Are Bio Fuels Truly Sustainable?

A lot of exiting things are happening in the world at the moment - and I'm not just thinking about the economic crisis. For some years now the climate situation has been on the agenda. The Kyoto Protocol put the negative effect of the increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere on the agenda and several countries committed to reducing carbon dioxide emission. Former vice president Al Gore managed to communicate the consequences of these emissions in his "Inconvenient Truth" in a way that everybody could understand. So now we are at the point where we know that we have to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, but how do we do it?

A number of challenges are facing us.

The clean technology race. A lot of different technologies are now effectively competing against each other for investments and customer attention. Photo voltaics, algae based bio diesel, 2nd generation ethanol from wood and agro waste, wind power and wave and tidal power and many more.

The sustainability dilemma. As it has turned out the initiatives that were taken to act, and to actually shift from petro-fuel to bio fuel ended by being pooh poohed - first by NGOs as the friends of the earth in their campaign against use of palm oil in bio fuels, due to the fact that palm oil plantations are replacing virgin rainforest. - and then at the top of the commodity price hike by the UK Gallagher Review that recommends less widespread usage of bio fuels due to potential negative environment effects, as well as undesirable competition towards food usage and in some cases questionable environmental effects.

It is not difficult to understand that many people are now confused and don't know how to act. We thought bio fuels were the way to go, now we are told that they are bad for the environment. This is however just a classical example of refinement of the solution as time passes.

Bio fuels were never THE solution. There is simply not enough land and resources to allow us to both produce the food that we need for 6 billion people AND at the same time replace all the petro-oil that we consume in the world. But bio fuels are also in the future a part of the solution, if the bio fuels are produced in a sustainable way: sustainable bio fuels are so called 2nd generation bio fuels. 2nd generation bio fuels are produced from what would otherwise be waste. A lot of these 2nd generation bio fuels are already here. They include wood and bark pellets made from sawdust and wood paste after wood processing, other bio material pellets made from various waste from processing of agricultural crops, straw, waste bio oils from industrial processing of food. And then there are the liquid bio fuels that we are all waiting for, because we will be able to run our cars on them: bio diesel from Jathropa oil, bio ethanol from agricultural waste as well as the exiting bio diesel from algae. In the case of Jathropa we are still waiting for somebody to grow the bushes that are going to give the oil, D1 Oils are busy developing this after they shut down their UK operation. In the case of bio ethanol the Danish companies Novozymes and Danisco are both busy developing the killer-enzymes that are going to make them rich. Bio diesel from algae, this is one I'm not so familiar with, however it is my impression that there are still a number of years before we will see commercial large scale plants.

So where is my Modern By-products Group. We are really concerned about the environment and it is our mission to utilise food and agricultural waste/by-products in the best way possible. In many cases the answer lies in bio fuels. We run our trucks on by-product fish oil and ethanol based bio diesel as well as many of our partner's trucks. We sell thousands of tons of 2nd generation liquid bio fuel for heating and electricity generation. We supply bio fuel to a power plant that has achieved the world's toughest ecolabel, the Swedish "Bra Miljöval".Personally I enjoy driving the SAAB 9-5 Biopower, which runs on any bio ethanol and gasoline mix, and actually gets more HP the more ethanol I add.

But as I said - a lot of exiting thing are happening in many different companies. My friend and former colleague Lars Jagd is heading the upcoming technology provider Stirling. Take a look at their offering, as this is really a cool alternative, if you want your own CHP plant. Another friend of mine is busy shaking up the Danish electricity market by offering green electricity, it will be interesting to see if the Danish consumer really cares.

I think that the solution lies in many different ways of intelligently using the resources that are available to us. Different technologies will be used in different regions and existing facilities can be used in new and more environmentally friendly ways.

From Used Cooking Oils to biodiesel

Sveprol Bio Production AB, a company in The Modern By-product Group recently signed a countrywide contract with McDonald's in Sweden. MBP collects the used cooking oil from 230 restaurants in all of Sweden, and makes sure that the used oil is reused for biodiesel manufacture. As part of the contract MBP provides McDonald's with biodiesel from 2nd generation biological oils, in what can be described as a green circle. (for more details please refer to McDonald's press release (in Swedish) from 3 November 2008 on their homepage)

Sveprol has the ability to collect the used cooking oil in a cost efficient way, which is not an easy task in a country with only 19,8 people per square kilometer (only Norway, Finland and Iceland are more sparsely populated in Europe). After collection the oils are filtered and treated in order to be used as substitute for virgin oils. This is a good illustration of what Modern By-products is all about. At the same time as we are reducing waste, we are substituting virgin oils that can instead be used for human consumption - and last but not least the biodiesel from renewable sources replaces normal diesel from mineral oil, which we all know is a finite resource.

Modern By-products in 10 years

In 2009 The Modern By-products Group celebrates its 10 year anniversary. From being a good business idea 10 years ago, born by company founder David Magnussen, the concept has grown and been successful, so that we are today active with offices in 8 countries and a growing business. The concept has been clear from the beginning: we want to help companies in the food, oleochemical and biodiesel industry to better manage their by-products. Many companies have over the years come to rely on MBP to handle their by-products in an optimal way ensuring that by-products are handled optimally from an environmental, legal and economical point of view. In this process we have developed extensive knowledge and technical expertise necessary in order to manage what is for many companies seem trivial tasks.

In the year of our 10 year anniversary we have decided to share some of our ideas and thoughts with a wider group of people through this blog. We do this because we are passionate about what we do; and because we often find that people are very interested in what we do. In this blog I look forward to share our insights in reuse of resources, renewable energy technologies and green policies in different countries. I hope that you will find these thoughts interesting and I look forward to any thoughts and feedback that you wish to share.