Fuel or famine?: Farmers in countries such as the U.S. and Brazil have grown increasing amounts of crops, such as maize, for biofuels. But the growth in the industry is now being fingered in the current food security crisis.

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PARIS: Next-generation biofuels, which are greener than present crop-based fuels, are in the works – but it will take many years, and massive financial support, before they reach the pump, experts say.

Such caveats amount to unfortunate news for the biofuel industry as it seeks to battle its way out of a storm.

The surging price of petrol and diesel from fossil fuels has prompted farmers, notably in the United States and Brazil, to grow crops such as corn, soy, colza and sugar cane which are then distilled into the petrol substitute ethanol.

Skyrocketing food prices

Partly in response to this agricultural switch from food to fuel, the price of dietary staples has blasted skyward this year, worsening hunger among the very poor and in half a dozen vulnerable countries stoking political instability (see, The coming famine, Cosmos Online).

Scientists are working hard to develop second-generation biofuels that would mainly use non-food cellulose materials, such as straw, wood and timber chips, which would be supplemented by easy-to-grow fibrous plants.

Two techniques - one biological, the other a combination of heat and chemicals – are being used to render this feedstock into biofuels, respectively ethanol or a diesel and kerosene substitute called BTL (Biomass to Liquids).

But the public will have to wait until 2015 for ethanol and 202O for BTL, said Xavier Montagne, deputy scientific director at the French Institute for Oil (IFP).

Claude Roy, an interministerial official who is coordinating France's efforts in biofuels, said "the real outcome lies in the battle of the yields," a reference to the amount of fuel that is harvested compared to the energy used to produce it. "At present, the two techniques have low energy yields. We have to double present yields to make them viable. Tripling them would be ideal," he said.

Tripling yields

Such improvements can only come through research and development and economies of scale in manufacturing – and those in turn can only come through massive investment.

For instance, the German firm Choren Industries is to build a biofuel refinery with a 200,000-tonne capacity. The cost is a billion euros (A$1.62 billion), compared with just 40 million euros (A$64.6 million dollars) for a similar facility handling rapeseed, also called colza.

Such investments are fine – just so long as oil prices hold up. In many minds are memories of a false dawn 30 years ago. Investment in renewable energies surged in the late 1970s but was wrecked when, a few years later, the price of crude plummeted and oil climbed back into the saddle.