Corn for cars or corn for people
Friday, May 4, 2007 at 10:56PM Some would have you believe that corn ethanol will be the great savior of the American driver and the Midwest corn farmer. Our representatives in Washington seem to think so. They are working on a bill that would increase incentives for research and development of ethanol technology and the production of the magic fluid. Ethanol is turning out to be a great profit center for farmers and processors. Nobody else will really get much out of it and some are already suffering from it.
The first problem with ethanol as a motor fuel is that it takes a lot of energy to make the stuff. I have written about Energy Return On Investment (EROI) before. The concept is simple – if it takes the energy in a gallon of fuel to produce that fuel, then you gain no net energy with which to do something useful. Corn sucks up a lot of fossil fuel energy in natural gas fertilizer, petroleum based pesticides, and diesel for tractors and trucks. The fermentation and distillation process takes yet more. The EROI on corn ethanol might be anywhere from 0.7 (a net loss) to 2 (one unit of energy in gets you two out) with an average of 1.5. As Professor Cutler Cleveland pointed out, an ethanol economy would require two thirds of our energy stream to be tied up in ethanol production so we could drive around on the other third.
Aside from the problem of basic physics, there is one of geography. There just isn’t enough land to grow enough corn to supply even a fraction of our fuel needs. An article by the Earth Policy Institute sums it up nicely.
“According to the EPI compilation, the 116 plants in production on December 31, 2006, were using 53 million tons of grain per year, while the 79 plants under construction—mostly larger facilities—will use 51 million tons of grain when they come online. Expansions of 11 existing plants will use another 8 million tons of grain (1 ton of corn = 39.4 bushels = 110 gallons of ethanol).
In addition, easily 200 ethanol plants were in the planning stage at the end of 2006. If these translate into construction starts between January 1 and June 30, 2007, at the same rate that plants did during the final six months of 2006, then an additional 3 billion gallons of capacity requiring 27 million more tons of grain will likely come online by September 1, 2008, the start of the 2008 harvest year. This raises the corn needed for distilleries to 139 million tons, half the 2008 harvest projected by USDA. This would yield nearly 15 billion gallons of ethanol, satisfying 6 percent of U.S. auto fuel needs. (And this estimate does not include any plants started after June 30, 2007, that would be finished in time to draw on the 2008 harvest.)”
So, if we diverted our entire corn crop to ethanol, we would supply 12% of our motor fuel. Of course, we would have to use the equivalent of 8% of our motor fuel to grow the corn and distill the ethanol, so we would net 4%.
Add to this the problem that intensive industrial corn production is responsible for the loss of topsoil. It takes the earth hundreds of years to create an inch of topsoil, but industrial agriculture has been stripping it away ten times faster. The more corn we grow this way, the less dirt we have to grow it in.
The final stake in the heart for ethanol is that we are responsible for 40% of world corn exports. In Guatemala, the poorest country in Central America, the rising price of corn is causing severe hardship. Even though the type of corn used for ethanol production is not the same as the type used for human consumption, a price rise in one pushes up the price of the other. The increase in the price of corn has paralleled the recent surge in ethanol production. Compare the doubling of the price of white corn over the past six months to this graph.
It’s a basic case of supply and demand, the demand competition being between gas tanks and stomachs. The amount of corn needed to fill your gas tank with ethanol would fill a Guatemalan’s stomach for a year. With the price of corn heading up sharply, it looks as if it will be an either/or proposition.
Reader Comments (2)
I appreciate your discussion on ethanol. We in this county (Webster) in SW Missouri are in the legal throes of having an ethanol plant being built. No planning and zoning unfortunately.
Any information about the amount of water per gallon of ethanol
please. The company's prediction is in the millions of gallons per day from deep wells.(1000 to 1500 ft.)
Thank you.
Hi Gary,
Thanks for your comment. Try this URL: http://www.agobservatory.org/library.cfm?refid=89449
The article is all about the competition between ethanol plants and other water uses.
The takeaway is that ethanol plants in Minnesota average about 4 gallons of water for each gallon of ethanol produced.
MH