Despite the green rhetoric, biofuels and biogas are not the most effective or economic solutions for our energy needs. They remain costly distractions from more viable energy solutions.
The Climate Crisis lobby touts biofuels and biogas as effective ways to capture a potent greenhouse gas, methane. Even better, in a two-birds-with-one-stone move, they can replace natural gas (which is mostly methane), or transportation fuels (gasoline, diesel, jet fuel).
Despite the efforts of bioenergy firms to transform biomass into hydrocarbons, the process is inefficient and impractical. Biomass, which includes various waste products such as restaurant food, food processing, agricultural, and forestry waste, is used as input. However, this alternative energy strategy is neither effective nor economic, except in rare niche cases.
Biofuels are ethanol produced from biomass. The biomass is either fermented or undergoes a similar process, whence ethanol is distilled. Residual degraded matter is sold as organic fertilizer. This superficially would be a win-win situation, but, in practice, perfectly edible foodstuffs – usually corn or sugarcane – are fermented to produce the alcohol.
Oil refiners legally must buy ethanol, in Ontario, several states in the U.S., and elsewhere, including Brazil and India, despite its relatively high cost for its energy value. Ethanol is blended with gasoline and supplied to service stations. This wastes food and reduces its supply, thus making it more expensive to the public. Furthermore, it does little to achieve the goal of lowering carbon dioxide emissions, as burning ethanol also produces CO2.
It also does little to reduce demand for petroleum-source fuel. Ethanol blends lower the fuel economy of the vehicles using them – as the U.S. Energy Information Administration notes, ethanol has less energy by volume than gasoline. Sadly, this now-big industry in the midsection of North America, Brazil, and now India has a difficult-to-end protected, subsidized status.
Biogas is less controversial. Its feedstock is usually waste material or liquids (such as sewage). Producing methane this way is relatively cheap. However, biogas has other unavoidable costs. The first is the removal of different gases, water vapour, and other contaminants. Methane cannot enter the existing natural gas distribution system before that significant first step. Connecting biogas facilities to the natural gas distribution system is also costly. Biogas remains costlier than natural gas.
Biogas cannot replace fossil fuel-sourced natural gas. The Canadian Biogas Association’s 2020 report estimates that 155 petajoules (PJ) of Canada’s biogas potential is “realistically available” annually. In contrast, Canada consumed 4,164 PJ of natural gas in 2023; 155 PJ is only 3.7% of that amount. Profitable producers should not receive the significant subsidies or legal mandates ethanol unjustifiably enjoys.
Putting the waste matter to use that otherwise must be disposed of at a considerable cost is admirable and ingenious. While it may make more sense in densely populated countries with high-intensity agriculture, temperate climates and relatively high-priced conventional natural gas, only Denmark shows significant exploitation thus far, of this still expensive ‘renewable’ gas (others, such as Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, and South Korea do not).
Biogas production and gathering systems’ improving efficiency might increase its uptake in Canada as its price falls, but it currently seems unlikely to be a big part of Canada’s energy consumption. Expensive government programs will not make it so.
Ian Madsen is the Senior Policy Analyst at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.