Sustainable aviation fuel can cause more damage to the environment

Alan Guebert
| South Bend Grandstand

Federal policymakers and their Big Ag friends have a problem: Their hopes of turning corn and soybeans into the feedstock for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) were dashed when the aviation industry ruled that biofuel from both crops did not meet “sustainable” guidelines. As such, there would be no corn or soy-based SAF.

That’s not the news the biofuel lobby, agriculture and agricultural commodity groups, and the Biden administration wanted. All quickly joined forces to encourage “the use of updated scores by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s GREET model,” and not the airline industry’s “greener” metric, to ensure that “the carbon intensity” of “ corn-based ethanol SAF” met. aviation benchmarks.

It’s not a little bureaucratic hassle. Billions in federal SAF tax credits, promised under the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, are on the table.

Farm and food: Part 1: Are Big Ag and the USDA Manipulating the Rules for the Sustainable Aviation Fuel Project?

Switching to GREET (or Greenhouse Gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy use in Technologies), all hoped, would create a burgeoning new market for ethanol, just as electric vehicles are pushing into the government-mandated gasoline market.

Better yet, the Department of Agriculture (USDA) could monitor the approval process and, if necessary, put its green thumb on the GREET scale.

At a press conference in Washington, D.C. on March 21, USDA CEO Tom Vilsack did almost exactly that when he noted that agricultural practices such as “no-till, cover crops and energy-efficient fertilizers… should be considered” when determining an SAF. winner.

Then he leaned in even more openly: “I’m confident we’re going to send the right signal,” Vilsack said.

The clear implication was that USDA would be more than happy to push any more art-than-science model facing ethanol to get it into today’s 16 billion gallons per year jet fuel market.

But just adding green-sounding agricultural practices like no-till — while adding carbon credits to controversial technologies like carbon pipelines and methane-producing manure digesters — won’t make ethanol green or SAF sustainable, environmental experts point out.

When agricultural land use researchers at the universities of Wisconsin, California, Kentucky, and Kansas State measured the economic and environmental impact of ethanol after the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) sharply increased its production in 2007, they found a very mixed, definitely not- green bag.

Their joint 2022 study found that during the first fifteen years, the RFS increased corn prices by 30%, expanded corn production by 6.9 million acres, and added 5.2 million acres to the total U.S. cropland base.

As much as those new acres and higher prices pleased American farmers and made ethanol an industrial giant in rural areas, it all came at very high environmental costs.

“This increased agriculture,” notes the report, which includes the following notations in brackets, “is accompanied by greater use of fertilizer (3-8% per year), greater deterioration in water quality (an increase of 3- 5% in nitrate leaching and phosphorus runoff) and increased carbon emissions due to land use changes.”

“This one policy” – the RFS – “effectively increased pollution across the entire agricultural sector by several percent,” noted a co-author, Tyler Lark of Wisconsin.

And, the University of California analysis in the report adds, those hectares added by RFS “are responsible for 62% of estimated increased greenhouse gas emissions” due to a “loss of biomass” – carbon sinks such as pastures and forests – and increased fertilizer. usage.

Land Grant researchers aren’t the only carbon health care providers blowing the whistle on ethanol. Two climate change experts from the World Resources Institute presented an even darker biofuel/SAF assessment last December.

If the Biden White House follows the science “rather than bowing to pressure from the biofuel industry,” they wrote, it will find that crop-based jet fuels, far from being a climate solution, are even worse than their fossil alternative.

This suggests – again – that the “green” in most agriculture-focused carbon credit schemes actually means more money for the schemers, not a healthier, more sustainable world.

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