Leader Volume 76 • Issue 11
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4 Chemistry&Industry • November 2012
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‘Longer term, what is needed is to move away from agricultural sources of carbon altogether and find other routes to achieve energy independence that do not conflict with what’s on the dinner table’
Chemurgy trilemma
Cath O’Driscoll Deputy editor
A
dilemma is one or actually two things. But the word that is needed to describe the current fuel, feed and food crisis is a ‘trilemma’, according to Christian
Patermann, a former programme director for the EU Commission, speaking at the recent European Forum for Industrial Biotechnology (EFIB) meeting in Dusseldorf, Germany. The crux of the problem is working out how to produce enough of all three sustainably to satisfy the demands of an ever-enlarging population – particularly one that includes a bigger proportion of more affluent middle classes with an appetite to eat more meat. While there are many possible solutions, the focus of the EFIB event was on producing more of what we need – food, feed, fuel and chemicals – from plants, by opting to substitute traditional polluting petrochemical feedstocks for renewable sugars and oils. And the emergence of this new bio-based economy also comes accompanied by another word: ‘chemurgy’, pointed out Sarah Hickingbottom, senior research economist at consultancy LMC International – an idea that dates back to the 1930s, around the time of Henry Ford’s invention of a car built from soya beans and hemp. Growing all of the things we need and want in plants may be theoretically achievable, but the big question is how much extra land will this require – and what effect, if any, this may have on food prices? According to figures from LMC, the amount of land dedicated to growing arable crops around the world remained roughly the same between 1980 and 2002, but all of that changed in the past 10 years when an extra 90m ha has been brought into production as demand growth outpaced yield growth. The real ‘game changer’ has been biofuels, Hickingbottom said: over the past decade more than 140m t of crop demand has been added by the biofuels sector, with a significant impact on the land area needed. LMC’s Feedstocks for bio-based chemicals report says that roughly 900m ha of land is currently being used to grow arable crops,
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