What's going on with biofuels?

In this episode, Dan Lashof of the World Resources Institute discusses the trajectory of biofuels since the early 2000s and the implications of new biofuel standards recently proposed by the US EPA.

(PDF transcript)

(Active transcript)

Text transcript:

David Roberts

My fellow olds will recall that, back in the 2000s, biofuels were an extremely big deal in the clean-energy world, one of a tiny handful of decarbonization solutions that seemed viable. Biofuels — and the many advanced versions thereof allegedly on the horizon — dominated discussions of climate change policy.

Much has changed since then. Principally, it has become clear that electrification is the cheapest path to decarbonization for most sectors, including the transportation sector. The Biden administration has explicitly put electrification at the center of its transportation decarbonization strategy.

Biofuels, in the meantime, have gone exactly nowhere. Advanced biofuels remain almost entirely notional, old-fashioned corn ethanol remains as wasteful as ever, and new scientific evidence suggests that the carbon costs of biofuels are much larger than previously appreciated.

It's not clear if anyone has told the EPA. For the first time in 15 years, the agency is on the verge of updating biofuels production mandates first established by the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, and its proposed standards do not appear cognizant of these recent developments, or of the administration's larger transportation strategy.

To discuss the latest developments in biofuels and the EPA's puzzling blind spot, I talked to Dan Lashof, director of the World Resources Institute. We discussed how biofuels have developed since the early 2000s, the lack of progress in advanced biofuels, and the stakes of EPA's coming decisions.

Alright then. Dan Lashof. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.

Dan Lashof

Really happy to be here.

David Roberts

I've been wanting to do an episode on biofuels forever because I often just pause to think, whatever happened to biofuels? Because old people like you and I will recall way back in the day, in the early times, biofuels used to be a very big deal. They used to be the top line item, the sort of the hot subject of conversation, and it's really flipped since then. So maybe just to start, let's use our little time machine squiggly squiggly fingers, time machine, go back to say 2005 to 2010, the early 2000s, and just sort of tell us what was the state of the decarbonization conversation then and what role did biofuels play in it?

Dan Lashof

Right, well, back then, Tesla hadn't built its first car. Photovoltaics cost ten times or more what they do today. And the big fight was to prevent hundreds of new coal plants from being built. So the idea that we would replace gasoline with electricity seemed far-fetched at best. And a lot of environmental advocates were focused on fighting coal. There was some discussion of alternative fuels, but when you looked at the transportation sector, biofuels seemed like one of the best options out there. And then there was this idea, there was a debate about corn ethanol from the beginning, right?

David Roberts

Corn ethanol goes back. I mean, I kind of want to distinguish between corn ethanol and kind of biofuels. The larger category, like corn ethanol, goes back farther than the rest of this stuff. Right?

Dan Lashof

Right, but back then we weren't making much of it, right? So in 2007, there was about 6 billion gallons of corn ethanol being produced, which is about 4% of gasoline consumption back then. And there was a debate about it. A lot of that debate was like about net energy balance. Remember that one?

Does it take more energy and fertilizer and tractor fuel and trucking than is in the fuel? I think that debate sort of missed the point, and it was gradually shifting to, well, we don't really care about BTUs, we care about carbon and what's its net carbon impact.

David Roberts

And I feel like the limitations of corn ethanol were around even then, which is why I remember so much buzz around cellulosic biofuels.

Dan Lashof

Yeah, right. At that time, there was new research that seemed very exciting. I was convinced that that was the future of biofuels. Right. We were going to make ethanol not from grain, not from the corn kernels, but from corn stalks, maybe from some perennial grasses like ...

David Roberts

Switchgrass.

Dan Lashof

Yeah, right. And that was going to be awesome because you wouldn't be competing with food as much, and it was supposed to be cheaper because you weren't ... as waste material or the yields were higher. So that was going to take over.

David Roberts

Yeah. Wow. We were so young then. And so then this is the sort of political atmosphere in which came the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which, among its other sort of puzzling features in retrospect, was a big bipartisan energy bill passed in part to address emissions and I guess just wasn't the poison that it is now, I guess. But so part of that bill was about biofuels and setting those standards. So just tell us kind of what we did about biofuels in that bill.

Dan Lashof

To set the stage. The big political driver really was concerned about imported oil, which was peaking. It actually peaked in 2005, but it was about the same level through 2005, '06, '07.

David Roberts

Right. Because this was before the fracking revolution changed all that.

Dan Lashof

Right. And fuel economy standards for automobiles had been stagnant for a long time. So the bill had three main components. One was reform of the fuel economy standards, actually setting them on a size basis, which allowed the auto companies to kind of accept it, and then setting a target to increase them to 35 miles per gallon.

David Roberts

Is that when the light truck loophole made its way into ...

Dan Lashof

No, that was already there. This was actually designed to help address that by saying it did leave trucks and cars separate, but it said, we're going to base the fuel economy for a manufacturer based on the mix of sizes of vehicles they make. So if they make bigger cars, they don't have to hit the same level, but it reduced the sort of clip effect between a truck and a car. So it actually allowed more of these crossovers, but it also allowed unlocking an increase in the standards which had been stuck. So that was a big component. And one of the things that environmentalists were most excited about in that bill, there was also a set of energy efficiency provisions, appliance standards and other things.

And then the third big piece was the Renewable Fuel Standard.

David Roberts

And did the Renewable Fuel Standard exist prior to this or was it developed for this bill.

Dan Lashof

It did exist. I think it was first passed in 2005, but it was relatively modest.