Essay by John Mattingly
Agriculture – June 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
BLUE SUN PRODUCERS will be making canola-based biodiesel in the San Luis Valley. The company hopes to bring the price of biodiesel in line with the cost of petrodiesel, and bring economic benefit to Valley farmers and consumers.
The full story on Blue Sun Producers, including their thoughtful and optimistic business plan, can be found at www.gobluesun.com.
However, as an my old fence-sitter friend used to say, “There’s some that’s for it, and some that’s against it.”
To start with, the name “Blue Sun” is a bit of a puzzler. The company slogan is: BLUE MEANS GO, but offhand, I can’t think of anything for which blue means go. There’s no blue light at intersections, and blue moons are rare. Maybe it’s just me, but the company name suggests a sun obscured by something blue, which can’t be the sky. To me, the closest color association is to air pollution, blue smoke, and/or the blues. Blue sun just doesn’t seem like the right image for a product whose sustaining virtues are efficiency and reduced tailpipe emissions.
But an odd name isn’t fatal. There are questions about the economic and environmental viability of biodiesel production, though. To approach them, a couple of basics are worth mentioning.
First, how diesel engines work. Invented by Rudolph Diesel in 1895 to burn powdered coal, diesel engines create internal combustion by compressing a mix of air and misted fuel to the point of explosion — as opposed to a gasoline engine which mists fuel into the cylinder chamber and ignites it with a spark. There is no spark inside a diesel engine, only extreme compression of the air/fuel mix.
Diesel fuel is refined from crude oil, but is not as highly processed as gasoline, and thus contains a heavier load of hydrocarbons, which is to say, it retains a good measure of the crude oil from which it was refined. The retained oil content is necessary for both primary and secondary lubrication of all moving parts in the diesel engine’s fuel-to-combustion system. Rubbing diesel fuel between fingers reveals a consistency similar to light-weight motor oil.
Second, a definition of biodiesel: a fuel produced from renewable biomass that has a high oil content. Sources include canola, soybeans, certain mustards, and even spent vegetable cooking oil from restaurants. It turns out that oils pressed from plants have combustion and lubricity characteristics equivalent to, and in some cases superior to, petroleum diesel fuel, and the combustion waste products of biodiesel are considerably cleaner than petrodiesel. Almost any biological oil, with tinkering in some cases, can be combusted in a diesel engine.
Promoters of biodiesel point to four main advantages provided by their product:
1. Cleaner emissions.
2. It’s a renewable energy source that reduces dependence on fossil fuels.
3. Better engine performance from higher cetane content.
4. It contributes to the local and regional economies which produce the “homegrown fuel.”
ALL OF THESE CLAIMS have obvious merit. But a close look also reveals some problems.
First, while it’s true that biodiesel burns cleaner, it takes fuel to make this fuel. To produce the biomass for biodiesel, be it from soybeans or canola, farmers require petroleum-based fuels, chemicals, and pesticides. And farmers don’t ordinarily use biodiesel for those production processes, because in its pure form biodiesel is about twice the cost per gallon of petrodiesel, and in a 20% blend with petrodiesel it is still several dimes a gallon more expensive than petrodiesel.
According to a study done by the US Department of Agriculture (full study available at Bio diesel Lifecycle.pdf, and also on the Blue Sun website) biodiesel produced from soybeans yields a remarkable 3.2 times more energy than is required to produce it. The study used Life Cycle analysis (defined by USDA as scrutiny and calculations employed in “cradle to grave” analysis), which results in an energy balance number. The USDA analysis presumes to look at all of the costs and benefits of growing the biodiesel used in city buses, compared to all of the costs and benefits of harvesting the petroleum diesel that is used in different city buses from the same fleet.
THE USDA STUDY relies heavily on averages: average biomass yields, average biomass production costs, average processing expenses, and average driving conditions for the busses. We all know the story about the man who drowned in a pond whose average depth was one foot. Also, the study assumed free solar energy but ignored the externalized costs of producing soybeans, such as the soil depletion to the farms, the air and water pollution from the machines involved in the farming process, and the water pollution from farm chemical runoff; yet the USDA study gave an externalized benefit to biodiesel’s lower tailpipe emissions.
While these findings are probably as optimistic as they are variable, there appears to be some small net gain from using petrodiesel to grow biodiesel, the primary gain coming from solar energy, and from the contribution of externalized benefits ledgered by lower emissions. Eventually, one would hope that biodiesel would be used to produce biodiesel, and the energy balance number would increase.
Second, even though expanding the use of biodiesel would reduce dependence on fossil fuels, that reduction could also be accomplished by driving no more than 55 MPH; by legislating higher CAFÉ (Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency) standards for better fuel economy; by using energy efficient technologies; and by expanding public transportation. Although biodiesel doesn’t directly limit the implementation of those alternatives, it is a supply-side solution that may distract customers from pursuing other courses.
Whether biodiesel production from San Luis Valley canola proves to be a distraction or a real contribution to our fuel-hungry culture depends in part on whether the particulars of the SLV energy balance are similar to the energy balance numbers in the USDA study. The USDA study did not include irrigation costs, for instance, which are a significant factor in SLV canola production.
A Life Cycle analysis of SLV irrigated production would, at a minimum, include (a) externalized costs of aquifer depletion; (b) electrical energy, which is coal energy, which produces emissions that have an externalized cost in addition to cash out-of-pocket for the KWH; (c) steel and components of center pivot sprinklers, electric motors, pumps, casing, etc.; and (d) the higher fertilizer and chemical rates to match up with the higher irrigated yields. Collectively, these factors could impact the energy balance number, depending on the oil yield from the SLV canola crop.
Using numbers I am familiar with as a canola grower, I can’t figure out how Blue Sun makes financial sense. Start with this: Blue Sun is paying growers 11¢ a pound for harvested canola, delivered to a field warehousing facility in the SLV. Biodiesel weighs about 8 pounds to the gallon, so Blue Sun needs 20 pounds of 40% oil canola seed to make a gallon of biodiesel. Thus Blue Sun is paying $2.20 a gallon just for the canola, before incurring costs of processing, management, and distribution.
If I grow canola for personal biodiesel production on a 120-acre irrigated circle in the SLV, the numbers flow like this: 3000 pounds of canola per acre times 120 acres = 360,000 pounds of canola per circle. At 40% oil content, this yields 144,000 pounds of oil, which, at 8 pounds to the gallon is potentially 18,000 gallons of biodiesel. It’s going to cost at least $15,000 out of pocket to grow the 3000 pound/acre canola crop on the circle (not counting capital costs of land ownership), and the investment in processing and storage equipment remains. That results in a cost of about $2 a gallon to produce and process farm grown canola into farm fuel.
STIR IN THE EXTERNALIZED BENEFITS of reduced emissions and better performance, and these costs begin to make sense, particularly if the farmer uses his own biodiesel to produce the canola after the first year. And finally, it’s true that biodiesel is good for the local economy, creating jobs and tax revenue. But in the case of Blue Sun biodiesel production from San Luis Valley canola, there has been some concern about the use of genetically modified seed, specifically Roundup Ready canola seed. Blue Sun Producers does not endorse Roundup Ready seed. They simply purchase harvested canola that meets certain standards, and process it. Genetically engineered canola looks the same as hybrid or open pollinated canola, so there is no distinguishing between the three at the field warehouse.
One concern is that a majority of farmers will prefer Roundup Ready seed because of the short term advantages for weed control. And thus they may unleash a band of super weeds upon the future — or mutant canola plants. There is some merit to this concern because gene-hopping can occur between related species, and canola, being in the mustard family, could cross pollinate with the Roundup Ready gene to create noxious mustards. The reply to this concern is that canola and mustards, being broadleaf plants, can be eliminated with a long menu of other herbicides, and in many cases Roundup is actually not the preferred chemical for its control.
THERE ARE ALSO FOLKS in the Valley, and the greater US, who do not want GM crops grown for bio-ethical reasons. Crossing species is crossing a line into unassigned territory where consequences aren’t yet mapped. There are mathematical possibilities that an affliction could be unleashed on the human population by the bacteria used in the gene transfer process.
In response to this concern, farmers and the ag chemical industry point out that consumers don’t want to work in the fields any more pulling weeds, yet they demand cheap food. To keep pace with shrinking margins, farmers use chemicals instead of human labor, producing more and more for less and less. The market value of most raw agricultural products today is the same or less than in 1968 when I first started farming, yet the cost of farm production inputs has increased at least tenfold since then. The only way to stay in business is to employ the latest technology, and that is the road that has led us to genetic engineering, and a host of other innovations involving chemicals that may have long term ill effects not yet identified.
But in this writer’s view, consumers are as responsible for the push toward chemicals and the manipulation of crop production at the genetic level as producers. Consumers get what they want, and, for the most part, deserve.
John Mattingly farms and writes near Moffat in the San Luis Valley.
