“As the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory has demonstrated, ethanol is an earth-friendly biofuel that reduces greenhouse gas emissions by an average of 34 percent over their its lifecycle, while advanced biofuels can reduce emissions by 100 percent or more over conventional gasoline”.
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Andrew Steer, president of the World Resources Institute, told the New York Times at the study’s publication that “many of the claims for biofuels have been dramatically exaggerated”.
Years of number crunching that had seemed to corroborate the climate benefits of American biofuels were starkly challenged in a science journal on Thursday, with a team of scientists using a new approach to conclude that the climate would be better off without them.
MI could better combat climate change by another method, DeCicco said.
DeCicco countered that all of his research is peer-reviewed, meaning other scientists in the field have, and will continue to, scrutinize it. “It’s just a question of how long you have to wait”. The same amount of CO2 is then returned to the atmosphere when the carbon in the crop is combusted for energy.
The environmental justification rests on the assumption that biofuels, as renewable alternatives to fossil fuels, are inherently carbon neutral because the carbon dioxide released when they are burned was derived from CO2 that the growing corn or soybean plants pulled from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. During growth they quickly absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and return the same amount of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere when the carbon crop is combusted for energy, he said.
Professor DeCicco countered that all of his research is peer-reviewed and that he has sought funding from more environmentally-oriented organisations but failed to raise the necessary cash. “Some of the fundamental questions about timescale are not scientific questions”.
The University of MI scientists dispensed with the timescale-based approach altogether, eliminating the need for policy decisions about which timeframes should be used. The latest study provides an overview of eight years of climate impacts of America’s biofuel sector.
The findings from the new approach were welcomed by Timothy Searchinger, a Princeton researcher who has been a vocal critic of bioenergy.
Searchinger said the approach developed in MI provides an “additional calculation” to help overcome the flawed assumption that climate pollution released when bioenergy burns does not matter.
Researchers and policymakers look at life-cycle analyses, accounting for all of the emissions created in the supply chains for respective fuels: With gasoline, it takes into account not just tailpipe emissions, but carbon emissions during oil drilling, transportation, fuel refining and other parts of the process.
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The researchers said their analysis showed that during the period when USA biofuel production rapidly ramped up, the increased carbon dioxide uptake by the crops was only enough to offset 37 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions due to biofuel combustion.
