This week’s Nature had a great editorial about biofuels: Kill King Corn.

It says much of what I’ve complained about earlier–namely, that replacing petroleum with corn-based ethanol is not terribly efficient, or environmentally friendly.

“As far as the greenhouse goes, figures from the International Institute for Sustainable Development’s Global Subsidies Initiative put the cost of averting carbon dioxide emissions by using corn-based ethanol at more than $500 a tonne of carbon dioxide. What’s more, the heavy use of nitrogen fertilizer in growing corn leads to significant emissions of nitrous oxide, an even more potent greenhouse gas….

[discussing subsidies] this will drive world corn prices up by 20% by 2010. This has a knock-on effect on other staple crops — more land for corn means less for wheat, for example. Higher prices are good news for farmers, including some of those in developed countries. But they can be bad news for the very poor, who spend a disproportionate amount of their income on food.”

The article goes on to suggest some ways biodiesel and other cellulose-based products could be produced in a sustainable way:

“This sorry state of affairs has the small benefit of providing a stark, contrasting background against which to sketch out what a successful and sustainable biofuels industry might look like. It will be based not on digestible starch from staple crops such as corn or cassava, but for the most part on indigestible cellulose, with some room for biodiesels that, because they grow on marginal land, do not compete with food production. In the medium to long term, it will not seek to produce ethanol — a poor fuel — but a range of more complex fuels delivered by carefully designed microbes. “

The editorial was prompted by this news feature on a shrub in India with interesting possibilities, Jatropha.