Ethanol
The News Gets Worse.
From Cornell University: An acre of U.S. corn
yields about 7,110 pounds of corn for processing into 328 gallons of
ethanol. But planting, growing and harvesting that much corn requires about
140 gallons of fossil fuels and costs $347 per acre, according to Pimentel's
analysis. Thus, even before corn is converted to ethanol, the feedstock
costs $1.05 per gallon of ethanol.
Some critics point out that, technically, it takes more than
one gallon of gas to produce a gallon of gas too. Sort of. It
appears that the amount of energy required to extract and process the oil
used to make the gasoline is greater than the yield. Like ethanol.
So what we have here is that we are paying a premium to make the fuel
portable and usable by cars. Point taken. However, that doesn't
change the fact that using corn to make ethanol is not the economic or
environmental solution it's proponents claim, and, even more to the point,
even if you used all of the corn crops in the U.S. for ethanol, it still
wouldn't be enough to replace even 1/3 of American requirements.
("1/3" is generous-- some experts say it is much less.)
From the New York Times, May 15, 2006:
A. David Pimentel, a professor at Cornell University,
published a paper in 2005 with Tad W. Patzek of the University of
California, Berkeley stating that the corn-to-ethanol process powered by
fossil fuels consumes 29 percent more energy than it produces. The results
for switchgrass were even worse, the paper said, with a 50 percent net
energy deficit. “I’m sympathetic, and I wish that ethanol production was a
net positive and a help to this nation,” Dr. Pimentel said in an interview.
“But I’m a scientist first and an agriculturalist second. I don’t think the
U.S. will meet its goals with biofuels.” He also said the United States did
not have enough agricultural land to displace gasoline with biofuels. “Even
if we committed 100 percent of the corn crop to making ethanol, it would
only replace 7 percent of U.S. vehicle fossil fuel use,” he said.
I had read something like this years ago, so I was
surprised to see and hear numerous articles and news stories praising the
idea of ethanol as a gas substitute for North America, and, just maybe, the
long-dreamed-of solution to our dependence on foreign oil. I started
thinking-- am I crazy? Did I dream that ethanol actually takes more
energy to produce than it creates?
No.
Even "60 Minutes" recently rhapsodized about the
possibility of filling America's freeways, long after the Saud's are
depleted, with biomass-fuelled cars, without once mentioning that corn is
produced with the help of fertilizers, pesticides, tractors, machinery, and
transport, all of which consume vast quantities of.... fuel. In fact,
if you had to use ethanol to produce ethanol instead of fossil fuels, the
absurdity would become clear: it would take 1.5 gallons of ethanol to
produce one gallon of ethanol.
In short, ethanol is not cheap, not sustainable, and
solves nothing. There is no way America could ever produce enough corn
to produce enough ethanol to even begin to replace fossil fuels.
Think that particular study by Pimentel is biased?
You would think, then, that defenders of ethanol would be happy to show you
different studies that show different results. On the contrary, they
tend to damn with faint praise, admitting that corn-based ethanol may never
be able to replace, at best, more than 1/3 of our current fossil fuel
requirements.
In all fairness, some scientists claim that ethanol can be
more efficiently produced. In all fairness, the scientists who say
that appear to be employed by
ethanol
manufacturers. Archer Daniels Midland is the largest manufacturer
of ethanol. According to the Cato institute,
it costs taxpayers
about $30 for every $1 of ethanol produced.
Except one thing: it gives the American government
an excuse to bribe farmers in Iowa to support a particular candidate in the
early caucuses come election year, as "West Wing" dramatized (Republican
candidate Arnold Vinick refused to endorse ethanol and, in this fantasy
drama, still won the nomination).
Ethanol is a scam.
