I normally work in astrophysics, but one of my other interests is energy, energy security, reduction of fossil fuel use, and environment.
Please DO NOT quote me as an employee of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab - I AM NOT. The material and opinions expressed here are absolutely not those expressed, paid for, condoned, or even tolerated by LBNL or the University of California.
Ethanol from US grown corn is well-known among experts to be of little value for reducing imports of foreign oil, and somewhere between no value and a monstrous disaster for reducing greenhouse gas emission. The corn lobby, agribusinesses such as ADM, Cargill, and the like, have spent millions in PR and lobbyists telling lawmakers and the public just the opposite. They have succeeded in securing hundreds of millions (if not billions (I am working on the references and numbers here) in subsidies for everything from ethanol stations to subsidies for corn farmers. The result so far has been no reduction in greenhouse gasses, lots of profits for Agribusinesses and Ethanol businesses, and a huge increase in food prices with disasterous effects all over the world. Corn ethanol is a boondoggle perpetrated by the corn loby against the American people. It may be one of the biggest and most expensive of all time. The corn ethanol boondoggle is the "prefect storm" politically. The corn ethanol boondoggle allows a politician to look pro-farmer, pro-environment, pro-america, pro-energy security, and recive huge helpings of money from lobbyists all at the same time. It may, in fact, be irresistable to any politician. This is why it must be identified for what it is: Corn ethanol is a boondoggle.
I am hoping that more americans will recognize that we should fight the corn ethanol boondoggle, and that many of you will link to this page, and use the phrase "corn ethanol boondoggle" in your text. In this way, whenever anyone searches on "corn ethanol", the full phrase, "corn ethanol boondoggle" will appear in the text results for the search.
DON'T TAKE MY WORD FOR IT: Look at the results of the definitive 2006 "study of studies" published in the journal, "Science".
• The ERG (energy resources group) at UC Berkeley did a good job of reviewing and fairly comparing different claims on net energy from corn ethanol and separately, greenhouse gas emissions. This group repudiates earlier claims that much more energy goes into producing corn ethanol than comes out; they claim that "co-prodcuts" of corn ethanol are not fairly counted, and yield an energy savings. For example, if you make corn oil as a result of your ethanol process, this will surely be sold, eliminating the need for energy to be expended to make this product elsewhere. So, some oil is definitely saved, making corn ethanol - but most of that savings is just transferred to natural gas and dirty coal. The results of corn ethanol production for greenhouse gas emission, then, are clearly damning (quoting the paper):
"The published results, adjusted for commensurate system boundaries, indicate that with current production methods corn ethanol displaces petroleum use substantially; [however] only 5 to 26% of the energy content is renewable. The rest is primarily natural gas and coal (Fig. 2). The impact of a switch from gasoline to ethanol has an ambiguous effect on GHG emissions, with the reported values ranging from a 20% increase to a decrease of 32%."
The really important point here is that LOTS of Coal, the dirtiest popular form of energy (though much of it domestically produced) goes into making corn ethanol. Put another way, If you switched over to 100% ethanol tomorrow, we would still use 95% to 74% as much fossil fuel (because both oil and coal are greenhouse gas producing fossil fuels)!
So, should the US taxpayer pay out billions in subsidies for something that replaces a little bit of imported oil but gives us lots of strip mining and the bad health effects of dirty coal, and probably no decrease in greenhouse gasses? I think this is the definition of a boondoggle - the corn ethanol boondoggle. Now, this all assumes two things: First, that corn ethanol is made in a good way. Other scenarios have much worse results. Second, the land use issues must be ignored for these results to hold. Land use issues as determined by the February 29 2008 issue of Science, would be an all-out catastrophe for greenhouse gas emission. Details here.
[Regarding co-products: I wonder if this takes into account a saturation of the market at the required scale- if we scale up to make billions of gallons of ethanol to supply cars, and billions of gallons of free corn oil come with it, would we really use it all?]
More References:
Farrell 206 Article Farrell et al. 2006, Science, 311,506
• Some of the original references stating that corn ethanol are energy negative come from Pimintel, Patzek, and Ho, S. These are plant scientists. (Pimintel has been identified with a website which has politically controversial ideas about immigration, which has been used on the net to smear these results.)
D. Pimentel, T. D. Patzek, Nat. Resources Res.14, 65 (2005)
Ho, S.P. “Global Warming Impact of Ethanol Versus Gasoline.” Presented at 1989 National Conference, “Clean Air Issues and America’s Motor Fuel Business.” Washington DC, October 1989.
T. Patzek, Crit. Rev. Plant Sci. 23, 519 (2004).
• Shapouri has a research group at the USDA which publishes the very rosy picture for corn ethanol and is critical of the Pimintel-Patzek studies
H. Shapouri, A. McAloon, ‘‘The 2001 net energy balance of corn ethanol’’ (U.S. Department of Agriculture, Washington, DC, 2004). Also available at www.usda. gov/oce/oepnu.
NYTimes reported a study which showed that all biofuels - the ideal miscanthus cellulosic ethanol, not just corn ethanol - cause release of carbon currently sequestered in non-agricultural land, and that this release DWARFS the carbon emission saved by even the best cellulosic biofuel process. In other words, we could run our country as green as we want, but somewhere else in the world they will practice slash-and-burn agriculture to offset the land going out of agricultural production. The really essential point is not that they will burn the rainforests - the essential point is that the carbon content of the meanest scrubland as scrubland instead of ag land is huge - and not so different from rainforests.
Searchinger., T et al. Science 29 February 2008 319: 1238-1240 - economic analysis
Joseph Fargione, Jason Hill, David Tilman, Stephen Polasky, and Peter Hawthorne
Science 29 February 2008 319: 1235-1238 - calculation of carbon released when land converted to biofuel production.
I am by no means certain that this study is the most important source, but it is an important source for the idea that policitians frequently use new energy technology as a misdirection to avoid sober evaluation of energy policies in the near term. This is a 2003 NRDC (National Resources Defense Council) report. In this report they identify the Bush Administration "hydrogen economy" vision as so hopelessly far in the future, and with such small potential for even medium and long-term impact, that it could only be considered misdirection. The really powerful part of the report is that they do a good job pointing out the huge potential for saving on fossil fuels (and therefore reducing pollution, greenhouse gasses, money to middle eastern dictatorships, etc. ...) by the simplest conservation measures. It seems to me that these ideas, if not directly, were picked up in the next year or two in influential New Yorker Magazine and New York Times articles.
"Dangerous Addiction 2003: Breaking the Chain of Oil Dependence" is a report by the NRDC by Daniel Lashoff and Roland Hwang.
Please feel free to contact me with personal correspondence (not spam or invective, thanks) at:
Bruce[underscore]Grossan[at sign]lbl[dot]gov (anti-spam
format email address)
Last Update 2010 Dec. 11.