Is Ethanol Saving the Planet?
Over at the Corner, Ian Murray notes a study By Dennis Avery, Biofuels, Food or Wildlife? The Massive Land Costs of US Ethanol. According to Avery, current legislation pushed by the White House on the use of ethanol will require drastic changes to the U.S. landscape:
America’s total corn crop in 2005 was about 280 million metric tons, second only to the record 2004 crop of 300 million tons. In both those years, the U.S. produced about half of the world’s corn crop, and an even higher percentage of its corn exports. However, a recent University of Minnesota study says that if all the current output of U.S. corn and soybeans were put into biofuels, it would replace only 12 percent of our gasoline demand and 6 percent of our diesel needs.Replacing 10 percent of U.S. gasoline with corn ethanol would require planting more than 55 million more acres of corn, on top of the 80 million acres of corn U.S. farmers are already planting. Where would we plant the additional corn? The only underused cropland in the U.S. is roughly 30 million acres of land enrolled in the Conservation Reserve—which is mostly too arid to grow corn.
Efforts to force-feed the U.S. corn ethanol industry are likely to trigger lots of forest clearing, but U.S forestland is of substantially poorer quality than its corn land. Our corn is grown on our best land, while our forests grow on our worst. Forest land is steeper, dryer, poorly drained, or somehow lacking—and therefore low-yielding. If the land quality of the cleared forests is only half as high as the quality of the current corn land, the additional land required to displace 10 percent of our gasoline with corn ethanol could total 110 million acres.
Murray also notes that the World Food Program is warning that the world demand for biofuels will force it to cut back on food distribution or demand more money. Given that this sort of thing seems to follow from government action like night follows day, we ought to stop talking about "the Law of Unintended Consequences" and start calling it "the Law of Deliberate, albeit Unspecified Consequences."
Comments
You'd think we'd learn at some point that government does a very poor job at this kind of thing.
Posted by: Lisa Roberts | July 17, 2007 1:47 PM
I'd hope that anyone employed in the field of biofuels understands these limitations of corn and other biomass production. Without alternate methods of producing fuels, planting more crops simply won't make much of a dent in our needs.
Luckily, there appears to be a recent interest in cellulosic biofuels. In the last year or so, there have been five centers established around the U.S. to help develop technology to greatly increase the amount of fuel that is derived from cellulose, "waste" plant material. One of the centers is at ORNL, funded to the tune of something around $125 million per year.
I have been involved with some of the computational efforts at ORNL to understand the biochemical processes of the enzyme cellulase in its production of simpler polysaccharides from crystalline cellulose. If we (collective 'we') are successful in our efforts, we may be able to increase the efficiency of biofuel production by up to 6 orders of magnitude. That would completely "change the game" when it comes to our energy dependency.
Posted by: Sean | July 17, 2007 7:29 PM
Sean,
Sounds very cool. Unfortunately, your wish that anyone involved in biofuels would understand these limitations hasn't proven true. There's a lot of farm state politics involved in present ethanol legislation. While the people that are doing research on cellulose ethanol are genuinely trying to come up with a viable alternative to imported oil, the evidence suggests that the lobbyists and politicians pushing a corn-based ethanol requirement are clearly interested in driving up the price of corn.
Posted by: Don Roberts | July 17, 2007 7:55 PM