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Special UN Report: Biofuels Impact Food Prices and Availability
A new report from the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE) out of Rome, for the United Nations, implicates biofuels as a cause of high food prices. The June 2013 report, released today, is titled, “Biofuels and food security” (PDF) . This comprehensive document includes many interesting graphics and it attempts to cover all aspects of biofuels production. Every-so-often I catch a headline or tweet from biofuels interest groups or lobbyists who periodically promote the story that biofuels do not contribute to high food prices. This document clearly states that they do. While the ripple effect of the production and consumption of biofuels is far-reaching and can even account for some increased income for small-shareholder farmers, they are being promoted especially by corporate agricultural interests. Just this week DuPont received much feel-good publicity in promoting their food, agriculture and alternative energy “innovation center” in Johnston, Iowa, where their Pioneer Hi-Bred business unit is located. What was (at least part of) the hoopla really about? Making cellulosic ethanol out of corn stover. Taxpayers are on the hook for funding second generation biofuels, by the way, and cellulosic ethanol from corn stover qualifies. Follow the money. Currently, in the EU, biofuels policies are being rewritten, and the biofuels industry there, just like it does here, is lobbying hard against new proposals before the Parliament and Council to limit the use of food crops for biofuels. Here are a few chosen, key statements from the United Nation’s report: 1. In the last few years (since 2004) of short-term commodity food price increase, biofuels did play an important role. 2. All crops compete for the same land or water, labour, capital, inputs and investment and there are no current magic non-food crops that can ensure more harmonious biofuel production on marginal lands. Therefore, non-food/feedcrops should be assessed with the same rigour as food/feedcrops for their direct and indirect food security impacts. 3. In the case of the US, the impact on food security is essentially through the global transmission of prices. 4. (O)n the technological frontier for biofuels, few … countries have the resources to move forward to second-generation biofuels, given the often proprietary nature of this technology, the elevated capital investments required, and the high demands that second-generation technologies make on infrastructure, logistics and human capital. 5. (I)ndustrial advances can take place more quickly than agronomic advances needed to lower feedstock costs of both conventional and advanced biofuels. 6. Given the increasing price of fossil fuels and more efficient production, biofuels, or at least some of them, will be competitive even without public support. Increasingly it will be the market rather than policies that will drive the development of the sector. 7. Biofuel development has both global and local effects, positive and negative, short and long term. Many of these effects take the form of increased competition, for food, for land, for water. There are links between biofuels and food security. Therefore biofuel policies have to integrate food security as a major concern. Included was a good summary of how corn ethanol in the U.S. has impacted other commodities: The US has historically been both the world’s leading producer and exporter of corn, responsible for as much as 50 percent of world trade. The share of US corn production directed to ethanol increased in one decade from less than 10 percent to over 40 percent in the 2010/11 crop year, and remained at that high level in 2011/2012. Not only did the US exports and share in international corn trade decline as a result, but a significant part of the expansion of corn production in the US came at the expense of other major global crops, including soybeans. This was seen to have two effects: an increase in the price of corn and of its close substitutes like wheat on world markets, and a stimulation of food and feed production in other regions of the world, at the same time as major quantities of corn were subtracted from the feed market. This next chart shows us how policy of individual nations affects trade and consumption of biofuels. I also wanted to include the chart from the report with EROI (net energy return on investments) values from various feedstocks, but when I looked at their numbers, they looked quite “off” to me, so I am not including it here. Unfortunately, EROI numbers, while important, fluctuate wildly and are difficult to obtain and keep current, I suppose. The report lists the environmental sustainability concerns of biofuels, one of my own major concerns, below. 1. Lifecycle GHG emmisions. 2. Soil quality. 3. Harvest levels of wood resources. 4. Emissions of non-GHG air pollutants, including air toxics. 5. Water use and efficiency. 6. Water quality. 7. Biological diversity in the landscape. 8. Land use and land-use change related to bioenergy feedstock production. Certainly, here in the U.S., we have seen large negative impacts on all of the items on this list, making a project such as corn ethanol production insanely unsustainable and destructive to our environment in its current policy form. …………………………………………………………………….. NOTE: A special thanks to ActionAid for alerting me to this report. Continue reading
USDA’s Farmland Price Update Report (August 2013)
By K. McDonald on August 5th, 2013 The USDA comes out with an annual farmland price report every August. The newly issued report summarizes farmland price changes since a year ago. Here are this year’s report highlights: ● The United States farm real estate value, a measurement of the value of all land and buildings on farms, averaged $2,900 per acre for 2013, up 9.4 percent from revised 2012 values. ● Regional changes in the average value of farm real estate ranged from a 23.1 percent increase in the Northern Plains region to no change in the Southeast region. ● The highest farm real estate values were in the Cornbelt region at $6,400 per acre. ● The Mountain region had the lowest farm real estate value at $1,020 per acre. ● The United States cropland value increased by $460 per acre (13.0 percent) to $4,000 per acre. ● In the Northern Plains and Corn Belt regions, the average cropland value increased 25.0 and 16.1 percent, respectively, from the previous year. ● In the Southeast region, cropland values decreased by 2.8 percent. ● The United States pasture value increased to $1,200 per acre, or 4.3 percent above 2012. ● The Southeast region had the largest percentage decrease in pasture value, 1.5 percent below 2012. ● The Northern Plains had the highest increase in pasture value, at 18.4 percent. (Click to enlarge) Note that separate maps like the above are included in the report for cropland and pastureland values. SOURCE: Land Values 2013 Summary (PDF) Continue reading
Biomass: There’s Money in That Wood Waste
Posted: 06/24/2013 One country’s demonstration project is another country’s established technology. When Sherwood Park in Alberta built a demonstration biomass district heating project they bought the equipment from Lambion Energy Solutions of Germany. Axel Lambion is the CEO and he chuckles at project’s demonstration status. In his charming, German accented English notes that his company has built over 3,400 of these projects throughout Europe and around the world. In fact, his great, great grandfather was building biomass energy systems for sawmills at the end of the 19th century. “His slogan was take useless waste and make high quality energy out of it. Energy at that time was very expensive, it seems like we have forgotten this in the last decades,” says Lambion. And that’s exactly what the project in Sherwood Park does. Its feedstock is waste wood, ground up wooden pallets and crates, of which there is a plentiful supply garnered from nearby pallet manufacturing operation North Star Pallets . They’re also planning to burn agricultural residues, like barley straw or oat hulls, on a research basis. The project was commissioned in September of 2012 and came in at $3.2 million with the federal government putting in $1.5 million, $350,000 coming from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and Strathcona County (Sherwood Park is in Stathcona County) filling in the rest with along with expertise supplied by the Resource Industry Suppliers Association . And while we kid about its demonstration project moniker it is well deserved, it is the first project of its kind in Alberta. The project itself is quite similar to the one we profiled at UBC , it burns biomass and uses the energy to heat several different buildings. Like the UBC project it was an add on to an existing natural gas district heating system. District heating is a simple idea. Produce the heat in a large centralized plant and then pipe it to nearby customers, but it still hasn’t cracked into the mainstream in Canada yet ( despite this awesome typewritten report from 1975, PDF ). However, the list of benefits from district heating is worth remembering Customers no longer have to worry about maintenance Space savings with the removal of furnaces and chimneys in each building Less risk of fire Improved air quality Flexible – can add absorption chillers for cooling or electricity generation depending on demands More efficient Less greenhouse gas emissions The efficiency of the one-megawatt biomass heating plant of the demonstration project blows away all of the little furnaces and boilers that would have been used out of the water. It heats a recreation centre, numerous county buildings, a large theatre space and even nearby condos. The economies of scale are impressive. A condition of receiving its grants meant it had to meet or exceed air quality and emissions requirements. The government wanted this project to be replicable in other urban sites and it ensures it’s a good neighbour with scrubbers, multiple monitors and something called an electro-static precipitator. According to Harry Welling of Kalwa Biogenics, another partner on the project, the heating provided by the biomass project can cover half of the heating load on the coldest prairie winter day of the year and the vast majority of the heating loads the rest of the year. To use utility company jargon, it provides the base-load heat and the natural gas boilers provide peak demand and backup. The system also reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 1,200 tonnes a year compared to the natural gas system it was added to. It also burns 12,000 tonnes of biomass a year. To avoid noise the project uses a modular container system to haul the biomass in and take the empty containers away. Each container carries 3.5 tonnes of biomass Bucolic little biomass boiler It’s tucked into an area of town called Centre in the Park featuring green space, couples walking their dogs and fountains. The containers only get replaced on weekdays and during daytime hours. Except for the sign telling you so you’d hardly know there was a large wood-fired boiler in this bucolic little area. Welling was also instrumental in assessing the economics of the project. The big factor in deciding to build a system like this is the cost of fuel. While the price and volatility of natural gas has declined over the years the cost of the commodity has been steadily inching up since early 2012 . Welling has crunched the numbers and found that with biomass at $40 per tonne, the cost of a gigajoule worth of heat is $2.20, or roughly half of the current price of natural gas. Chopping the fuel cost in half is quite the accomplishment, but with a biomass system comes other costs – mostly labour and transportation. Those “liabilities” are actually anything but, they’re local jobs that are filled by people who live in the county. And when you start talking about economic opportunities for biomass the lowest hanging fruit is the forestry and lumber processing industries. This is an area of the economy that has been depressed for quite some time. Burning biomass for heat or power means new economic opportunities. When Axel Lambion looks at Europe he sees a saturated market. Everyone and their dog has a biomass system, they’re taking old coal plants and co-firing them with wood pellets . Lambion has even installed systems that run on left-over grapes from the wine-making process and left-over potato skins from a French fry operation – they’re not very efficient but they do deal with waste effectively. By comparison Canada is a land of opportunity, with only a few similar systems installed across the country. “That’s why I’m here. In fact it’s very interesting for us,” says Lambion. “We are very proud that we are doing a project for Vanderwell Contractors up in Slave Lake which is a big privately owned saw mill. We’re doing a project where we burn 50,000 to 60,000 tonnes of hawk fuel (waste wood) which we convert into electric energy.” The project could generate 3.6 megawatts of electricity and it could save the sawmill hundreds of thousands of dollars in electricity costs each year. Canada has the biomass. And we need to reduce our waste and our greenhouse gas emissions. We need the jobs and the heat and power. Once companies like Lambion and others prove their mettle in the North American market expect Canadian and U.S. companies to get a lot more involved with biomass energy systems. We’d love to hear your biomass story in the comments. Continue reading
