Bio or bust?

Abstract

Last month, oil prices reached US$100 per barrel for the second time—the first time was in late 2007. Just a few weeks before, in early December, most representatives at the United Nations' Climate Change Conference in Bali pledged to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide further, and set new targets and limits to be implemented when the Kyoto Protocol ends in 2012. Caught between rising prices of crude oil and natural gas, and their commitment to stop global climate change by cutting the emission of greenhouse gases, many countries are now investing in the development and use of alternative and renewable energy sources to avoid their economies going ‘bust’. > …the growing demand for biofuel […] has raised concerns about the long‐term economic, environmental and social viability of alternative fuels Biofuels—bioethanol and biodiesel derived from plants—seem to be an elegant solution to this dilemma because they decrease dependency on fossil fuels and only return recently sequestered carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The governments of many industrialized and developing countries are therefore creating and expanding policies and research programmes to increase the production and use of biofuels. Nevertheless, the growing demand for biofuel to be produced from crops previously used for food has raised concerns about the long‐term economic, environmental and social viability of alternative fuels. In August 2007, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) sponsored a global conference, ‘Agricultural Biofuels: Research and Economics’ at the University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, MN, USA) to discuss these issues. Clearly, the current standards of technology and agricultural output are not sufficient to replace fossil fuels entirely. This challenge can ultimately only be met by new scientific and technological solutions that allow an increase in the production of biofuels without having a negative impact on the environment or food supply. Theoretically, biofuels could be produced from …