The case against biofuels: probing ethanol’s hidden costs

In the cornbelt of the Upper Midwest, even more serious problems arise. Corn acreage, which expanded by over 15 per cent in 2007 in response to ethanol demands, requires extensive fertilisation, which adds to nitrogen and phosphorus that runs off into lakes and streams and eventually enters the Mississippi River watershed. This is aggravated by systems of subterranean tiles and drains - 98 per cent of Iowa’s arable fields are tiled - that accelerate field drainage into ditches and local watersheds. As a result, loadings of nitrogen and phosphorus into the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico encourage algae growth, starving water bodies of oxygen needed by aquatic life and enlarging the hypoxic “dead zone” in the gulf.

Next is simply the crop acreage needed to feed the biofuels beast. A 2007 study in Science noted that to replace just 10 per cent of the gasoline in the US with ethanol and biodiesel would require 43 per cent of current US cropland for biofuel feedstocks. The EU would need to commit 38 per cent of its cropland base. Otherwise, new lands will need to be brought into cultivation, drawn disproportionately from those more vulnerable to environmental damage, such as forests.

A pair of 2008 studies, again in Science, focused on the question of greenhouse gas emissions due to land-use shifts resulting from biofuels. One study said that if land is converted from rainforests, peatlands, savannas, or grasslands to produce biofuels, it causes a large net increase in greenhouse gas emissions for decades. A second study said that growing corn for ethanol in the US, for example, can lead to the clearing of forests and other wild lands in the developing world for food corn, which also causes a surge in greenhouse gas emissions.

A third study, by Nobel-Prize winning chemist Paul Crutzen in 2007, emphasised the impact from the heavy applications of nitrogen needed to grow expanded feedstocks of corn and rapeseed. The nitrogen necessary to grow these crops releases nitrous oxide into the atmosphere - a greenhouse gas 296 times more damaging than CO2 - and contributes more to global warming than biofuels save through fossil fuel reductions.

Thus have biofuels made the slow fade from green to brown. It is a sad irony of the biofuels experience that resource alternatives that seemed farmer-friendly and green have turned out so badly.

What’s needed are a freeze on further mandates to slow overinvestment, reductions in the blenders’ tax credit - especially when corn prices are high - and cuts in tariff protection to encourage cost-reduction strategies by US producers. And the high environmental and human costs of using corn, soybeans, and other food crops to produce biofuels should spur government initiatives to develop more sustainable forms of renewable energy, such as wind power, solar power, and - one day, perhaps - algal biofuels grown at waste treatment plants.

Yet sadly, as in so many areas of policy, Congress and the administration prefer to reward inefficiency and political influence more than pursuing cost-effective - and sustainable - energy strategies.