Energy Tribune

Prior to February 7, few energy watchers were familiar with Tim Searchinger. But as the lead author of an article in Science that appeared on that date, concluding that corn-based ethanol and other biofuels likely produce far more greenhouse gases than gasoline, Searchinger was suddenly being quoted in major media outlets all over the world.

Searchinger and his eight co-authors found that when accounting for land-use changes, corn ethanol production “nearly doubles greenhouse emissions over 30 years and increases greenhouse gases for 167 years.” They also found that “biofuels from switchgrass, if grown on U.S. corn lands, increase emissions by 50 percent.” Searchinger is currently a research scholar at Princeton. He spent 17 years as an attorney at the Environmental Defense Fund; he graduated from Amherst College and holds a J.D. from Yale Law School. He exchanged e-mails with Robert Bryce in mid-February.

ET: When we talked on the phone, you said biofuels were a “perfect” platform for various interests – environmentalists, farm lobby types, national security hawks – to promote their agendas. Please explain what you meant.

TS: I meant they appear to be a win/win/win solution. Environmentalists can point to an existing technology that appears to provide solutions to global warming, and one that can appeal to the farm groups they need to support climate change legislation. To others, biofuels appear to offer a route to decreased energy dependence. Those who like farm subsidies see biofuels as an even stronger way of boosting farm incomes, and even those who don’t like farm subsidies can look at biofuels as a better way of helping farmers.

ET: There is an odd parallel underway regarding biofuels: at the same time that Europe is rethinking its embrace of biofuels, the U.S. Congress has mandated the production of 36 billion gallons per year by 2022. Why is the U.S. lagging behind Europe in looking at the downsides of biofuels?

TS: Europe’s stronger focus on biodiesel rather than ethanol perhaps provided a stronger connection between biofuel policies and the clearing of Southeast Asia’s rain forests for palm oil plantations. But it is not at all clear that Europe’s policies will be better than the U.S. Right now, the proposed new E.U. directive would be worse.

ET: Your report is one of several that have been produced in recent months that are critical of biofuels. Has the momentum shifted toward the biofuel skeptics?

TS: My report highlights the costs of using productive land to grow biodiesels but endorses the value of using waste products. Whether government policies move in this direction remains to be seen.

ET: One of the most surprising things in your report was its negative view on switchgrass – a feedstock that has been touted as one of the best alternatives for new ethanol production. Why would a conversion to switchgrass be bad?

TS: If switchgrass is grown on good corn land, for example, using an acre to produce switchgrass displaces the same amount of food as using an acre to grow corn. As farmers around the world replace the food, they plow up new forest and grassland in significant part. Switchgrass ethanol does better than corn ethanol because of its higher conversion efficiency and lower use of fertilizer, but it still causes land use change. Whether switchgrass could be grown productively on lands that otherwise are not productive remains a possibility. Dr. Tilman [David Tilman, an ecologist at the University of Minnesota] argues convincingly it would be better to grow mixed prairie grasses in some highly degraded areas, and I hope that is true, but whether that is feasible still remains to be proven.

ET: What are the key problems in making cellulosic ethanol viable? Is it the low sugar density of the feedstock, i.e., switchgrass or whatever?

TS: As a commercial matter, the technologists are still struggling to reduce the costs of enzymes to permit the scaling up of cellulosic ethanol cost-effectively. My team’s analysis, however, suggests that the key question for the environment is the source of the cellulose. I also wonder whether chemical methods of making ethanol from cellulose and other waste products would be equally good with the right feedstock, particularly because chemical methods appear to be able to handle a diverse mix of feedstocks at the same time.

ET: During our discussion the phone, you also mentioned that some critics have accused you of working for the oil companies. Why is the biofuels debate so polarizing?

TS: No one has really accused me. Some people just asked. There is a lot at stake in the biofuels debate and I think that raises the rhetoric.

ET: If you were king and could mandate a “greener” approach to transportation fuels and transportation policy, what would you do first?

TS: My specialty is agriculture and land use, not energy, so I don’t come with any special knowledge of these issues. But if I were king, I would mandate a rapid switch to more efficient cars and scaling up of hybrids, change land use and tax policies to discourage sprawl, and greatly boost the most efficient forms of mass transportation, like dedicated bus lines. Over the longer term, I am convinced by those who argue that vehicles should become battery-powered and supported by whatever we do to reduce carbon from electricity production. Since I focus on the challenge of feeding 9 to 10 billion people while simultaneously preserving forests, grasslands, and their carbon, the transition away from any combustion in transportation can help because smog reduces global agricultural yields substantially. Reducing smog would boost yields and help us feed people without tearing down more forests.

ET: Your article in Science ends with a short discussion of the trade-offs between growing food and growing biofuels. It concludes with this sentence: “When farmers use today’s good cropland to produce food, they help to avert greenhouse gases from land use change.” Lester Brown and others have talked about the morality of growing food versus growing crops to make biofuel. What’s your take: does it make moral sense to use cropland to grow grain to make motor fuel?

TS: Using land to grow biofuels raises the cost of grain. That has minor effects in the developed world because the retail price of food only modestly reflects the costs of grain. But it has big effects on those hundreds of millions who live on $1 or $2 per day. To mitigate global warming, we are going to have to place more disincentives on converting forests, and that itself is going to contribute to rising food costs by reducing the cheapest ways of providing more food. But if we were to limit conversion and simultaneously spur demands through biofuels, the rising food costs would be even worse. The effects of rising prices seem abstract to people, but even if you just read the articles journalists have begun to write about the effects on the world’s poor, those effects do not seem so abstract.

ET: What might your report mean for schools like the University of California at Berkeley, which recently launched a $500 million partnership with BP on a massive biofuels research and development program?

TS: That kind of initiative can make valuable contributions, in my view. I would hope they would focus first and foremost on the challenges of making energy out of waste products, and second, on whether there are ways to produce biofuel crops productively on land that otherwise would be unproductive.