UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food to call for a 5-year moratorium on first generation liquid biofuels

Tonight Jean Ziegler, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, will present his annual report to the General Assembly in New York. In it, he will call for a 5-year moratorium on the production of liquid biofuels made from food crops such as corn, wheat, palm oil and rapeseed. A UN special rapporteur is an independent expert, who does not receive any financial compensation for his or her work.

Over the past month, Biopact has been corresponding with Mr Ziegler's staff to discuss some of the findings contained in the report, which is now publicly available, here [*.pdf; note: if the link doesn't work, check under 'annual reports' on this page and click the document with the code: A/62/289]. We agree with most of the rapporteur's heavy criticisms of first-generation biofuels, especially when it comes to fuels made from crops on which populations in the developing world depend (corn, wheat, palm oil).

But we do hope he also includes several of the theoretical points made throughout the last year by a myriad of organisations who see major chances for the poor to get out of poverty by participating in the biofuels market. These perspectives were not included in the report. We think they are important. Some leading organisations, including the UN's very own FAO, the UNCTAD, the UNIDO as well as the WorldWatch Institute, have said biofuels could help end global hunger(previous post, here and here). But this will require a major overhaul of trade rules, an active effort to engage small farmers and poor rural communities in the sector, and a rethink of the massive biofuel subsidies paid to wealthy farmers in the EU and the US (say the IEA, the OECD, the Global Bioenergy Partnership, alongside a host of other major think tanks and renowned experts).

Moreover, high oil prices can be truly catastrophic for poor countries, and are actually killing people: according to the UN's latest inter-agency report on biofuels, some of the least developed countries are already forced to spend 6 times as much on imported oil than on health care, with obvious tragic consequences for those who need this most basic of services. Biofuels could make an end to this disaster.

Many poor countries have a very large potential to produce sustainable biofuels that do not impact food security negatively. On the contrary, in a free biofuels market, these countries would stand to benefit massively from their comparative advantages which would allow them to boost incomes with which to strengthen their food security (earlier post and here). But again, to make this happen, trade reform and an end to subsidies in the EU/US are a minimal requirement. The Biopact has also called for a more courageous EU foreign aid policy aimed at helping developing countries tap their large biofuels potential, via tech transfers, agricultural expertise and investments in infrastructure.

For the rest, we strongly agree with Mr Ziegler's entire argumentation:

• as long as such trade and market related reform measures and tech transfer efforts are not in place
• as long as social and environmental sustainability criteria for biofuels are not agreed on
• as long as more efficient second-generation biofuel production processes that allow us to use any type of biomass instead of food crops are not available
  
• and as long as it is not entirely clear whether biofuels are pushing up food prices (the UN and the EU think they don't, but most other analysts think they do play a role)
  

then the precautionary principle should come into effect. Hence, a temporary moratorium on first-generation biofuels made from food on which the poor depend is entirely legitimate.

Sadly, we feel the rapporteur's call will not have any major effect on the rush towards food-based biofuels. The subsidies and protectionist measures in the US and the EU are large and strong enough, and oil prices high enough, to make first-generation fuels commercially attractive and to continue the massive investments into the sector. Moral imperatives do not make much of an impression on those who profit from the current situation.

In any case, we will keep you posted on the rapporteur's presentation, which can be viewed live over at the UN Webcast [entry ends here].
energy :: sustainability :: biomass :: bioenergy :: biofuels :: ethanol :: biodiesel :: food security :: agriculture :: subsidies :: tariffs :: United Nations ::

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Carbon-negative bioenergy is here: GreatPoint Energy to build biomass gasification pilot plant with carbon capture and storage

The transition towards radically carbon-negative energy is happening faster than expected. Today, GreatPoint Energy, Inc., a developer of technology to convert coal, petroleum coke and biomass into clean natural gas while enabling the capture and sequestration of CO2, announced plans to build a US$25 million pilot-scale gasification plant to be located in Brayton Point at the research and development center of energy utility Dominion. Dominion is the largest power generating facility in New England. GreatPoint Energy has secured a grant from the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative to test biomass in its facilities.

By coupling biomass gasification to carbon capture and storage (CCS), yet another step towards carbon-negative bioenergy systems is being taken - the most effective type of energy with which to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and combat climate change (earlier post and here). The plant in Massachusetts will use wood chips, corn stover, and switchgrass as a feedstock to make natural gas. These biomass sources store CO2 from the atmosphere. When they are gasified they release CO2, which is then captured and sequestered permanently in geological sites. The end balance: negative emissions. Only energy systems based on biomass can become carbon-negative - that is, they take emissions from the past out of the atmosphere. All other renewables are carbon-neutral at best, slightly carbon-positive in practise (previous post; and schematic, click to enlarge).

GreatPoint has developed a technique for converting different feedstocks - coal, petroleum coke, or biomass - into methane, or natural gas, through a catalyst-based gasification process - the 'bluegas' process. It says this allows it to produce natural gas that costs less than current market prices, while at the same time the process can be easily coupled to CCS. This combination of factors has attracted the attention of top-flight venture capitalists and other industrial companies. Last month, it announced an additional $100 million investment led by Dow Chemical, Suncor Energy, AES, and Citi division Sustainable Development Investments (earlier post).

The bluegas gasification system is an optimized catalytic process for combining coal, steam and a catalyst in a pressurized reactor vessel to produce pipeline-grade methane (99 percent+ CH4) instead of the low quality syngas produced by conventional gasification shown below. The first step in the bluegas process is to feed the coal or biomass and the catalyst into the methanation reactor. Inside the reactor, pressurized steam is injected to 'fluidize' the mixture and ensure constant contact between the catalyst and the carbon particles. In this environment, unlike conventional gasification, the catalyst facilitates multiple chemical reactions between the carbon and the steam on the surface of the coal or biomass. These reactions catalyzed in a single reactor generate a mixture predominately composed of methane and CO2 (schematic, click to enlarge):
energy :: sustainability :: biomass :: bioenergy :: biofuels :: climate change :: gasification :: carbon capture and storage :: bioenergy with carbon storage :: carbon negative ::

The proprietary catalyst formulation is made up of abundant, low cost metal materials specifically designed to promote gasification at the low temperatures where water gas shift and methanation take place. The catalyst is continuously recycled and reused within the process.

As part of the overall process the bluegas production facility recovers most of the contaminants in coal as useful by-products and, in addition, roughly half the carbon in the coal is captured as a pure CO2 stream suitable for sequestration.

In addition, unlike many conventional gasifiers, the bluegas process is ideally suited for lowest cost feedstocks such as Powder River Basin (“PRB”) coal and petroleum coke from the Canadian oil sands (a waste-product produced in the upgrading process) as well as a number of biomass feedstocks. The result is a disruptive technology with dramatically improved economics and an environmental footprint equivalent to that of natural gas, the most environmentally-friendly fossil fuel.


GreatPoint Energy and Dominion will be hosting a ceremony today with Governor Deval Patrick to commemorate the agreement in Somerset, Massachusetts. GreatPoint Energy plans to create more than 100 new jobs and invest more than $25 million in the demonstration plant and R&D Center of Excellence.

Upon the completion of construction of the demonstration plant and research complex, which is expected to take twelve months, GreatPoint Energy intends to develop full-scale facilities around North America. The company will then transport its bluegas product to New England residents by pipeline at a cost that is less than drilled or imported natural gas.

GreatPoint Energy plans to locate its commercial gasification facilities in locations where the carbon removed from the biomass and fossil fuel feed can be sequestered in geological formations or used for enhanced oil recovery.


References:
GreatPoint Energy to Build Leading-Edge Research Center and Clean Energy Demonstration Plant at Dominion's Brayton Point Power Station in Somerset, Mass. - October 25, 2007.

Biopact: GreatPoint Energy closes $100 million capital raise for gasification and CCS technology - September 24, 2007

Biopact: Growth in carbon emissions accelerating; exceeding worst case scenario - October 23, 2007

Biopact: A quick look at 'fourth generation' biofuels - October 08, 2007

Euractiv: 'Carbon-capture trials safest way forward' - Laurens Rademakers, Biopact - April 3, 2007.

Abrupt Climate Change Strategy group: overview of studies on carbon-negative bioenergy and its potential to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels.

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Opinion: the leading cause of hunger? Bad regimes

There is too much food on this planet. So much in fact that leading international experts from health, agriculture, food, education, finance, environmental protection, politics and economics will meet at the McGill University Health Challenge Think Tank on November 7-9 2007 to tackle "one of the most serious threats" to our children’s health and well-being: the global childhood obesity pandemic. Two billion people are overweight, half a billion are obese, and the epidemic is beginning to change the very biology of our offspring. But at the same time, 800 million people in the developing world, especially children, go to bed hungry every day. Clearly, something is very, very wrong.

The global food system is highly efficient in feeding people in the wealthy West and the emerging economies. The planet is now putting out enough food to meet the basic, healthy dietary needs of roughly 9 billion people. So how is it possible that there still is such a large number of hungry people? How is it possible that, say, the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country with a capacity to produce food for 2 billion people, cannot feed its own relatively small population? The answers to this question aren't simple. Economists, development thinkers, sociologists and agricultural experts differ on pinpointing the main causes, let alone on how to design policies to tackle the problem. Are agricultural subsidies in the US and the EU holding back food production in the developing world? Are exogenous factors - wars, political instability, volatile markets - to blame? Droughts or floods? The persisting effects of colonialism? A combination of all these factors?

No, none of these, says Mia Doornaert, a leading Belgian intellectual, in a pretty politically incorrect opinion piece [*Dutch] published recently in De Standaard. According to Doornaert, the main cause of hunger in poor countries is entirely clear: bad local regimes. We don't need complex social sciences to discover this. We don't need a technical debate on the global food system. Forget the subsidies argument, forget the argument about 'imperialism', forget climatic and agricultural arguments, forget the 'bad globalisation' argument. All these reasons are used to create a smokescreen with which people try to hide the most obvious truth: developing countries' own corrupt and incompetent leaders are the main culprits for global hunger - dixit Doornaert.

We translate Doornaert's essay because it offers a view many of us are uncomfortable with. Many people doing development work in the South largely tend to blame the West and the past for the ills in today's poor countries. But we must begin to recognize that bad governance could well be the key driver of many of these problems instead. In Europe, Doornaert is seen as a controversial intellectual, because she often succeeds in turning typically 'right-wing' arguments in social debates into left-wing ideas, and vice-versa. We think in this piece she dismisses the effects of 'exogenous' factors a bit too easily, but she's definitely on to something. The argumentation seems simple, but what she says has long been a taboo amongst development workers.

Compassion and empathy were for sale again during the World Day Against Extreme Poverty (October 17), writes Doornaert. But meanwhile, the junta in Myanmar continues to oppress the impoverished Burmese. Mugabe keeps depriving Zimbabweans of food and has ruined the bread basket of Africa. The North Korean regime, which has turned the country into one big slave camp, keeps ferociously starving its people:
sustainability :: biomass :: bioenergy :: biofuels :: agriculture :: food :: hunger :: economic development :: developing countries :: governance ::


These and other tragedies confront us with the most difficult of questions: how does one liberate peoples from catastrophic regimes that don't give a damn about the fate of their populations and systematically ruin entire countries?

The country formerly known as Burma was one of the most prosperous nations in Asia when it gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1948. But generals took power and in 1962 general Ne Win began to push his disastrous 'own way to socialism' - no other continent has experienced the lethality of these 'own ways to socialism' better than Asia.

Zimbabwe was the bread basket of South East Africa when Mugabe came to power in 1980. For a short while, it looked as if he was set to become a new kind of African leader. But 37 years later he holds on to power like some kind of dictatorial madman who terrorises his opponents and his people, and who has destroyed this major African food producing and exporting country.

North Korea was, by far, the wealthiest part of the peninsula after the Korean war of 1953, which divided the nation into North and South. But there too, the 'own way to socialism' has become a stalinist nightmare. In this once wealthy country, hundreds of thousands if not millions have died in famines.

And the world watches and mourns. But none of these tragedies were unavoidable, and one cannot blame the 'usual suspects', such as the colonial past, 'imperialism', or the EU's farm subsidies.

Nobody forced Mugabe to implement an irrational and corrupt political agenda. And it certainly wasn't 'imperialism' which pushed Ne Win and Kim-Il Sung to create their own version of an Asian type of socialism that has claimed millions of lives in Mao's China and in the Khmer Rouge's Cambodia.

In Africa and elsewhere millions of people are food insecure while there is more than enough food on this planet. Millions die of preventable diseases for which there are very simple cures. Millions of women and children have to walk several kilometers each day to fetch drinking water, while a pipeline could easily be build.

And no, all of this isn't the result of the selfishness of the wealthy West, but of the machiavellic obsession with power, the corruption, the incompetence of these countries' own leaders. During the World Day Against Extreme Poverty these factors were left almost entirely out of the debate - something we have become accustomed to.

The Asian 'tigers' who succeeded in gaining prosperity and gradually moved towards more democracy from the sixties and seventies onwards, did not rely on development assistance and foreign aid to get there. Most of these regimes weren't textbook examples of transparency or democracy. But at least their leaders did not rob these countries of their wealth. Instead, they invested in their populations and in their economies. All this was happening while Latin-American and African elites preferred to put the money they stole into European and American bank accounts. The Asian tigers instead invested intensively in education, for boys and girls.

There aren't that many other examples of regimes emulating the success story of the Asian tigers. Oil producing countries are making enormous profits, an amount of money that vastly surpasses that of all foreign aid. But none of these countries invests this money into people. Saudi Arabia prefers to use it to build mosques across the globe. Populists like Iran's president Ahmedinejad and Venzuela's Hugo Chavez spend it on getting votes domestically and on gaining support internationally.

Africa's ills, including the continent's wars and outbursts of violence, don't need a description. But what can we do about them? One thing is clear, we don't have to count on the 'international community', that is the United Nations. Because this institution sides with regimes, not with peoples. Only a handful of governments on this planet really cares about good governance and human rights. The UN reflects this state of affairs.

China, one of the five permanent members of the Security Council, demonstrates this well. The country supports the Sudanese and Burmese regimes and shows its neocolonial intentions in Africa, where it buys access to natural resources, from corrupt governments. These regimes are happy to work with China, because this country doesn't intervene in 'internal affairs', nor does it demand governments to meet good governance basics, as Europe would do.

China profits while Europe is merely good enough to pump foreign aid into these countries, whose refugees it has to accept at its borders. Europe's soft-power may be well-intentioned, but in practise it is powerless. Powerless against regimes which are the single biggest cause of poverty, hunger and misery.


Next we will be publishing an overview of a vision diametrically opposed to Doornaert's. It is based on Jonathan Krieckhaus's analysis of the political economy of development, which he set out in his landmark book 'Dictating Development: How Europe Shaped the Global Periphery'.

Translated by Jonas Van Den Berg for Biopact.

Image (of Doornaert): courtesy of De Standaard.

References:
De Standaard: De eerste oorzaak van honger? Slechte regimes - October 20, 2006.

AlhaGalileo: Changing the global dietary environment Top international experts to meet at McGill conference on childhood obesity - October 25, 2007.

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European Biodiesel Board threatens legal action against U.S. biodiesel subsidies

Earlier we reported about a biodiesel export scheme in the US, the so-called 'B99' subsidy, which allows American producers to dump cheap biodiesel on the EU market, eroding the margins of European manufacturers (earlier post). The European Biodiesel Board, the voice of the EU's biodiesel industry, announces it strongly condemns this subsidy which it calls 'unfair' and says it stands ready for legal action.

In the framework of the US Federal measures adopted in 2004, biodiesel can be subsidised up to $264 per cubic meter (300 USD/tonne, approximately €200/tonne) only by adding a 'drop' of mineral diesel to biodiesel. US producers can therefore claim the maximum subsidy for a 'B99,9' blend. Such a blend can then be exported to Europe where it is eligible to European subsidy schemes.

Since the benefit of the blender credit is not restricted to biodiesel produced and consumed on the US territory, the 2004 support provisions resulted in a surge of B99 exports to the EU. In most cases B99 blends are sold in the European market as 'pure biodiesel' and at a substantial discount (over €120-180/tonne), in some cases at a lower price than the one of the raw materials purchased by the EU industry for producing biodiesel.

The EBB estimates that some 700,000 tonnes US methyl ester have entered the EU since January 2007 (compared to only 90,000 tonnes for the whole 2006), meaning that the 1 million tonnes threshold could be reached before the end of this year. This represents a sudden and sharp increase in US exports which is only explainable by unfair support measures:
sustainability :: biomass :: bioenergy :: biofuels :: biodiesel :: export subsidy :: dumping :: US :: EU :: WTO ::

At the same time, there are worries that such unfair practice will not be closed rapidly by the US Congress and that the support scheme will even be extended beyond 2008. In any case, closing the so-called 'splash and dash' loophole, whereby foreign producers (Indonesian, Malaysian) are taking advantage of the US biodiesel credit before shipping their commodities to Europe, will not solve the real problem, the EBB says.

The 'splash and dash' practice represents only a very minor share (less than 10%) of the overall B99 shipments that are reaching Europe. Most of the B99 is coming from US producers, using US raw materials. According to the EBB, the strong support measures enjoyed by US farmers explain the permanence of this unfair practice.

In most EU countries biodiesel producers are experiencing dumping competition from B99 blends. This competition is price-setting and is progressively disrupting the margins of European biodiesel producers, putting out of business most EU producers. As a result the important biodiesel industrial capacity risks remaining largely unutilised and production may start stagnating if not already declining as from this year, if urgent action is not taken.

This is why, unless the situation is solved very shortly by the US legislator, the EU biodiesel industry will initiate a comprehensive legal action against this unfair trade practice, in the form of a joint anti-dumping and anti-subsidy complaint, possibly supported by a WTO complaint.

The EU biodiesel industry is urging the European Commission to take the necessary actions to counter and then eliminate unfair 'B99' subsidised exports, a trade practice that is clearly breaching WTO rules and threatening the concept of international trade in biodiesel.

The European Biodiesel Board, also known as EBB, is a non-profit organisation established in January 1997. EBB represents the voice of the EU biodiesel industry. It gathers 56 companies and associations and aims to promote the use of biodiesel in the European Union. EBB member companies account for around 80% of EU biodiesel production.

References:
European Biodiesel Board: EBB strongly condemns the unfair subsidised US biodiesel exports and stands ready for legal action [*.pdf]- October 16, 2007.

Biopact: EU biodiesel output doubles in 2 years, may reach 2010 targets early - July 18, 2007

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