Photo by Hummanna. Licensed under Creative Commons license 2.0.

Food security is a big issue in global politics these days, and the UN is starting a three-day conference in Rome today to discuss it. Since some food crops are currently used to make fuel, representatives from the biofuel industry wanted to make their voice heard in Italy. To that end, Gordon Quaiattini of the Canadian Renewable Fuels Association, Rob Vierhout from the European Bioethanol Fuel Association, and Bob Dinneen of the Renewable Fuels Association (RFA) in the U.S. have sent a letter to the UN conference leaders explaining their views. You can download the letter (PDF) or read it by clicking here (that's page 1, then 2 and 3).

The letter warns the UN and anyone else against singling about biofuels as a "major cause" of the recent upswing in food prices, calling such an attitude "highly precipitous." In a sign of just how quickly things move, the letter faults the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) for using oil price estimates contained in a December 2007 Organization of Economic Co­operation and Development (OECD) report. The letter says that those prices are outdated, since, "Oil prices have increased some 40% since December. Moreover, many recent long­range projections show future oil prices at much higher levels (one has oil prices rising to $150 per barrel by the end of this year)." That's where a lot of the rise in food prices lie, the letter says, not in biofuel crops. Read more from the RFA after the jump.

If it works, this could be great/terrible. Sapphire Energy announced yesterday that they have been able to take algae and mix in sunlight, CO₂ and other photosynthetic microorganisms to make 91 octane gasoline "that conforms to ASTM certification." The renewable gasoline, as Sapphire calls it, contains "high-value hydrocarbons chemically identical to those in gasoline," which could potentially lower gas prices (depending on how much it costs to make a gallon of this stuff) but won't do much for CO₂ emissions from vehicles. One good side is that the algae need CO₂ to grow. The overall carbon dioxide balance was not disclosed by Sapphire, but I've sent in an email to see how much CO₂ the algae need to make the gasoline. It'd be nice to learn this in the early stages, since Sapphire's rubric is "to be the world's leading producer of renewable petrochemical products," CEO Jason Pyle said in a statement.


UPDATE: A Sapphire representative sent ABG this information: "The Sapphire gasoline will be chemically equivalent to current high octane gasoline which means it will have the same energy characteristics (BTU per gallon etc) and release the same amount of CO2 into the environment as traditional gasoline. However every single carbon atom in the Sapphire gasoline is extracted from the environment as CO2, thus the product it will be carbon neutral."

[Source: Sapphire Energy]