Food and Fuel

In 1798, Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus wrote that, if left unchecked, population growth would outpace agricultural production and catastrophic famines that would rock humanity would ensue. Fortunately, the mechanization of agriculture proved him wrong and in recent decades, agricultural surpluses have been the norm in many countries, not the exception. But when food-prices skyrocketed in 2008, sparking protests around the world, the alarm bells went off again, and policies promoting biofuels took the heat. Understandably so, as biofuel production stands in direct competition with food production.

Despite the bad rap they have had in the press in recent years, biofuel’s promise of being a low-carbon-footprint fuel source that works with today’s technology makes its development an active field of investigation. The race is on to find sustainable ways of producing biofuels, especially since the EU has pledged to cover ten per cent of transportation fuels using renewable sources by 2020.

Professor Edgard Gnansounou, at the Bioenergy and Energy Planning Research Group, has made it his goal to show that the competition between food and fuel doesn’t have to be a zero sum game. “We are looking into ways of producing biofuels that are fully compatible with the principles of sustainable development,” he says. “I believe that it is possible.”

Biofuels have been under development since the advent of the diesel engine, but their heyday came in the 1970s in Brazil. Drawing on Brazil’s bountiful supply of sugar cane, extracting the sugar sirup, and fermenting it with bacteria, billions of liters of bio-ethanol are produced every year to propel the country’s cars. Today, in the name of greenhouse gas reduction, corn, oil palms, jatropha, and a variety of other plants are cultivated around the world with the sole purpose of producing biofuels – bio-diesel or bio-ethanol – to reduce the carbon footprint of vehicle transport.

“While first generation biofuels stand in direct competition with the food production, we are studying technical, social, and environmental impact and feasibility of a second generation of biofuels,” explains Gnansounou. These so-called second generation biofuels are produced using stems, husks, and other types of plant residues that we can barely chew.

“One of our projects centers on palm oil plantations in Brazil, where the palm oil trees are used in reforestation programs. The fruits they provide are used in first generation biofuel production. The empty fruit bunches provide the biomass needed to produce second generation biofuels,” he says. By combining both approaches, biofuel yield could be increased without having to augment plantation size.

For the time being, second generation biofuel production is still in a pilot phase. The sugars that it relies on are harder to get to, typically trapped in ligno-cellulose, the hard material that makes wood wood. And while it works in the lab, some hurdles still have to be cleared before the process can be commercialized.

One of the main challenges is economic viability. A potential solution: the biorefinery. Much like a petroleum refinery, a bio-refinery maximizes the value that can be extracted from the raw material, in this case, biomass. Biofuels could be made more affordable by selling expensive by-products to the pharmaceutical or cosmetic industries.

A second solution takes advantage of economies of scale, as increasing the size of production facilities decreases the cost of biofuel production. But with that come problems related to logistics. Only by combining plant residues from several plantations does it become possible to benefit from these economies of scale. But transporting the residues requires fossil fuels consumption and negatively impacts the biofuel’s carbon footprint.

“In July 2012, we had the kick-off meeting of Swiss-Brazilian project that aims at addressing these and many other practical questions that stand in the way of sustainable biofuel production,” says Gnansounou, who, thanks to this project, will soon have a handful of students working away on these issues.

Contrary to Malthus, Gnansounou is confident that the planet has the resources to grow crops for both food and fuel, since he sees the bottleneck not in agricultural potential, but rather in governance. But unraveling those issues is a whole other story.