Rice report weighs biofuels and water resources

Houston Business Journal - by Ford Gunter Reporter#

The relationship between biofuel-driven agriculture and water-supply issues is addressed in a new report from Rice University.

In "The Water Footprint of Biofuels: A Drink or Drive Issue?", Rice scientists caution against a head-first dive into developing biofuels as an alternative to imported oil.

"The ongoing, rapid growth in biofuels production could have far-reaching environmental and economic repercussions, and it will likely highlight the interdependence and growing tension between energy and water security," the report states.

The report was authored by Pedro Alvarez, George R. Brown Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and three colleagues, and was funded by Rice University's Shell Center for Sustainability.

The large amounts of water and the run-off that includes fertilizers, pesticides and sediment is referred to as the "water footprint" of biofuels.

"These potential drawbacks," the writers state, must be "balanced by biofuels' significant potential to ease dependence on foreign oil and improve trade balance while mitigating air pollution and reducing fossil carbon emissions to the atmosphere."

The report recommends that specific biofuel crops should be grown in certain areas, depending on the water footprint. In Nebraska, for example, it takes 50 gallons of water to irrigate enough corn to produce enough ethanol to fuel an average car for one mile. In Iowa, though, it only takes 23 gallons. For Texas sorghum, it's 115 gallons.

"From a water-supply perspective, the ideal fuel crops would be drought-tolerant, high-yield plants grown on little irrigation water," the report states.

The authors urge that crops be chosen based on the appropriateness to the local climate and should be sustained by rainfall rather than irrigation.

Susan Powers at Clarkson University, Joel Burken at Missouri University of Science and Technology and Rice graduate student Rosa Dominguez-Faus co-authored the report. Amy Myers Jaffe, the Wallace S. Wilson Fellow in Energy Studies at the James A. Baker III Institute, also contributed to the report.

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