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2009-2010 Post-Doctoral Research Fellowships
Research Plan
How Different Biofuel Throughputs Compare Against Credible Performance Levels
Biofuels have been hailed as a powerful solution to the environmental problems created by fossil fuels. A closer look, however, has begun to reveal significant—and at times alarming—impacts of this new industry. Clearly, not all biofuels are created equal. Furthermore, the biggest impact from the production of biofuels may not be in their net GHG or energy impacts, but rather larger impacts associated with the production of any primary agricultural products.
The work of WWF and many companies themselves suggests that 85-99% of their most significant impacts are outside their control—literally outside of the box, e.g. their manufacturing and distribution systems. The most significant impacts are in fact upstream—in the production of raw materials. The production of any commodity has hundreds if not thousands of impacts that can be identified. Most multi-stakeholder groups, however, have found that it is relatively easy to achieve consensus about the 6-10 most significant environmental impacts, regardless of the crop. In the dozen or so commodity roundtables convened by WWF, the most significant impacts tend to fall into three groups—environmental, social, and economic. The most significant environmental impacts are direct habitat loss, indirect loss through displacement, soil (health and erosion), water (take and effluent), toxic chemicals, N, net carbon, and net energy.
To better understand the impacts of producing biofuels, WWF is hosting a symposium in November in order to better understand the global range of impacts for a single product such as sugarcane. Under what conditions are the impacts of producing ethanol from sugarcane acceptable? For example, how much water, N, soil erosion does it take to make a liter of ethanol from sugarcane? What is the range of sugarcane production from better to worse in regards to the key impacts?
Similarly, how different are the averages of different throughputs (e.g. corn, rape, palm oil, sugarcane, jatropha, etc.) when compared to one another? What can we say about acceptable impacts? Which throughputs, produced under which conditions would tend to meet acceptable performance levels? And then there is the issue of second generation biofuels—how do they stack up?
We would like the Biofuels Post Doc to pick up the work of the symposium and begin to identify individuals and groups that can help fill in the data gaps. For WWF, credible biofuels policies and investments should be based on credible science. Today, while we know that some throughputs are better than others under certain conditions, we simply do not have the data to compare them credibly much less to defend a position of which to support and which to oppose on scientific grounds.
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