Indirect land use change impacts of biofuels

Because natural lands, such as rainforests and grasslands, store carbon in their soil and biomass as plants grow each year, clearance of wilderness for new farms translates to a net increase in greenhouse gas emissions.

In 2007 a University of California, Berkeley team led by Farrel evaluated six previous studies, concluding that corn ethanol reduced GHG emissions by only 13 percent.

[2][9] Preliminary estimates by Delucchi from the University of California, Davis, suggested that carbon released by new lands converted to agricultural use was a large percentage of life-cycle emissions.

[9][42] In 2008 Timothy Searchinger, a lawyer from Environmental Defense Fund,[43] concluded that ILUC affects the life cycle assessment and that instead of saving, both corn and cellulosic ethanol increased carbon emissions as compared to gasoline by 93 and 50 percent respectively.

[1] Fargione and his team published a separate paper in the same issue of Science claiming that clearing lands to produce biofuel feedstock created a carbon deficit.

The worst-case scenario is converting Indonesian or Malaysian tropical peatland rainforest to palm biodiesel production, which would require about 420 years to repay.

[46] Wang and Haq from Argonne National Laboratory claimed: the assumptions were outdated; they ignored the potential of increased efficiency, and no evidence showed that "U.S. corn ethanol production has so far caused indirect land use in other countries."

[2] In his response, Searchinger rebutted each technical objection and asserted that "... any calculation that ignores these emissions, however challenging it is to predict them with certainty, is too incomplete to provide a basis for policy decisions.

"[25] Another criticism, by Kline and Dale from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, held that Searchinger et al. and Fargione et al. "... do not provide adequate support for their claim that bioufuels cause high emissions due to land-use change", as their conclusions depends on a misleading assumption because more comprehensive field research found that these land use changes "... are driven by interactions among cultural, technological, biophysical, economic, and demographic forces within a spatial and temporal context rather than by a single crop market".

[citation needed] In February 2010, Lapola estimated that the planned expansion of Brazilian sugarcane and soybean biofuel plantations through 2020 would replace rangeland with a small direct land-use impact on carbon emissions.

"[48][49] The authors conclude that intensification of cattle ranching and concentration on oil palm are required to achieve effective carbon savings, recommending closer collaboration between the biofuel and cattle-ranching sectors.

[50] A study by Arima et al. published in May 2011, used spatial regression modeling to provide the first statistical assessment of ILUC for the Brazilian Amazon due to soy production.

The analysis showed a strong signal linking the expansion of soybean fields in settled agricultural areas at the southern and eastern rims of the Amazon basin to pasture encroachments for cattle production on the forest frontier.

The analysis showed that the displacement of cattle production due to agricultural expansion drives land use change in municipalities located hundreds of kilometers away.

The field is relative new, especially when compared to the vast knowledge base present in fossil fuel production, and the limited analyses are driven by assumptions that sometimes lack robust empirical validation.

"[58][59] On the other hand, more than 170 scientists and economists urged that CARB "include indirect land use change in the lifecycle analyses of heat-trapping emissions from biofuels and other transportation fuels.

[62][64][66] In December 2009, the Renewable Fuels Association (RFA) and Growth Energy, two U.S. ethanol lobbying groups, filed a lawsuit challenging LCFS' constitutionality.

[70][71][72] The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA) established new renewable fuel categories and eligibility requirements, setting mandatory lifecycle emissions limits.

[74][75] EPA's draft analysis stated that ILUC could produce significant near-term GHG emissions due to land conversion but that biofuels can pay these back over subsequent years.

[73][74][75] On the same day that EPA published its notice of proposed rulemaking, President Obama signed a Presidential Directive seeking to advance biofuels research and commercialization.

The Directive established the Biofuels Interagency Working Group, to develop policy ideas for increasing investment in next-generation fuels and for reducing their environmental footprint.

During this period, more research is to be conducted to develop more reliable models and methodologies for estimating ILUC, and Congress will review this issue before allowing EPA to rule on this matter.

[96] UNICA welcomed the ruling, in particular, for the more precise lifecycle emissions estimate and hoped that classification the advanced biofuel designation would help eliminate the tariff.

[98][99] The U.S. Renewable Fuels Association (RFA) also welcomed the ruling, as ethanol producers "require stable federal policy that provides them the market assurances they need to commercialize new technologies", restating their ILUC objection.

[102] Several Midwestern lawmakers commented that they continued to oppose EPA's consideration of the "dicey science" of indirect land use that "punishes domestic fuels".

[101] House Agriculture Chairman Collin Peterson said, "... to think that we can credibly measure the impact of international indirect land use is completely unrealistic, and I will continue to push for legislation that prevents unreliable methods and unfair standards from burdening the biofuels industry.

The legislation ordered the European Commission to develop a methodology to factor in GHG emissions from ILUC by December 31, 2010, based on the best available scientific evidence.

[114][115][116][117] UNICA called for regulators to establish an empirical and "globally accepted methodology" to consider ILUC, with the participation of researchers and scientists from biofuel crop-producing countries.

[127] UNICA welcomed the EU efforts to "engage independent experts in its assessments" but requested that improvements because "... the report currently contains a certain number of inaccuracies, so once these are corrected, we anticipate even higher benefits resulting from the use of Brazilian sugarcane ethanol.

"[128] UNICA highlighted the fact that the report assumed land expansion that "does not take into consideration the agro-ecological zoning for sugarcane in Brazil, which prevents cane from expanding into any type of native vegetation.