Bio Fuels: At the Tipping Point?

Bio Fuels: At the Tipping Point?: "

Photo: Honeywell Aerospace

Tom Vilsack became the United States' first agriculture secretary to visit the Paris Air Show when he stopped by the Alternative Aviation Fuels Showcase in the middle of the 2011 Salon du Bourget. This was a warm up for his participation in the G20 summit meeting of agriculture ministers in downtown Paris where he defended the US's continuing support for development of bio fuels. He made it clear that the renewed emphasis on bio fuels won't be another ethanol boondoggle that caused a spike in feed corn prices because it diverted part of the food crop harvest into bio fuel production.

USDA now has shifted away from bio-fuel feed stocks that compete with the food supply. 'The US is making a concerted effort to identify nonfood feedstocks such as camelina, miscanthus, jatropha, woody feedstocks, livestock waste, solid waste and algae, diversifying away from our reliance on corn,' he said.

The scale of the challenge is daunting. More than 1-million square miles of camelina or 67,000 square miles of algae would have to be cultivated to produce enough bio crude to satisfy the world's thirst for kerojet. That would wean us away from petroleum based jet fuel and reduce net carbon emissions by at least one-third because carbon dioxide is absorbed by growing plants.

Vilsack, though, said that development of bio fuels is a national security concern because it can assure a "steady, secure supply" of fuel. Translation: The world will no longer have to bow down to petro monarchs, two-bit despots and oligarchs who sit on most of the world's petroleum reserves.

Economics will drive the shift from petroleum-based fuels to bio-jet, Vilsack asserts. With petroleum crude now at $100 per barrel or more, large scale production of bio-crude starts to make economic sense, especially with a little seed money from USDA. The Agriculture Department's Biomass Crop Assistance Program [BCAP] has made a five-year commitment to developing 50,000 acres per year for non-food feedstocks.

When will bio jet replace petroleum-based aviation kerosene? "I'd like to be able to same the timetable was yesterday," Vilsack says. "But there's still a lot of work to be done . . . It's getting to the tipping point and I think the future is very bright." "