Sustainable biofuels

There's been a lot of concern recently about the sustainability of biofuels - both the effects of forest clearance to make way for current biofuel crops such as sugarcane and corn, and the effective competition between food and fuel biofuels create, which threatens to starve the poor. However, it seems New Zealand has hit on another way of making biofuel which avoids these problems: we can use trees:

Results from a feasibility study have found that there are no significant technical or supply barriers to producing ethanol from New Zealand's softwood feedstocks, despite previous concerns that it was technically too difficult and too expensive to utilise this resource.

These findings are the outcome of an international collaboration between New Zealand's Crown Research Institutes Scion and AgResearch, New Zealand's largest pulp and paper producer Carter Holt Harvey and US-based cellulosic ethanol and specialty enzyme development company Verenium Corporation.

The recently completed study into the development of biofuels for New Zealand evaluated the infrastructure, technology and economics of a transportation biofuel facility using New Zealand softwood plantation forests as feedstocks. It also considered opportunities to utilise existing infrastructure from the pulp and paper industry and Verenium's proprietary enzymes to convert wood and wood residues into sugars which can be fermented and refined into ethanol.

The study found there is both sufficient wood and wood residues available in New Zealand to supply a commercial-scale ethanol refinery, and a domestic market large enough to support it.

Beyond that, they're suggesting we could potentially run our entire vehicle fleet on domestic bioethanol, if we planted more marginal land in forest. And it would be fully sustainable, with no competition with food crops, and result in a net carbon sink overall (as we would be significantly increasing overall forest area).

The question the press release doesn't answer, though, is whether this can be done at a price competitive with that effectively set by expected oil prices and the Biofuels Sales Obligation. If it can be, then that green future might be closer than we think.