U.S., Brazil plan ethanol partnership

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Food or fuel?...

'Biofuels Can Hurt the Poor'
Nov 6, 2007 - A body tasked with shaping European Union policy on biofuels is dominated by companies with a vested interest in promoting this source of energy, environmentalists have claimed.

In early 2008, the European Biofuels Technology Platform will publish a report outlining a programme for greater research and development into how crops grown on farmland can be used to quench Europe's ever-growing thirst for transport fuels. The Platform is the successor of the Biofuels Research Advisory Council (BIOFRAC), a group also set up at the European Commission's request. Last year BIOFRAC recommended that 25 percent of the Union's transport demands should be met by biofuels (also called agrofuels) by 2030.

Like BIOFRAC, the Platform is mainly comprised of industry lobbyists. Of the 125 people on its various working groups, just two belong to non-governmental organisations. The Platform's steering committee includes representatives of the Spanish oil and gas firm Repsol, the European Biodiesel Board and carmakers Volvo and Volkswagen. Environmental campaigners are perturbed that the group is biased towards firms who either have a vested interest in biofuels or car companies who realise that the greater use of biofuels can provide them with an incentive not to develop more energy-efficient models.

"The Commission has ensured that the same companies that shaped the EU's vision on agrofuels through BIOFRAC are now implementing its recommendations and designing the agrofuels research and development agenda," Belen Balanya from Corporate Europe Observatory, which monitors the influence of business on EU law-makers, told IPS. "There is a clear conflict of interest as these are corporations with a direct commercial interest in the development of agrofuels in the EU."

More EUROPE: 'Biofuels Can Hurt the Poor'

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Amazon endangered by deforestation, climate change...

Nature fund warns of severe Amazon damage
Thursday 6th December, 2007 - The World Wide Fund for Nature has confirmed a vicious cycle of climate change and deforestation could wipe out or severely damage nearly 60 percent of the Amazon forest by 2030.

Deforestation in the Amazon could release 55.5 to 96.9 billion tonnes of CO2 up to 2030, which is equivalent to more than two years of global greenhouse gas emissions. At a press conference, scientist at the Woods Hole Research Centre in Massachusetts, said the destruction of the Amazon would also destroy one of the key stabilizers of the global climate system.

Dan Nepstad, who is also the author of a new WWF report titled the Amazon's Vicious Cycles said: 'The importance of the Amazon forest for the world's climate cannot be underplayed. It's not only essential for cooling the world's temperature but is also such a large source of freshwater that it may be enough to influence some of the great ocean currents, and on top of that it's a massive store of carbon'. .

He added that current trends in agriculture and livestock expansion, fire, drought and logging could clear or severely damage 55 percent of the Amazon rainforest by 2030. If, as anticipated by scientists, rainfall declines 10 percent in the future, then an additional four percent of the forests will be damaged by drought.

More Nature fund warns of severe Amazon damage

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Report: One-third of world's population affected by weather disasters
Dec. 6, 2007 -- One third of the world's population has already been affected by weather-related disasters and this is set to soar because of climate change unless urgent international action is taken, said a report by Tearfund, one of the UK's leading relief and development agencies

Tearfund says governments must commit at least 50 billion U.S. dollars every year to helping the world's most vulnerable communities prepare to save their own lives and livelihoods. The report called Climate of Disaster published this week in Bali, a resort island of Indonesia, reveals that in the last 10 years, weather-related disasters have killed over 443,000 people, affected 2.5 billion people and cost an estimated 600 billion U.S. dollars in economic losses.

With climate change increasing the number and intensity of extreme events such as floods and droughts, more and more people are becoming vulnerable to a range of environmental disasters. Without urgent action, this trend is set to rise, leading to unprecedented levels of suffering and deaths. Poor people will be hit hardest - they are the least able to cope with, and live in the most vulnerable areas of the world. Speaking at the UN Climate Change conference in Bali, Andy Atkins, Tearfund's Advocacy Director said "It is time for the international community to take stronger action to support vulnerable communities' efforts to reduce the risk of disaster."

"Airlifting stranded people from floodwaters and sending food packages to those affected by drought can no longer be our sole response to weather-related disasters. As a global community we have a moral responsibility to invest our aid money upfront in helping the planet's poorest people prepare for predictable disaster," Atkins said. "If we do not, then many thousands of lives will be needlessly lost and billions of pounds of aid money will not be used to best effect," he said. A two-week UN climate change conference kicked off here on Monday. The conference is tasked with setting up a roadmap for negotiations on a new climate deal before the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.

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Is the trade-off worth it?...

Ethanol bill fuels food costs
December 7 2007: Expect the price of beef, pork, chicken and a host of other goods to go up if the House energy bill becomes law. But the trade-off may be worth it.

If a recently passed House bill mandating a 7-fold increase in biofuels becomes law, there's little doubt food prices will rise. The question is by how much, and is the trade-off worth it?

On Thursday the House, as part of a larger energy package, passed a bill mandating the increased use of biofuels - fuel from ethanol and other plant matter largely used to power vehicles - from current levels of about 6 billion gallons a year to 36 billion gallons a year by 2022. The move is supported by environmentalists, who say biofuels generate about 20 percent less greenhouse gasses than fossil-based fuels like gasoline. Corn farmers and the ethanol industry are obviously on board.

The bill also has the support of those what want to reduce U.S. oil consumption. Over 60 percent of the country's oil is imported - mostly from Canada, Mexico and Venezuela. That 36 billion gallons of biofuel could replace roughly 25 percent of the nation's current gasoline consumption of about 140 billion gallons a year. But it's clear the biofuels mandate, which calls for 15 billion gallons a year of corn-based ethanol and another 21 billion gallons from "advanced biofuels" that use other plants besides food crops, will drive up the price of corn.

With it, the price of other corn-dependent products like chicken, pork, or items that use corn syrup, like soda, which have already seen an increase, are likely to rise further. Karen Batra, a spokeswoman for the National Cattleman's Beef Association, said that corn prices are already up 21 percent this year. "The ranchers are already taking a hit." Food prices overall have risen 4.5 percent over the last year, according to Brian Todd, president of the industry association the Food Institute. Meanwhile, prices for other consumer goods excluding food and energy have risen about 2 percent this year.

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Granny says, "Mebbe they could use the feathers for soakin' up oil spills...

Chicken fat could be new biodiesel
Dec. 19, 2007 -- Researchers in Arkansas are looking at ways to convert chicken fat into biodiesel fuel.

Chemical engineers at the University of Arkansas were successful in using so-called supercritical methanol to transform chicken fat and tall oil fatty acid into biodiesel fuel, the university said Wednesday in a news release. The yield was greater than 90 percent, the university said.

Graduate student Brent Schulte subjected low-grade chicken fat and tall oil fatty acids to a chemical process known as supercritical methanol treatment. Substances become "supercritical" when they are heated and pressurized to a critical point, the highest temperature and pressure at which the substance can exist in equilibrium as a vapor and liquid.

"The supercritical method hit the free fatty-acid problem head on," chemical engineering professor R.E. "Buddy" Babcock said. "Because it dissolves the feed material and eliminates the need for the base catalyst, we now do not have the problems with soap formation and loss of yield. The supercritical method actually prefers free fatty acid feedstocks."

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[waltky]

GM backing switchgrass ethanol...

AUTOSHOW-GM eyes breakthrough in cellulosic ethanol
Sun Jan 13, 2008 - General Motors Corp said on Sunday it has bought a stake in start-up biofuel company Coskata Inc. which has developed a commercially viable process to bring cellulose-based ethanol to the market in 2011.

"We are very excited about what this breakthrough will mean to the viability of biofuels and, more importantly, to our ability to reduce dependence on petroleum," GM Chief Executive Rick Wagoner said in a statement. GM said it would not disclose the size of the stake or how much it had invested in Coskata. "Cellulosic ethanol has a significant amount of potential," said David Friedman, a research director at the Union of Concerned Scientists. "But we'll have to wait until GM releases the data behind this and they actually launch production."

Cellulosic ethanol production currently costs about double that of traditional U.S. ethanol, a plant-based distilled alcohol derived mostly from corn in the United States and from sugar in Brazil. The new U.S. energy bill signed into law by President George W. Bush in December mandates a huge jump in biofuels production for America's automobiles - 36 billion gallons by 2022, with 16 billion gallons from cellulosic ethanol. "That bill sent a signal to ethanol producers that there will be a demand for their product," said Matt Hartwig, spokesman for trade group the Renewable Fuels Association. "The GM announcement underscores the ethanol industry is rapidly developing to meet that demand."

Cellulose is a structural material contained in nearly every plant, tree, and bush all over the world without agricultural effort or cost needed to make it grow. Switchgrass and wood chips are the main such "biomass" materials being researched today to produce cellulosic ethanol, which is identical to corn or sugar ethanol but needs more processing, GM said the process developed by Coskata relies on gasification and patented microorganisms to produce cellulosic ethanol for less than $1 a gallon, about half the cost of producing gasoline. Founded in 2006 with backing from venture capitalists including Vinod Khosla, a top Silicon Valley investor, Coskata is one of a handful of U.S. companies trying to develop commercially viable cellulosic ethanol.

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Determining the Amazon's importance...

Scientists puzzle over Amazon's role in warming world
3 Feb. `08 — Julio Tota stood atop a 195-foot steel tower in the heart of the Amazon rain forest, watching "rivers of air" flowing over an unbroken green canopy that stretched as far as the eye could see.

These billows of fog showed researcher Tota how greenhouse gases emitted by decaying organic material on the forest floor don't rise straight into the atmosphere, as scientists had supposed. Instead, they hover and drift — confounding scientific efforts to unlock the secrets of the world's largest remaining tropical wilderness. "What we've learned is, the Amazon rain forest is much more fragile and much more complex than we had first imagined," Tota said. "My research is pretty specific. It's aimed at showing why all our measurements are probably off."

Tota is part of the Large Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment, a decade-old endeavor involving hundreds of scientists, led by Brazilians and with funding from NASA and the European Union. Their open-air "laboratories" are 15 such observation posts spread over an area of rain forest larger than Europe. The project's goal is to make the best scientific arguments for why this vast rain forest — along with other endangered forests in Africa, southeast Asia and elsewhere — is essential to combating global climate change. But as the first phase of the $100 million experiment draws to a close, its researchers acknowledge that the data have raised more questions than answers.

Scientists can now say with certainty that the Amazon is neither the lungs of the Earth, nor the planet's air conditioner. Paradoxically, the forest's cooling vapors also trap heat, by reflecting it back toward Earth in much the same way greenhouse gases do. But a key question remains unanswered: Does the Amazon work as a net carbon "sink," absorbing carbon dioxide, or is it adding more CO2 to the atmosphere than it is subtracting, because of burning and other deforestation that have claimed an average 8,000 square miles — an area the size of Israel or New Jersey — each year of the past decade?

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Guess the tree-huggers don't like ethanol...

Ethanol Mandates Could Drive Up Food Prices, Enviros Say
February 04, 2008 - Environmental groups are backing away from federal biofuel and ethanol mandates. While renewable fuel sources may reduce greenhouse gas emissions, they also could raise food costs and cause shortages, critics say.

"We are witnessing the beginning of one of the great tragedies of history," Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, said in a statement. "The United States, in a misguided effort to reduce its oil insecurity by converting grain into fuel for cars, is generating global food insecurity on a scale never seen before." "As a result, prices of food products made directly from these commodities such as bread, pasta, and tortillas, and those made indirectly, such as pork, poultry, beef, milk, and eggs, are everywhere on the rise," he added. "In Mexico, corn meal prices are up 60 percent. In Pakistan, flour prices have doubled. China is facing rampant food price inflation, some of the worst in decades," Brown said.

But industry advocacy group Ethanol Across America said in a policy statement that "despite extensive media coverage about the potential for a significant increase in food prices due to corn demand for ethanol, statistics simply do not support this claim. "U.S. consumers continue to enjoy the most affordable and abundant food supply in the world - in spite of a surge in corn demand for ethanol production," the group said. According to a March 2007 Congressional Research Service report, ethanol demand has already driven up corn prices as well as prices for soy beans and other grains.

According to the report, "Since food costs represent a relatively small share of consumer spending for most U.S. households, the price run-up is relatively easily absorbed in the short run. "However, the situation is very different for lower-income households, as well as in many foreign markets, where food expenses can represent a larger portion of the household budget," it added. Brown noted that the World Bank reports that for each one percent rise in food prices, caloric intake among the poor drops 0.5 percent.

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Could biofuels add more CO2 to the atmosphere?...

Biofuel: Bad for the Environment?
Feb. 7, 2008 - Researchers Say Biofuels Could Do More Harm to the Planet Than Good

As the debate over what do about human-caused global warming increases and "green fever" sweeps the nation, many environmentalists and politicians have viewed biofuel as a logical replacement for fossil fuels. But two new studies released Thursday call into question the global movement toward biofuel. According to these researchers, production of biofuel actually contributes to global warming, doing more harm than good.

The studies, one conducted by Minnesota-based Nature Conservancy and one by Princeton University, examined the same issue: What environmental impact does growing vegetation used for biofuel have on global warming? U.S. demand for ethanol crops like corn, soy and switchgrass has resulted in the conversion across the globe of natural habitats – like grasslands and rainforests – into fuel-ready farmland, according to the studies. That development has released mass amounts of carbon into the air, researchers said.

"You ask the world's farmers to produce energy and that's going to take additional land and that land has to come from somewhere. Unfortunately, much of it is coming from our natural ecosystem. What's the consequence of that?" Joe Fargione, the regional science director for the Nature Conservancy and the lead author of one study, told ABCNews.com. "If you imagine a grassland and a cornfield, there's much more carbon in the grassland soil. When you convert a grassland into a cornfield, that carbon has to go somewhere. It goes into the air as carbon dioxide and contributes to global warming."

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Studies Say Clearing Land for Biofuels Will Aid Warming
Friday, February 8, 2008; Clearing land to produce biofuels such as ethanol will do more to exacerbate global warming than using gasoline or other fossil fuels, two scientific studies show.

The independent analyses, which will be published today in the journal Science, could force policymakers in the United States and Europe to reevaluate incentives they have adopted to spur production of ethanol-based fuels. President Bush and many members of Congress have touted expanding biofuel use as an integral element of the nation's battle against climate change, but these studies suggest that this strategy will damage the planet rather than help protect it.

One study -- written by a group of researchers from Princeton University, Woods Hole Research Center and Iowa State University along with an agriculture consultant -- concluded that over 30 years, use of traditional corn-based ethanol would produce twice as much greenhouse gas emissions as regular gasoline. Another analysis, written by a Nature Conservancy scientist along with University of Minnesota researchers, found that converting rainforests, peatlands, savannas or grasslands in Southeast Asia and Latin America to produce biofuels will increase global warming pollution for decades, if not centuries.

Tim Searchinger, who conducts research at Princeton and the D.C-based German Marshall Fund of the United States, said the research he and his colleagues did is the first to reveal the hidden environmental cost of producing biofuels. "The land we're likely to plow up is the land that we've had taking up carbon for decades," said Searchinger, the lead author. Estimating that it would take 167 years before biofuel would stop contributing to climate change, he added, "We can't get to a result, no matter how heroically we make assumptions on behalf of corn ethanol, where it will actually generate greenhouse-gas benefits."

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Ethanol fires harder to put out...

Ethanol poses challenge to firefighters
February 27, 2008 - The nation's drive toward alternative fuels carries a danger many communities have been to slow to recognize: Ethanol fires are harder to put out than gasoline ones and require a special type of firefighting foam.

Many fire departments around the country do not have the foam, do not have enough of it, or are not well trained in how to apply it, firefighting specialists say. It is also more expensive than conventional foam. "It is not unusual to find a fire department that is still just prepared to deal with traditional flammable liquids," said Ed Plaugher, director of national programs for the International Association of Fire Chiefs.

The problem is that water does not put out ethanol fires, and the foam that has been used since the 1960s to smother ordinary gasoline blazes does not work well against the grain-alcohol fuel. Wrecks involving ordinary cars and trucks are not the major concern. They carry modest amounts of fuel, and it is typically a low-concentration, 10 percent blend of ethanol and gasoline. A large amount of conventional foam can usually extinguish such fires.

Instead, the real danger involves the many tanker trucks and railcars that roll out of the Corn Belt with huge quantities of 85 or 95 percent ethanol and carry it to parts of the country unaccustomed to dealing with it. "Now, the most common hazardous material has a new twist to it," said Mike Schultz, a firefighter who manned a foam gun during a recent blaze in Missouri. The risk is more than theoretical. Over the past several years, ethanol accidents on highways, along railroads, and in storehouses and refineries have triggered evacuations and fires from Texas to Minnesota, injuring several people and killing at least one person.

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Biofuels affecting commodity prices and food relief...

Crop boom may prompt food aid rethink in US Congress
Fri Feb 29, 2008 WASHINGTON - A lawmaker who has championed using U.S. food aid donations to fund development projects is rethinking his support of proposed legislation as soaring commodity prices eat into aid available for crises.

Rep. Jerry Moran, a Kansas Republican, sponsored an amendment to U.S. farm legislation last year that would guarantee a minimum of $450 million from the largest U.S. food aid program, Food for Peace, for non-emergency programs that aim to break the cycle of famine and poverty in poor nations. "I'm not backing off on my belief in developmental aid, but I do recognize that this dramatic increase in commodity prices in a very short time suggests that we've got to find a solution to the immediate crisis," said Moran. The Senate passed a similar set-aside of $600 million in its version of the legislation, the 2008 farm bill, worth about half of the program's overall regular yearly funding.

Now, as lawmakers prepare to broker a House-Senate compromise, Moran said record crop prices have prompted him to reevaluate. "What that amendment is designed to do is make it more difficult to raid non-emergency money, but we are in an extraordinary time," Moran said in an interview.

Advocates of greater non-emergency aid argue such programs, in which private aid groups often sell U.S.-donated commodities in developing countries to finance nutrition, farming or other projects, say they help avert future food emergencies. Yet the set-aside is opposed by the Bush administration, which says it sharply reduces money available for emergencies in countries reeling from drought, famine or war. That could keep help out of the hands of up to eight million people, it says.

Aid officials are already struggling to stretch budgets to keep up with booming commodity markets, which have soared in step with growing biofuel production, rising incomes in emerging markets, and meager harvests. Soaring prices recently forced Food for Peace to divert money destined for future aid to pay for past donations after the cost of the food it donates jumped 41 percent in the first half of fiscal 2008. In recent years, the United States has spent about $350 million annually on non-emergency aid in Food for Peace.

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U.S. cuts back on food aid due to rising prices
Sunday, March 2, 2008 - The U.S. government's humanitarian relief agency will significantly scale back emergency food aid to some of the world's poorest countries this year because of soaring global food prices, and the U.S. Agency for International Development is drafting plans to reduce the number of recipient nations, the amount of food provided to them, or both, officials at the agency said.

USAID officials said that a 41 percent surge in prices for wheat, corn, rice and other cereals over the past six months has generated a US$120 million budget shortfall that will force the agency to reduce emergency operations. That deficit is projected to rise to US$200 million by year's end. Prices have skyrocketed as more grains go to biofuel production or are consumed by such fast-emerging markets as China and India. Officials said they were reviewing all of the agency's emergency programs -- which target almost 40 countries and zones including Ethiopia, Iraq, Somalia, Honduras and Sudan's Darfur region -- to decide how and where the cuts will be made.

"We're in the process now of going country by country and analyzing the commodity price increase on each country," said Jeff Borns, director of USAID's Food for Peace, the organization's food aid arm. "Then we're going to have to prioritize." The reductions, international relief agencies say, will seriously complicate already strained efforts to combat global hunger, particularly in Africa, Central Asia and Latin America. Poor countries in those regions are struggling to cope with record food price surges, which have made it difficult for aid groups to sustain their operations in some countries.

The cuts will likely have a direct impact on major USAID partners, including aid groups and the United Nations World Food Program, the largest international provider, which counts on U.S food aid for 40 percent of its distribution. The U.N. program is confronting similar price pressures. It announced this month that it was facing a US$505 million shortfall due to soaring food and fuel costs, and would cut distribution if it did not receive new funds. Meanwhile, need is increasing. Afghanistan, for instance, recently put in an emergency request for US$77 million to cope with skyrocketing prices that have put key staples out of reach for more and more Afghans.

"Look at what's happened to wheat prices alone -- they shot up 25 percent in one day last week," said Josette Sheeran, executive director of the World Food Program. "This is really the first emergency we've faced without a drought, war, natural disaster. We will have to cut the amount of people being served or the amount of food being served if we do not get more funds." Groups that work with USAID, several of which have been informed of the shortfall over the past two weeks, are alarmed. Emergency aid is earmarked only for countries in desperate need as a result of natural disasters, civil strife or other humanitarian crises. Although the United States has proportionally provided less of the world's food aid in recent years, it still provides about half the global total in efforts to relieve hunger among more than 800 million people. In 2007, USAID gave about 2.5 million tons of food, accounting for more than 50 percent of the emergency aid in a number of nations, including Ethiopia.

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