U.S. Environment Can’t Afford Big Ethanol
July 7, 2005
The Energy Bill passed by the Senate would require the U.S. to produce 8 billion gallons of ethanol per year. That’s a bad idea, for America and our environment.
The ethanol lobby told Congress that subsidizing 8 billion gallons of ethanol “would replace 2 billion barrels of imported crude oil.” Actually, it would take 156 billion gallons of ethanol to replace 2 billion barrels of crude oil, since there are 42 gallons in a barrel of crude, and ethanol yields 25 percent less energy per gallon than gasoline.
Worse, a new study by Washington State University researchers—just published in Bioscience—says that U.S. ethanol yields only about 10 percent more energy than it takes to make it. That means most of the effort and cash invested in the ethanol plants is wasted.
To get even that, we’re having to subsidize the ethanol to the tune of 50 to 70 cents per gallon, or 60-80 percent more cost per mile of driving than a gallon of gasoline before the recent oil price spike.
Worst of all, the Washington State bioscientists say it takes about 2.4 acres of land growing corn to support a car driving for a year on E85—gasoline with 15 percent ethanol mixed in. If we ran even 10 percent of our cars on the ethanol mix, that would take about 48 million more acres of good cropland away from Nature—or 100 million acres of poor cropland. U.S. national forests total only 191 million acres.
Why would we have to take land away from Nature to grow ethanol? Because meat and feed demand is rising rapidly in densely-populated Asian countries where the alternative to imported corn is clearing highly-erodable tropical forests full of irreplaceable wild species. That’s a big reason why the World Trade Organization and the Bush White House are right now negotiating to open the farm trade barriers which have kept American corn out of such massive markets as China, India and Indonesia.
Farmers like to say there’s a farm surplus, but in fact the market last year took all of the record corn yield from 79 million U.S. acres and wanted more. We paid the corn farmers far less subsidy on their feed corn than we did no their ethanol corn.
Some of the Green die-hards say we could make ethanol at less cost from the cornstalks and sell the corn. They don’t realize that the cornstalks are left on the field to maintain soil nutrients level—and to minimize soil erosion. Taking the stalks for ethanol plants would be an environmental sin—and we’d have to burn up still more liquid fuel to gather huge tonnages of them into an ethanol facility.
If we actually need ethanol, just the soil erosion threat from another 50 to 100 million acres of corn argues that we should buy the ethanol from Brazil. The Brazilians make their ethanol out of sugar cane, which yields three times as much energy per acre as corn.
The Washington State researchers found that even Brazil, however, would get cleaner air if they put their sugar/ethanol land back into forest than they get from burning ethanol instead of gasoline.
Providing just one-third of the world’s expected energy demand growth to 2050 through biofuels might require six million square miles of biofuel crops. That’s more than the land area of the United States. If we insist on growing the energy crops organically, we may need nearly twice as much acreage.
Why don’t we put the ethanol investment into cleaner-burning coal-fired power plants? The coal won’t make any significant difference to our global warming. Cores taken from Antarctic glaciers and cave stalagmites on four continents tell us that the Earth has had 600 global warmings in the last million years. The 1500-year natural climate cycle is driven by a tiny cycle in the irradiance of the sun.
With clean coal technology instead of ethanol, we can reduce global soil erosion, and save more land for wild species. Even the farmers will make more money producing feed and livestock products for Asia than they’d realize if we burn their corn as subsidized auto fuel.
Posted in Commentary |