Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Dan Piller

"The competition in the seed industry will guarantee those higher yields," Ted Crosbie said at the Biobased Industry Outlook Conference at Iowa State University.

Timothy Searchinger of Princeton University, who has criticized the use of prime farmland to grow crops for fuel, responded: "I hope to God Ted is right about increased crop yields. If he`s not, we`ll have to cut down much of the rain forests in the world just to grow food."

Searchinger, a lawyer formerly associated with the Environmental Defense Fund, roiled the biofuels industry earlier this year with a paper that asserted that the production of ethanol would double the amount of greenhouse emissions during the next 30 years.

He argued that with increased corn production farmers will use more of diesel and natural gas, thus increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

Plus, "to produce biofuels, farmers can directly plow up more forest or grassland, which releases to the atmosphere much of the carbon previously stored in plants and soils through decomposition or fire," Searchinger`s report stated.

Searchinger acknowledged that his research is unlikely to make him popular in the Midwest.

"But I think that Ted Crosbie and Iowa farmers are doing a good thing by feeding the world," Searchinger said. "They should keep doing it. They should not use prime farmland to produce crops for biofuels."

ISU`s Bioeconomy Conference this year came as the food-vs.- fuel debate over biofuels has put ethanol on the political defensive. Record high corn prices have stimulated criticism from U.S. livestock and grocery interests, aid organizations, Third World nations and others who say biofuels share the blame for rising food costs.

"We have $100 per barrel oil, and we`re moving toward the equivalent of $100 per barrel food," said David Tilman of the University of Minnesota, who also spoke at the conference. "How many people can afford that?"

Crosbie, who grew up on an Iowa farm, said the United States can expect to see corn yields of 25 billion bushels within the next quarter century, a yield almost double the 13.1 billion bushels produced last year. At the same time, he said, more nations will become self-sufficient in corn production thanks to better corn genetics and crop production techniques.

He said ethanol has become a "whipping post," but added "if the economics of ethanol work and if there continues to be a need for renewable fuel, it won`t matter how many scientific articles are written."

Stephen Long of the University of Illinois, who has done pioneering research on switchgrass and miscanthus to replace corn for ethanol production, was sympathetic to corn farmers.

"Five years ago, there were large surpluses of corn and U.S. farmers were accused of dumping those surpluses onto Third World economies, hurting local farmers," Long said. "Today, the situation is reversed. The surpluses are gone and the U.S. farmers still are being blamed."

Long said the question is far from settled on how biofuels will affect global warming. "There are remarkably few measurements on the exchange of biofuels and greenhouse gases," Long said.

But he warned that "global climate change may be coming faster than we think."

Charles Wyman of the University of California at Riverside, a longtime researcher and promoter of cellulosic ethanol, warned that government subsidies alone aren`t enough to sustain the industry.

"Eventually, you need private investment and investors are always afraid that the government will change its mind and take the subsidies away," Wyman said. "Beware of the `valley of death` for new technologies as they emerge from their beginning stages and find it hard to attract capital."

John Regalbuto of the University of Illinois-Chicago said advances in catalysts can produce a new generation of petroleum-based biofuels that are more environmentally friendly and also get better mileage than ethanol.

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