Biofuels, Food Security and Land Grabbing

This week’s Science Saturday is about biofuels, a form of green energy that is made from plant matter. Our science geek Charlie Keeble tells a tale about how this remarkable innovation in green energy contains more harm to human development than it can benefit people. Biofuels are a carbon-neutral form of energy derived from plant matter such as palm oil, corn, rapeseed oil, soybeans, and ethanol from sugar cane. They are made in the exact same agricultural process of growing and processing food from crops on arable land.

The farmers sow the pellets or seeds and grow them naturally in the soil until they are ready for harvesting as biomass. Biomass is organisms such as plants and animals, and it’s the technical term for living organic matter like the ingredients for biofuel. Once the biomass has grown as plants their characteristics are rich in oily nutrients and they appear tough with strong colours, just ripe for making biofuel.

The process that involves converting these plants into biofuel comes in three stages and it applies to the form of the biofuel that is to be made. This three-stage process is for a high-temperature version. First, there is pyrolysis, which involves heating the plants in an oxygen-free environment at high temperatures of 500 – 700 degrees Celsius.

This breaks down the biomass into vapour, gas, and char. Once the char is removed, the vapours are cooled and condensed into a bio-crude liquid. The second step of the process is gasification. Here the biomass is exposed to a higher temperature range greater than 700 degrees Celsius. There is some oxygen present here though and it produces a biofuel gas known as synthesis gas (syngas), which is composed of mostly carbon monoxide and hydrogen.

The third and last stage here is used when working with wet biomass like algae. This process is called hydrothermal liquefaction. By heating water under moderate temperatures of 200 -350 degrees Celsius and elevating the pressure inside the hydrothermal chamber the biomass is converted into liquid bio-crude oil.

As an alternative fuel source for cars, they come in two forms: biodiesel and bioethanol. Bioethanol is an alcohol made from corn and sugar cane, while biodiesel is made using vegetable oils and animal fats. Now biofuels are already in use in British cars whereby they can be used in conventional petrol and diesel cars where they are blended with standard unleaded fuel, which contains 5% bioethanol. Regular diesel is also blended in the same way and contains up to 5% biodiesel. 

Biofuels are considered to be carbon neutral because the carbon dioxide emitted when they are burned is balanced by the carbon dioxide taken up by the atmosphere when the plants are grown. That means that when they are burned in the production process to make them, that amount of carbon dioxide produced is removed from the atmosphere by the crops from which they are grown.

However, they are not as carbon neutral as they claim to be. In Brazil, sugarcane has been actively grown for making bioethanol since the 1970s in order to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels.

However Brazilian farmers don’t bother to cultivate their sugarcane crops ethically because they prefer to burn their fields during the harvesting. They did this largely up until 2017 because of the geography of the land made it difficult for them to get the machinery they needed to prepare for growing a fresh set of crops. Fortunately, however they have passed laws banning the practice of burning sugarcane fields to reduce the massive amounts of greenhouse gasses they released.

This negated the carbon benefits of using bioethanol.  Furthermore, biofuels are not as sustainable as their proponents claim them to be. Although they can allow for motor vehicles to be fuelled without contributing to climate change the technology and production behind biofuels has some very negative effects on the world’s population.

Possibly worse than oil and gas production does for the environment. In fact, biofuels are linked to two major humanitarian problems: food insecurity and land grabbing. The fact that biofuels are grown in the ground, as they are made from plant matter, makes them an unsustainable fuel source and supply that affects food security. The amount of land that is used to farm biofuels is immeasurable and that land usage is displacing valuable farmland that could provide the food needed to feed an ever-growing population.

According to DEFRA the amount of land in the UK used to grow bioenergy in 2020 was 121 thousand hectares (about 300 thousand acres). Of the plants that were grown to make this bioenergy, it included 29 thousand hectares of wheat, 75 thousand hectares of maize, and 7 thousand hectares of sugar beet. That is a lot of useful food stocks that could be used to feed people precious amounts of nutrients in cereals and corn, and of course, sugar to give people energy in their food and drink.

This sounds like a terrible waste of good energy supplies for human consumption. The questions that we should ask about this use of agricultural products here is what makes it better for society: the diet and nutrition of human beings or the benefits of green bioenergy to reduce artificial pollution? It’s a case of being forced to choose between food or fuel.

Biofuel production is also linked to deforestation and land grabs in developing countries. There is a campaign group called Biofuelwatch who cautions the world about the technology of biofuel and that we should be careful about embracing this green energy source. They claim that it will lead to the expansion of industrial monocultures resulting in more land grabs and human rights abuses in developing countries. In developed geographical blocks like Europe and America they have got so little land left with which to make biofuels that corporations in the agricultural sector seek land elsewhere.

One of the biggest places for land grabbing to grow biomass is in Africa. Here property rights are weak and not well recognised by the courts because they are owned and worked by indigenous tribes who have worked the lands for generations long before the legal systems were brought into being.

In my university textbook, I looked at this cross-referenced chart showing the amount of land acquired in each region of the globe. In Africa most of the land there is acquired by foreign investors and real estate companies. 12.3 million hectares of land are owned by Asian nations including China, India, and South Korea, 3.7 million hectares by Western Asian such as oil-rich Gulf States like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, 6 million hectares by European nations, and 6.4 million hectares by African nations themselves. Some of which are in the business of biofuel production and that land acquisition and purpose is linked to rising food prices.

Demand for biofuels is driven not just because of the climate agendas of the global North but also by their constant speculation about fossil fuel reserves creating this rush for energy security. But if you like the way in which we are treating our crops as a fuel source instead of a food source it is not helping. The European Union had this target to make 10% of its transport from renewable sources by 2020 and in Britain, the government has set a target to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by 2030. Such political action like this has ramped up pressure to buy land in the global South where chronic malnutrition and poverty are still prevalent and this commitment has provoked controversy.

As this graph shows the amount of global land acquisitions between 2000-2010 is primarily focused on serving the demand for biofuel in the name of environmentalism. This is one of the less well-known evils of the green movement. Now Western corporations and wealthy Chinese and Arabic business people have been taking advantage of this situation.

One way they do it is to offer the African leaders their resources and modern agricultural technology to make the poor quality soils in their lands fertile using biochar. They offer this to the owners of the land through the government completely excluding the indigenous tribes and communities from the negotiating table in the process.

This land grabbing in these developing countries is heartbreaking and it represents a form of neo-colonialism where the do-gooders have gone and profited from poverty in third-world nations. Just because the environmental movement is doing good for the health of the planet doesn’t mean they also intend to save the human race from extinction.

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