SUAREZ:  One of the approaches that is often talked of in the multi-prong strategy is what are we going to do is biofuels.  Suzanne Hunt, what is biofuel?

HUNT: The two principal biofuels that are in the market place right now are ethanol and biodiesel.  And ethanol is produced principally in the United States from corn and in Brazil from sugar cane.  The largest biodiesel producer in the world is currently Germany and they use mostly rapeseed but it’s also made from animal fats and other vegetable oils.

SUAREZ:   And can this really make a big dent in a nation’s overall energy consumption?

HUNT:  I think that biofuels are going to play an important role when integrated effectively with other strategies so for example right now ethanol supplies about 3 percent of America’s gasoline needs.  If we were to double the fuel efficiency of our vehicles on average which would just bring us up to the current average in Europe, we wouldn’t even to bring in advanced technologies.  The contribution that biofuels makes doubles so you can see how just even at the low levels combining biofuels with other strategies enhances its role.  But I think as the technology develops and we get into advanced fuels that are using non-food feed stocks, the production potential dramatically increases.

SUAREZ:  What about the effect on the environment?  Is there an advantage in burning the barrel equivalent of ethanol versus a barrel of petroleum or petroleum products? 

HUNT:  That’s a really important question.  Biofuels can be produced sustainably and they can be produced very unsustainably.  So how you produce the fuels, what feed stocks you use, how you produce the feed stocks, what type of energy is used in processing, all of these factors help determine the net environmental impact.  So you really have to do a detailed analysis to compare biofuel production to oil, but I think it’s really hard to make a direct comparison.  In general you have lower emissions from when you are using the biofuels and you have a potential to dramatically improve the environmental impacts. And when we move into the advanced fuels over the next few years environmental impacts dramatically improve because you start to be able to use waste products as your feed stock.  You can use novel feed stocks, algae is an exciting one that’s kind of on the horizon, and then ideally you start to use feed stocks that don’t compete as directly for prime agriculture lands. 

SUAREZ:  And don’t compete directly with food.

HUNT:  Exactly.  And ideally you produce these fuels in a way where you’re achieving multiple goals.  So for example you use algae to purify waste water and then harvest the algae to produce energy.  So really integrated planning and systems is the direction that I think we need to go.

SUAREZ:  Now when you talked about places where this is already well-entrenched and moving forward, you mentioned the United States and Germany.  Certainly Brazil is a big player and the tenth biggest economy on the planet, but what about the poor farmers of the world?  Can they get in the game or is the up front investment in the technology so advanced and so expensive that the people in the Congo or in Thailand just feel well, no, this is a part of the solution that’s not going to involve me. 

HUNT:  I think there is the potential for the poor and for farmers around the world to really benefit from this industry, especially when we consider that 70% of the poorest people still live in agricultural areas and it’s been an enormous problem in several decades that farmers can’t get a decent price for their crops. So there’s this huge potential but it’s certainly not guaranteed.  So another piece of it is that we will continue to be producing biofuels from edible crops for the foreseeable future while the next generation technologies are coming to market and the tropical countries actually have an advantage.  The tropical oil feed crops are much more productive per hectare per acre.  They have cheaper labor and generally more productive crops, so they have a lot of advantages over temperate climate agriculture but there needs to be a very strong effort to ensure that the poor farmers are not left out of this because you can see trends in the industry towards concentrated ownership, vertically integrated protection systems that can lock out the poor farmers if we don’t work hard.  You can actually see in a number of places the U.S. ethanol industry started out very much based on a farmer-coop ownership structure so this isn’t something that’s impossible.  It’s very doable.

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