It seems that BP is getting with the program. They are spending half a billion dollars to do biofuel research at the University of California, Berkley.

from here

Officials of oil giant BP are expected to announce it is awarding a $500 million biofuels research program to a consortium led by researchers at the QB3 facility at the University of California, Berkeley. The consortium includes the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley Lab in Berkeley and the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek as well as the University of Illinois, which will provide agricultural expertise.

…

The institute is expected to focus on developing new biofuel components and improving the efficiency and flexibility of those blended with transport fuels. It will also develop new technologies to enhance and accelerate the conversion of organic matter to biofuels with the aim of increasing the proportion of a crop that can be used to produce feedstock and use modern plant science to develop species that produce a higher yield of energy molecules and can be grown on land not suitable for food production.

Research is greatly needed to increase the efficiency of the biofuel process for temperate climates is pretty poor, perhaps these very smart people can figure out a way to get more bang for our bio-buck. The need is dramatically illustrated in a new report out from Oregon State University.

from here.

For each option, the researchers examined the cost of production, its contribution to energy independence and its environmental impact in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. They calculated “net energy” as the amount of energy in the biofuel minus the amount of energy it takes to produce, process, and transport the biofuel. Another term often used to express this value is “Energy Returned on Energy Invested”, or ‘EROEI’.

Their results suggest the following:

• ethanol made from wood cellulose produced the greatest net energy, netting 84 percent of its energy after production fuel costs were subtracted (EROEI: 1.84 to 1).
• biodiesel made from canola netted 69 percent of its energy after subtracting production fuel costs (EROEI: 1.69 to 10)
• ethanol made from corn netted a mere 20 percent of its energy after subtracting the energy spent to produce it (EROEI: 1.20 to 1).
• compare this with ethanol made from sugarcane in Brazil (EROEI: 8.3 to 1 up to 10.2 to 1); if this ethanol were to be exported to the US, that is transported in tankers over the Atlantic, the EROEI would only be marginally affected and remain many times higher than that of any biofuel made in the U.S.

Read the full report here. (pdf) As you can see without further study, and improvements in efficiency home grown biofuels will have a very hard time competing in a global marketplace. If places like Brazil, African nations, and south east Asia can make biofuel much cheaper and with much more efficiency they will, and American biofuel producers will be forced out of the market without huge and unsustainable subsidies or trade embargoes.