Global Warming: Are biofuels the answer? Maybe not yet.

Global warming has been a hot topic lately: the earth is getting hotter, and its got everyone in a frenzy. Despite the political debate surrounding the issue, the general scientific consensus is that (among other things) rising carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air is the culprit; and humans are to blame for the CO2. No matter what the cause, the earth is getting hotter, and something needs to be done about it.

So get rid of the carbon

The solution to global warming (at least the part that we contribute to) is to reduce the amount of carbon in the air. The thought is that, if you get rid of the CO2 in the air then less of the sun’s energy will be trapped in the earth’s atmosphere. When less energy is trapped, the globe doesn’t heat up as much. Pretty simple right?

Blame the fossils

Reducing the carbon in the atmosphere would be much easier if we didn’t rely so heavily on certain types of fuels called fossil fuels. Fossil fuels, such as coal, oil, and natural gas, are fuels which come from the ancient remains of dead plants, animals, and other organisms. Over millions of years, their remains were converted into fuels. These fuels lie buried underground, just waiting to be mined or drilled for our use.

And we do use them… 86% of our energy comes from fossil fuels. Energy from burning the fuels powers our homes and fuels our cars, among other things. The truth is that, as a society, we are addicted to energy; we can’t get enough. But all that energy comes at a price: burning fossil fuels releases carbon into the atmosphere.

More carbon = more warming= bad news for the environment.

Enter biofuels: they had so much potential

In response to this, many different ideas surfaced about how we can replace fossil fuels. One of the more widely implemented solutions to this was the biofuel movement. Biofuels are, by definition, fuels which are made from biological material such as corn or natural fats. You may have encountered automobiles designed to run on E85, which is a fuel made from corn ethanol.

The idea was this: plants are made of carbon. They get their carbon by taking it from the air. When you burn fuels made from plants, you are not adding “extra carbon” to the air; just returning what the plant took out of the air.

Sounds good, but it had some problems

The use of biofuels had two major issues which got in the way of its use. The first issue was the “carbon costs” involved in producing the plants. When farmers grow the corn, they burn lots of fossil fuels to run the machinery used to care for and process the plant material.

The extra demand for corn had consequences on the economy as well. Because so many people wanted corn for biofuel production, the price of corn increased. This increased the prices of many different foods which rely on corn (chickens eat lots of corn).

The future is cellulose

Despite these setbacks, scientists are hard at work trying to overcome these drawbacks. One of the technologies in the works involves utilizing the cellulosic biomass of plant material. Cellulosic biomass is a very common carbon source: every plant has cellulose. It turns out that it is very difficult to digest into a usable form for biofuels (the common name for cellulose is “fiber,” we can’t digest it either).

To make the future even brighter, we don’t even have to use corn to get the cellulose: scientists are exploring the use of switchgrass, a plant which is very good at sequestering carbon out of the atmosphere. The catch right now is that this carbon is sequestered into cellulose: a currently unusable form.

In the future, we might be able to use this untapped resource of carbon to make biofuels. Scientists are currently working on engineering a microbe which can digest the cellulose, and they are getting very close to a viable alternative to fossil fuels. One of the last challenges is to make the process cheap enough to compete in the marketplace. These new technologies are a step in the right direction toward reducing our carbon emissions.

What do you think? Are biofuels the answer to global warming? Leave a comment below.

( themometer photo credit: Robbie1; corn photo credit: L. Bernhardt, Resident Loon)