03/07/08 Distorting the Facts

Distorting the Facts. I'm Greg Martin as Line On Agriculture presents the Harvest Clean Energy Report. One of the golden rules in journalism is to make sure you have your facts straight. Plenty of damage can be done if not and that is what is happening in the world of biofuels. A pair of new studies in Science magazine are not showing the industry in a good light. Patrick Mazza, research director for Climate Solutions gives us an overview. MAZZA: What these studies are about is soil carbon releases that occur when land is converted from a natural forest or grassland to cropland and there is truly a lot of carbon locked up in soils so what these studies did was looked at how much carbon is reduced by biofuels. By different kinds of biofuels and then it balanced it out against the carbon releases from plowing up new fields and gain various carbon payback times  and some are way out there. Mazza says the two studies make some broad assumptions. MAZZA: It based it on 30-billion gallons a year of corn ethanol made in the United States. Nobody is talking about 30-billion gallons. In fact the Federal Renewable Fuels Standard caps it at 15-billion gallons a year. Also it calculated this based on no yield increases and everybody knows corm yield increases have gone up majorly; I mean they have gone up 1.6% a year. The principals of the study are based in fact but one study used a computer model and these broad assumptions to get their results. MAZZA: When you are doing a computer model it's all about the assumptions you are putting in, so you've got to ask yourself how good are the assumptions and when you are assuming we are going to be producing 30-billion gallons of ethanol  that's not a very good assumption. The studies also do not take into consideration the advances in cellulosic ethanol and they point the finger at current ethanol plants using more energy than they produce. MAZZA: Even conventional ethanol plants are improving their performance. Now you are starting to see ethanol plants that are using instead of natural gas, they're using biogas. Instead of drying the feed product and shipping it to the cattle lot they're co-locating with the cattle lot so a lot less energy is used and these scientists assumed that corn ethanol provides a 20% carbon reduction compared to gasoline and when you are looking at some of the new model ethanol plants you're seeing reductions compared to gasoline more like 50%. Studies like these that appear in major publications are extremely detrimental to the renewable industry so make sure you check all the facts. For additional information on clean energy, visit harvestcleanenergy.org. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network. www.harvestcleanenergy.org