Water

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Bioenergy > Issues > Environment > Water

Rainforest-fed stream in Madagascar

Information about biofuels and bioenergy and water.

Issues

• Water pollution
  • Acidification
  • Nutrient loading
    • Eutrophication

• Water usage
  • Irrigation
    • Groundwater depletion

Resources/Reports

• RSB principle on Water
• Joint Water Quantity/Quality Management Analysis in a Biofuel Production Area (PDF) by Márcia Maria Guedes Alcoforado de Moraes, Ximing Cai, Claudia Ringler, Bruno Edson Albuquerque, Sérgio P. Vieira da Rocha and Carlos Alberto Amorim for the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), May 2009; analysis of a case study in Brazil.

Events

• 11-13 May 2010, Maputo, Mozambique: Bioenergy Markets Africa. (Themes: Africa, specifically Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Zambia, Malawi & Madagascar, food vs. fuel, GHG reductions, jatropha, land tenure, life cycle analysis, policy, water)

News

Tropical forests provide essential ecological services such as protecting critical watersheds, functioning as valuable carbon sinks and helping to regulate our global climate.

• The Case Against Biofuels: Probing Ethanol’s Hidden Costs, 11 March 2010 opinion piece by C. Ford Runge in Yale environment360: "Despite strong evidence that growing food crops to produce ethanol is harmful to the environment and the world’s poor, the Obama administration is backing subsidies and programs that will ensure that half of the U.S.’s corn crop will soon go to biofuel production."
  • "Yet a close look at their impact on food security and the environment — with profound effects on water, the eutrophication of our coastal zones from fertilizers, land use, and greenhouse gas emissions — suggests that the biofuel bandwagon is anything but green."
  • Due to fertilizer usage, "loadings of nitrogen and phosphorus into the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico encourage algae growth, starving water bodies of oxygen needed by aquatic life and enlarging the hypoxic 'dead zone' in the gulf."[1]

• Impacts of Global Biofuel Boom Remain Murky, 16 October 2009 by Scientific American: A U.N. Environment Programme "report concludes that so-called lifecycle assessments must go beyond calculating greenhouse gas emissions and consider how agricultural production of feedstocks affect the acidification and nutrient loading of waterways."
  • "'From a representative sample of [lifecycle] studies on biofuels, less than one third presented results for acidification and eutrophication, and only a few for toxicity potential (either human toxicity or eco-toxicity, or both), summer smog, ozone depletion or abiotic resource depletion potential, and none on biodiversity,' it adds."[2]

• African Jatropha Boom Raises Concerns, 8 October 2009 by The New York Times Green Inc. blog: "Once the darling of biofuel enthusiasts, jatropha is raising concerns."
  • "In a report leaked to The East African newspaper last week, Envirocare, an environmental and human rights organization, highlighted the impact of the jatropha trade in Tanzania — including concerns over the displacement of farmers, water consumption, and the substitution of food crops for biofuels."
  • "Indeed, of 13 potential bioenergy crops analyzed...in a study...in the American Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, rapeseed and jatropha were found to be the least water-efficient biofuels."
  • "Mr. Ruud Van Eck, the chief executive of Diligent Energy Systems, a Dutch jatropha developer working in Tanzania, is among business executives who have contested the findings on the water footprint of jatropha."[3]

• IDB releases new version of Biofuels Sustainability Scorecard, 11 September 2009 by InterAmerican Development Bank: "The Inter-American Development Bank has released a new version of its Biofuels Sustainability Scorecard, which will enable users to better anticipate the impacts of potential biofuel projects on sensitive issues such as indigenous rights, carbon emissions from land use change, and food security."
  • "The first version of the Scorecard, an interactive, web-based tool that was released a year ago, addressed 23 key variables including greenhouse gas emissions, water management, biodiversity and poverty reduction. The IDB subsequently held five regional meetings to solicit feedback on the Scorecard and began collecting and reviewing hundreds of comments and suggestions submitted by outside experts."
  • "The new version of the Scorecard includes a spatial analysis tool that enables users to quickly access existing Geographic Information System (GIS) data regarding areas for biodiversity preservation. Future versions will add data layers to show the spatial dimensions of categories including water scarcity, cultural sites and high carbon sequestration areas, among others."[4]

• Can Dirt Really Save Us From Global Warming?, 3 September 2009 by NPR: "This month the Senate is set to take up the climate and energy bill that Congress began work on last spring. One provision will likely set up a system to pay farmers for something called 'no-till farming.'"
  • "There's a possible conflict brewing here, though. Federal law and the energy bill encourage farmers to remove crop residue — the remains of the previous season's crop — to make ethanol."
  • "'That's a no-no,'" soil scientist Rattan Lal says. "'The moment you take the crop residue away the benefit of no-till farming on erosion control, water conservation and on carbon sequestration will not be realized.'"(Audio also available)

• BP Gives up on Jatropha for Biofuel, 17 July 2009 by the Wall Street Journal's blog Environmental Capital: "BP has indeed given up on jatropha, the shrub once touted as the great hope for biofuels, and walked away from its jatropha joint venture for less than $1 million."
  • Jatropha, "the inedible but hardy plant that just a few years ago seemed like it could revolutionize biofuels has turned into a bust. The initial attraction was that it grows on marginal land, so it wouldn’t compete with food crops. But marginal land means marginal yields. And jatropha turned out to be a water hog as well, further darkening its environmental credentials."[5]

• Exxon Sinks $600M Into Algae-Based Biofuels in Major Strategy Shift, 15 July 2009 by The New York Times: "Exxon is joining a biotech company, Synthetic Genomics Inc., to research and develop next-generation biofuels produced from sunlight, water and waste carbon dioxide by photosynthetic pond scum."[6]

• Bioenergy Makes Heavy Demands On Scarce Water Supplies, 4 June 2009 by ScienceDaily: "The 'water footprint' of bioenergy, i.e. the amount of water required to cultivate crops for biomass, is much greater than for other forms of energy. The generation of bioelectricity is significantly more water-efficient in the end, however – by a factor of two – than the production of biofuel. By establishing the water footprint for thirteen crops, researchers at the University of Twente were able to make an informed choice of a specific crop and production region. They published their results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) of 2 June."
  • "By linking the water consumption to the location and climate data, it is possible to select the optimum production region for each crop. This makes it easier to prevent biomass cultivation from jeopardizing food production in regions where water is already in short supply".
  • "Water that is used for bioenergy – whether it be for a food crop such as maize or a non-food crop such as jatropha – cannot be used for food production, for drinking water or for maintaining natural eco-systems."[7]

• Water worries cloud future for U.S. biofuel, 14 April 2009 by Reuters: "Critics argue that precious water resources are being bled dry by ethanol when water shortages are growing ever more dire. [U.S.] Federal mandates encouraging more ethanol production don't help."
  • "'Biofuels are off the charts in water consumption. We're definitely looking at something where the cure may be worse than the disease,' said Brooke Barton, a manager of corporate accountability for Ceres".
  • "Corn is a particularly thirsty plant, requiring about 20 inches of soil moisture per acre to grow a decent crop, but most corn is grown with rain, not irrigation. Manufacturing plants that convert corn's starch into fuel are a far bigger draw on water sources."
  • "Water consumption by ethanol plants largely comes from evaporation during cooling and wastewater discharge. A typical plant uses about 4.2 gallons of water to make one gallon of ethanol, according to the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy."
  • "The ethanol industry pegs that at about 3 gallons of water to 1 gallon of fuel."[8]

• Biofuels, food crops straining world water reserves, 24 August 2008 by AFP: "Burgeoning demand for food to feed the world's swelling population, coupled with increased use of biomass as fuel is putting a serious strain on global water reserves, experts said".
  • Scientists predict that "we will only be able to 'meet food demands by 2050 if we have a much more efficient use of water...That does not include the water we need for all that biomass'".

• China and India face water risk from biofuels - A paper by researchers from the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), "Biofuels and implications for agricultural water use: blue impacts of green energy" (PDF file), predicts food and water shortages in China and India associated with increased production of biofuels.
  • The report concludes that "the strain on water resources would be such in China and India that it is unlikely that policy makers will pursue biofuel options, at least those based on traditional field crops." [9]

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