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The light bulb, the cocktail party, and you

2008-06-26T23:12:43Z

Years ago, when I was young, I spent most of my time working on energy efficiency technology policy. Now I spend most of my time working of renewables, but from time to time, my colleagues forget and ask me questions that are way over my head. And so it was that I was recently pressed to provide our board with simple answers to all the questions they might possible get asked at a cocktail party.

One of the issues that everyone asks about is mercury in compact fluorescent. I wrote one of my early blogs about it, and spent a good chunk of my talk for the board focusing on it. My main message on CFLs and mercury is that if you care about mercury pollution, one of the best things you can do is use more CFLs. But if after using a CFL, we can recycle it, that's even better. So I was happy to see this story that Home Depot is going to start to take CFLs back for recycling.

NRDC's real expert on bulbs and all energy efficient appliances is Noah Horowitz and I encourage you to read more about him and his great work here and here. Now Noah is one of those incredibly smart people that have the ability to make very complicated topics comprehensible. And he helped me do that with bulbs for the board. So without further ado, here's the presentation I gave at NRDC's most recent board meeting.

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Group of scientists urge CA to ignore some biofuel pollution

2008-06-26T04:40:22Z

Yesterday a group of scientists sent a letter to the head the the California Air Resource Board urging the agency to basically ignore the new and uncertain modeling showing that biofuels made from some feedstocks can actually increase global warming pollution. I know and have great respect for some of the folks that signed this letter, but this is not a responsible position.

Scientific uncertainty is not an excuse for in action. CARB and EPA, which is looking at very similar issues, should proceed with the best available data and modeling and not assume these emissions are zero.

The source of pollution that is at the heart of my friends' letter is the emissions from indirect land-use change. I've written extensively about the articles that brought this dynamic into focus here, here, and here (among others), but I'll cover the basics again. In February, Tim Searchinger and a group of researchers published an article attempting to quantify the GHG emissions that are caused when arable land is diverted from the food and feed market to produce fuels. The most fundamental dynamic here is the supply and demand of arable land--if some of the supply is taken out of the food and feed markets, the market strives to achieve a new equilibrium. There are fundamentally three options and some of each happens: demand goes down, the production of food and feed intensifies on the remaining acres, and new land is drawn into production.

As Searchinger et al. showed, the emissions from new land being cleared and cultivated for annual row crops can easily overwhelm the reduction in emissions from avoided fossil fuel production. The slides below summarize the traditional lifecycle analysis and Searchinger et al.'s results. (NB: if you view this in full screen mode on slideshare, you can actually see some of the small print.)

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While there is certainly is still much to learn about how to accurately model the impacts of land-use change, my friends and their colleagues are wrong about some of the areas and levels of uncertainty, and more importantly, they are wrong what CARB and EPA should do in light of this uncertainty. For starters, the letter includes some simple mistakes. At one point in their letter, they claim that Searchinger et al. ignore the production of distiller grains, which put most of the protein value of corn back into the feed market, but this is from Searchinger et al.:

First, not all corn diverted to ethanol has to be replaced by new crops. The analysis assumed that roughly one third of all corn diverted to ethanol would “come back” as feed in the form of dry distillers grains.

I'm sure that all the authors of the letter read the full article and the supplemental online materials, so I'm a bit stymied by this error.

They also make a big point over the fact that corn exports haven't actually gone down and in fact have gone up in some recent years when ethanol production has expanded significantly. But this misses two key points that Searchinger makes, which are that a) in the face of growing world demand for food, if biofuels reduce us to just treading water in terms of exports, we're actually falling behind and b) the gains in yield, which many have criticized Searchinger for under estimating, should actually be driving up exports.

The valid point made in the letter is that the type of modeling that Searchinger is doing is new. As the slides above show, he had to bring together three different data sets. There's only one other model out there, GTAP, that covers the same territory. Furthermore, while articles such as this make a strong case that the correlation between ag and forestry commodity prices and land-clearing are more than just coincidences, there not exactly an experiment you can run and repeat to prove the causal connection between some sources of biofuels and land-clearing.

Faced with this uncertainty, the authors argue:

Given that our only options for sustainably powering transportation with a significant reduction in transportation related greenhouse gas emissions are biofuels, batteries, and hydrogen, a presumptive policy implementation based on the current understanding of indirect impacts will have a significant chance to hurt real progress on reducing carbon emissions and decreasing our reliance on fossil fuels.

But what about the risk that ignoring these impacts will launch an industry in a way that is dependent on feedstocks that actually increase global warming pollution? Doesn't the precautionary principle dictate that we assume these emissions are not zero? I find the suggestion that we should take this risk on day one especially unnecessary given that there are ample feedstocks to launch the cellulosic biofuels industry that entirely or overwhelmingly avoid the land-use impact question. C&D waste wood, sustainable portions of agricultural residues and forest residues can all provide multiple billions of gallons and side step the land-use impact by having no impact on the food and feed markets. (By the way, the same dynamic will play out in the fiber market, that's part of why we have to make sure that our natural forest residues are really "precommerical slash and brush" as they are required to be under the new RFS.)

The tremendous complexities around biofuels are often painted with too broad a bush--this approach is evil, that approach will save the world. My friends have fallen into this trap by calling, even temporarily, for taking our eye off the actual performance of each type of biofuel as best as we can possibly measure it. Others have looked at the uncertainty around measuring land-use change emissions and argued that we should simply have a moratorium on all biofuels.

CARB and EPA have the obligation to chart the middle coarse here. They should use the best models and best data available and put a value the indirect land-use emissions of different feedstocks grown on different types of land. These values will be wrong and some may even be directionally wrong--positive when they should be negative and negative when they should be positive. However, the carbon stores in forests and grasslands around the world are so large and clearing practice are so destructive that I'm convinced that for the most part these values will move the industry in the right direction. There will be plenty of feedstock for the advanced biofuels industry to launch while CARB and EPA refine their numbers, and this much needed industry wont start down the path of doing more harm than good.

Solar wins in NY, sparks controversy in CA

2008-06-20T02:11:07Z

Big news today in NY with the passage of legislation that significantly expands the opportunities for distributed renewable energy. Specifically, the package of bills, which Governor Patterson has already pledged to sign, expand net metering up to 2 MW for all customer classes for solar and wind and expand net metering for farm waste digesters up to 500 kW. NRDC's excellent Albany advocate, Rich Schrader, sent me the following insider's overview of how we got here:

Net metering broke through the Albany slumber this session largely for three reasons: both legislative houses had new chairs of their respective Energy committees and each brought a fresh, collaborative approach to the issue; several alternative technology business groups, including ACENY and Sun Edison, worked closely with NRDC and enviros to execute a disciplined legislative strategy; and the tumultuous oil price spikes refashioned the electric market in a matter of weeks, making solar and wind competitive products.

Sen. George Maziarz succeeded Jim Wright as Energy chair early in the session. At around the same time, Assemblymember Kevin Cahill was appointed Energy after his predecessor, Paul Tonko, left the Assembly to head NYSERDA. Both chairs wanted to pass a bill, but the rhythm of the session early on was more a cautious minuet than a tango, until energy prices drowned pretty much every else thing out.

Sen. Owen Johnson, an influential Long Island Republican, passed his bill first, which allowed solar and methane technologies to net meter. Assemblyman Steve Englebright passed a four-technology bill in his house, which included solar, wind, methane and fuel cells. Our main political goal was to get as many technologies as possible in the bill without coming out of the session empty-handed. We organized a clutch of lobby days, some with enviros-only, some with solar companies, some with wind firms. More quietly, we met over a period of weeks through the spring, with a number of Western New York senators in a delegation that included NRDC and wind and solar business leaders. Between the steady political advocacy and the volatile market, senator after senator dropped their opposition. Finally, both chairs agreed to move several bills here at session's end, which will include solar, methane and wind.

It's nice to win some times!

In only somewhat related news on the other coast, this article ran a few days ago highlighting the controversy surrounding the siting of transmission to get renewable electricity from a proposed large-scale concentrating solar power facility in Mojave Desert to San Diego. The solar power plant would anchor a number of renewable energy projects, but as noted in the article:

[San Diego Gas and Electric's] $1.5-billion power line would cut 23 miles through the middle of Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, a spot known for its hiking trails, wildflowers, palm groves, cacti and spectacular mountain views.

Not surprisingly, the transmission proposal has run into stiff opposition. Some other environmental groups argue that SDG&E should avoid the transmission all together through rooftop PV. As NRDC's advocacy for net metering makes clear, we certainly agree that we need more of that, but ultimately that won't be enough. We don't know yet if the solar plant is the best option, but we have said that if it is, the transmission line should follow a different that we believe will significantly reduce the impacts. Here is the letter we filed opposing the proposed line and advancing the alternative.

SDG&E's VP for renewables is right when he's quoted:

"It's a trade-off," said Stuart Hemphill, Edison's vice president for renewable and alternative power. "Clean energy perhaps requires building infrastructure in potentially sensitive areas. There's no way around it."

But that doesn't mean that we can afford to give up trying to minimize those tradeoffs and the impacts of that infrastructure. That's why NRDC is part of the California Renewable Energy Transmission Initiative, which has as part of its mission statement the goal of planning for renewable energy transmission needs so that they can happen where they are needed and are developed in an appropriate and environmentally responsible way. We need to expand this type of planning nationally. It will reduce the unnecessary impacts from renewable energy infrastructure and, almost as important, it will reduce the controversy around this infrastructure and thus speed its development.

NRDC, wind power, and St. Lucie

2008-06-06T01:51:31Z

A few weeks back Florida Power and Light asked NRDC to support a wind project that they have proposed for St. Lucie, Florida. Energy project siting battles take a lot of resources, and NRDC simply can't afford to get involved except in the most important and precedent setting projects. So I said, no. However, increasing the use of renewable energy is one of NRDC's priorities in general and especially in Florida, so I offered instead to send a letter emphasizing the importance of wind as a way to fight global warming and thus the need to give wind a full and fair hearing.

Poorly sited, wind farms can be environmentally destructive and there is a valid range of opinions about the visual impacts. However, the challenges of global warming and benefits of wind power are too significant for us to lightly prejudge or short circuit the necessary environmental siting review and permitting process.

That was the point I tried to make in my letter. I assumed that since I didn't say that NRDC "endorsed" or "supported" the St. Lucie project that no one would assume that we did. And for the record, we have not taken any position on the project.

Hind sight being 20-20, I'm not surprised that some took our support for wind in general to be support for the project. And this happened in the first article that reported on our letter, which ran with the headline "Turbine plan gains support from National Resources Defense Council." (Yes, they got NRDC's name wrong both in the original article and in the corrected one.) And boy, did I hear an earful from a number of very passionate local advocates.

I have since talked to the reporter and he has corrected the story with this one.

I have also since read this article in NRDC's Onearth Magazine, which mentions that NRDC is working with the Surfrider Foundation to help protect the coastline of...where else but St. Lucie County. The article paints a compelling picture of a beautiful part of the country at high risk from global warming and poor environmental management.

I have no idea if the site that FLP has proposed for St. Lucie is a suitable site for wind, but we all--even the most passionate defenders of our local environment--have to struggle with what we can do to help fight global warming. If we say no to a wind farm or solar panels or some other solution to global warming, we have to think long and hard about where else those technologies should go and what other solutions we can do locally.

We cannot afford to sacrifice our natural treasures or fragile and endangered ecosystems in our fight against global warming. The cure must not be worse than the disease. But there are going to be tough decisions to make, and the fight against global warming is not one that we can afford to lose.

More about PA coal ethanol plant proposed on top of school

2008-05-20T11:27:24Z

Last week I wrote about a corn ethanol plant would use waste coal for process energy and has been proposed for a small town in Pennsylvania. As I mentioned in that post, the proposed site for the ethanol plant, being developed by Sunnyside Ethanol, is right next door to the town's school. Turns out it's the combined elementary and high school and by right next door, I meant abutting.

Unfortunately, the questions remain. Why would anyone want to build an ethanol plant that can't comply with the new GHG standards in the renewable fuel standard and why would anyone finance such a project? I've got some meetings in the works with experts involved in the finance side and hope to have answers soon.

Pam Sheeder, the fearless leader of the local group (Citizens for a Clean Curwensville) fighting the project sent me these two pictures to help show just how close the project is to the town's school.

More to the southeast:

Bioheat is like all biofuels: we got to get it right

2008-05-20T02:24:47Z

Both Massachusetts and New York City are considering a mandate that heating oil contain an increasing percentage of biodiesel. The resulting mix, known as bioheat, has some air quality benefits but, like most biofuels, can either be good for the environment or bad depending on how the feedstock is produced and how the fuel is refined.

I took a broadly negative stance on the idea of a bioheat mandate early this year when I testified in front of the MA Advanced Biofuels Taskforce arguing that such an approach tried to pick winners and failed to ensure any really environmental benefit. The situation has become more complicated since then. While the MA ABT has recommended to go ahead with a mandate, it also recommended adopting a low-carbon fuel standard, and it was this latter idea that the political leadership of the state focused on.

In NYC, where there's actual legislative language being kicked around, there have been various attempts to incorporate general and vague reference to sustainability standards. More importantly the idea of the mandate is linked to requirements for wider use of low-sulfur diesel and requiring oil-fired boiler to update their air pollution permits. These additional requirements could make a big reduction in air pollution from this very dirty family of boilers.

Unfortunately, as this article details, there's a rush to try push the bioheat mandate through that's putting these benefits at risk by not requiring bioheat to actually produce less global warming pollution than regular heating oil.

Both the California Air Resource Board and US EPA are in the midst of developing the accounting protocol to measure the full lifecycle GHG emissions of different biofuels. The recently passed renewable fuel standard requires all biofuels from new facilities to produce at least 20% fewer GHG emissions than gasoline or diesel and biodiesel would have to comply with the advanced biofuels standard of a 50% reduction.

So why would MA and NYC adopt a bioheat mandate that didn't at least require the biodiesel being used to make the bioheat to meet the renewable fuel standard GHG levels? Do we really want local markets for substandard biofuels--biofuels that are not good enough for the rest of the country--biofuels that may actually make global warming worse?

I can understand that some developers might be worried that they won't comply with the RFS standards, but why would the City Council or MA legislature want to do something supposedly to fight global warming that might actually make it worse? Why wouldn't they simply require their respective environmental agencies to start implementing the mandate as soon as the lifecycle accounting protocol becomes available next year? At this point, they probably couldn't start the mandate until winter of 2009 at the earliest and 2010 is more realistic. So we're talking a year delay in when the mandate kicks in and the bill could be passed today.

My recommendation to MA and NYC are simple:

Have the mandates go into effect as soon as either CA or EPA promulgates lifecycle GHG accounting protocol;
Require all biofuels used to make bioheat be at least compliant with the 50% reduction requirement in the RFS (personally, I think we could shoot a little higher, but let's at least not be substandard); and
Don't specifically require biodiesel, which is a very specific type of biofuel--instead open the mandate to any diesel alternative that meets all relevant health and performance specifications;

A coal powered ethanol plant and a test of the new RFS

2008-05-14T18:55:01Z

In a little town in central Pennsylvania, a company called Sunnyside Ethanol, LLC (owned by Consus Ethanol, LLC) wants to build an 80 million gallon per year corn ethanol refinery that would get its heat and power from a waste coal boiler. The project would stand about 150 yards from the town's high school and a stone's throw from half a dozen houses. Waste coal, in case you don't know, is the stuff that's not good enough to burn in a regular coal plant. Needless to say, it's pretty nasty stuff.

This local news TV clip gives some good basics and introduces Pamela Sheeder, a local mother and leader of Citizens for a Clean Curwensville. (If you watch the video, take note that while the project has an air permit, it hasn't started construction. Also, what do you want to bet the borough council president doesn't have children at the high school.) These two articles introduce the only local councilman, Samuel Ettaro who has stood up against the project to ask the important questions.

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Now those of you who have been reading my blog or the popular press may think, what a sec, are the lifecycle GHG standards in the new RFS supposed to stop this sort of a project? Others who read this recent Inside EPA article (subscription, but here's the first paragraph in case: [1]) about how most of the growth in the corn ethanol industry is grandfathered and thus exempt from these standards may think, so this is one of the projects that squeaked through. No disrespect, but both groups are wrong.

The RFS establishes criteria for fuel that can be used by the oil companies to comply with the standard. The law requires that all renewable corn-based ethanol used to comply with the RFS “produced from new facilities that commence construction after the date of enactment of this sentence, achieves at least a 20 percent reduction in lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions compared to baseline lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions.” In other words, if someone want to make substandard fuel, they're allowed, but you got to wonder who is going to buy it.

As to the grandfathering provision embedded in the language above, it exempts fuel produced at existing facilities and facilities that commenced construction on or before December 19th, 2007, from the 20% greenhouse gas reduction requirement. The US Environmental Protection Agency is responsible for implementing the RFS and has not promulgated a definition for “commenced construction” in this context. The definitions that EPA has used elsewhere when implementing air pollution regulations generally require a project to have all of its permits, and to either have made large, irrevocable, construction-related financial commitments or to have begun actual on-site construction.

The project in question doesn't have local land-use or building permits, reportedly doesn't have title to the land, may not even have all of its financing lined up, and certainly hasn't broken ground. In other words, there's no way under any existing regulatory definition of "commence construction" that this project is anything other than a new project. Therefore, its ethanol is going to have to meet the 20% reduction requirement gasoline to be considered “renewable fuel.”

Now a legal eagle among my loyal readers will point out that EPA is allowed to lower the 20% requirement to 10%. But this facility is using waste coal to convert corn into ethanol. Even under traditional lifecycle analyses this combination can't come close to a 10% reduction and the definition of lifecycle GHG emissions in the RFS goes beyond the traditional approaches in very important ways. While EPA is in the process of developing the regulation to implement the lifecycle definition, nevertheless, I find it extremely unlikely that ethanol from a facility that uses waste coal for process energy would be able to meet this lifecycle emissions requirement for the following two reasons:

· Traditional lifecycle analyses have estimated that ethanol refined at a facility using coal for process energy produces more greenhouse gas emissions than gasoline over both fuels’ lifecycles. NRDC’s internal calculations historically have suggested that using combined heat and power can improve this balance, but only to the point of making the ethanol just slightly better than gasoline. The figure below comes from a peer reviewed journal article authored by one of the foremost authorities on the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions of ethanol, Michael Wang from Argonne National Laboratory. As this figure suggests, according to traditional lifecycle assessments, unless a coal-fire ethanol refinery is not drying its distiller grains, the ethanol produced would not comply with the minimum standards in the RFS.

-Studies published in Science earlier this year have shown that emissions from land-use changes caused direct and indirectly by the growing of crops in order to make biofuels can dominate the lifecycle emissions and have been either ignored or significantly under estimated in traditional lifecycle analyses. While the assessment of emissions from land-use changes caused indirectly by biofuels is at very early stages, the definition of lifecycle GHG emissions in the Energy Independence and Security Act explicitly requires EPA to include these emissions. Even if the values suggested in the Science articles prove to be off significantly, including emissions from land-use change will make it all but impossible for ethanol produced at a facility that uses coal for process energy to meet the standards in the RFS.

So if the project is not going to be exempted and will have to meet the GHG standards but by virtue of using waste coal doesn't have a chance in hell of complying with those standards, why is it being built? And just as interestingly, who is financing it and where's the due diligence? Or is there a market for substandard, uncertified ethanol? And if there is what does that say about the need for ethanol incentives?

If you have any answer, I'm all ears. This is one project that no one should be interested in building or paying for. We have to wake up the financial community towns like Curwensville don't get stuck with half baked, fully polluting dinosaurs like Sunnyside Ethanol.

[1] From Inside EPA article:

Despite draft modeling showing that coal-fired ethanol plants will exceed the energy law's lifecycle greenhouse gas (GHG) standard, agency officials say that few existing facilities will be subject to the GHG standard because facilities exempted from the standard by Congress will likely be able to provide almost all the fuel needed to meet the law's 15-billion gallon corn ethanol mandate.

Op-ed on biofuels, food prices, and GHG emissions

2008-05-14T01:55:11Z

It has already been such a crazy week that I'm only just getting a chance to do my own PR. On Monday, the Minneapolis Star Tribune ran an op-ed coauthored by my friend Lee Lynd and yours truly. Lee is one of the foremost thinkers on consolidated bioprocessing of lignocellulosic biomass into fuels, a professor at Dartmouth, and the chief technical officer at Mascoma. So he knows what he's talking about, and it's always a pleasure to piggyback on the clear thinking of smart people.

I've written about the gist of the article here before, but to reiterate what I think are the three most critical points:

The solution to the food vs. fuel debate and the concerns about the GHG emissions of biofuels are one and the same--use the nonfood part of the plants and get the biomass off the land in doesn't interfere with food production or convert our wild landscapes rich in carbon (and biodiversity) into crops.
There is ample reason to believe that there is a significant amount of biomass that meets this criteria and that much more can be produced if the regulations guide the market to develop this material.
We need to build on the safeguards and standards adopted as part of the RFS in December with a low-carbon fuel standard and technology-neutral and performance based incentives.

The editor did a pretty good job cutting our 885 word original down to a svelte 663 words. For posterity's sake, I've pasted the full, original text below. There are two important substantive cuts both having to do with the importance of the context of biofuels.

The first came in the first paragraph where the second sentence originally read:

While these concerns should motivate greater efforts to do biofuels right, we must not throw the biofuels baby out with the bathwater – especially given the dearth of viable alternatives to power a sustainable and secure transportation sector.

But the part about the dearth of viable alternatives was dropped. I wrote about the reasons that we bother to struggle with biofuels a few weeks ago.

The second big cut came towards the end when this entire paragraph was dropped:

We need efficient vehicles, mass transit, and plug-in vehicles, but along with reducing demand for liquid fuels, we need to find new ways to sustainably produce them. A major focus of the renewable fuel standard is expanded production of cellulosic biofuels. Farmers and producers involved in the existing biofuel industry are generally open to such an expansion as long as they are not left holding the bag.

So now, for your reading pleasure, I offer the unedited original text of our op-ed:

Rethink Biofuels But Watch the Bath Water

Nathanael Greene and Lee Lynd

Biofuels were riding a wave of popularity only a few months ago, but now suddenly they’re being roundly condemned in light of rising food prices and recent studies showing that biofuel production can exacerbate climate change. While these concerns should motivate greater efforts to do biofuels right, we must not throw the biofuels baby out with the bathwater – especially given the dearth of viable alternatives to power a sustainable and secure transportation sector. Rather than retreating from current policies, which do more for smart biofuels than many realize, Minnesota and the nation should follow California and Massachusetts in building – wisely – on this foundation.

The current rise in food prices is causing a humanitarian crisis that we must address. But if we want to fix the problem, we first need to understand what’s behind it. Biofuels are a modest part of the food price picture, consuming only 4 percent of world grain, and there is little evidence that food prices would be much lower if we did not produce biofuels. The primary reasons for skyrocketing food prices include our rising energy costs, increased demand for meat in developing countries, drought, and misguided national and international agricultural policies.

Global warming is also a crisis, and two recent papers in Science identify issues that we must pay attention to if biofuels are going to contribute to lowering global warming pollution. The papers point out that if the demand for biofuels causes unmanaged forests or grasslands to be converted to row crops, we must account for the global warming pollution released during that conversion, and that these emissions can overwhelm the benefits of displaced gasoline or diesel consumption. However, showing that these undesirable results could happen given unsustainable practices in no way establishes that they must happen. There are solutions.

We can produce biofuels in ways responsive to these challenges. This can be done by making biofuels from non-food biomass (woody material, grasses, stalks and stems), while also producing this “cellulosic” biomass in ways that neither compete with food production nor cause increased global warming pollution that comes from converting wild landscapes to row crops. In other words, using the right part of plants and producing them in the right ways take biofuels out of the food price equation and makes them part of the solution to global warming.

Such cellulosic biomass is available from a greater diversity of sources than row crops, including wastes, land that cannot grow food crops or is not needed for food production, and potentially new approaches that coproduce food and biofuel feedstocks. Several studies have shown that wastes from the forest products industry, crop residues and winter cover crops could provide hundreds of millions of tons of biomass annually and certainly enough to comply with the recently adopted 21 billion gallon federal renewable fuel standard for “advanced biofuels.” Higher production levels are likely possible, particularly in light of emergent market forces and public policies.

The renewable fuel standard, signed into law in December as part of the Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA), is the first biofuels policy to mandate a shift in our production practices in a way that directly addresses global warming pollution and indirectly – by promoting sustainable cellulosic biofuels - will address the food production challenge. The Act establishes minimum global warming pollution standards for biofuels and critical land-use safeguards. New biofuels projects that increase global warming emissions—including emissions from land conversion—are not permitted under EISA. Most of the mandated 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol production capacity required by the Act is already in place or under construction. As expansion beyond this level is unlikely to be favored by either market forces or regulation, the ceiling of corn ethanol production appears to be in sight.

The low-carbon fuel standard, first embraced by California and recently by Massachusetts, goes beyond setting a minimum standard and rewards the best solutions. This approach requires that oil companies reduce the average global warming pollution of their fuels, but lets the market decide the best mix of options. Biofuels that provide the most reductions will certainly play a big role, but so can other technologies such as plug-in vehicles that use electricity and natural gas powered cars and trucks.

We need efficient vehicles, mass transit, and plug-in vehicles, but along with reducing demand for liquid fuels, we need to find new ways to sustainably produce them. A major focus of the renewable fuel standard is expanded production of cellulosic biofuels. Farmers and producers involved in the existing biofuel industry are generally open to such an expansion as long as they are not left holding the bag.

In the middle of April, six committees of Minnesota’s House and Senate jointly gave the low-carbon fuel standard a full initial hearing. We should build on foundation provided by the renewable fuel standard and follow the state level leadership with a federal low-carbon fuel standard as part of comprehensive climate legislation. We also need to realize that better biofuels policies are no excuse for not addressing world hunger head on through better agriculture and food aid policies. More generally, we should go beyond all or nothing headlines and pursue a transition to biofuel strategies that realize the compatible objectives of replacing oil, expanding opportunities for existing producers, and securing both food supplies and a sustainable future.

Nathanael Greene is a senior policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council; Lee Lynd is a Professor of Engineering at Dartmouth and Chief Scientific Officer of Mascoma Corporation.

In hand wringing over biofuels mandate, safeguards at risk

2008-05-08T01:47:20Z

The Hill was alive with the sound of finger pointing and hand-wringing yesterday when I testified before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality about the RFS. (All the testimony including mine is available on the Subcommittee's web site. Mine is also available here, on NRDC's site, and my oral statement, which I basically read, is here if you want the 600 word version.) The hearing was ostensibly an EPA oversight hearing to learn about implementation of the RFS, but it was really mostly a platform for two groups of legislators: 1) those that want to reduce or eliminate the RFS and replace it with more domestic oil, liquid coal or both and 2) those that want to gut the safeguards in the RFS.

Any number of oil and coal patch republicans or dems would probably vie for the leadership of the first group, but the ranking member of Energy and Commerce, Joe Barton (R-Texas) would get my vote. He has a bill to repeal the recent RFS and reinstate the 2005 RFS. This would cut the corn ethanol mandate in half and entirely eliminate the advanced biofuels requirements and all of the minimum lifecycle GHG standards and land and wildlife safeguards.

The leader of the second group is Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (D-S.D.) who has a bill (H.R. 5236) to replace the current definition of eligible woody biomass, which includes the safeguards, with the version that passed in the Senate last year, which effectively allows in all wood.

Now the politics here are really strange because of course the anti-biofuels fossil fuel group was more than happy to support the anti-safeguard crowd, but many of the anti-safeguard are strongly pro-corn. So when Rep. Herseth Sandlin testified about her bill she had to spend half her time talking about how great corn ethanol is and Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill) basically yelled at his colleagues. "This is very frustrating, how short-sighted we are to walk away [from corn ethanol]," he boomed, and then at the end, he added that what we really needed to do was pass the Herseth Sandlin bill and add liquid coal to the mix.

Adding to the array of strange bedfellows, four environmental groups sent a letter to the Subcommittee's chair adding their voice to that of the Governor of Texas, and a bunch of Senate Republicans calling for a waiver of the current RFS.

A voice of reason came in a statement from the Chair of Energy and Commerce, Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.). As the first line of a comprehensive article in the E&E Daily (subscrip) by Alex Kaplum put it: "House Energy and Commerce Chairman John Dingell (D-Mich.) threw cold water yesterday on the growing cry to scale back the federal ethanol mandate Congress approved last year."

Among other things in his statement, he says the following:

I would observe that the ink had hardly dried on this new law when the clamoring began to alter the RFS, and these requests for Congressional intervention continue. In my view, amendments to the law at this time would be unwise and could lead to unintended consequences.
I believe that all stakeholders would be well-advised to consult with the EPA as it develops the rule and try to address any concerns within that forum. If unresolved issues still remain after the rule is finalized, there may be need for Congressional action. To act in advance of that date, however, undermines important processes.

Another good article in E&E Daily on Monday by Ben Geman got my perspective on these various efforts right:

Nathanael Greene, a biofuels expert with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said biofuels are among the many factors that are contributing to increased food costs. But he does not see altering the biofuels mandate as the answer.
Instead, he argues that lawmakers should "build on top" of the mandate by altering biofuels tax credit and tariff policy. Lawmakers should encourage biofuels that fare best in terms of greenhouse gas reductions and other environmental factors, he said, which would thereby steer production toward cleaner fuels that do not compete with food.
"The solution to a lot of the global warming concerns, particularly the land-use emissions concerns, and the solution to getting biofuels out of the food price equation are the same thing," he said.
Greene is also concerned that reopening the mandate would allow for "mischief," such as a push to weaken environmental restrictions in last year's energy bill.

The Herseth Sandlin bill certainly qualifies as mischief in my book. While my testimony provides a full explanation of why we think the RFS got the definition of renewable biomass and woody biomass specifically right, I'll summarize our points here:

First it's important to understand that our wild landscapes and federal lands are only becoming more critical to wildlife and for their ecosystem services and as stores of carbon as global warming puts increased pressure on our lands. So the need for safeguards is greater than every. Still the new RFS allows the vast majority of woody feedstock that is likely to ever be economically viable for biofuels. It only excludes: old growth, few remaining grasslands, our most sensitive landscapes, federal lands, and the conversion of natural forests to forest plantations.

In other words, all the material from a forest plantation can be used, as can the material from a naturally managed forest (one that uses natural regeneration). But you can't convert a natural forest to a forest plantation. Plantations may look like forests but they're deserts from the perspective of biodiversity.

The federal land exclusion is a big sticking point for Herseth Sandlin, who has a number of interests that want to harvest the Black Hills for energy. But "preventative thinning" from a forest is ostensibly to restore the forest health and reduce the risk of fires. This means that you don't want the material to grow back, which makes it an open loop source of carbon not unlike the carbon from coal. Furthermore, the evidence that thinning helps reduce the risk of fire is uncertain at best and there are studies that suggest that it actually makes fires worse. And finally, for that material that is already being cut and left in the forests, there are better more local and more appropriately scaled options such as producing heat and power for local communities.

The only thing that I would add to Ben's E&E Daily article is that I actually offered three steps that Congress should take to build on the RFS:

Adopt a low-carbon fuel standard, as California and Massachusetts are planning to do.
Pass comprehensive climate legislation built around a mandatory, economy-wide carbon cap and a carbon credit trading system.
Reform the various existing biofuels tax credits and import tariffs to be a single technology-neutral, performance-based credit to encourage water efficiency, reduced water pollution, better soil management, and enhanced wildlife management.

Massachusetts moves to adopt low-carbon fuel standard

2008-04-25T03:26:10Z

Yesterday, in a major step forward for biofuels policy, the Massachusetts governor, senate president, and speaker of the house jointly called for the adoption of a low-carbon fuel standard. The LCFS is a technology-neutral, performance based approach to reducing the greenhouse gas emissions from transportation energy. This a vast improvement over the technology specific, volume incentives and mandates that until recently dominated US biofuels policies.

The way a LCFS works is that the full lifecycle GHG emissions from the fuels each oil company is selling are added up and divided by all the energy in that fuel. This becomes the company's average fuel carbon intensity. Overtime under the LCFS, the oil companies have to reduce this average carbon intensity by mixing in sources of transportation energy with lower lifecycle GHG emissions. In California, which was the first to move towards a LCFS and is now in the process of developing the regulations, the goal of the LCFS is to require a 10% reduction in carbon intensity by 2020. In other words, a company could replace all of their current fuel with an alternative that has 10% lower lifecycle GHG emissions, or half with an 20% lower alternative, and so on. The LCFS rewards the sources of energy that have the lowest lifecycle GHG emissions. Just as importantly, it penalizes high carbon fuels such as liquid coal. (Check out this awesome short video if you don't know how bad liquid coal is.)

As I've written about before, this is stark contrast to the original RFS, which was a simply volume mandate that totally ignored how the biofuels were produced. Our current tax credits for ethanol and biodiesel and our import tariff on ethanol are similarly blunt, ignoring the impacts or benefits of the fuels' lifecycle. As I've written about before, the current RFS was the first step towards setting performance based requirements. It sets minimum lifecycle GHG emissions requirements for fuels from new facilities and establishes land-use safeguards.

But the new RFS is still a volume mandate for a specific set of fuels and these standards are floors--you have to be a biofuel and you have to be above the floor to qualify. If you're electricity or natural gas you can't compete and you don't get anything for being better than the floor.

While they are moving ahead in the state, they also invited the other states that are part of the Regional Green House Gas Initiative to join Massachusetts. This is exactly the type of leadership we need, and it should be mutually reinforcing with efforts already underway in the Northeast.

NESCAUM has been doing a study of a LCFS for the air regulators of the NE states, but this is should throw that effort into high gear and greatly increase the chances that the other governors will follow Massachusetts' lead.

The announcement builds on the findings of the Massachusetts' Advanced Biofuels Task Force, which were released yesterday. I testified before the Task Force, and my primary recommendation was that they adopt an LCFS, so that's extremely gratifying. Importantly they repeatedly in the press release and theTask Force report refer to the importance of addressing GHG emissions from direct and indirect land-use change.

Interestingly, the ABTF stuck to its recommendation that the state adopt a biodiesel and bioheat mandate, which I recommended against, but they appear to have amended these mandates to link them to the lifecycle GHG accounting that is central to a LCFS and made the mandates "as technology neutral as possible." I have yet to read the details, but this sounds workable to me and may be a good model for other places that eager to do a bioheat bill.

Here's a summary of the ABFT recommendations from the Executive Summary (PDF, 2MB):

• Prioritize efforts to achieve near-term implementation of a regional, technology-neutral and performance-based Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS), with Massachusetts leading the way.
• While a Massachusetts LCFS is being developed, pass amended versions of the legislation you cosponsored, implementing targeted transitional biofuels mandates and exempting cellulosic biofuels from the state gasoline tax, with a sunset date. Both the transitional mandates and cellulosic fuel exemption should require significant greenhouse gas reductions and other environmental protections, including direct and indirect impacts such as those on land use. The mandates and cellulosic tax exemption should be as technology-neutral as possible, and should phase out as a Low Carbon Fuel Standard comes into existence.
• Support pilot deployment in the state fleet of plug-in hybrid and all-electric vehicle technology in light- and heavy-duty vehicles, as well as fuel-efficient flex-fuel vehicles.
• Develop infrastructure necessary for consumer use of biofuels and implement limited-cost investments in equipment for ethanol and biodiesel distribution, such as E85 stations along major state highway corridors, subject to budget constraints.
• Develop standards for full lifecycle evaluation of biofuels that consider their carbon and other environmental impacts, including direct and indirect land use impacts.
• Parallel to progress on biofuels, continue to explore policy options for vehicle efficiency and reducing vehicle miles traveled.

Cape Wind is needed now; MMS should move quickly

2008-04-21T20:43:43Z

Today we pressed send on our written comments on the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for the proposed Cape Wind offshore wind project.The DEIS was prepared by the Mineral Management Service as part of the permitting process for the project. Based on our review of this the information in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers DEIS and other analyses that have been done on the project, NRDC has concluded that the project’s environmental benefits will far outweigh its impacts.

While NRDC has long been a strong supporter of increased use of wind energy, we have moved cautiously when it came to the Cape Wind project. This has been out of respect for the environmental review process—a corner stone of modern environmental policy—and wanting to make sure that the first offshore wind project in the US gets it right. The results of the DEIS and the other studies we have reviewed make it clear to us that the Cape Wind project will be a big win for the environment and is urgently needed. However, no energy project is without its potential environmental impacts and, to address these, NRDC strongly recommends that the Final Environmental Impact Statement (“FEIS”) and any lease, easement, and right-of-way for the Project include specific monitoring and mitigation conditions to protect the coastal and marine environments.

The technology for producing electricity from wind energy has improved greatly over the past twenty years, and wind—on and offshore—now represents one of the most promising sources of emissions free electricity. Indeed, offshore wind power is probably the New England’s largest untapped renewable energy resource and a vital resource for the entire country.

The potential benefits of the project are undeniable. The project would produce a maximum electric output of 468 MW and an average daily output of 182.6 MW free of air and water pollution. In addition to the local and regional air pollutants, such as NOx and SOx that the project would avoid, the project would reduce emissions of carbon dioxide—the pollutant most responsible for global warming by 0.88 million tons per year. As UCS calculated as part of their comments, this means that Cape Wind will reduce expected growth in CO2 emissions from the power sector in 2014 by about 9%.

This would be an important contribution to fighting global warming for two reasons: 1) it would do more than any other renewable energy source of electricity in New England to avoid global warming pollution and 2) it is by far the largest single contribution that Cape and Islands—a region that is exceptionally vulnerable to global warming—can make to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

To address the environmental impacts of the project, NRDC recommends that the FEIS and lease, right-of way or easement for the project include the following: 1) a requirement for a comprehensive underwater acoustic monitoring system that not only measures the levels of underwater noise but that detects the approach of marine species into the safety zone around the turbines, 2) a requirement that construction activity be scheduled so as to avoid periods of peak abundance of threatened or endangered species, 3) a requirement that additional surveys be conducted to reduce remaining uncertainty regarding the threat of impacts to the federally endangered Roseate Tern, and 4) a requirement—detailed below—for a comprehensive Environmental Management, or adaptive management, system.

Given the relative lack of experience with offshore wind projects in this country, there is the possibility that the scale of certain impacts will only become clear overtime. It is important to the future not only of this project but to offshore wind generally, that there be an effective system be in place to monitor and adjust operations to avoid such impacts.

To that end, we call on MMS to include in the FEIS and as a condition of any lease, easement or right-of-way, a detailed and comprehensive Environmental Management System for monitoring and mitigating potential impacts associated with project construction and operation. MMS’s interim policies and Best Management Practices, issued as part of its Alternative Energy and Alternate Use (AEAU) Program, require MMS and lessees and grantees to adopt adaptive management that will include monitoring of activities to ensure that potential adverse impacts of OCS alternative energy development are avoided (if possible), minimized, or mitigated.

The Environmental Management System should achieve the following goals:

· be guided by a panel of government and academic scientists,
· include specific adaptive responses for environment impacts judged to be reasonable possibilities at the chosen site,
· include a framework that prevents abuse of the program and which also protects the economic interest of Cape Wind by establishing a reasonable budget for implementation costs and mitigation measures including possible short-term shutdowns,
· require monitoring during both construction and operation, and
· require that all data collected be made available to the public, in electronic form, in real-time when possible.

The urgency of stopping global warming increases regularly as the drumbeat of scientific studies about the quickening pace of climate change continues. Cape Wind will make an important contribution to the fight against global warming both through its immediate displacement of fossil fuels and by paving the way for greater use of offshore wind.

MMS should adopt our recommendations, finalize the EIS, and expeditiously permit the project with the recommended monitoring and mitigation measures.

The dangers of the food vs. fuel debate

2008-04-20T18:03:23Z

A quick review of a Google news search for "ethanol" and "food" is instructive. Here's an excerpt of the results:

Don't Blame Ethanol For Soaring Food Prices
A Worsening Food Crisis
Corn-Based Ethanol Tied to Higher Food Costs
Biofuels under attack as world food prices soar
Demand for Corn-Derived Fuel is Driving Up Food Prices, but New ...
It's time to scrap the ethanol
‘Biofuels suspension won’t help rice situation’
Food Riots Made in the USA (The Weekly Standard - Apr 18, 2008): "Right now, we're trying to run our cars on corn ethanol instead of gasoline. As a result, we suddenly find ourselves taking food out of the mouths of ..."
New 'Green' Body Count (FOXNews)

(Got to love that last one -- Fair and balanced as long as by "fair" you mean shill for the looney neocons and and "balanced" you mean gleefully biased.)

The food vs. fuel fight is in full swing. I've weighed in on it before and I'm working on an editorial with a friend to try to raise the profile of a few critical points:

There are many reasons food prices are high and the poor are starving including energy prices, increasing demand for meat as part of changing diets in developing countries, extreme weather events probably linked to global warming, misguided national and international agricultural policies, and certainly making biofuels from food crops too.
While corn ethanol consumes about 24% of US corn production and US corn production is about 40% of world corn production, ethanol consumes just 4% of world grain (corn, rice, wheat, soy, etc.). Common sense suggests that food-crop derived biofuels would a similarly small role in overall grain prices. While inelastic supply and demand curves can lead to disproportionate impacts, economic modeling confirms that biofuels are a modest part of the food price picture.
Nevertheless, just as we strive to develop biofuels with the largest greenhouse gas benefits, we should simultaneously strive to develop biofuels that don't interfere with food markets.
Fortunately, the solution to these twin challenges are the same--developing and deploying as quickly as possible biofuels made from the non-nutritive part of plant culled from our waste streams, grown on lands that have been degraded by poor management but have not reverted to their natural state, or integrated into food production in a way that neither diminishes food production or the quality of the land.
The RFS just adopted is not perfect, but it is the first biofuels policy to mandate a shift in our production practices in a way that will address these challenges. The minimum GHG standards, which require EPA to address both emissions from direct and indirect land-use, and the land-use safeguards (see our new factsheet on these) will over time make biofuels that do not compete for prime arable land or ecologically sensitive lands the only ones that can comply with the federal fuel mandate.
Now we need to take the next steps on our policies including adopting a federal low-carbon fuel standard and revamping our ethanol and biodiesel tax credits (and our ethanol import tariff too) to be performance-based and technology neutral.

While I worry that the current mud-fight over food vs. fuel will lead to dangerously blunt policies that would throw out the biofuels baby with the bath water, I worry more that the mud-fight will distract us from doing something serious about world hunger. The argument that we should address the starvation being caused by current high prices through minimizing the production of biofuels from food crops is wrong and distracts us from the real solutions. This argument is basically calling for addressing world hunger by encouraging overproduction here in the U.S. (Less corn ethanol means more supply, more supply means lower prices -- or so the argument goes.) But overproduction in developed countries comes at a high cost to our environment, to farmers around the world, and ultimately to the economies of the countries with the most hungry. Overproduction is what we’ve had for decades, and it has crushed farmers in developing countries around the world. Subsidized overproduction and the resulting cheap food does trickle down to feed more people, but it’s not sustainable -- nor is it the most effective way to feed the poor.

We can, and must, move biofuels as quickly as possible to non-food biomass grown and harvested in ways that does not aggravate the competition for land; we have to do this both to fight global warming and to disentangle biofuels from food prices. But scapegoating biofuels just distracts us from the policies that move the big levers. I'm not a hunger or poverty policy expert, but it seems obvious to me that in the short term dramatically increased food aid is key. And in the mid- to long-term keys would include ag development aid, better nutrition policy here at home to change our diet, and reducing oil consumption through vehicle efficiency, VMT reduction, electrification of transportation, and getting biofuels from non-food crops.

U.S. consumption of meat and oil are ultimately the biggest culprits here. The idea that changing our biofuels policy is the only thing the most affluent country on earth can do to make sure the poorest have enough food is just an abdication of responsibility.

Philpott and I discuss biofuels

2008-04-04T18:08:10Z

Two weeks ago, I wrote about some misguided claims by David Pimentel and what I saw as overly broad and overly pessimistic views on biofuels from cellulosic biomass by Tom Philpott. Last week, Tom paid my blog here a visit and posed some reasonable questions and invited folks to what will hopefully be an informative debate on his blog on Grist. So let's have at it.

Rather than start with our points of disagreement, I'd like to start with some points that I hope that Tom and many of our readers will agree with because in the end these points are the reasons that I and NRDC continue to struggle with biofuels despite all the challenges and controversies. First and foremost, we need to stop global warming by stabilizing atmospheric GHG concentrations at the equivalent of less than 450 ppm CO2. For us here in the US, this means reducing our GHG pollution by 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. Furthermore, we have to do this in a way that ensures that the cure is not worse than the disease. In other words, we have to try to stop global warming while also addressing our other major environmental and social challenges and we can't afford to exacerbate those challenges.

This is a daunting challenge and our current path is not going to get us there. We cannot extrapolate forward our current rates of consumption and our current rates of technological improvement and expect to get to a sustainable future. We need important technological innovations and changes to our policies. What's more, there is no single technological innovation that will magically put us on a path to sustainability. We need innovations and changes across our economy.

The good news is that even analysts as conservative and mainstream as McKinsey and Co. believe we can be on the right path by 2030 at little or no cost to our economy as long as we start now. However, it takes aggressive action and requires a wide array of technologies.

1 Constant 2007 dollars

2 Billions of tons of CO2 equivalent eliminated per year relative to business as usual projections

Source: NRDC analysis partially extrapolated from McKinsey report; see www.marketinnovation.org

And this is probably even more true in the transportation sector as it is in the rest of the economy. Our current path domestically and internationally is wildly unsustainable with demand growing and efficiency deteriorating (until our recent victory on increasing CAFE). As a result, gasoline demand is expected to roughly double in the US by 2050 under BAU.

Up to here, I'm hoping that we're all mostly in agreement.

Our options to bend the GHG emissions curve associated with transportation are fairly straight forward: improve the efficiency of our vehicles, change our mode of transport to more efficient ones, travel less, and put lower carbon fuels into our cars, trucks, planes and other forms of transport. When we look at trying to reduce the transportation sector's emissions by 80% from 1990 levels by 2050 through these options, it's not easy to make the numbers add up. In the light-duty vehicle sector, one of the most aggressive scenarios that we have analyzed relies on improving our vehicle fuel economy three fold, cutting our VMT 20% and ramping up the use of electricity to where it drives 50% of all VMT. (For modeling purposes, we assume all vehicles are flex-fuel plug-ins hybrids that use electricity for 50% of their driving and E85 for the rest. To be clear, we don't care if it's this configuration of vehicles and we certainly don't care what fuel molecule ends up being used.) Even under this scenario we still see the need for about 60 billion gallons (on an ethanol basis) of truly low-carbon biofuels (e.g. about an 80% reduction from gasoline lifecycle GHG emissions) to provide about 9 1.4 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent GHG emission reductions. And even after that, the transportation sector is just barely carrying its weight in terms of providing emissions reductions.

(Note: 38 billion gallons on a gasoline equivalent basis equals 58 billion gallons on an ethanol basis because of the lower energy density of ethanol.)

What happens if these emissions reductions don't materialize from biofuels? Nothing, if we can get them from some other part of the transportation sector, but of course every other option faces technical and political challenges as well. Whether it is battery technologies, entrenched interests addicted to sprawl, or the challenges to rapidly scaling up renewable power and the associated transmission, no pathway is a technically and politically sure thing.

So what if these emission reductions don't materialize from the transportation sector at all? Again, nothing as long as we get it from some other sector, but again there are challenges everywhere we look. The bottom line is that we need lots of solutions and we need them all to provide as much pollution reduction as they can in a broadly sustainable way.

And that is why NRDC continues to struggle with biofuels. Not because I like ethanol or we like controversial and complicated issues, but because we're committed to stopping catastrophic climate change. To do that we can't afford to give up trying to figure out how to make potentially significant solutions work.

I'm going to leave off at this point and see if we're in agreement on the premise that we have to struggle hard to figure out how to make potentially significant solutions to the climate challenge work. There are perfectly valid questions about whether biofuels can technically and politically be made to be a solution (and I look forward to discussing them), but I want to make sure that we come to these questions with a shared sense of urgency around trying. We cannot afford blind optimism, but we must share a belief that we can and must over come enough of the technical and political challenges to the solutions to global warming to save our environment from ourselves.

Biogasoline and the search for renewable fuels that fit better

2008-03-26T22:10:10Z

Today Shell and a small biofuels start-up called Virent announced their collaboration on "biogasoline." According to the press release (here's the link to the free press kit):

Virent's BioFormingTM platform technology uses catalysts to convert plant sugars into hydrocarbon molecules like those produced at a petroleum refinery. Traditionally, sugars have been fermented into ethanol and distilled. These new ‘biogasoline’ molecules have higher energy content than ethanol (or butanol) and deliver better fuel efficiency. They can be blended seamlessly to make conventional gasoline or combined with gasoline containing ethanol. [emphasis added.]

I don't know anything about Virent's technology or what the "collaboration" with Shell really entails. (Apparently it has been going on for a year, so I'm not even clear what the news is that warrants a press release. For more on the business news angle, check out Cleantech.com. And here is some history from Cleantech blog and Biopact) But it's the last line of the quote above that I see as important.

While the technical challenges of dealing with ethanol's absorption of water and corrosiveness are eminently addressable, they do represent real costs. So it should surprise absolutely no one to see oil companies working hard to find renewable fuel molecules that fit into the existing system more easily. And, as I noted ages ago at the end of this post, this is great and should be warmly embraced by the biofuels industry and regulators alike.

We need to be wary of two things, though. First we need to test all new fuel molecules to make sure we address any unintended and currently unregulated emissions. Permeation of VOC from the fueling system and aldehyde emissions from ethanol are a perfect example of this. We need testing, and where necessary new regulations.

Second, we need to resist any calls to hold off on developing ethanol infrastructure while oil companies and startups work on these new molecules. The threat of having to invest in this infrastructure is one of main reasons that most oil companies will consider real investments in the biofuels sector.

The only other point of interest in the press release for me was the fact that Virent is using catalytic technologies to convert sugars to fuels--not gasification and not biotechnology. This goes to the point I made in this post about the explosion of different technology pathways currently being explored.

They haven't cracked the cellulosic conversion nut. They require water soluble carbohydrates; so someone else will have get the cellulose to that stage. In the end, who knows if this effort will pan out into something that is a better fit with our current infrastructure and has a better net energy balance as they claim? And what about water use and pollution and GHG emissions? But the more different pathways receiving real attention, the greater the chances are we'll find at least one that is a real improvement over the oil, ethanol, and biodiesel we have today.