From the BBC article wrote:The grain required to fill the petrol tank of a Range Rover with ethanol is sufficient to feed one person per year. Assuming the petrol tank is refilled every two weeks, the amount of grain required would feed a hungry African village for a year.
Much of the fuel that Europeans use will be imported from Brazil, where the Amazon is being burned to plant more sugar and soybeans, and Southeast Asia, where oil palm plantations are destroying the rainforest habitat of orangutans and many other species. Species are dying for our driving.
The expansion of biofuels would increase monoculture farming.
If ethanol is imported from the US, it will likely come from maize, which uses fossil fuels at every stage in the production process, from cultivation using fertilisers and tractors to processing and transportation. Growing maize appears to use 30% more energy than the finished fuel produces, and leaves eroded soils and polluted waters behind.
Meeting the 5.75% (EU) target would require, according to one authoritative study, a quarter of the EU's arable land.
Using ethanol rather than petrol reduces total emissions of carbon dioxide by only about 13% because of the pollution caused by the production process, and because ethanol gets only about 70% of the mileage of petrol.
Food prices are already increasing. With just 10% of the world's sugar harvest being converted to ethanol, the price of sugar has doubled; the price of palm oil has increased 15% over the past year, with a further 25% gain expected next year.
Little wonder that many are calling biofuels "deforestation diesel", the opposite of the environmentally friendly fuel that all are seeking.
With so much farmland already taking the form of monoculture, with all that implies for wildlife, do we really want to create more diversity-stripped desert?
Others are worried about the impacts of biofuels on food prices, which will affect especially the poor who already spend a large proportion of their income on food.
This is from 2006 but pretty much nothing has changed. The points are still valid as far as I can see. In particular newer studies have shown that using arable land, fresh water and large monoculture plantation to replace fossil fuels would
- massively increase erosion
- destroy arable land by monoculture and agro chemicals
- endanger deep ground water integrity
- exceed the available fresh water resources
- destroy wild life and cultivation plant diversity
- promote pest species
The proper way to produce bio fuel is to use waste bio mass and sewage in bios gas plants, convert wood in a sustainable way (if economically feasible), use algae with sea water for feed bio mass and similar schemes that do not negatively affect the arable land, the food production and the fresh water resources.
Apart from that increasing fuel efficiency and saving fuel is still having the biggest potential. Fuel that you do not use is the best alternative.
So the agenda for road traffic should include
- improve combustion efficiency of ICE
- avoid throttling losses
- improve efficiency of power train
- reclaim brake energy (KERS)
- reclaim exhaust energy (turbo)
- reclaim heat energy by secondary thermodynamic process
- reduce vehicle weight
- reduce aerodynamic drag
- improve vehicle occupancy
- avoid unnecessary traffic
- reduce unnecessary speed
It is also important to improve battery technology in order to use more electric vehicles. Stationary electricity production from fossil fuel hits 60% efficiency compared to under 30% in typical ICE driven cars. So electric vehicles use less fossile fuel than ICE powered cars. Power stations can also quench CO2 back into empty oil and gas fields.
