I just wrote an article about cellulose ethanol and Iogen Corp.

http://www.carlist.com/autonews/2006/autonews_254.html

I was also on ABC radio with Jeff Passmore of Iogen Corp. You can hear it at

http://www.carlist.com/wabc_radio/240206/240206.html

Also, many of the newer approaches to making biodiesel and ethanol use crop residue that might otherwise be burned or composted, while production using corn and other crops that would be ideal for animal feed leaves behind a mash that can still be used as a high-nutrient feed for animals. Agreed, if we’re heading to a point where there’s no more gasoline/diesel and ALL vehicles must run on biofuel then it’s not sustainable, but that day is a long, long way off and becomes longer the more we supplement fossil-fuels with biofuels and rely more on emission-free grid power.

I don’t think you should completely rule out biofuels by taking an extreme view of the situation based on scenarios that may not present a problem for a 100 years.

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/11/23/feeding-cars-not-people/

Feeding Cars, Not People

December 12, 2004

By George Monbiot

With the main point that:

“To run our cars and buses and lorries on biodiesel, in other words, would require 25.9m hectares. There are 5.7m in the United Kingdom.(8) Switching to green fuels requires four and half times our arable area. Even the EU’s more modest target of 20% by 2020 would consume almost all our cropland.

If the same thing is to happen all over Europe, the impact on global food supply will be catastrophic: big enough to tip the global balance from net surplus to net deficit. If, as some environmentalists demand, it is to happen worldwide, then most of the arable surface of the planet will be deployed to produce food for cars, not people.

This prospect sounds, at first, ridiculous. Surely if there was unmet demand for food, the market would ensure that crops were used to feed people rather than vehicles? There is no basis for this assumption. The market responds to money, not need. People who own cars have more money than people at risk of starvation. In a contest between their demand for fuel and poor people’s demand for food, the car-owners win every time. Something very much like this is happening already. Though 800 million people are permanently malnourished, the global increase in crop production is being used to feed animals: the number of livestock on earth has quintupled since 1950.(9) The reason is that those who buy meat and dairy products have more purchasing power than those who buy only subsistence crops.

Green fuel is not just a humanitarian disaster; it is also an environmental disaster. Those who worry about the scale and intensity of today’s agriculture should consider what farming will look like when it is run by the oil industry. Moreover, if we try to develop a market for rapeseed biodiesel in Europe it will immediately develop into a market for palm oil and soya oil. Oilpalm can produce four times as much biodiesel per hectare as rape, and it is grown in places where labour is cheap. Planting it is already one of the world’s major causes of tropical forest destruction. Soya has a lower oil yield than rape, but the oil is a by-product of the manufacture of animal feed. A new market for it will stimulate an industry which has already destroyed most of Brazil’s cerrado (one of the world’s most biodiverse environments) and much of its rainforest.”