Moving Away from Oil: Biofuels and Biobased Products

The unfolding disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is rapidly adding to the already high price of our nation’s oil dependence. We need to find alternative, more sustainable ways to fuel our transportation systems, heat our homes, and create products and materials we use in daily living – for the sake of our health, our climate, our economy, our national security, and the fragile ecosystems upon which we depend.

The first thing we can do as a nation is to enact policies that encourage all of us to use much less petroleum. Policies such as a carbon tax on fossil fuels, or a petroleum tax, or a declining cap on fossil carbon emissions would encourage us to make different choices – to use more efficient public or alternative transit, to live closer to where we work, to use more fuel efficient vehicles, to insulate homes that use heating oil, to reduce our consumption of products that are petroleum-intensive to make and deliver.

These are all things that we can start doing today voluntarily (and some are), but because the price we pay for petroleum products does not reflect the true social and environmental costs of our oil dependence, relatively few people are making these choices. To get our country moving in the right direction, we need to begin charging the full price of our oil dependence. When the whole nation begins choosing to do these things together with resolve, we will see our oil dependence decline dramatically. And, we will see thousands more jobs being created in our communities as more of our energy dollars are invested and spent closer to home.

But even with reduced demand, we will still need liquid fuels and many other products that we make from petroleum today. What are the alternatives? During the fossil fuel era of the last century, we used the concentrated energy of plants that lived on earth millions of years ago to power our economy. In the renewable energy era of the next century, modern agriculture, forestry, and biotechnology can provide much of the liquid fuels, products, and chemicals that we need. Anything that we can make from fossil petroleum, we can also make from living plants today.

The shift to biofuels and biobased products is already well underway. A recent report from WWF surveys many of the opportunities that biotechnologies offer for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and petroleum dependence.

Biofuels. About 71 percent of the petroleum used in the United States is used for transportation. In 2008, biofuels provided about seven percent (9.2 billion gallons) of U.S. gasoline demand, and since then, production has continued to grow rapidly. Almost all of this is ethanol made from corn starch. In addition, the United States has the capacity (much of it now sitting idle) to produce more than 2.6 billion gallons per year of biodiesel . The Renewable Fuel Standard set by Congress calls for producing three times as much biofuel (36 billion gallons per year) by 2022. In the years ahead, biofuels increasingly will be made from energy crops, leftover residues from agriculture and forestry, urban waste streams, and algae. The airline industry and the Department of Defense (the biggest user of liquid fuels), with new initiatives and compelling deadlines, may be the first to create the feedstock supply chains, biorefineries, and markets for the first billion gallons of next generation, low carbon biofuels.

Bioenergy for heat. Eight million U.S. households (seven percent) depend on heating oil to heat their homes, accounting for more than three percent of U.S. petroleum dependence. Most are in the northeast, where households consumed about 3.8 billion gallons in 2008 . Locally grown wood pellet fuels and biobased heating oil can provide clean, low carbon, efficient, affordable, renewable alternatives. Advanced, thermostat-controlled wood pellet furnaces and home fuel delivery are available, providing many of the same conveniences as other heating systems. Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island have all enacted renewable biofuel standards for home heating oil requiring as much as 20 percent renewable fuel blend by 2020.

Biobased industrial chemicals and consumer products. About 23 percent of our petroleum is used to make industrial chemicals and consumer products such as tires, plastics, detergents, paints, solvents, lubricants, asphalt, and pesticides. Most of these chemicals and products can be made from biomass in advanced biorefineries, alongside biofuel production. The Biotechnology Industry Organization provides a survey of the opportunities in its recent report “Biobased Chemicals and Products: A New Driver of U.S. Economic Development and Green Jobs.”

Biobased building products. Petroleum is used to make numerous building materials and products and powers the equipment and vehicles used to manufacture, transport, and assemble buildings. Petroleum-based building products include asphalt roofing shingles, vinyl flooring, and plastic used for roofing insulation, wall systems, windows, pipes, and house wrap. Biobased alternatives to some of these products are available (e.g., such as wood roofing shingles, bamboo flooring, cellulosic insulation and biobased spray foam insulation) and others are in development. The challenge is to develop products that are safe for the environment and people, while also maintaining long term effectiveness, durability, moisture and fire resistance, cost, and energy efficiency. Research, development and testing are critical and must consider multiple performance goals.

Does the United States produce enough renewable biomass each year to end our dependence on oil, while also producing enough food, feed, and fiber, and preserving sensitive ecosystems? Each state and region needs to carefully assess the amount and types of biomass that it can sustainably grow and harvest for energy each year. Mechanisms to assure the sustainability of new biomass feedstock production systems need to be put in place. The productivity of existing agricultural lands and forests can be improved. Urban and agricultural waste streams can be recycled for energy, carbon, and nutrients. Productivity on millions of acres of abandoned and marginal lands can be increased. And concentrated algae-based biofuels and biobased products can be developed. In these ways, the United States can shift toward producing the volumes of biofuels and biobased chemical feedstocks needed to significantly reduce our petroleum dependence, while at the same time creating more rural jobs and income and developing advanced, state of the art biotechnology industries. Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, with their significant biomass production potential, could help lead the country in this transformation toward a sustainable energy future.

The key word moving forward as we develop biobased resources is sustainability . We depend on the earth’s biological productivity for everything – oxygen, food, fiber, energy, biological diversity, carbon and nutrient storage and cycling, clean water, and a host of other ecosystem services. The earth’s capacities to provide all of these services are finite and delicately balanced, and we degraded many of those capacities in the last century. As such, we need not only to preserve and sustain the earth’s life support capacities as we move forward, but we also have much to restore. If done right, developing and using bioenergy and biobased products can become a key part of a sustainable economy and good earth stewardship in the century ahead.