Biofuels Unravel Efforts to Shrink Gulf Dead Zone
By Steve Baragona, Washington, DC05 October 2009
Voice of America
But the U.S. Congress might have made that goal harder to achieve. In a bid to reduce dependence on foreign oil, Congress passed a law requiring refiners to include more and more biofuels in their gasoline each year, reaching 140 billion liters by 2022. Mike Griffin, a biologist at Carnegie Mellon University, says if farmers grew enough corn and other biofuel crops to meet that target, "Nitrogen loading would actually increase, and we would certainly not be able to meet the goals of the EPA."
Griffin says that Congress’s goal of increasing energy independence is obviously at cross purposes with the EPA’s goal of shrinking the Gulf of Mexico dead zone, a condition scientists call hypoxia.
"We certainly need to get the people that are doing the hypoxia mitigation strategies and the biofuels strategies together, so that if we are going to go down the road of increasing biofuels that we take these indirect effects of that production into account," he says.
But Griffin says the problem is not just biofuels. He and his colleagues also considered how much nitrogen fertilizer will be used to raise crops to meet growing food demands.
"If we did no biofuels, and we just allowed for food production to increase," he says, "you still can’t meet the hypoxia goals in the Gulf of Mexico. You still need to take mitigation actions even if we didn’t produce biofuels."
Buffer zones would help, but not solve problem
Griffin says planting buffer zones between crops and rivers or streams is one way to mitigate the fertilizer runoff problem. But his study shows buffer zones alone won’t be enough to reach EPA’s goal of reducing the dead zone by two-thirds. Other strategies will be needed.
That’s partly because agricultural runoff is not the only source of nitrogen pollution. Wastewater, industry and transportation all contribute too and Griffin says steps will need to be taken to reduce their effects as well.
The study was published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.