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The Energy Crisis

America is abuzz with talk of replacing imported oil with ‘biofuels’
produced from homegrown materials. The US Environmental
Protection Agency recently honoured famous country and western
singer Willie Nelson for his efforts to promote the use of biodiesel
through his own ‘BioWillie’ brand, a vegetable oil-based fuel which is
now being distributed at filling stations nationally. Clearly, many
hurdles stand in the way of making such biofuels commercially viable
with traditional sources. Indeed, it remains very difficult to forecast
whether powering our vehicles with crop derivatives will ever be a
truly economic proposition. Nevertheless, it is not too early to ponder
what impact the widespread adoption of biofuels would have on our
environment.

Michael S. Briggs, a biodiesel advocate at the University of New

Hampshire, has estimated that the United States would need about
140 billion gallons of biodiesel each year to replace all the petroleum-
based transportation fuels currently being used. This calculation is
premised on the idea that Americans could, over time, switch to using
diesel vehicles, as European drivers are clearly doing - half of the new
cars sold there now run on standard diesel. Although one could make
a similar appraisal for the amount of sugar-derived ethanol needed to
meet our needs, it is unlikely that drivers would ever want to fill up
their tanks entirely with ethanol, which contains only two-thirds of
the energy of gasoline, whereas biodiesel is only 2 per cent less fuel-
efficient than petroleum-based diesel. Hence a switch to biofuels
would demand no new technology and would not significantly reduce
the driving range of a car or truck.

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The main source of biodiesel is plant oil derived from crops such as
rapeseed. An acre of rapeseed could provide about 100 gallons of
biodiesel per year. To fuel America in this way would thus require 1 .4
billion acres of rapeseed fields. This number is a sizeable fraction of
the total US land area (2.4 billion acres) and considerably more than
the 400 million acres currently under cultivation. Consequently, the
burden on freshwater supplies and the general disruption that would
accompany such a switch in fuel sources would be immense.

Such calculations are sobering. They suggest that weaning ourselves

off petroleum fuels and growing rapeseed instead would be an
environmental catastrophe. Are more productive oil crops the answer?
Oil palms currently top the list because they can provide enough oil to
produce about 500 gallons of biodiesel per acre per year, which
reduces the land requirement fivefold. Yet its cultivation demands a
tropical climate, and its large-scale production, which currently comes
from such countries as Malaysia and Indonesia, is a significant factor
in the ongoing destruction of what rainforest remains there.
Conservationists have been warning that palm oil production poses a
dire threat to the dwindling population of orang-utans, for example,
which exist only in the wild in Borneo and Sumatra. So here again, the
prospect of dedicating sufficient land to growing feedstock for the
world’s transportation needs promises to be an environmental
nightmare.

There is, however, a ‘crop’ that is widely recognised as having the

potential to meet the demands of a biodiesel- based transportation
fleet without devastating the natural landscape: algae. Algae is a
single-celled plant, some varieties of which can contain 50 per cent or
more oil. They also grow much more rapidly than ordinary plants and
can double in quantity within several hours.

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The US Department of Energy funded considerable research on biofuel

production using algae after the oil problems of the 1970s, an effort
known as the Aquatic Species Program. Although this programme was
terminated in the 1990s, a lot of experience was gained through
research and various demonstration projects. The results suggested
that algae can be grown in sufficient density to produce several
thousand gallons of biodiesel per acre per year - a full order of
magnitude better than can be expected using palm oil and two orders
of magnitude better than soybeans.

It is not surprising then that many scientists and entrepreneurs are

once again looking hard at the prospects for using algae to produce
transportation fuels and sizeable amounts of money are being
invested in various schemes for doing so. David Bayless, a professor of
mechanical engineering at Ohio University, has been working with
scientists to engineer a device that can grow cyanobacteria (blue-
green algae). It uses carbon dioxide from the gases emitted from
power-plant chimneys and sunlight that is distributed to the growing
surfaces through optical fibres. Bayless uses an enclosed bioreactor
and claims to be able to produce as much as 60 grams of biomass per
square metre of growing surface per day.

Another recent effort is being carried out in San Diego by KentSeaTech

Corporation. This company gained experience growing algae as a part
of its aquaculture operations so was quick to respond when the
California state government started looking for ways to treat the huge
quantities of nutrient-laden water which runs off from adjacent farm
lands. ‘It’s no real difficult feat to turn nutrients into algae,’ says
director of research Jon Van Olst, ‘but how do you get it out of the

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water?’ This is what Van Olst and his co-workers have been trying to
achieve.

The people working on these ventures are clearly eager to make

growing algae a commercial success. Yet it is not hard to find experts
who view such prospects as dim indeed. John Benemann, a private
consultant in California, has decades of experience in this area. He is
particularly sceptical about attempts to make algae production more
economical by using enclosed bioreactors rather than open ponds. He
points out that Japan spent hundreds of millions of dollars on such
research, which never went anywhere. Even Van Olst has serious
reservations. ‘It may work,’ he says, ‘but it is going to take a while and
a lot of research before we get anywhere.’

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Questions 6-12

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in the
reading passage?
TRUE if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer
FALSE if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this

1. 2% of Americans already use biodiesel

2. At present in America, 400 million acres of land are used for
agriculture
3. The use of palm oil as a fuel source will require more land than
using rapeseed oil. ..
4. Growing biodiesel crops has had a positive effect on local wildlife
in some areas
5. One advantage of algae is the speed with which it grows
6. David Bayless believes that algae can produce more energy than
solar power.
7. It is easy to grow algae using agricultural waste water.
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