Holly Gibbs, a research fellow at Stanford University presented the latest study on land use for biofuel production this Valentine’s Day at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

According to this study, the increased call for biofuels made from agricultural crops such as corn, soybean, cassava, and palm oil as replacements for fossil fuels may be releasing more greenhouse gas emissions than it intends to prevent.

The reason for this lies in the way that these biofuels are produced. In order to make these so-called “liquid fuels” certain tropical rainforest climates are required to be cleared and burned. These very same climates are known to store 340 billions tons of carbon, and when burned in order to create biofuels their stored sum of carbon is emitted into the atmosphere.

The areas in which biofuels are in high demand rarely have the agricultural land available for their production, this means that countries such as the United States will attempt to decrease their carbon footprint by using biofuels burned from rainforests and savannahs around the world.

The consensus of the study appears to be that though biofuels will definitely play a significant part in decreasing the global use of fossil fuels thereby decreasing global carbon emissions; due to the lack of agricultural resources to produce the amount of biofuels necessary to sustain humanity’s energy requirements, it is necessary that we develop a diverse array of carbon emission limiting tactics, in order to achieve the “green sheen” that we desire.

Discussion Question: How are biofuels made?

News article:
http://sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/40924/title/The_hidden_costs_of_better_fuels