Why Burn Your Food?

This is my favorite argument that people raise against against biofuels, both because it sounds funny and because the actual explanation gets to the point of why we need biofuels.

In the end, hydrocarbon energy is hydrocarbon energy, whether you put in it in your mouth or in your car.  If there was no oil underground and your primary source of energy sustenance (ignoring the need for amino acids and fatty acids for the moment) was a 1000-gallon drum in your yard which held a liquid both edible and combustible in your car, you’d figure out pretty quickly that it’s worth burning one day’s supply of food to be able to drive to a job where you can earn 100 days’ supply of food with a day’s work.

This is how markets work: people make value choices to maximize their economic benefit.  If you have a substance that is more valuable in another form, guess what people are going to do with it?  

We’re not out of oil yet, and current prices may be a bubble, but cheap oil will run out someday, perhaps in the lifetimes of many reading this.  Hydrogen is a pipe dream and the power density of the internal combustion engine, at least as of yet, has no plausible replacement in the foreseeable future.  We need liquid fuel, and there are huge amounts of biomass available to make it.  Rail against the corn ethanol subsidy or the sugarcane ethanol tariff and I won’t disagree, but don’t try to tell me we can live without biofuels.  We can’t.

Some have argued that biofuels are starving people, but this is almost certainly untrue.  Food prices are only around the levels of the 1980s.  And while rising food prices are a burden, so are rising fuel prices; people also die from cold and suffer from high transport prices; where would fuel prices be without skyrocketing ethanol production? In fact, the poorest actually benefit from high grain prices because the poorest of the poor are subsistence farmers, who either grow just enough to eat, in which case the price is irrelevant, or (in a good year) have a slight excess to sell, in which case a higher price helps them buy more of other goods, raising their living standard.

Additionally, even as ag production soars, the cost of food-based ethanol is spurring research into cellulosic ethanol, made from waste biomass or cultivated non-foods like switchgrass, or algae grown in great sheet.  Bioengineering will likely produce better and better sources, until someday ethanol may be as cheap as gasoline derived from the $5 per barrel oil taken from the sands of Saudi Arabia.

And we here in the United States, with out vast plains and biotech prowess, are perfectly suited for such endeavours.  The Midwest could replace the Mideast as the largest source of the world’s energy.  That’s a future I’d like to live in.