springing up from the little bit of water that seeps back in. These are direct costs associated with our already approved future energy policy...import more dirty oil.
Using biofuels to power our vehicles reduces overall emissions. For this reason, the debate over whether or not to commercially produce biofuels has shifted to include these indirect costs associated with chopping down forests or taking land out of conservation status to grow plants to turn into fuel that we hear about so much in the media. Have these anti-biofuel number crunchers seen the landscape of the Canadian oil sands development? Can biofuel production really destroy a forest worse than this or this or this?
One square kilometer is roughly 247 acres, so the Canadian oil sands cover roughly 34.5 million acres. Joule Technologies with their 20,000 gallons of biofuel per acre per year technology could make 691,600,000,000 gallons of biofuel on the very same spot in Canada that we have already clearcut for oil sands production. At 42 gallons per barrel, 16 billion barrels of biofuel can be created on the 140,000 square kilometers of dessimated boreal forest in Canada. America consumes 8 billion gallons of oil per year.
According to the Joule Biotechnology website: "The SolarConverter™ system applies sophisticated optical and thermal engineering to allow its deployment on just minimal amounts of non-agricultural land, and it requires no fresh water. Its modular design means that the very same system in our laboratory today can easily move to wide-scale production. Interconnected assemblies can be multiplied to virtually any size based on land, CO2 availability, and desired output. The functionality is proven, whether the system comprises one module or 1,000. As a result Joule offers highly-extensible paths to commercialization and adoption".
Does it make any sense to build a pipeline from Canada to the Midwest U.S. in order to bring in 800,000 barrels per day of the dirtiest oil in the world? Why do biofuels get strapped with ILUCs until their production capabilities are so hindered with doubt that investors run for the hills, while oil sand development gets a free ride? The simple fact of the matter is that biofuels will never be as dirty as the oil sands in Canada, both in terms of energy cost to extract it and environmental degradation from its recovery.
We ought to be placing the the same level of scrutiny upon our fossil fuel industry that we are placing on biofuels. Since 'experts' say biofuels cannot sustain our society, we dont't foster their development; the same experts say that oil can no longer sustain our society, and we throw billions of dollars at securing the resource for the future...no common sense.
Perhaps a closer look at today's biofuel technology will reveal that the ILUCs for biofuel are far lower than the direct costs associated with oil sands and OCS driling as well as mountaintop mining practices in Appalachia. We need to start looking at the costs of the alternatives to biofuels and comparing production them.
We are already getting oil from Canadian oil sands; biofuels definitely stack up cleaner than the oil sands process.
Piping in the tar sands; Biofuels and Climate Change.
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