Hot air on biofuel

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: Today, with the world already reeling from the initial ravages of climate change, the big question before us is whether we can trust the developed countries that are responsible, in the first instance for bringing the world to the brink of a climate holocaust, to change their unsustainable life styles and give up their carbon addiction?

Or will the political economies of the 21 st century make life styles even more permissive by packaging currently available biofuels as guilt-free green alternatives to fossil fuels when in reality their impact on destroying the environment and raising hunger could be much larger. We must not forget the fact that the rich man’s 25-gallon tank of currently available biofuels takes away the equivalent of one year’s supply of food calories from the mouth of a poor fellow Indian.

There are several US and EU studies that have, over the years, shown that the net energy delivered by the current generation of biofuels is negative when one considers life cycle energy used by all inputs such as fertiliser, pesticides, irrigation, farm implements and their running, crushing, fermenting, refining, transportation etc. While the negative energy balances are country and region specific, studies have shown that the currently available US biofuel alternatives can consume between 27% and 118% more fossil energy than the energy they deliver.

In India there are studies to show that sugarcane-based ethanol has an overall negative energy balance when all energy inputs are considered. Needless to say that there are also studies especially from Universities and Researchers in the Corn and Soybean belt of the US that actually show net energy and emissions gains from biofuels.

The key point is that any Indian policymaker who is still nurturing the elitist idea that green fuels can be grown on fallow land, wasteland or non-arable land without water and other inputs must wake up to ground realities. Economically viable yields from green crops can only be realised based on intensive cultivation using water, fertiliser and pesticides—all of which consume energy.