 | By Abby RussoCommunications Intern |
The following blog was written by one of our Summer 2017 interns. For more information about our internships, visit our internship page here.
After Governor McAuliffe’s executive directive to reduce carbon emissions, energy sources and their carbon footprints have been in the spotlight. Many new energy sources discussed are actually in widespread use already. For example, you might have noticed while pumping gas that the gas contains 10 percent ethanol, one type of biofuel.
What is a biofuel? A biofuel is any fuel made from living matter, which makes fossil fuels like fracked gas ancient biofuels. Biofuels are most often used for generating power and transportation. Wood chips and pellets generate electricity at power plants and other biofuels like biodiesel, made from palm oil and sugarcane, are used to power vehicles. In order to create energy, the sugars and starches in plants are broken down to create fuel through an intense refining process. While the refined material can be used for energy, an immense amount of the biomass is required to produce just a small amount of energy.
Corn is most notably used to produce biofuels even though refining corn it isn’t a wildly efficient way of creating fuel. Why is this? Corn is crazy cheap to buy, easy to grow, and widely cultivated across the United States. The federal government subsidizes the growth of corn and production of ethanol, so growers have an incentive to keep producing corn despite the fact that it isn’t energy efficient or clean. Because the first presidential caucus is held in Iowa, a state known as the king of corn in the US, presidential candidates advocate for corn subsidies, driving the production of ethanol post-election.
In Virginia where growing corn is a little less common, power companies burn wood to generate electricity. They use “slash” wood from timber companies, the portions of trees unusable for timber or furniture. Opponents of burning wood for electricity argue that using wood could lead to unsustainable levels of logging to continue powering the plants. Dominion Energy currently powers three of its former coal plants using this method of burning waste wood.
While biofuels are renewable, they aren’t necessary clean. Proponents of biofuels claim that their use would produce a lower net amount of carbon pollution than burning of fossil fuels because while the plants for the fuels are growing, they absorb carbon dioxide. Their absorption of carbon dioxide should effectively offset the carbon pollution created when the biofuels burn. Unfortunately, the refining process of biofuels uses vast amounts of energy in the form of fracked gas and coal in order to process the plants into fuel. Because of the energy required to grow plants and refine them in addition to the carbon pollution emitted when biofuels are burned, they often have a larger carbon footprint than fossil fuels.
Clearing land in order to grow materials for biofuels results in another downside to their use. The destruction of other plants acting as carbon stores releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Clearing some lands, like bogs and rainforests which act as carbon sinks, can be even more destructive than clearing others. Because of this, growing palms for biodiesel results in even more carbon dioxide being released. More than that, the growing global population creates a demand for land for agriculture and other necessities as opposed to biofuels who growth requires large spaces for small returns.
To make more efficient biofuels, research has yielded proposed alternatives. First, scientists have proposed that using different plants with higher cellulose content be more efficient because they could use more of the plant. They have also proposed using crops that require less land to grow in addition to agricultural waste, like crop residue, that does not require extra land at all.
Some people have proposed using the land set aside for growing biofuels instead to produce solar energy because it is a far more productive use of the land in generating electricity. Per hectare, solar cells can produce 200 to 300 times more energy than the growth of biofuels. Unlike biofuels, solar is also a clean source of energy.
All in all, the use of biofuels may have some benefits, but there are cleaner sources of renewable energy available to collectively start reducing our carbon footprint instead furthering research on what appears to be a fairly inefficient source.