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Biofuels may be worse than coal and oil: experts

London: Using biofuels made from corn, sugar cane and soy could have a greater environmental impact than burning fossil fuels, according to experts. Although the fuels themselves emit fewer greenhouse gases, they all have higher costs in terms of biodiversity loss and destruction of farmland.

The problems of climate change and the rising cost of oil have led to a race to develop environmentally-friendly biofuels, such as palm oil or ethanol derived from corn and sugar cane. The EU has proposed that 10% of all fuel used in transport should come from biofuels by 2020 and the emerging global market is expected to be worth billions of dollars a year.

But the new fuels have attracted controversy. “Regardless of how effective sugar cane is for producing ethanol, its benefits quickly diminish if carbon-rich tropical forests are being razed to make the fields, thereby causing vast greenhouse-gas emission increases,” Jorn Scharlemann and William Laurance, of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, wrote in Science on Friday .

“Such comparisons become even more lopsided if the full environmental benefits of tropical forests — for example, for biodiversity conservation, hydrological functioning, and soil protection — are included.”

Efforts to work out which crops are most environmentally friendly have, until now, focused only on the amount of greenhouse gases a fuel emits when it is burned. Scharlemann and Laurance highlighted a more comprehensive method, developed by Rainer Zah of the Empa Research Institute in Switzerland, which can take total environmental impacts — such as loss of forests and farmland and effects on biodiversity — into account.

In a study of 26 biofuels the Swiss method showed that 21 fuels reduced greenhouse-gas emissions by more than 30% compared with gasoline when burned. But almost half of the biofuels had greater total environmental impacts than fossil fuels. These included fuels such as US corn ethanol and cane ethanol .

Biofuels that fared best were those produced from waste products such as recycled cooking oil, as well as ethanol from grass or wood. Scharlemann and Laurance also pointed to “perverse”’ government initiatives that had resulted in unintended environmental impacts.— © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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