Biofuels Boom Gone Bust, Then Boom...!

It might have sounded forward-looking and a good idea a year ago, but a lot can happen in a year. The world community, in thrall to conventional energy sources, in particular fossil fuels, worries about the impact on the environment our dependence on oil has produced. In the search for alternate energy-sourced solutions, an old idea going back to the early years of the 19th Century when Henry Ford consulted with George Washington Carver about the use of soybeans and farm waste converted to energy has been revived.

In 1900 Germany Rudolph Diesel built an engine fuelled by peanut oil. "All the world is waiting for a substitute for gasoline", observed Henry Ford. "The day is not far distant when, for every one of those barrels of gasoline, a barrel of alcohol must be substituted." He was a prophet and an enabler, in the era of automobiles emerging to change the way that society would view its habitations, its mode of transport. Recognizing at the same time society's future reliance on a dwindling stock of petrochemicals.

But as much of a visionary he might have been, he couldn't quite have envisioned how much the advance of motor vehicles would change the world, nor could he have fully imagined how reliant the world would become on fossil fuels. More than a century has passed, and his prophecy has taken awhile to become fully realized and appreciated, complicated by our growing awareness of the impact our dedicated and continued use of petrochemicals has had on our environment.

Finally, the world is heeding the warning of those people like Henry Ford, Washington Carver and others who foresaw a growing dependency on a finite energy source would lead to the current state of shortage. Exacerbated by the inordinately-rising expense, and the dilemma that would be faced as a result. Just as the advent of the motor vehicle using fossil fuel as an energy source changed the geography and layout of human settlements, the need to look elsewhere for energy will ultimately impact on what has become so familiar.

The United States, the European Union and Canada, in their desperation to wean themselves from petrochemicals determined to begin a slow withdrawal by setting a standard of a modest 5-6% biofuel mix with conventional gas to operate motor vehicles. In their zeal to open up this new front aimed at battling oil and gas dependence, billions were earmarked for ethanol plants to produce biofuels from crops farmers were now being encouraged to grow for ethanol.

A winning situation for everyone; farmers would now receive a considerably greater pay-back for their agronomic labour-intensive efforts at making a living; the burning of biofuels was seen as a "green" solution, throwing fewer carbon deposits into the atmosphere, and governments would be able to meet their environmental standards targets. Ethanol and biodiesel products were seen as an integral portion of the solution in battling environmental degradation.

Suddenly - although there were those who warned that using food crops to fuel machines rather than people was a disaster in the making - the world became aware that with the rising cost of energy to produce basic crops, a growing demand for those crops, partially as feed for cattle as larger portions of the world's growing middle class demanded meat diets, and catastrophic droughts and crop-destroying hurricanes were causing a world food shortage.

An official with the United Nations labelled biofuels a "crime against humanity" for diverting food from starving people. Senator Hillary Clinton expressed her opinion that farm crop waste - not crops meant for human consumption - should be used for ethanol. The world's poorest can no longer afford to buy over-priced rice, corn and wheat, thanks to sky-rocketing oil prices, higher demands for food grains in China and India, and crop failures in parts of the world facing environmental disasters.

Burma, once an exporter of rice to other parts of the world, has now had its major source of food crops in the Irrawaddy Delta destroyed by a deadly cyclone. Ten thousand farmers have been forced off their land in Australia, as a result of the worst drought the country has experienced in over a century. The "Big Dry" has placed many farmers into bankruptcy; many have committed suicide. Australia has lost a third of its family-operated farms in the last 20 years.

Those farmers growing crops for biofuels and earning a good living for the first time in decades, meeting the growing demand for their wheat and corn crops for biofuel production believe that they're helping, not harming food production. They claim that biofuels result in a less expensive alternative to oil. Biofuels are considered a renewable source of energy, unlike fossil fuels.

The billion litres of ethanol and biodiesel anticipated out of Canadian plants is expected to grow to three billion litres a year to meet the federal target of five percent biofuel in gasoline by 2010 and 2% in diesel and heating oil by 2012. Almost $3-billion in federal and provincial aid is pushing the program along. But there is a better alternative, and it can be explored, to take the place of food crops for ethanol production.

Municipal trash, agricultural waste, and the billions of trees killed by mountain pine beetles in British Columbia and Alberta could feed the upcoming generation of biofuel plants. Meanwhile, the plan is to continue to use farm crops for the next five years. At the very time when the world is undergoing a massive shortage of food crops.

It's short-sighted and just plain wrong. Canada's leading biofuel company, GreenField Ethanol, is ready to turn wheat straw, dead trees, municipal trash into biofuel. The trash would be sorted to extract paper, cloth and materials rich in oxygen, carbon and hydrogen. Cellulosic ethanol is the magic name of this next generation of biofuels. Using corncobs, wheat stalks and organic waste.

With the added benefit of being more efficient in reducing greenhouse gases than biofuels produced from grains, with the propensity to generate greater energy, as well. Lignol Energy Corp. in British Columbia is experimenting with forest waste by stripping away the tough lignin molecules to produce a mash of pure cellulose to which microbial enzymes are added, turning the cellulose into sugars, fermented finally into ethanol.

Meanwhile, plant breeders are hard at work to produce faster-growing, high-starch varieties of wheat crops for biofuel production, increasing the amount of wheat grown per acre. Just what starving people are most in need of. But then there's the politics of the environment, and there's the reality of farmers being offered a steady alternate market for crops, no longer facing low returns.

The world's starving are whole continents away, and it's hard to believe that those situations exist, while in advanced countries of the world there is a medical-health epidemic of obesity, a result of too much available food, and a convoluted manufacture of foodstuffs contorted into taste-tempting, nutrient-devoid and fattening constituents.