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  Growing Crops for Fuel: Thanksgiving in the Gas Tank

Growing Crops for Fuel Thanksgiving in the Gas Tank

By Christian Wüst

Part 7: Where Is All this Land?

Not unlike oil, gas and coal reserves, the world's arable land is distributed very unevenly. In Japan, where there are 25 inhabitants per acre of farmland, growing energy plants would be ecological hara-kiri.

Mongolia leads the earth in the amount of arable land per inhabitant. At 50 hectares per inhabitant, its vast plains seem to offer the key to agrarian oil sheikdom. But most of the country's land is barren pasture, which isn't likely to produce record harvests.

Germany, on the other hand, with five inhabitants per hectare, could at best qualify as a rural micro-emirate. Scheffer recently calculated Germany's best potential energy harvest. Scheffer's generous estimates give Germany 4 million hectares (9.8 million acres) of farmland that could be used to produce energy plants, plus another 4.5 million hectares (11.1 million acres) of green space and protected land, as well as 10 million hectares (24.7 million acres) of forests and brush suitable for harvesting scrap wood. After adding in all the liquid manure, organic waste, recyclable wood and industrial waste, Scheffer arrives at a total of 85 million liters of oil equivalent. That would be enough to satisfy slightly more than 20 percent of Germany's primary energy demand.

This calculation reveals the utopian nature of the notion that a densely populated, industrialized country could transform itself into a self-sufficient producer of bio-energy. Even a noticeable change in trends can only function through drastic reductions in consumption.

The auto industry's disgrace

However, nothing of the sort seems to be emerging in the current development. Automobile companies are following in the wake of the young biogas industry and use BtL and other green technologies to portray their thirsty products as more environmentally friendly than they really are.

Since the vision of clean hydrogen technology has evaporated, the auto industry has felt an acute need to explain itself. It has invested millions in the development of fuel cell cars, which would convert the lightest element in the periodic table into propulsion without emitting any exhaust gases.

This year BMW is introducing the first car that runs on both gasoline and hydrogen. But it's a luxury car in the company's 7 Series with a thirsty 12-cylinder engine -- hardly intended to contribute to solving the central existential question surrounding this type of fuel.

That fundamental question is simple: Where is this much-touted hydrogen supposed to come from?

The long-favored method of producing hydrogen from water using electricity generated with renewable energies remains a pipe dream. Electricity from renewable sources is the world's most costly source of energy, and hydrogen production would be one of the most inefficient ways to use it. For this reason, energy experts at the Wuppertal Institute see the forced launching of a hydrogen economy over the next 30 or 40 years as "ecologically unadvisable."

Moreover, not a single oil company has taken any serious steps to develop a distribution network for hydrogen. Car and truck makers, long fixated on this development, have been left high and dry when it comes to hydrogen. So fuel derived from plants is actually coming at a welcome moment.

Volkswagen and Mercedes have become "strategic partners" of biogas pioneers like Choren and Iogen, and they play the eco-patrons at joint press conferences, without actually investing much in the new technologies.

The auto industry is adept at using the politically purifying effect of plant-based fuels to extract itself from the disgrace of not having lived up to its promises. Europe's auto companies had assured the European Commission that they would reduce the carbon dioxide emissions of their products to 140 grams per kilometer, on average, by 2008. This would correspond to an average fuel consumption of six liters per 100 kilometers (or fuel efficiency of about 33 mpg).

By making this promise they successfully warded off planned legislation that would have imposed an upper limit for fuel consumption, which governments hoped to use to simply refuse to register notorious gas-guzzlers. This would have essentially banished the most profitable vehicle types, such as large SUVs, from the market.

But the auto industry will never be able to keep its promise, especially with popular large SUVs and powerful cars forcing down the average. The next hurdle -- reducing CO2 emissions to 120 grams by 2012 -- also seems insurmountable.

The European Commission has already raised the target value to 130 grams, citing new rules that require biofuels to be added to gasoline. By 2010, fossil fuels in all EU member states will be required to contain 5.75 percent biofuels, or about 27 billion liters.

Although the Germans are already approaching this goal, European-wide production lies at barely one-fifth of the target value. What is more, that production consists exclusively of refined biofuels produced using inefficient first-generation production methods. These methods are at best suited as a moral sedative for an energy-hungry society, one that wants to do everything to be without sin -- everything but conserve.

Correction Notice: Several errors in metric conversions have been corrected in this story.

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