Thank you very much. It's an honour to be with you, Mr. Chairman and committee.
I'm a professor of engineering and environmental science and policy here at the University of California, Davis, and also director of our Institute of Transportation Studies. I've studied alternative fuels for 30 years. I've written over 200 papers and 12 books on this topic, including the most recent--this is my only advertising here--Two Billion Cars. It came out this past year.
All energy supply options have large downsides. All of them have problems, including biomass. Incidentally, that is the reason energy efficiency strategies deserve to be the number one strategy to be pursued.
I want to make three points. The first point is that while there are many biomass feedstocks, some are clearly more attractive and promising than others.
Making fuels from food and feed materials is problematic, the so-called first generation. In general they use a lot of water, they have high energy inputs, they push up food prices, and they have high greenhouse gases. There are some exceptions to that. Probably the most promising is sugar cane from Brazil, where they've learned how to use much of the material from the sugar cane plant. They grow it very efficiently; it has high yields. But that tends to be one of the few exceptions.
What are much more promising are the second-generation feedstock materials you've been hearing about, the cellulosic materials, grass. A wide variety of grasses and trees can be used. They have much higher yields, they can use marginal lands, they use much less water, they use less energy, and they have a lower carbon footprint.
But this is what I really want to emphasize in talking about feedstock materials: by far the most promising and what I believe will be the most important feedstock material is the waste stream. That means crop residues, forestry residues, municipal solid waste. That's where the focus should be. I believe in the long term that will be the principal source of biomass material we will use for energy and fuel.
Then we come to the second topic, and that is the best way to use biomass. Here there's quite a bit of uncertainty. As the previous speaker talked about, biomass can be used for electricity production. Incidentally, it can be co-fired with coal and fossil fuel. It can also be converted into biomaterials as well as used for liquid fuels and fuels for engines.
The point I want to make here is, as far as transportation is concerned, probably the most important and promising application of biofuels is that they will eventually be used in airplanes and in long-haul, heavy-duty trucks, because those are the two applications where very dense energy materials are needed, and electricity and hydrogen are not very good sources for those two end uses.
As we think about the use of biomass, we really should be thinking those are the applications where the biomass materials are most attractive and in the end probably most likely to be used.
Then, third, we come to policy. I'm more familiar with the United States and Europe. In the United States, as you know, we have the renewable fuel standard, essentially a mandate to which they also attached a greenhouse gas threshold requirement. I believe very strongly that we need a much better policy, one that is more fuel neutral, that harnesses market forces. That approach is similar to what California has done on the low carbon fuel standard. This approach has also been embraced by the European Union. The European Union is moving away from mandates and towards a performance standard.
In California, there's a 10% performance standard. It means fuel suppliers need to reduce the carbon content of fuels by 10% by 2020. In a sense, it's grams of CO2 equivalent per megajoule. In the California case, and I think anywhere it's likely to be used, it will be based on a life-cycle metric. The target or the point of regulation would principally be the oil companies that are major fuel suppliers, but very importantly, it covers all fuels.
The real danger we have when we make policy is that, as one speaker said, there's a tendency to try to pick winners. The reality is that as policy-makers and academics we don't know what the best options are going to be. I've studied transportation fuels for 30 years. If you ask me what the best fuel options would be for 20, 30, or 40 years from now, I don't know the answer. I know some of them are more promising.
We need a policy that is fuel neutral and performance based and that harnesses market forces and motivates innovation. That's what the low carbon fuel standard does. One can tweak it and make small modifications, but I believe this is fundamentally the right approach.
The low carbon fuel standard provides a durable framework so that we don't have to keep changing it every couple of years, with a new subsidy here and a new subsidy there. We've gone through the process of what I sometimes call the “fuel du jour” phenomenon, where we keep jumping around. Policy-makers, legislators, journalists, and the public jump from one silver-bullet solution to another. It doesn't work. We keep making the wrong choices and there's a lack of fundamental performance standards.
In closing, that's my recommendation and my suggestion. I'll leave it to you, if you have any questions.
Thank you very much for your time.