Monday, March 20, 2006

Bio-Fuels -- Net Gain? We here a lot these days about the promise of bio-fuels. For example this article in Wired News and GM's Live Green Go Yellow campaign. This article in Renewable Energy World takes a balanced look at the costs and benefits of bio-fuels. How much agricultural land would be required to grow energy equivalent to our current fossil fuel use? How does that impact food production? How much carbon is released by initially plowing the fields to make them ready for agriculture? Quotes... Land Use: Therefore to make the European Union entirely self-sufficient in terms of vehicle fuel would require more than 200 million hectares of crops, around 55% of the land mass of the EU-25... Carbon Emissions: ...theory suggests that biofuels are carbon neutral - i.e. when burnt, a plant releases the same amount of carbon back into the atmosphere as it absorbed during its lifetime. However, once the energy inputs into the farming system in terms of fertilizers, transportation and carbon dioxide released from the soil by tillage etc. are accounted for, this figure drops substantially ...Land clearance not only has implications for habitat destruction, but also for climate change. Bringing forest, bog or grassland into cultivation releases vast amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. In Malaysia and Indonesia, plantations of this kind often lead to the drainage of large areas of tropical peat bogs, which then catch fire or erode away. These peat bogs are estimated to contain around 20% of all the land-based carbon on earth and their destruction is a leading cause of climate change (on average it produces about 15% of all global CO2 emissions, although in 1997-1998 this may have reached 40%!).13 7:56:52 AM    comment []

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