Environmental Impacts

Most mainstream environmental groups support biofuels as a significant step toward slowing or stopping global climate change. However, biofuel production can threaten the environment if it is not done sustainably.

Biofuels produce greenhouse gas emissions during their manufacture. The source of these emissions are: fertilisers and agricultural processing, transportation of the biomass, processing of the fuels, and transport and delivery of biofuels to the consumer. Some biofuel production processes produce far fewer emissions than others; for example sugar cane cultivation requires fewer fertiliser inputs than corn cultivation, therefore sugar cane bioethanol reduces greenhouse gas emissions more effectively than corn derived bioethanol. However, given the appropriate agricultural techniques and processing strategies, biofuels can provide emissions savings of at least 50% when compared to fossil fuels such as diesel and petroleum.

The increased manufacture of biofuels will require increasing land areas to be used for agriculture. Second generation biofuel processes can ease the pressure on land, because they can use waste biomass, and existing (untapped) sources of biomass such as crop residues and potentially even marine algae.

In some regions of the world, a combination of increasing demand for food, and increasing demand for biofuel, is causing deforestation and threats to biodiversity. The best reported example of this is the expansion of oil palm plantations in Malaysia and Indonesia, where rainforest is being destroyed to establish new oil palm plantations. It is an important fact that 90% of the palm oil produced in Malaysia is used by the food industry Malaysian Palm Oil Council; therefore biofuels cannot be held solely responsible for this deforestation. There is a pressing need for sustainable palm oil production for the food and fuel industries; palm oil is used in a wide variety of food products. The Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels is working to define criteria, standards and processes to promote sustainably produced biofuels. Palm oil is also used in the manufacture of detergents, and in electricity and heat generation both in Asia and around the world (the UK burns palm oil in coal-fired power stations to generate electricity).

Significant acreage is likely to be dedicated to sugar cane in future years as demand for ethanol increases worldwide. The expansion of sugar cane plantations will place pressure on environmentally-sensitive native ecosystems including rainforest in South America. In forest ecosystems, these effects themselves will undermine the climate benefits of alternative fuels, in addition to representing a major threat to global biodiversity.

Although biofuels are generally considered to improve net carbon output, biodiesel and other fuels do produce local air pollution, including nitrogen oxides, the principle cause of smog

To be informed of the complete facts, you need to remember that “biodiesel” (FAME) has an obscure carbon footprint.This fuel actually carries an alarmingly high amount of CO₂ concealed in its molecular structure, in the form of highly oxidized carbon at the “ester linkage”.When you burn biodiesel, extra CO₂ is simply released to the environment, with a negligible tradeoff in terms of heat or work output. As a result, biodiesel produces 14 to 20% more CO₂ per BTU than conventional petroleum diesel.

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