Hi, this is Ashley Cornwell, founder and CEO of Sustainable Systems Research and Development.    I will be using this space to write about the subject areas we are passionate about at SSRD:  during the coming months,  the spotlight will be on biofuels, as our own sustainable biodiesel facility in Los Angeles slowly becomes a reality.

These days, most people agree that biofuels — ethanol and biodiesel — have some kind of important role to play in our transition away from a petroleum based economy.  We are just past the point in history where everyone was talking about the potential for biofuels, and we have begun to experience, in a real way, their limitations, drawbacks and, ironically, their potential for doing worse ecological damage than the fossil fuels they substitute for.  Crop-based ethanol and biodiesel production has seen huge growth in recent years , and the recent drop in world oil prices has slowed, but not stopped, the new sector’s expansion.  And perhaps the slowdown in biofuels is a good thing.  This is an area where the interests of  several large, dark industries converge, and the kind of biofuels economy we end up with depends on whether it becomes the marriage of Big Oil to conventional agribusiness, or something more locally committed, small scale, and responsible.

My own faith in the promise of biofuels is unshaken, and SSRD is moving forward with its plans to build an innovative sustainable biodiesel facility in Los Angeles.  The keyword there, of course, is sustainable.

In the United States, government support for biodiesel and ethanol was supposed to help create American jobs in the agricultural midwest, and increase American energy security.  The policies — and in fact ethanol — are questionable from a sustainability point of view.  Sustainability has not always been a priority in the government’s (often) short sighted ideas of what jobs and energy security really mean, and of course it’s harder to hit a target you don’t aim for. From a scientific standpoint, there is an ongoing debate over whether crop-based ethanol, especially, even yields more energy than producing it requires.  Crops grown for ethanol and biodiesel both impact land use patterns, not only in the United States but around the world.  (For instance, a recent study suggests that since U.S. farmers began planting corn every year for fuel crops, rather than corn alternating with soybeans, Brazilians have picked up the slack by clearing more of the Amazon rainforest to plant in soybeans.   Deforestation, among its other destructive consequences, creates a net global carbon debt many times the size of what any crops repay).

Yet sustainable biofuels are possible, and it will be possible to make a profit producing them.  The single most important principle is to avoid an industrial, crop-based biofuel economy built on herbicides, till farming, monoculture, long distance transportation and apparent (but unsustainable) economies of scale.

Sustainable biofuels have these characteristics:

• Fuel production occurs locally, where the fuel is to be consumed.  This implies  a local-sized scaling of the fuel production.
• Fuel production uses sustainable agricultural practices, or even better, recycles  agricultural or other waste.
• Sustainable biofuels production creates less carbon than the fossil fuels it  replaces: ideally of course it should reduce net atmospheric carbon.

We are excited about proving that this set of criteria is practical, and profitable.