Tom Adams
Globe and Mail
December 2, 2005
Letter to the Editor
Globe and Mail
December 2, 2005
Re: Biofuel Revolution ‘beginning to happen now’ (December 1)
While ordinary Canadian have some excellent biofuel options for home heating using pelletized forestry and agricultural fuels, ethanol from starch crops like corn and biodiesel from oil crops like canola are not environmentally attractive. Leading ecology researchers, such as Cornell University’s David Pimentel, have demonstrated that road fuels derived from starch-based ethanol and biodiesel consume more fossil energy during their production than they yield. The more ethanol and biodiesel we use, the worse our energy and environmental problems get.
Tom Adams, Executive Director, Energy Probe
Biofuel revolution ‘beginning to happen now’
by Michael Vaughan, Globe and Mail, December 1, 2005
Biofuels produced from plant and animal feedstocks are growing by an estimated 10 per cent a year. Last week, for example, New York Governor George Pataki announced an initiative to increase the production of biofuels in New York State, part of a plan to help reduce the state’s dependence on foreign energy sources.
Under the executive order, state agencies will be required to purchase biofuels for use in heating and cooling plants and in their motor vehicle fleets. The order mandates that by 2012, at least 5 per cent of the heating fuel used in state buildings will be bio-diesel. By 2007, at least 2 per cent of fuels used in the state fleet must be biodiesel, with this percentage rising to 10 per cent in 2012.
The state government believes there’s about 800,000 hectares of underutilized farmland in New York State that could be put into productive use growing energy crops.
However, if biofuels are ever to supply more than a small percentage of transportation fuels, new technology and more efficient production methods will be needed, some of which are being developed in Canada.
Gord Surgeoner was born and raised in Southern Ontario and received his agricultural education at the University of Guelph and Michigan State University.
He was a professor in the Department of Environmental Biology, and then the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph until his retirement in January, 2004. Since 1999, he has been the president of Ontario Agri-Food Technologies, a non-profit organization consisting of members from farm associations, universities, industry and governments. He recently received the Order of Ontario.
Vaughan: I’d prefer to buy my automotive fuel from an Ontario farmer than a multinational oil company. Is there any chance that that’s going to be possible?
Surgeoner: It’s beginning to happen now.
We have 10-per-cent ethanol blends but they’re still sold by the major oil companies. You’re not going to create a whole separate retail channel out there. You’re going to have the Essos, the Shells and the Sunocos and so on. But if you drive in today to a Sunoco station you may be filling up your tank on a 10-per-cent ethanol blend, and the ethanol would have probably come out of Chatham, Ont., or from Commercial Alcohols Inc. and a large percentage of the corn that created the ethanol came from Ontario farmers.
Right now, the United States of America is by far the world’s largest supplier of corn. The No. 1 use for corn is animal feed, but ethanol has become the No. 2 use.
The day is coming rapidly when we will have what we call E-85 blends, in which 85 per cent of the fuel will be ethanol. Ford has announced that 250,000 of its vehicles will be flex-fuel. In other words, you can have 85-per-cent ethanol blends providing the fuel for that car. As we replace fossil fuels there will be an increased demand for what we produce in agriculture.
Vaughan: So is that it – is that as far as we can take the trend toward agri-fuels?
Surgeoner: Well, there’s biodiesel as well. In the province of Ontario, we have a 5-per-cent ethanol standard in gasoline, and I think we will see a similar standard for biodiesel in diesel fuel.
What I love about biodiesel is that we have some great Canadian technology that came out of the University of Toronto. Biox Corp. is building a 90-million-litre-a-year biodiesel plant in Hamilton right now. Rothsay, a division of Maple Leaf Foods Inc., is about to bring a 30-million litre plant on stream in Montreal.
The feedstock for these plants is an agricultural product but it’s a waste product; it’s grease that’s been used to cook French fries and chicken and so forth. It’s restaurant grease, and it’s also rendered animal material.
However, if we have a bad year for soybeans and the quality of the crop isn’t good for human feed or even animal feed, we can make biodiesel from soybeans, too.
Canola is the same. If you look at Europe today, the number one use of crops is biodiesel. All the rape seed in Europe, including all those yellow fields you see in England, those are diesel crops.
In Europe most of the biodiesel – and it’s a very large volume – is being created from crops, but it’s on what I call European economics, which is heavily subsidized.
Vaughan: So is it just subsidies that prevent Ontario farmers from getting into more of the fuel-producing crops?
Surgeoner: In Canada we have not historically spent a lot of time breeding our crops for new end-use purposes.
If we look at our soybeans, for example, we breed for high levels of protein. That makes great tofu and all kinds of foods, but to do so you sacrifice some of the oil in the crop.
But what happens if we bred soybeans not for food but for diesel? We would be at the start of what I call the innovation curve. We would make great gains early, I would think. We know some of the genetics that would make higher oil, and we have studies that say if we can get the oil content up in soybeans to this level, then it makes a lot of sense in biodiesel plants.
Vaughan: And will we pay a lot extra for these biofuels because we feel good about it?
Surgeoner: Actually, it depends what the price of oil is. At the current prices of oil, no you won’t pay extra. If a barrel of oil went back down to $10 a barrel, yes you would.
But what the consumer pays for biofuels at the end of the day is based on its functionality against the competition, which is fossil fuel. But we would eventually get into the classic supply and demand balance.
I guess that the point that I would make is that the more that we can replace fossil fuel – and we are never going to totally replace it in my lifetime – the more demand we put on agricultural products to make up the difference. But indirectly, in many ways, you will pay less for it.
I’m not sure of the exact number, but we have 30 or 40 smog alert days a year in Toronto. What we’re really doing is we are buying cleaner air.
If I sit in a hot August afternoon on Toronto’s Don Valley Parkway, then clean air suddenly becomes very important to me. On smog alert days we can see the increase in emergency room treatments.
So it’s about removing some of the demand for fossil fuel. It’s about cleaner air; it’s about better health; and it’s about rural development.
Vaughan: Okay, so let’s talk about rural development. Has the movement toward bio-fuels raised farm incomes and improved the viability of agriculture?
Surgeoner: In Ontario at this point I would unfortunately have to say, not yet.
The main reason is international trade issues. U.S. farmers are heavily subsidized. In my opinion, our farmers can compete with most people in the world on a level playing field, farmer to farmer. But if I have to compete against the U.S. Treasury or the European Union Treasury, that’s a pretty tough deal.
But our farmers’ advantage is, if you are near the ethanol plants, then you have lower transportation costs. And you don’t have border-crossing issues, which probably saves 10 to 15 cents a bushel. But that’s the max right now.
Still, if we didn’t have those markets today for ethanol, we would be so awash in corn that the price would be even lower. So the short answer about improving the viability of agriculture, again, is not yet.
Michael Vaughan is co-host with Jeremy Cato of Car/Business, which appears Fridays at 8:30 p.m. on Report on Business Television and Saturdays at 2 p.m. on CTV.
More on the subject . . .
What about CO2?
Re: Clean Coal: What About C02?, Letter, National Post, Jane Forbes, Nov. 19.
Ms. Forbes, of OISE/U of T, should know more about combined-cycle clean coal technology before she criticizes it.
In a nutshell, the process entails the combustion of coal in a self-contained oxygen-deficient environment, and in stages results first in CO plus other gasses and then CO2, N2, NOx and H2. All gasses are captured, so that the CO2 can be sequestered and the H2 separated. In addition to heat, the H2 byproduct has energy value.
We had an excellent presentation by the Clean Coal Power Coalition at our CIM branch in Winnipeg about two years ago, and the industry estimate then was that electricity prices in the order of 8 cents per kWh were required. The current marginal cost of producing additional power from natural gas- driven co-generation likely exceeds that price at current natural gas prices, so here we are in the future.
Credit is due to a committed environmentalist like Tom Adams for being prepared to discuss appropriate use of coal within the discipline of a scientific framework.
Energy Probe 