Asia Biofuels Travelblog, Pt. 2

If this is Wednesday, it must be Singapore.  No, wait -- the signs all say Hong Kong.  I barely remember Monday.  The schedule says we were in Kuala Lumpur, and so do my photos of the Petronas Towers, but it took 10 minutes of brainstorming with Jim to remember where we had lunch on that day.

In the end, it was the push back on European criticisms of Malaysian palm oil that brought it back for us.  Let me explain: As I wrote about a few weeks ago, there is recent concern that clearing jungle and peat bogs to plant oil palms has been contributing 8-10% of global emissions of carbon dioxide in recent years.  When cleared, the soil and peat release somewhere between ten and fifty thousand years worth of fossil carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.  Such an immense pulse of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere completely overwhelms the benefits of planting this land with any crop destined for refining into biodiesel.  If it is true, we are talking about thousands of years worth of deficit – we are better off, by far, burning petrodiesel.

As a result of this sort of criticism, palm-to-biodiesel investment in Europe has crashed, and The Netherlands has recently banned the import of oil from land that has recently been peat bog.  Granted, the Holland is not the biggest market in Europe by any means, but they have a clear interest in keeping all their reclaimed land dry, which increased carbon emissions threaten via sea level rise.  (I wonder if in Holland you can hear the thunder sounds made by the icecap on Greenland as it melts?)  It is worth considering whether the rest of the EU will follow suit, given the stated policy of reducing carbon emissions by 20% compared with 1990 levels.  Some of the people listening to our presentations about biofuels here are in fact investors in palm plantations, and they were decidedly of the opinion that, at least in Malaysia, no virgin jungle or wetlands are being cleared form growing oil palm.  We were even invited out into the bush to check it out for ourselves.

Perhaps on the next trip.

As a result of the hubbub caused by accusations about carbon release from land cleaning in SE Asia, Malaysia and Indonesia this week sent a delegation to Europe to explain that all is in fact well.  Indonesia is claiming that it has 18 million hectares of degraded land it can use for planting oil palm -- land cleared illegally for timber harvest and now left to rot, as it were.  The word down here is that Indonesia has really cracked down on illegal logging, and the people on the ground seem to think this is credible.  But having just flown over large sections of Borneo, with all the rows of neatly planted oil palm, literally as far as the eye can see from 30,000 feet, I am led to wonder where the truth is.

More news on the topic this week.  From Bloomberg, via The Business Times (6 June, 1007):  According to the story, Indonesia “ups efforts to protect primary forests,” and “won’t allow oil palm growers to cut primary forests for establishing plantations”.  Rachmat Witoelar, Minister for Environment, claims that, “They will be planted in lots already empty.  There are plenty of these, 18 million hectares of them.”  The article goes on to say that Indonesia plans to add seven million ha of plantations by 2011, thereby roughly doubling the global supply of palm oil.

Palm oil has nearly doubled in price in recently, despite the almost quadrupling of supply in recent years.  The price appears to be supported almost entirely by food use of the oil in Asia (primarily India and China), and is presently at a 20-30% premium over the price of petrodiesel.  That means, for the time being, converting palm oil to biodiesel is way underwater.  The only palm oil flowing into gas tanks is due to mandates by national governments for blending, which happens regardless of price.  But that volume is small compared to food use.

Naturally, this leads to a discussion about whether palm oil will stay this high, or whether economic forces will somehow come into play and restore prices to the historical range.  I’m just a simple physicist, but I can’t see prices falling, and my guess is you don’t want to be short on palm oil.

If Indonesia indeed plants all that additional palm, because palm takes a few years to start producing oil, the land will gradually come into production over something like eight years.  This will be completely absorbed by a mere annual ~9% increase in demand, which is less than we have seen in recent years.  The economies of China and India are growing at 8-12% per year, depending on who is doing the accounting.  This suggests anyone who was planning on cheap palm oil for biodiesel is out of luck and needs to find a new feedstock.

But the connection to food markets is a general problem for biofuels these days.  There is already plenty of talk about price pressures on corn due to ethanol demands, and in general biofuels are putting significant pressure on food prices around the world.  And it doesn't look to be the case that we actually have enough arable land or water to simply start cultivating dedicated energy crops at large scale.  There is some hope for jatropha, but it takes a long time to mature and the number of trees presently in production is so small that assertions of it's commercial role are simply guesses.  China is evidently planning on planting 13 million hectares in jatropha -- an area the size of England -- but it just isn't clear what sort of oil production those trees will provide.

All this comes back to Synthetic Biology because in the medium to long term, breaking the connection between biofuels and food crops will only come from building new fuel production pathways in plants and microbes.

More on this in the coming days.

Rob and Jim's Ridiculous Adventure, Or Asia Biofuels Travelblog Pt. 1

(Saturday, 2 June)  Just moments ago, I was annoyed that my e-ticket had been rebooked as a paper ticket, requiring me to carry (and keep safe) 12 boarding passes for my flights over the next 10 days.  But I’ve just discovered a bonus.

Here I sit, not in business class, not in even in first class, but in a “super first class” seat on the top deck of a 747, shortly headed to Taipei and then to Kuala Lumpur along with Jim Newcomb, my colleague from bio-era.  The seat is courtesy of a client, who probably only paid for business class.  I have more legroom here than I do in my living room.  I have to stand up and take a few steps just to see what goodies are stocked in the seat-back pocket in front of me.  When I finally reach the row ahead of me, and retrieve the overnight kit, I find Cellular Day Cream, Cellular Hand Cream, Creamy Moisturizing Lip Balm, and finally, Cellular Lipo-Sculpting Eye Gel.

Jim is stuck back in cattle, err, business class, and I wonder how he is enjoying his Cellular Lipo-Sculpting Eye Gel.  He is that kind of guy.  Formerly of the CIA and various CEO and strategy jobs.  The perfect market for Lipo-Sculpting Eye Gel.  Ah, I know, I’ll regift him my tube of the stuff in order to make up for his lack of legroom.

Let me be clear: I don’t mind the luxury treatment one bit, and I plan to enjoy it.  Because the flight is leaving at 2 AM local and in the next 10 days we will visit 6 Asian financial capitals while giving 5-6 presentations a day, all day, every day.

It’s a tad ironic, then, that these presentations -- and all the associated frequent flier miles -- are in the service of describing the future of the biofuels market in Asia and Europe, which is closely coupled to the desire to reduce carbon emissions.  I’ve been cramming my head full of information about the carbon costs of various biofuels and the effects of carbon regulation on fuels markets.  I’m flying ~20,000 miles in the next 10 days, which, as Jamais Cascio might say, is a hell of a lot of cheeseburgers.

Hmmm…I wonder what the carbon cost is of toting all this Cellular Lipo-Sculpting Eye Gel back and forth across the Pacific at 35,000 feet?  Any thoughts, Jamais?

Water Arithmetic for Biofuels

Some months ago, I set out to try to make a back of the envelope calculation of how much water is available in the U.S. for growing crops destined for processing into biofuels.  Unfortunately, the more I learn, the larger the envelope seems to get.

My interest was piqued at Synthetic Biology 2.0, where Steve Chu, Nobel Laureate and Director of LBL, suggested there was plenty of water available for growing rain fed crops on marginal agricultural land.  (I've written about this before: "The Impact of Biofuel Production on Water Supplies", and "Live from Synthetic Biology 2.0".)  I have spent most of my life living in Western states, and over the years the snow pack has gotten smaller, summer water shortages more frequent, and acrimony over water issues all the more intense.  So I am somewhat skeptical of the notion that we can somehow conjure up sufficient resources to simply farm our way into energy independence.

Because it seems very hard to sort out just how much water is available from rainfall, or from aquifers, I am going to punt on the calculation.  Perhaps someone else out there can figure out an easy way to make an estimate.  The simplest way to judge how much water can be used for growing biofuels may be to look at the broadest possible level and note how much effort Western states are putting into shoring up water rights, how many are building new pipelines, and how many are putting desalination plants into operation.  The New York Times has a nice story today on all of this, entitled "An Arid West No Longer Waits for Rain":

Some $2.5 billion in water projects are planned or under way in four states, the biggest expansion in the West's quest for water in decades.

..."What you are hearing about global warming, explosive growth -- combine with a real push to set aside extra water for environmental purpose -- means you got a perfect situation for a major tug-of-war contest," said Sid Wilson, the general manager of the Central Arizona Project, which brings Colorado River water to the Phoenix area.

New scientific evidence suggests that periodic long, severe droughts have become the norm in the Colorado River basin, undermining calculations of how much water the river can be expected to provide and intensifying pressures to find new solutions or sources.

..."The Western mountain states are by far more vulnerable to the kinds of change we've been talking about compared to the rest of the country, with the New England states coming in a relatively distant second," said Michael Dettinger, a research hydrologist at the United States Geological Survey who studies the relationships between water and climate.

Mr. Dettinger said higher temperatures had pushed the spring snowmelt and runoff to about 10 days earlier on average than in the past. Higher temperatures would mean more rain falling rather than snow, compounding issues of water storage and potentially affecting flooding.

Changes in rainfall are having very real consequences in the way state and regional planners think about how water is distributed in the West.  States are engaged in legal actions against each other to prevent new pipelines that might redistributed what water there is, and cities are paying for water now legally owned by farmers:

The great dams and reservoirs that were envisioned beginning in the 1800s were conceived with farmers in mind, and farmers still take about 90 percent of the Colorado River's flow. More and more,  [Robert W. Johnson, the Bureau of Reclamation commissioner], said, the cities will need that water.

An agreement reached a few years ago between farmers and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the chief supplier of water to that region, is one model. Under the terms of the agreement, farmers would let their fields lie fallow and send water to urban areas in exchange for money to cover the crop losses.

"I definitely see that as the future," Mr. Johnson said.

Note that this means there will be less water available for crops presently grown as food.  Yet another complicating factor for figuring out how much water will be available for growing biofuels.  All across the globe, the demand for  food crops has increased dramatically as corn is used to make ethanol for fuel.  This has produced mass protest in Mexico, and prompted the Chinese government to curtail ethanol production.  For example, in the 21 December, 2006, Asian Times, "Biofuels eat into China's food stocks".

The story was more explicitly told in Red Herring a few months ago, "Corn Again: 3 Reasons Ethanol Will Be Back":

In more bad news, China on Wednesday halted the expansion of its ethanol industry, blaming it--and other industrial corn uses--for soaring grain prices, according to Xinhua, China's official news agency

Here is a recent column from Bloomberg on water and biofuels, by Andy Mukherjee.  He focuses on the trade-offs and odd cost structures used to encourage biofuel production in China and India.  The piece has some interesting numbers and is basically a tale of woe.

Oddly, near the end of the column, Mukherjee throws down the statement that, "The U.S. has plenty of water; the world as a whole doesn't."  Um, hasn't he heard the phrase "water wars"?  We have those today, every day, in the Western U.S., and they are only getting worse.  Food vs. electricity, waterborne commerce vs. fish?  Most of the fighting is done with words, but bullets and bulldozers come into play none too infrequently.  The only place on the west coast really flush with water is Los Angeles -- witness all the green lawns during the desert summer -- but that's because they just steal it all from somewhere else.                

The year end issue of New Scientist carried an interesting centerfold entitled "The State of the Planet", which, alas, doesn't seem to be available online.  There is a small map of groundwater withdrawal by country.  The U.S. withdraws somewhere between 251 and 500 cubic meters (1000 liters) per person per year, India between 101 and 250 cubic meters, and China less than 100 cubic meters.  Europe, Brazil, Russia, and Canada all fall between 100 and 250 cubic meters per person per year.  Interestingly, only the U.S., China, and India withdraw a total annual amount greater than what is recharged naturally.

Thus we are already operating at a significant, perhaps severe, water deficit, and I just don't see how we can avoid pushing further into negative territory by using yet more water for growing plants used as fuel.

Below are a few resources that may be of use in sorting out how much water is actually available for growing biofuels.

Here is a 1976 report suggesting the total annual precipitation in the US is 5759 cubic kilometers, which is 5759 billion cubic meters, and here is a page from Purdue University stating that:

The U.S. receives enough annual precipitation to cover the entire country to a depth of 30 inches...  Most of this precipitation returns to the water cycle through evapotranspiration. Of the 30 inches of rainfall, 21 inches returns to the atmosphere in this manner. Water loss by plants, the transpiration portion of evapotranspiration, is most significant. One tree transpires approximately 50 gallons of water a day. Approximately 8.9 inches of annual precipitation flows over the land in rivers and returns to the ocean. Only 0.1 of an inch of precipitation infiltrates into the ground water zone by gravity percolation.

A recent OECD report puts US water consumption at ~518 billion cubic meters annually, or ~1730 cubic meters per capita annually.

If you prefer thinking in old fashioned gallons, here is a report from the EPA entitled, "How We Use Water in These United States." 

Here is the USGS Groundwater Atlas of the United States, and Estimated Use of Water in the US in 2000.
 

The Impact of Biofuel Production on Water Supplies

In an earlier post I mentioned briefly that I am concerned plans to grow crops for producing domestic biofuels do not adequately consider how much water this project will require.  I am all for domestic production of biofuels, and have a small project going to examine the possibilities.  But in my experience the people who have already launched businesses to this end, and the venture capitalists who funded them, all evince surprise at the notion water should be part of the engineering model for fuel production.

It seems I'm not the only one thinking along these lines, as Reuters today is reporting that, "biofuels could worsen water shortages".  The International Water Management Institute has just release a report that claims, "Conquering hunger and coping with an estimated 3 billion extra people by 2050 will result in an 80 percent increase in water use for agriculture on rainfed and irrigated lands."

The Western US is already stretched for water supplies; we mine aquifers for water faster that it can be replaced and declining yearly snow packs are producing drought conditions in cities accustomed to profligate summer water usage.  Some improvement could be made in the way we transport and use water, by switching to drip irrigation and lining canals and irrigation ditches to prevent leakage, for example.  But, given the yields from soy or canola, producing sufficient plant matter to replace any significant fraction of petroleum fuels with biofuels could easily require as much water as we already use to grow food crops.  I'm not nearly as bullish on algae for biodiesel now, although we might still figure out how to make it work.

I don't see any sign of the IWMI report online yet, and I quail at reading something compiled by 700 people.  But I will probably have a look when it is available.  This is exactly the sort of thing we have to figure out if we are to produce carbon neutral biofuels at scale.