Monday, December 28th, 2009

In a forthcoming article1 in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Val Smith and colleagues describe why biofuels produced from algae have many benefits:
They also point out an interesting pitfall:
1Smith, V. et al (in press) The ecology of algal biodiesel production. Trends in Ecology and Evolution.
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sandialabs/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Posted in biofuels, energy, solutions, sustainability, technology | 3 Comments »
Saturday, December 5th, 2009

In this week’s issue of Science, Jerry Melillo and colleagues investigate1 what kinds of impacts might arise from changing land use to grow more cellulosic biofuel crops. If you think about it, the switch to biofuels could have a big impact on greenhouse gas emissions—and not in a good way. For instance, clearing a forest or pastureland to grow a biofuel crop could cause a net release of carbon from the ecosystem, as plant growth changes, biomass is lost, and soil decomposition increases.
Using a model of the world economy coupled to a terrestrial ecosystem model, they considered two cases:
What did they find?
Posted in biofuels, technology | No Comments »
Friday, October 23rd, 2009

Palm oil has garnered a lot of news recently. It’s an ingredient in many processed foods and, increasingly, is being used to make biodiesel fuel.
One initial concern was the destruction of tropical rainforests and peatlands to create palm oil plantations. To the extent that these plantations are leading to habitat destruction in places like Indonesia, this threatens species like the orangutan.
In this week’s early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (open access), a team addressed a second potential problem: air pollution, specifically ground-level ozone production.
The news about ozone is potentially confusing, so let me start with a quick primer:
The PNAS article indicates that ozone production is a growing threat in palm plantations, which show higher temperatures and levels of VOCs and nitric oxides than adjacent rainforests.
Although the level of ozone in palm plantations is not yet at a level that threatens health, the team used a model of ozone production to suggest that if nitric oxide emissions were to reach levels seen in the developed Western world (which may be expected with further development and auto use), this could lead to ozone concentrations exceeding 100 ppb, which is considered an emergency air quality event.
Bottom line: In tropical regions, we need to think of how to balance economic development, biofuel production, habitat protection, and–now– human health. To the extent that processed foods and biofuel production are driven largely by consumption in industrialized countries, we share in the responsibility of dealing with this issue.
Already, some companies like Whole Foods have banned unsustainably produced palm oil to combat habitat destruction, but this doesn’t solve the new issue of air pollution. The article suggests that new varieties of palm plants that emit much lower amounts of VOCs could solve this problem. That’s good news.
Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahvega/ / CC BY 2.0
Tags: Indonesia, orangutan, ozone, palm oil
Posted in biofuels, pollutants | 1 Comment »
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
There’s an interesting article in Friday’s issue of Science by a team of ecologists and environmental scientists arguing that the way we think about biofuels is flawed and can potentially lead to bad outcomes in mitigating climate change.
Here’ s the issue: When we think of using, say, wood from forests or grasses from grasslands for energy, we normally think of this process as being carbon neutral–i.e., the carbon released when we burn the wood/grass will be taken back up by the regenerating forest/grassland. No net change in atmospheric CO2. At face value, this sounds like a great strategy for dealing with atmospheric CO2.
However, the authors indicate that the carbon accounting system in the Kyoto protocol, EU carbon trading system, and developing U.S. cap and trade plans makes a mistake in how biofuels are handled. Specifically, because of the carbon neutrality of biofuels, the carbon accounting system simply ignores (1) the release of carbon to the atmosphere from biofuel burning and (2) the movement of carbon from the atmosphere back into regenerating forests and grasslands (or other biofuel crop). At first glance, this appears to make sense: If burning biofuels is carbon neutral, just ignore the release and uptake of carbon since they cancel one another out.
There are two major problems with this–one ecological and another economic:
Tags: biofuel, carbon neutral
Posted in biofuels, climate change science | 2 Comments »