Biofuels in Europe, from Europe

This is an article based on the chapter discussing biofuels as substitute for crude oil, in our book The World After Cheap Oil (Facebook page). It was recently published by Routledge. You can find other relevant articles here.

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European Union has recently woken up to realize that using biofuels made of food crops might not be a very good idea on the whole. It has raised global food prices significantly, leading to hunger and civil unrest amongst the poorer people of the world. Even the envisioned emissions reductions have failed to materialize, since land-use changes have proved to be a significant source for emissions. As a result, there have been actions (if meager) to cut the part of food-crop based biofuels on the total bio-component of gasoline and diesel-oil.

Since biofuels made of food crops are a very bad idea, we will need another feedstock. The next in line, at least domestically thinking, are the so called second-generation, cellulose-based biofuels. That is, liquid fuels made of woodchips and such. So what do the numbers tell us?

Let’s use a state of the art (not even built yet, but planned) Fischer-Tropsch bio-refinery from UPM as an example. It uses 1.5-2 million cubic meters of wood annually, with energy content of around 3–4 TWh. In addition, it uses 0.4 TWh of electricity and 5 000 tons of hydrogen. Other feedstock includes nitrogen, oxygen (400 000 tons / year), heat for drying, steam, cooling water and sweet water. The output of the refinery is around 300 000 tons of mainly biodiesel and naphtha, which corresponds to around 6 000 barrels of oil equivalent per day. The refinery in question would be integrated to a paper- or pulp-mill, so it can use all the benefits of co-production to be maximally efficient.

What do these numbers mean? EU uses roughly 13 mbpd of oil (with over 11 mbpd imported). As a ”back of the envelope”-calculation, replacing this oil with bio-oil is a daunting task. It would require around 2,200 such bio-refineries, which cost 0.5 billion a piece (so maybe 1000 billion in total). The refineries would require 880 TWh of electricity per year, which equals the combined electricity consumption of Germany and UK, or around one fourth of total EU electricity consumption.

The wood used as the main feedstock amounts to 4,000 million m3 annually. This is more than six times the annual growth of forests in Europe, and more than ten times the current annual logging. The forests of Europe would be gone in mere six years. The rather meager 1.3 percent slice that forestry-based activities contribute to European GDP would grow substantially, at least for a few years. Of course this is only theoretical. Nobody is talking of replacing all our (mostly imported) oil with biofuels anytime soon.

Let’s assume that Europeans use around half of their oil in transportation (it is in the ballpark for our back-of-the-envelope calculation). If we were to liquefy all of our total annual forest loggings, we would manage to get around 20 percent of our transportation oil use covered. But then there would be nothing left for the integrated paper mill to produce. No wood for building stuff like houses and furniture.

The core message here is that we need to drastically cut back our dependency on oil, especially in transportation, before we can start to find meaningful substitutes for crude oil. Not just for climate’s sake (increased logging is nowhere near carbon-neutral, says recent studies), but for our economy’s sake. Imported oil is a major factor in the European recession that has been more or less going on as long as we have had oil prices above 100 USD per barrel (since 2008). Biofuels, when they are not a very bad idea to begin with (like using food crops that are needed to fuel people, not cars), can play only a small part. And if we import our biofuels, we will end up paying even more than we would for conventional oil. The needed scale just isn’t there, and probably won’t be for decades. High oil prices, on the other hand, have already been wrecking our economy for years already.