A Fair Accounting of Greenhouse Gases For All Potential Transportation Fuels

It is troubling--and, at the same time, sadly amusing--that an enterprising reporter at USA Today has done more homework on the possible indirect effects of increased renewable electricity generation than scores of analysts at the über environmental agency known as the California Air Resources Board (CARB). Chris Hawley's 1,800-word article in the June 17 edition of the newspaper says more about the significant secondary effects associated with the increased use of windmills for power generation than the thousands of pages of analysis performed by CARB for the state's recently adopted Low Carbon Fuels Standard (LCFS).

You may recall that the LCFS, adopted in April, requires California fuel providers to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from transportation fuels by 10 percent by 2020. This necessitates that each transportation fuel be given a "carbon intensity score" that can be used by fuel providers to gauge the ability of different fuels to reduce GHG emissions relative to the high-carbon fuels being replaced (gasoline and diesel fuel). In determining the carbon intensity scores for a wide range of transportation fuels, CARB says it considered both direct GHG emissions associated with the production and use of the fuel as well as the indirect GHG effects that occur in the global marketplace as the result of the increased use of a particular fuel type. Think of these indirect emissions as the "ripple effects."

Here's the rub: CARB suggests the only fuels causing any indirect effects at all are crop-based biofuels. CARB suggests indirect GHG emissions should be charged to biofuels as the result of a macroeconomic construct known as indirect land use change. According to CARB's logic, a land use change occurs when farmland previously devoted to feed production is now used to produce biofuel crops, causing supplies of the displaced feed crops to be reduced. Then, the supply reduction causes prices to rise, which, in turn, stimulates increased feed production elsewhere in the world. If that production takes place on land formerly in non-agricultural uses, stored carbon is presumably released into the atmosphere from the land conversion and added to the biofuel's carbon intensity score.

So, under CARB's analysis, increasing the use of biofuels causes the indirect GHG effect of indirect land use change. But increased use of electricity from new windmills for electric vehicles, ramping up the use of natural gas for transportation, or using hydrogen as fuel for automobiles are assumed to have no indirect GHG or market-mediated effects. And by ignoring the tremendous indirect social, economic, and environmental costs of petroleum production and use, even oil itself is given a free ride in CARB's analysis. As a result of this biased, apples-to-oranges analysis, most biofuels available today are deemed by CARB to be slightly worse than gasoline or diesel in terms of GHG impacts.

Many stakeholders have vigorously challenged CARB's claim that it made a fair attempt to characterize and quantify the indirect effects of other fuels. Yet, CARB has remained reticent to such assertions, despite the agency's repeated failure to provide evidence that it made any serious effort to investigate the indirect effects of all fuels evenly. CARB's draft LCFS regulation incredulously states that, aside from biofuels-induced indirect land use change, "No other significant indirect effects that result in large GHG emissions have been identified that would substantially affect the LCFS framework for reducing the carbon intensity of transportation fuels." At the April hearing where the regulation was adopted, CARB's deputy executive officer even had the audacity to suggest the hunt for indirect effects of other fuels was akin to the hunt for nuclear weapons several years ago in Iraq. "Actually, we looked for them," the official said, referring to indirect effects. "I thought...it was kind of like the search for the weapons of mass destruction."

After reading Hawley's article in USA Today, it is abundantly clear that one place CARB absolutely did not look for indirect effects is Mexico's Isthmus of Tehuantepec. According to Hawley, U.S. and European energy companies are racing to install thousands of wind turbines in this agricultural area to take advantage of low costs and high average wind speeds. Hawley writes that "Nearly every day, another tower rises out of the countryside."

And while the rapid escalation of wind turbines in the area promises to pad the coffers of multi-national energy companies, it is taking a toll on the local economy and environment. As Hawley writes, "...the energy gold rush has also brought discord, as building crews slice through irrigation canals, divide pastures and cover crops with dust."

The article documents in detail many of the negative consequences resulting from the rush to build more wind turbines in the area. Some of the most compelling passages are below.

To support the huge generators, crews built gravel roads 50 feet across, hammered in pylons and poured 1,200 tons of concrete for each tower. Pads of gravel 100 feet long and 50 feet wide were dumped onto sorghum fields and grazing land to support the cranes.

Farmer Salvador Ordaz now has two roads cutting through his 16 acres of pasture and says part of the land is unusable because of dust and blocked irrigation lines. He has had to cut his herd to 10 cows from 30. "When you think of windmills, you just think of this one tower," Ordaz said. "But it affects a lot more land than that."

"People are not thinking about the long term," [farmer Alejo] Giron said. "Those generators will be making millions of dollars for the company, and they will be limiting what you can do with your land for 30, 40 years."

Enter the debate over indirect effects. Who will make up for the lost sorghum production that resulted from the construction of the roads and gravel pads? Where will Ordaz's lost pasture and the resulting decreased beef production be offset? In keeping with California's line of logic, those lost resources must be made up for somewhere else in the world. Will it be in the Amazon River basin or the Nigerian jungle, at the expense of sensitive ecosystems? Will the new roads built by the energy companies that now dissect the isthmus lead to additional urban or industrial development, further squeezing out cropland and forcing it somewhere else? Should the carbon emissions associated with these activities be charged to the end use of the electricity generated by the windmills in question? These are the types of questions that biofuels were subjected to in the California LCFS development process, while CARB turned a blind eye toward all other fuels, including wind-generated electricity.

The wind towers being erected on the faraway isthmus in Hawley's article are the same type of windmills that the state of California assumes will spring up across the western U.S. to provide an abundance of power to the millions of electric vehicles that the state believes will be humming along its highways in the very near future (never mind the possible substantial indirect environmental effects associated with electric vehicle lithium-ion batteries). So far, the state has failed miserably in examining the potential direct and indirect impacts of electricity from those wind towers, or any other non-biofuels for that matter.

Hawley's article is an excellent reminder that every decision we make as consumers of energy has indirect effects. While those effects are difficult--if not impossible--to identify and quantify with any degree of acceptable certainty, there is no debate that they exist .

Complexity aside, if policymakers and regulators are compelled to assess the indirect effects of one fuel, they must commit to making serious evaluations of the indirect effects of all fuels.

Comments

[FuelFarmer]

I find the "Big Corn Lobby" rhetoric to be increasingly trite and stale...and you never answered my question.

If I'm a factory owner paying two workers, I'm going to pay more money to the one that does more work and creates more output...I'm going to ensure that asset is well-supported so that it can continue to produce.

Again, I think there is a seat at the table for ALL renewable energy technologies, but I am growing really tired of the constant (and unsupported) assault on biofuels.

[WmC]

For anyone who thinks "the ethanol industry’s lead lobbyist" is an objective source of information, I've got some old shares in Enron I'd like to sell you.

[BannedNBoston]

LEGALIZE HEMP
8X More BTU's than corn
8X More biodiesel than soy or canola
6X More fiber than cotton
strongest root structure known
much less fertlizer required
200,000 TDI OWNERS WANT GREEN HEMP DIESEL!!!!!

[Biodiversivist]

Informative link, psaurian. Especially the pie chart showing ethanol sucking up just about all renewable energy funds, and it isn't even renewable energy! Seattle and Berkeley have both dropped biodiesel based on the same CARB study that is causing Dineen so much heartburn:

http://biodiversivist.blogspot.com/2009/06/seattle-drops-crop-based-biodiesel.html

It took an area the size all of the cropland in Indiana last year plus an additional 5000 square miles (20% of our corn crop, and that is accounting for distillers grain wastes) to replace less than 5% of our gasoline supply last year. The land used for windmill pads and roads when compared to the land used for biofuels is like comparing a postage stamp to a football field. That in a nutshell, is why nobody is taking this latest argument from the Renewable Fuels Association seriously.

Modern industrial agriculture is by its nature an ecological disaster. It is a necessary evil to stay fed. A cornfield is as biologically impoverished as a mall parking lot. It is a vast area of land that had to be sterilized of all other lifeforms to plant a single genetically modified plant. It is immoral to expand it for liquid fuel for old car technology that throws 80% of the energy in a tank of gas away as waste heat.

[Photofarm]

WRONG, what a load of baloney.

[Photofarm]

There land use argument from crops is very flawed. Take ethanol from corn, they don't credit the DDG's. ( distillars grains ) that are feed to livestock. They also don't want to credit soybeans nitrogen fixing ability that reduces corn N needs by 40 to 60 lbs per acre.

The rain forest in Brazil is cleared for the value of its lumber, and the land is not used for crop production, but instead is put in grass for grazing.

[psaurian]

So Bob, you think there is inequity how wind energy's indirect land use impacts are calculated vs. ethanol's profound impact? If we're going to talk about inequity in terms of America's energy future, don't you think you need to address the gross inequity that ethanol has against all other forms of energy the federal government classifies as renewable?

This report shows how ethanol gobbles up fully two thirds of all the federal subsidies for renewable energy --- including those for wind, solar and geothermal.

http://www.ewg.org/reports/Ethanols-Federal-Subsidy-Grab-Leaves-Little-For-SolarWind-And-Geothermal-Energy+

That's the real inequity. A fair accounting would be for wind and solar to get a bigger piece of the federal pie, but ethanol already hogs the vast amount of support.

[FuelFarmer]

Hey psaurian,

Could it be the reason biofuels get a "dispropor­tianately" larger share of federal support is because they provide an order of magnitude more energy to the transportation sector than any other renewables?

Why give wind and solar bigger pieces of the federal subsidy pie when they are contributing much smaller slices to the energy pie (and creating fewer jobs)?

By the way, I am a huge supporter of wind and solar and have been supportive of the installation of several turbines in my area.

[KillTheMessenger]

We are giving biofules a disproportionately larger share of federal support because they have a disproportionately larger and more efficient lobby in Washington than other renewables.

Please let's keep things on the real level here. Funding, in this case, has nothing to do with effect, and it has everything to do with political contributions.