The Telegraph 2 Feb 08;
Biofuels are being championed as the eco-friendly alternative to oil, gas and coal, which could revive Britain's farming industry. But how green are they? And is it right to grow crops for fuel instead of food? Fred Pearce investigates
Keep going past the abbey at Walsingham in north Norfolk, turn right down a narrow lane just before Wells-next-the-Sea, and there is a field of Britain's tallest and strangest farm crop, a subtropical supergrass rather like bamboo. It is called Miscanthus, or elephant grass - probably because you could hide a small elephant in the stuff. If it catches on, elephant grass will change the landscape of Britain, obscuring hedgerows and field patterns far and wide under a thick beard.
Local farmer Tom Green took me inside his 11-hectare thicket. The dense grass was hard to penetrate and impossible to see out of, or over. After just six months' growth, it was twice our height, and as the wind blew the grass like an ocean swell, I began to feel disorientated. I wasn't the first. When beaters from the local shoot went in to flush out birds, they got seasick. 'Several were ill before they got out,' Green said.
Why grow this sinister, alien grass? Green said he is cultivating the fuel of the future - biofuel. He showed me the first harvest baled up on the edge of the field, ready for trucking to the world's largest straw-burning power station down the road at Ely.
Biofuels are crops intended to replace oil, gas and coal in the world's power stations, industrial boilers and fuel tanks. There are three sorts. Some, like Green's elephant grass, are burnt in conventional industrial or power-station boilers. Others like corn and sugar are distilled into liquid ethanol to replace petrol in transportation. Still others - mostly vegetable oils such as soya, rape and palm oil - are refined to make a substitute for diesel.
For now, cars cannot run on either neat bioethanol or biodiesel. But much of the fuel for sale at filling stations across Britain is already blended with small amounts of biofuel. From April, most petrol and diesel will contain 2.5 per cent biofuel, rising to 10 per cent by 2020.
We have always had biofuels - wood, hay and charcoal among them. In 1892 Rudolf Diesel ran the demonstration model of his engine on peanut oil; and the Model T Ford first hit the road burning ethanol rather than petrol. For most of the past century, cheap crude oil has eclipsed the biological alternatives. But for more than two years now, biofuels have been among the fastest growing sectors in the global energy economy.
The new enthusiasm has two origins. The first is the growing uncertainty about supplies of oil. Whether or not analysts are right in saying that oil is starting to run out, it is certain that the majority of what remains is in the hands of potentially unstable regimes, and that prices are rising steeply. That is why George W Bush fired the starting gun on the new biofuels boom in the US in 2005 when he declared that American corn could replace oil imports from the Middle East.
Second is the growing fear of climate change - burning oil, coal and natural gas greatly adds to the emissions of carbon dioxide. Like these fossil fuels, biofuels are made of carbon, the basic building block of all life forms, so burning biofuels also creates carbon dioxide. But what makes them different is that they emit the same amount of carbon when burnt as their origination crop absorbed from the air while growing. Taken overall, biofuels should be carbon neutral, though things aren't quite so simple (see The carbon conundrum, below).
British farmers, like many around the world, hope that they are on the verge of a biofuels bonanza. And it is a bonanza that could involve a bewildering variety of crops. Farmers such as Green are growing elephant grass or willow coppice to burn in power stations and boilers. Britain's largest power station at Drax in North Yorkshire last year mixed its regular supplies of coal with 300,000 tons of elephant grass in an effort to reduce its carbon emissions.
Other farmers are growing sugar beet and grain crops such as wheat to make into bioethanol. Green is involved in this, too. His sugar beet used to be turned into packets of Silver Spoon at British Sugar's giant factory at nearby Wissington in the Fens. But this year's crop will go to a new distillation unit that British Sugar has just completed there. Petrol blended with bioethanol at the plant has been on sale in British filling stations ever since it opened last November and the plant is expected to produce 70 million litres of bioethanol this year.
So far the biggest biofuel crop in British fields is rape for turning into biodiesel. If you buy diesel, you may be consuming a small part of the harvest from Paul Temple's rape field. Temple farms 340 hectares outside the small market town of Driffield in the Yorkshire Wolds. Like many farmers, he has for some years included rape as part of his crop rotation, for use in cooking oil and margarine. 'Two years ago, my rapeseed was a Cinderella crop, with no profit,' he said. 'But now, thanks to biofuels, prices are higher and I am investing equipment, time and energy into increasing yields.
'Biofuels could transform the UK farming industry,' he said as we drove though Driffield. 'This town has lost its purpose in recent years. The jobs in agriculture have disappeared. There used to be four grain merchants here, now there are none. But biofuels could be the way back.'
Temple is the vice president of the National Farmers' Union (NFU) and constantly commuting to Brussels to help determine European Union farming policy. 'Much of Britain's farmland is going to waste at present, when it could be growing fuel,' he said. Rather than lying fallow or being given over to conservation, he wants to see fields growing biofuels.
Indeed, it was partly due to advice Temple gave in Brussels that the EU last year suspended its set-aside programme, which paid farmers not to grow crops on a portion of their arable land. The NFU says this gives farmers greater 'flexibility' in managing their land, and with grain prices rising most, farmers can make more money growing crops for biofuel than taking set-aside cash.
Temple's 2008 rape crop will go to a crushing mill in Hull owned by Cargill, the international grains trader. From there the crushed seeds will cross the Humber estuary to a new biodiesel plant in the industrial port of Immingham run by a company called Greenergy. This automated plant - all steam and pumps and aluminium vessels - is the baby of the environmental entrepreneur Andrew Owens (you could call him the Anita Roddick of biofuels), and supplies half the biodiesel sold in Britain today. He plans to buy a quarter of a million tons of rape from British farmers in 2008 - 10 per cent of the entire crop.
Owens met me on site. 'We refine to food standard,' he said proudly as we donned hard hats and climbed to the top of the plant to look across the industrial landscape below. 'What comes out of here is virtually extra-virgin oil. The bits in the bottom that make it good food don't make such good fuel, so we take those out. It goes back to the farmers as animal feed.' The rest heads down a pipeline for blending with conventional fuel, before heading for the filling station forecourts.
Owens, who started his business making greener fuels 15 years ago, has seen 40 per cent annual growth in the past three years. Big buyers of his biodiesel include bus companies and supermarket fleets. He currently has construction workers on site, doubling the plant's size in time for the introduction in April of the Government's new rules on blending biodiesel with regular diesel. To fund this, Owens has sold two 25 per cent stakes in his company, one to Tesco, his biggest customer, and one to Cargill, his biggest supplier. Neither company is normally in the good books of environmentalists, but they can smell the profit in biofuels.
Temple and thousands of other British rape farmers should be delighted by news of this expansion, but many are growing worried. The clue is Greenergy's location on the waterfront of the country's largest port. Yes, the biofuels refinery can take crushed Yorkshire rapeseed from Cargill, but it can equally well run on other vegetable oils imported from Asia or Latin America.
Biofuels may sound like the quintessential local crop, but in practice the feedstock is traded on the high seas almost as much as oil. About half of the raw material arriving at Greenergy's jetty already comes from abroad. Owens mixes home-grown rape with soya from Brazil and palm oil from Southeast Asia. British farmers are becoming bit-part players in a global market that is growing in volume but getting more and more competitive on price, and that looks like bad news for people like Temple and Green. Just as they get their new biofuel crops into the ground, foreign farmers could undercut them. By the time this year's harvest is grown, the buyers may have gone elsewhere.
Sugar beet farmers are already complaining that the offer price from British Sugar's new bioethanol plant, at just over £20 a ton, has come down by almost a third, and is less than the cost of growing and transporting the crop. The farmers fear they are about to be gazumped by Polish beet growers.
Last year, Britain's fields turned bright yellow as they were planted with rape on an unprecedented scale. But, for all Temple's enthusiasm for his crop, wheat may prove more profitable this year since prices have doubled in the past 12 months as global stocks diminish with droughts in Australia and elsewhere. Meanwhile, Drax power station recently replaced some of its elephant grass with a shipment of olive pips from Italy. 'If we are not careful, we won't have a home-grown biofuels industry at all; the feedstock will all be imported,' says David Croxton, a Somerset farmer and the managing director of Biomass Industrial Crops (Bical), a co-operative of farmers that is the country's biggest trader in elephant grass.
Will Thurmond, an American consultant on biofuels, says British farmers are right to fear the worst. Biofuels manufacturers in Europe and the US are scouring the world for cheaper feedstock. I met Thurmond at Europe's largest biofuels exhibition, at Newark, Nottinghamshire, in mid-October. Thousands of biofuels farmers and businessmen had assembled there in the belief that they were part of a new wave of green technologies that is both helping fight climate change and making megabucks. Virtue meets reward.
But the golden future was slipping through their fingers. It wasn't just that farm prices were going in the wrong direction. Even their sense of going green was being shaken by a sudden surge of criticism from environmentalists who they had expected would be their friends. Twenty minutes into the event, the showground was invaded by placard-waving protesters who shouted, 'Feed people not fuel'. There were only a few dozen of them, but they were vocal, determined and well-organised.
One protester, sporting a tweed jacket, leather briefcase and delegate's badge, managed to padlock himself to the podium at the conference auditorium. 'I want to stop BP from using "greenwash" to keep on with their position of power,' he told me. He meant that big oil companies such as BP were taking over biofuels to make profit rather than helping the planet. For him, this was betrayal. The protesters were soon ejected, but afterwards, some of the more thoughtful delegates admitted that there were genuine issues to be discussed. 'We'd like the greens here next year,' they said.
The most toxic charge against biofuels is that they will starve people by taking scarce land and water supplies that should be used to grow food. The veteran American environmentalist Lester Brown describes the increase in the use of biofuels as a 'smash and grab raid by the 800 million people who own automobiles, on the fields that grow food for the planet's three billion poor'. He blames the biofuels boom for the recent surge in world food prices and warns that the only way of growing both food and biofuels is to chop down the remaining rainforests.
In truth, greens have got themselves in a huge tangle over biofuels. Some are in favour of biofuels because they will help fight climate change; others are vehemently against them because they could cause hunger and trash the environment. Surf the net and you find that Friends of the Earth 'warmly welcomes' the Government's new rules requiring biofuels at the forecourt. But another environment group called Biofuelwatch, which helped instigate the Newark protests, says those same rules 'will cause starvation'.
This confusion is reflected in government circles, too. Until recently there has been cross-party agreement that biofuels are a solution to both oil shortages and climate change. But in recent weeks, the Environment Secretary Hilary Benn has been sounding more cautious. At the Oxford Farming Conference in January, his new chief scientist Bob Watson warned that 'the way we are currently producing biofuels is not the way to go', because it was driving up food prices and accelerating forest loss. Even the European Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas admitted last month that 'environment problems caused by biofuels are bigger than we thought', and suggested that his targets for vehicle fuels might have to be put on hold.
Such concerns are already making some potential backers of biofuels think again. Last August, the coach company National Express pulled out of a biofuels trial after discussions with environment groups. 'What appears to be the green option may not actually be green after all,' said the chief executive Richard Bowker.
All this sounds a gloomy prognosis, but there may be hope. Watson held out the prospect that within five years scientists will have perfected ways of making bioethanol for car engines from non-food crops such as elephant grass. Then the world could grow biofuels on wasteland.
Meanwhile, perhaps the future lies closer to home. Before the big corporations and President Bush got involved, the biofuels business had been growing through small projects run by green-minded communities and enthusiasts. Five years ago Britain's biggest biofuels project was turning used chip-fat into biodiesel. At the Newark exhibition, that spirit was still on display. There were dozens of stands shwing off schemes for making biofuels from everything, including urban refuse and pond algae. Maybe we need to go back to the drawing board.
Back in Norfolk, they think so. Green's nearest neighbour, Stephen Temple, runs a dairy herd that supplies milk for the family cheesemaking business. It produces 18 tons of cheese per year, including the Alpine cheese - named after the brown Swiss in his herd. The heat for the dairy, cheesery and farmhouse alike comes from boilers that he has installed to burn local wood pellets.
Burning wood in a county full of farm copses is the simplest method of heating available, he said. No trashed rainforests, no heavy fertiliser applications, no blighted landscapes - and significantly cheaper than relying on British Gas. 'Every new housing development round here should have a heating system that burns wood,' he says.
But while Temple dreamt of a future based on the oldest biofuel of all, his neighbour Green had a problem. I asked Green why the bales of elephant grass from last year's harvest were still sitting at the roadside. It turned out that Ely power station, which had originally ordered them, had changed its mind. Green wasn't sure why. He reckoned he might be able to sell the elephant grass at a knock-down price to Drax, but was starting to think that he would be better off with a local solution.
The high school in Wells, two miles up the road, was putting in a new boiler that would be able to burn his elephant grass. It could take 50 tons per year, nearly half his crop. 'I think I will hang on to these bales, in case the school needs them,' he said.
The carbon conundrum
In theory burning biofuels is carbon-neutral because they emit the same amount of carbon they absorbed while growing. In practice, things aren’t so simple. The problem is that it takes a lot of energy to grow, transport and process biofuels – energy that probably comes from burning coal or oil. Manufacturing fertiliser, for instance, requires a lot of energy and if the biofuel is made into a liquid to put in petrol tanks, that process is energy-intensive, too. A critical question to ask, to establish the green credentials of all biofuels, is how much energy does it take to grow and process them?
Tom Green's elephant grass comes up trumps. He says leaves falling from the crop in winter provide all the fertiliser it needs and the grass requires very little processing before being shoved into a power station boiler. If the boiler is close by, the carbon footprint of elephant grass is virtually nil. By contrast, growing corn and turning it into bioethanol – President Bush’s favoured method – requires so much energy that the overall carbon emissions are almost as great as burning Brent crude.
The vegetable oil crops turned into biodiesel at Immingham come somewhere in the middle of this range. The energy requirement for processing palm, soya or rape oil is more modest than for bioethanol. And while rape requires fertiliser, soya and palm oil require very little. Greenergy’s Andrew Owens said this means that processing palm oil and soya, even after they have been shipped from Southeast Asia and Brazil, is still the greenest way of making biodiesel.
So should we all switch to diesel cars burning biodiesel? Not so fast. The issue is that most of the world’s palm oil is grown on former rainforest land in Malaysia and Indonesia, and huge areas of forest continue to be burnt to make way for new plantations. With the prospect of booming demand for palm oil to make biodiesel, the Indonesian government alone is planning to establish another three million hectares of plantations in its rainforest provinces.
Much the same is happening with soya in Brazil. Even worse, many of the Southeast Asian forests being trashed are on peat swamps, which are made up of the waterlogged remains of old forests and contain a great deal of carbon. Before oil palms are planted, the swamps have to be not only cleared, but also drained, which oxidises the peat and releases the carbon.
It makes no sense to clear rainforests and drain peat swamps to grow crops intended to reduce Europe's carbon emissions, said Jack Rieley, a wetlands expert at the University of Nottingham. 'I estimate that draining the swamp forests will release at least 30 times more carbon than will be saved by using the palm oil as fuel.'
Owens accepts that if growing biofuels in the tropics involves deforestation or loss of peat then 'the carbon emissions are likely to outweigh any benefits from the use of biofuel'. But he is angry that biofuels are being singled out when far more palm oil is used in the food industry than in biofuels. Britain currently consumes a million tons of palm oil per year and less than five per cent of that is for biofuel.
Owens claims that it is biofuels people who are trying to drive up environmental standards in Southeast Asia - but there is a long way to go. An industry initiative, backed by Owens, to certify 'sustainable' palm oil that isn't grown by destroying forests or draining bogs is making slow progress. It hasn’t yet certified a single plantation.
Green biodiesel? One day, but not yet.
