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February 12, 2008
In a January 23, 2008 Maui News Viewpoint, Dain Kane, Maui County liaison for Blue Earth Biofuels, extolled the virtues of imported palm oil and Blue Earth as a model of sustainable energy, work force relations and farm contracts.
The foundation of the Blue Earth Biofuel’s 120 million gallon mega-refinery is the importation of palm oil from Indonesia, or, as Blue Earth’s spokesman Landis Maez said back in 2007, soybean oil from South America. Continuing to import oil, whether it be vegetable oil or petroleum, is exactly what is not considered sustainable. In the last year the voracious appetite for energy and cooking oil in China, for instance, has caused the price of palm oil to rise 100% on the international market. Shortage of soybean oil has caused the price of soybeans and soybean oil to skyrocket so much that Midwestern U.S. biodiesel refineries have suspended their production of biodiesel and expansion of facilities.
In a telling story published in the January 20, 2008 Sacramento Bee by Tom Knudson, called “Dark Side of a Hot Biofuel,” the destruction caused from imported palm oil is detailed. As a result of rainforest destruction, Indonesia and Malaysia have now become the third greatest producers of CO2 global warming gases. Recognition of the unenforceability and inability to trace the lands and origins of palm oil due to the fact that it’s a bulk commodity blended and shipped in giant batches has made European Union officials wary. “How can palm oil be sustainable if it’s causing so much destruction?” said a Rainforest Alliance Network director (see www.RAN.org).
RAN has identified abuse and harsh working conditions on many soy and palm oil plantations. The quality of the worker’s health is marginalized by exposure to toxic pesticides, and in Brazil, slave labor is still used on many soy plantations. The spread of massive agro-oil plantations violates traditional and indigenous land rights, forcing small family-farmers to shift from subsistence to export-driven commodity farming, and pushes them off their lands entirely. On the Island of Sumatra, an indigenous Kubu native said, “I am a victim, I have lost my garden. Cannot grow the rubber, bananas, chiles and other things I need to feed my family.” Indeed, the price of palm oil has only become economical because the cost of labor in Malaysia, Indonesia and Brazil is cheap and the laborers are exploited by gigantic corporations, corrupt governments and military dictatorships.
Kane states “… at 20-plus megawatt per acre energy yields, agricultural-based energy… will reduce our dependence on foreign oil... ” The Hawaii Agriculture Research Center report of 2007 states that we can expect 400-500 gallons of refined biodiesel per acre from energy crops like African palm oil trees. This is in addition to waiting twelve years for an acre of palm oil trees to mature in optimal conditions with plenty of rainfall. Is this enough profit to secure viable farm contracts for $3.50 per gallon of refined diesel, or a gross of $1,575 per acre (not including deducting the costs of farming, water, fertilizer, pesticides, labor etc.), and after waiting twelve years to grow the oil? And by the way, in truth, Mr. Kane, you will need somewhere near 25,000 acres of prime agricultural land to produce enough agro-oil for 20 megawatts of electricity.
Don’t get me wrong here, my truck runs on bio-diesel and I support bio-diesel as a sustainable local transportation fuel. I just don’t approve our electric utility overlooking the best bio-diesel company on the planet; our own homegrown local company of the year, Pacific Biodiesel, for some mega-refinery that will keep us locked into imported agro-fuels forever to feed its giant appetite.
Nor do I feel we can justify building the largest bio-diesel refinery in North America when we have no history of what crops and yields we can really grow for fuels in Hawaii. Let’s not be a party to destroying the world’s great wildernesses for the sake of oil when we can invent our way out of the energy problem by using established, tested and already performing technologies like wind and concentrated field solar. In 2007, Nevada Solar One (www.youtube.com, search “Nevada Solar One”) was completed using 400 acres to produce 64 megawatts of electricity to supply 50,000 homes with clean sustainable power from parabolic mirrors. We can do this here in Hawaii right now, and put hundreds of people to work in a new economy based on real actionable sustainability.
Lance Holter is Chair of the Sierra Club Maui Group and drives his bio-diesel truck around Pa‘ia, Maui.
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Lance Holter
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