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Biofuels Land Use Debate
By Jeanne Bernick
3/29/2008
By Jeanne Bernick, Farm Journal Crops & Issues Editor
Anew, heated discussion on ethanol’s carbon footprint and effect on land use change has keyed up the media and bolstered critics of biofuels.
On Feb. 7, Science magazine published two studies that examined the greenhouse gas impact of land use changes caused by biofuel demand. The general thesis of both studies is that corn demand for ethanol is reducing U.S. production of soybeans and driving up soybean production in places like Brazil, where conversion of rain forest, savannah and grasslands may seriously impact climate change.
Timothy Searchinger, who is coauthor of one of the studies, told National Public Radio, “Right now, there’s little doubt that ethanol is making global warming worse.”
A number of prominent researchers have strongly reacted to the findings. “There are no real, verifiable data in either of these papers on the land use changes that actually occur as more corn is processed into ethanol,” says Bruce Dale, Michigan State University biofuels life cycle analysis expert.
On the other hand. While striking a blow to ethanol’s environmental record, the studies are providing a timely discussion of ethanol’s effects on greenhouse gas emissions.
The crux of this new debate resides in the concept of “land use change.” In general, land use changes that occurs as a result of biofuels can be separated into two categories: direct and indirect.
Direct land use changes involve direct displacement of land for farming of the feedstocks needed for biofuel production (for example, acres planted to corn for ethanol). Indirect land use changes are those made to accommodate farming of food in other places in order to maintain the global food supply and the demand balance.
Critics of biofuels, therefore, claim that to grow an ethanol crop means taking a crop out of the food chain and putting it into fuel, and that indirect land use change results in a carbon debt instead of a carbon offset.
“Ethanol from crop plants is going to induce crop cultivation somewhere else in the world,” says Michael O’Hare, professor of public policy at the University of California–Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy. “This has not been accounted for in the discussion on biofuels carbon footprint.”
One concern with this thinking and with the Science studies is that they don’t factor in increasing corn yields when determining land needed for ethanol, says Michael Wang of the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory. As yields per acre increase, less land cultivation is required for corn ethanol production.
Another concern is that the authors modeled a case where U.S. corn ethanol production increased from 15 billion gallons a year to 30 billion gallons a year by 2015. In the new energy bill, however, Congress established an annual corn ethanol cap of 15 billion gallons by 2015.
“Congress established the cap—based on its awareness of the resource limitations for corn ethanol production—to help prevent dramatic land use changes,” Wang writes in response to the studies. “Thus, Searchinger et al. examined a corn ethanol production case that is not directly relevant to U.S. corn ethanol production in the next seven years.”
Vital science. It is obvious based on the debate of biofuels’ impact on land usage that more scientific assessment is needed to design policies that prevent unintended consequences from biofuels, says National Corn Growers Association president Ron Litterer.
“The scientific community should be discouraged from rushing to judgment on these issues simply to satisfy political timetables,” Litterer says.
You can e-mail Jeanne Bernick at jbernick@farmjournal.com.
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