December 2007 has been an active month for the climate change issue. Negotiators from around the world met in Bali, Indonesia, under auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change seeking a successor to the Kyoto Treaty. In the US, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee deliberated a bill that would establish a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse-gas emissions. And Finland’s Neste Oil Corp. announced plans for a precedent-setting renewable-diesel plant that illustrates the conflicts that can arise in a global grope for simple answers to complex questions.
Neste Oil’s facility, in Singapore, will make renewable diesel using a proprietary process able to run a range of animal fat and vegetable oil feedstocks. The company started up a 170,000-tonne/year plant based on the process this year at its 200,000-b/d refinery at Porvoo, Finland, and plans to bring a second unit on stream there in 2009. The Singapore project is noteworthy for, among other things, its size. The design capacity is 800,000 tonnes/year, which Neste Oil says will make the plant “the largest facility producing diesel fuel from renewable feedstocks anywhere.”
Warming antidotes
In the current political climate, any fuel that can be called renewable or that bears the prefix “bio” wins favor. All such fuels are presumed to be effective antidotes to global warming. Yet they’re not all alike.
Against environmental and performance standards, diesel from the Neste Oil process measures up well, according to Cal Hodges, president of A 2nd Opinion Inc., a clean fuels and regulatory issues consultancy in The Woodlands, Tex. “This technology is proven and will significantly reduce life-cycle carbon emissions,” said Hodge, who is helping Neste win regulatory approvals for its renewable diesel in the US. In a press release, he noted the Singapore plant’s capacity exceeds total current production of biodiesel in all the US.
Neste’s Singapore plant won’t make biodiesel, an ester. Its product will be a hydrocarbon made from palm oil. Hodge said diesel from palm oil has average carbon intensity—a measure of carbon emissions associated with a fuel—30-46% that of gasoline, depending on farming methods. And the product won’t require special handling or have the performance drawbacks of biodiesel from transesterification.
Given these advantages, renewable diesel from palm oil should have unanimous support from supporters of aggressive precautions against greenhouse warming. It doesn’t.
The market for all edible oils, of which palm oil accounts for 30%, has grown rapidly in recent years. According to the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), Kuala Lumpur, the area under cultivation for palm oil has increased more than 43% since the 1990s, mostly in Malaysia and Indonesia. To make room for oil palms, some plantation owners are destroying forests and draining and burning peat bogs, which act as carbon sinks.
The environmental group Greenpeace has added palm oil to its list of climate-change threats. Last month it anchored one of its ships in position to keep a palm oil tanker from leaving a port in Indonesia. The Greenpeace ship flew a banner reading, “Palm Oil Kills Forests and Climate.”
Acknowledging concern
Greenpeace has been known to exaggerate environmental claims. Neste Oil, though, acknowledges the concern. It committed to process in Singapore only palm oil that complies with a new RSPO certification system. While the step shows good faith, it doesn’t annul the boost that consumption as a fuel feedstock will give to overall demand for palm oil—and therefore to pressure on oil palm growers to encroach on forests and peatlands. If Greenpeace is correct about the extent of the practice, climate-change benefits of diesel from palm oil are in some measure compromised.
This seems like a paradox: Production of a fuel that lowers carbon emissions meets resistance because of its association with agricultural methods that increase carbon emissions. But it’s really just a reminder: There are no energy panaceas. All energy forms have advantages and disadvantages. Markets and science must sort them out and can if allowed to do so. But the sorting can’t happen by fiat. And it won’t happen overnight.
