From the University of Leicester department of inconvenient truths:
New study suggests EU biofuels are as carbon intensive as petrol
University of Leicester research into greenhouse gas emissions from oil palm plantations provides robust measures now being used to inform international policies on greenhouse gas emissions
A new study on greenhouse gas emissions from oil palm plantations has calculated a more than 50% increase in levels of CO2 emissions than previously thought – and warned that the demand for ‘green’ biofuels could be costing the earth.
The study from the University of Leicester was conducted for the International Council on Clean Transportation, an international think tank that wished to assess the greenhouse gas emissions associated with biodiesel production. Biodiesel mandates can increase palm oil demand directly (the European Biodiesel Board recently reported big increases in biodiesel imported from Indonesia) and also indirectly, because palm oil is the world’s most important source of vegetable oil and will replace oil from rapeseed or soy in food if they are instead used to make biodiesel.
The University of Leicester researchers carried out the first comprehensive literature review of the scale of greenhouse gas emissions from oil palm plantations on tropical peatland in Southeast Asia. In contrast to previous work, this study also provides an assessment of the scientific methods used to derive emissions estimates.
They discovered that many previous studies were based on limited data without appropriate recognition of uncertainties and that these studies have been used to formulate current biofuel policies.
The Leicester team established that the scale of greenhouse gas emissions from oil palm plantations on peat is significantly higher than previously assumed. They concluded that a value of 86 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) per hectare per year (annualised over 50 years) is the most robust currently available estimate; this compares with previous estimates of around 50 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) per hectare per year. CO2 emissions increase further if you are interested specifically in the short term greenhouse gas implications of palm oil production – for instance under the EU Renewable Energy Directive which assesses emissions over 20 years, the corresponding emissions rate would be 106 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) per hectare per year.
The findings have been published as an International White Paper from the ICCT.
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  IMAGE:Oil palm plantations on peat: note the leaning trunks owing to low load-bearing capacity of peat soils.Click here for more information. |
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Ross Morrison, of the University of Leicester Department of Geography, said: “Although the climate change impacts of palm oil production on tropical peatland are becoming more widely recognised, this research shows that estimates of emissions have been drawn from a very limited number of scientific studies, most of which have underestimated the actual scale of emissions from oil palm. These results show that biofuels causing any significant expansion of palm on tropical peat will actually increase emissions relative to petroleum fuels. When produced in this way, biofuels do not represent a sustainable fuel source”.
Dr Sue Page, Reader in Physical Geography at the University of Leicester, added: “Tropical peatlands in Southeast Asia are a globally important store of soil carbon – exceeding the amount stored in tropical forest vegetation. They are under enormous pressure from plantation development. Projections indicate an increase in oil palm plantations on peat to a total area of 2.5Mha by the year 2020 in western Indonesia alone –an area equivalent in size to the land area of the United Kingdom.”
Growth in palm oil production has been a key component of meeting growing global demand for biodiesel over recent decades. This growth has been accompanied by mounting concern over the impact of the oil palm business on tropical forests and carbon dense peat swamp forests in particular. Tropical peatland is one of Earth’s largest and most efficient carbon sinks. Development of tropical peatland for agriculture and plantations removes the carbon sink capacity of the peatland system with large carbon losses arising particularly from enhanced peat degradation and the loss of any future carbon sequestration by the native peat swamp forest vegetation.
Although there have been a number of assessments on greenhouse gas emissions from palm oil production systems, estimates of greenhouse gas emissions from land use have all been based on the results of a limited number of scientific studies. A general consensus has emerged that emissions from peat degradation have not yet been adequately accounted for.
The results of the Leicester study are important because an increase in the greenhouse gas emissions associated with biodiesel from palm oil, even if expansion on peat only occurs indirectly, will negate any savings relative to the use of diesel derived from fossil fuel.
If these improved estimates are applied to recent International Food Policy Research Institute modelling of the European biofuel market , they imply that on average biofuels in Europe will be as carbon intensive as petrol , with all biodiesel from food crops worse than fossil diesel and the biggest impact being a 60% increase in the land use emissions resulting from palm oil biodiesel. Bioethanol or biodiesel from waste cooking oil, on the other hand, could still offer carbon savings.
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 IMAGE:Subsidence pole inserted in peatland in Johor, peninsular Malaysia. The pole was inserted beside an oil palm plantation in 1978 and at the time of this photograph (2007), 2.3 m…Click here for more information. |
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This outcome has important implications for European Union policies on climate and renewable energy sources.
Dr Sue Page said: “It is important that the full greenhouse gas emissions ‘cost’ of biofuel production is made clear to the consumer, who may otherwise be mislead into thinking that all biofuels have a positive environmental impact. In addition to the high greenhouse gas emissions associated with oil palm plantations on tropical peatlands, these agro-systems have also been implicated in loss of primary rainforest and associated biodiversity, including rare and endangered species such as the orang-utan and Sumatran tiger.
“We are very excited by the outcomes of our research – our study has already been accepted and used by several scientists, NGOs, economists and policy advisors in Europe and the USA to better represent the scale of greenhouse gas emissions from palm oil biodiesel production and consumption.
“The findings of this research will be used by organisations such as the US Environmental Protection Agency, European Commission and California Air Resources Board to more fully account for greenhouse gas emissions and their uncertainties from biofuel produced from palm oil. This is essential in identifying the least environmentally damaging biofuel production pathways, and the formulation of national and international biofuel and transportation policies.”
Dr Chris Malins of the ICCT said, “Peat degradation under oil palm is a major source of emissions from biodiesel production. Recognising that emissions are larger than previously thought will help regulators such as the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), European Commission (EC) and California Air Resources Board (CARB) identify which biofuel pathways are likely to lead to sustainable greenhouse gas emissions reductions”.
The research was funded by the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), an international think-tank made up of representatives from the world’s leading vehicle manufacturing nations. The research was commissioned by Dr Chris Mallins of the ICCT and led by Dr Susan Page and Ross Morrison, both of the Department of Geography, University of Leicester. Other contributors to the work were Professor Jack Rieley of the University of Nottingham and chair of the scientific advisory board of the International Peat Society (IPS), Dr Aljosja Hooijer of Deltares in the Netherlands, and Dr Jyrki Jauhiainen of the University of Helsinki. The research was conducted over a period of three months during spring of this year and has recently been published as an International White Paper by the ICCT.
It’s down to about 30 Million Acres, now, Brian. They’re taking a couple of million acres out every year. It’s on “contract,” so a farmer would have to pay a penalty to take his/her acres out before the contract expires.
Most of it is just too marginal to make a steady income in corn, wheat, or beans. Most of it will probably end up in switchgrass, or miscanthus. You’ll still have all the advantages you mentioned, plus we’ll get another 30 Billion Gallons, or so, per year of transportation fuel.
We could give away an unlimited amount of corn, and beans at the pier every year, and those same Africans would still be starving. It has nothing to do with “us.” It’s “them.” They don’t have the “Capital, or Knowledge to “farm,” and they don’t have the money to buy product (and, even if they did, their own politicians/elites would have it marked up so high they couldn’t afford it anyway *and, on top of that, there is so little transportation infrastructure through most of Africa, that if we managed to get it past the elites, we still couldn’t get it to the villages.)
We might as well worry about what we can do to save ourselves. Maybe, somewhere along the way, They will catch a break.
What would cause someone who hasn’t a clue what they’re talking about to post this?
“b) biofuels are a net energy loser, as it takes more to generate them than they return;”
Speaking of “perverse,” and nind mumbingly stupid . . . . . .
DirkH says:
November 4, 2011 at 9:55 am
Kum Dollison says:
November 4, 2011 at 8:38 am
“We’ll just stick with those nice, clean tar sands; ok?”
They’re only clean once the tar is removed.
————————————————————————————————————-
I think Kum had his tongue firmly lodged in his cheek. The Alberta oil sands are only called tar sands by Greenies and Americans who relate to “tar” pits in the US. The Athabasca Oil sands leak crude oi; out of the ground and have leaked into rivers for hundreds of years, The first explorers of the area noted it. I know some of you don’t like Wikipedia, but the Athabasca oil sands contain heavy crude oil (not tar) roughly equivalent to all the known oil reserves in the world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athabasca_oil_sands
Yeah, I was just bein’ a bit sarcastic. They’re messy, but we (or the Chinese, or both) are going to use them. If they’re “reclaimed” properly (and, they will be,) they can be used w/o any lasting damage. They Are slow to develop. They’re not going to just jump in and start turning out 4, or 5 mbpd, much less 10 – 12 mbpd. It’ll take awhile.
In the meantime, world demand is increasing by about 1.5 million barrel/day, Annually, and within the next half-decade, or sooner, we’ll be looking at Declining world production. So, we’re going to have to “hustle.”
We’re already producing approx. 2 million Barrels of Biofuels/Day (more than the oil sands,) and we will have to ramp that up pretty sportily to stay ahead of the curve. The article about palm oil, and peat, is, mostly, pretty much nonsense, but palm oil won’t turn out to be the “Major” Player in the game (just not enough yield/acre, and a bit too labor-intensive.
This says it all
Quote
The University of Leicester researchers carried out the first comprehensive literature review of the scale of greenhouse gas emissions from oil palm plantations on tropical peatland in Southeast Asia.
Unquote
They did not even get off their backsides.
Question for the outraged.
What would you grow instead of Palm Oil?
Did you know that they dont like planting on Peat, they avoid it.
The picture of the “Fertiliser” reminded me of the Polar Bear on the bergybit. Ask yourself, why no pictures of wheat/barley. rye, beet, fields when they have been fertilised.
Plus I will add, grass will be grown under these trees, cattle raised, yields increased all with no fertilsers. That is starting now.
Oil Mills use fruit bunches as fuel. The fronds are used as fertilser. They use plants to control insects, they use owls to control vermin.
I know a lot of my friends are senior planters, been in the business 40 years. They are not impressed with these reports and rightly so.
Philip Bradley says:
November 4, 2011 at 8:42 am
I’ve been saying for years that the cutting down of SE Asia forest for palm oil plantations, largely to produce biofuels is the biggest environmental disaster of my lifetime.
The “haze” that blankets SE Asia each year to make way for the oil palm is surely the cause of Trenberth’s missing heat. Mile after mile of jungle cut down and burned to make way for oil palm.
And Climate Science is worried about fossil fuel? Isn’t it really over-population they are trying to solve? The solution. Burn food in you cars. That will solve the over-population problem quick enough. Eugenics with a modern face. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot – amateurs in comparison. Killing millions to save the planet.
http://thecitizen.co.tz/sunday-citizen/-/15298-special-reportmillions-face-starvation-across-africa-as-land-rush-intensifies
Sorry this post and some comments have really yanked my chain.
Would it not be much better to start with ” How can we do this much better”
Those having apoplexy over palm oil. You need to ask yourself some hard questions and make the first connection. Is this not proof indeed that watermelons are Insane. Dammed if you dammed if you dont.
It is the most productive and versatile crop even more so than Hemp. Oh hemp, perfect but guess what you cannot use it, its name, hemp, nudge nudge so its better to kill thousands of old people because they cannot afford fuel rather than, God forbid, grow hemp.
Co2 emitters, ignoring that CO2 is good, a well run Palm oIl plantation uses little fertilisers ( what wrong with them, nature uses them all the time). Why waste money when you have other means to do it. They produce their own energy, use used fruit bunches to power the powers and biodiesel to power the generators. They use their own water, all vegetable waste gets used as fertiliser or mulch. It is carbon neutral.
Yes I get that some good forest has been stolen, yes and that makes me angry, people have been disposed. Thats is peoples and corporations fault and greed not bio fuels or palm oil. Look at the land clearances in Scotland and Ireland for a historical perspective. Have we not learned anything from that????????
Solar is crap in the tropics. The jungle produces masses of junk and gunk every day. In very short order both solar panels and solar heaters are junk. Nothing will clean it. Except, i have designed a bio product that will using existing bacterial technology. Any funders??? real action not apoplexy. As usual, do it yourself or not at all.
Biofuels are driving the cost of food to levels that are unaffordable.
Roger Longstaff says:
November 4, 2011 at 8:19 am
In my opinion, anybody who advocates biofuel policies is not just wrong, but evil…..
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I agree. In effect most biofuels are taking food from empty stomachs in order to feed empty gas tanks. And all in the name of science that is almost certainly wrong and possibly fraudulent.
I think the word ‘obscene’ comes to mind….
Chris
Logic is not a strong point with some people. Yes the use of corn in the USA did drive up some food prices, no doubt. But what happened, no more corn than ever is grown. Prices falling.
How much wheat, barley, lettuce, sugar beet , leeks can you grow in the jungle or tropical scrub?
How much food can you grow on millions of acres set aside as “non productive”
The problem is not bio fuels, its bad management.
Also cows cannot eat corn, too much sugar. So remove the sugar and make ethanol and then you have a nice animal food. Just one small issue ignored. Maybe not strictly correct but I think that you get the point.
“A new study on greenhouse gas emissions from oil palm plantations has calculated a more than 50% increase in levels of CO2 emissions than previously thought – and warned that the demand for ‘green’ biofuels could be costing the earth.”
I think it to be a very dangerous folly to burn edible hydrocarbons as fuel instead of using them in the food chain, either for direct consumption or indirect via animal feed. This artificially ties the value of food to the manipulated market price for energy, so not only does OPEC have a major say in fuel prices but now they will have a say in the price of food.
In the west, we still have enough prosperity to afford this unnecessary jump in food prices, but the social disruption caused by rising food prices was a published factor in the overthrow of some Arab governments. The people who advocated this policy now have blood on their hands from its unintended consequences.
Cows cannot eat corn? Really?
Some people have no knowledge of basic facts, but enjoy lecturing others anyway.
Diverting arable land suitable for food crops to biofuel production won’t fly in the long run of course. One might argue it was necessary to do it as a bridge to get to the promised land. The promised land is an organism that only needs sunlight, waste or brackish water, and air to produce biofuels with minimal pre or post processing. There are some patented, genetically modified species of bluegreen algae that are believed to be good enough to compete with light sweet crude oil @ur momisugly $30/bbl. Even if that’s overly optimistic today the price of LSC is closer to $100/bbl and even ethanol from corn meal and diesel from corn oil can compete with $100/bbl crude.
The current strategy of using food crops for biofuel feedstock does however get the infrastructure in place and working with these fuels after they’ve been produced. A lot of the transportation fleet for instance have engines able to burn anything from 100% gasoline to a blend of 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline – the so-called “E85” standard also known as “FlexFuel” and many if not most gasoline you buy at the pump is 10% ethanol.
The promise of synthetic biology only begins at competing with $30/bbl oil. There’s nothing stopping it from getting to $3/bbl equivalent that I can see when all that’s essential to it is sunlight, brackish water, and air. Algae grow quite well in seawater, air is everywhere, and sunlight is plentiful even though some locations get more than others. So you run a pipe to supply seawater to a barren desert and grow all the biofuel crops you want in that location which is good for nothing else anyhow. At a yield of 20,000 gallons/acre/year 10% of the Texas panhandle devoted to biofuel production will supply all the liquid fuel requirements of the whole United States. It has the water and sunlight already and all it’s being used for is oil wells, wind turbines, and livestock forage. There’s one person who lives there for 150 acres. You’d have to treble the population just to get enough workers to run the biofuel operation.
Mark my words. Within the next few decades we will see a 180 degree change in how atmospheric CO2 is treated. National governments and world organizations will need to limit how much CO2 can be REMOVED from the atmosphere instead of how much can be added. Carbon is a basic building block for not only fuels but also for construction materials of all sorts. Once we have synthetic organisms that can be programmed to build things out of carbon and carbon compounds essentially for free there will be a gold rush on atmospheric CO2 because that’s the handiest, most ubiquitous source of carbon to use in building durable goods. Unlike fuels which return the carbon to air if you build homes and furniture and all sorts of other things out of carbon composites the CO2 removed from the atmosphere doesn’t get returned. Eventually that will become a huge problem.
Yep more Soylent Green
Suggest you read ” Maybe not strictly correct but I think that you get the point.”
I was just making up a simplistic example.off the top of my head. Plus you know that Cows really function best on good green grass as per design, Nut thats not the point.
so cotton is evil you cant eat it, but make shirts to keep warm but growing biodiesel to keep warm is evil
Jeez
More Soylent Green! says:
November 5, 2011 at 7:19 am
“Cows cannot eat corn? Really?”
They can but it’s not good for them. Causes all sorts of digestive problems.
“Some people have no knowledge of basic facts, but enjoy lecturing others anyway.”
Yeah, but in this case it’s you that didn’t have the basic facts.
@soylent green con’t
Unlike cattle, people can and do use corn as a staple food without any problems. Therein lies the rub with diverting corn for biofuel production. It’s the price for whole kernal corn and corn meal that poh’ people who subsist on it must pay. Those people couldn’t afford beef to begin with so that’s not much of a problem. Not a lot of the price of beef depends on the price of corn anyhow as corn is only used to fatten them up for a few months before slaughter. It also requires a number additives including antibiotics and hormones for them to tolerate eating whole grain corn for a few months without getting sick. Whole grains are not natural components of the ruminant diet.
John Marshall says:
November 5, 2011 at 3:33 am
“Biofuels are driving the cost of food to levels that are unaffordable.”
Yes but OPEC is driving the cost of oil to levels that are unaffordable.
I’d bust up OPEC, one way or another, if it was up to me. International trade law prohibits price fixing but that’s exactly what OPEC does – they are a multi-national cartel and they fix the price of oil. It’s illegal under international law so I guess it’s one of those “too big to fail” situations that lets banks and auto companies get away with things. In this case “too big to fight”. We’d probably have to oust the governments of the OPEC countries to end the illegal price fixing and that would so disrupt the flow of oil in the short term that it becomes a case of “the cure is worse than the disease”.
The second option is to elect someone like Rick Perry who realizes the US is an energy rich nation and if legal prohibitions are lifted we could either stop importing oil and/or drive the price of it down so far that it would no longer be a problem. It takes some big stones and disregard for the economic fortunes of OPEC nations just to make that change but I really think it’s time and it’s the only viable plan I’ve heard for fixing the US economy as getting off the dependence on foreign oil would entail a couple million people in good paying jobs in the energy industry right here at home.
henrythethird says:
Let’s try something – let people use the palm oil FIRST – and set up bio-oil recycling centers. You’ll still get the oil (it may be dirtier), but people have collected and used old deep-fry oil in cars for awhile now.
There’s also the issue of transesterification. Which requires strong acids and a light alcohol such as methanol or ethanol. Even though Rudolf Diesel’s prototype worked perfectly well without replacing propan-1,2,3-triol (glycerol) with mono alcohols.
Good points guys. Something drives up prices, some are ok some are not. Selective condemnation. Personally I dont feel comfortable using corn as a fuel , even if it goes increase the usage. Much better to use both land and crops that are only really suitable for fuel crops. As is the case of Palm Oil. Yes greed gets in the way, they try to use good jungle but again thats people, bad management, bad control. Not the concept.
Grey lensman says:
November 5, 2011 at 4:33 am
The problem is not bio fuels, its bad management.
The problem is that without all the mandates, subsidies, and tax breaks, the bio-fuel industry would collapse in a heartbeat. It’s an industry based on politics, greed, and bad science. It’s enough to give anyone indigestion.
Never mind the co2!! The onLy crime is using edible oils to replace abundant fossil and nuclear fuels. Another study destined for the waste basket of time.
Gary, are you saying that energy diversity is a bad thing. That we sould not use low quality and land set aside for growing fuel and industry crops. Palm Oil can be grown in a vast range, and has a huge range of uses. Only so much cooking oil and stuff.
Seems to me sometimes that Watermelons with their calls for protecting environmental diversity forget the sale needs apply to Humans, their economies and energy.
We need to demand more hydro kinetic, geothermal and sensible bio fuels. Scrap the corporate windmills and accept solar only works in a few places. Similarly does it take much to ensure that both energy and food production increase.
But what happens in real life is slash-and-burn jungle clearance. Jungle soils are good for jungles: thin, fast turnover soil, readily depleted by any kind of non-diverse (e.g., farming or logging) replanting. Bad idea.
@ur momisugly Grey Lensman; It seems pretty obvious that those who are in the biofuels industry would have strong motives to push the energy diversity and energy independence “advantages”, in addition to the carbon nonsense, while completely ignoring the dollar cost in comparison to conventional fuels, as well as pooh-poohing any environmental concerns. It all boils down to greed and ethics.