Ethanol's Empty Promises

[IZZY_T]

Commentary: Ethanol's empty promises

By John Krist
February 13, 2006

American farmers are absurdly proficient at growing corn. Last year's crop covered 82 million acres and yielded more than 11 billion bushels worth $23 billion, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, making it the nation's top farm commodity.

And almost none of that corn was food. Not technically, anyway, even though a lot of it ended up in American bellies. This helps explain the enthusiasm among lawmakers and lobbyists for investment in alternative fuels such as ethanol, which received a boost in President Bush's State of the Union speech and in the 2007 budget he unveiled recently.

Thanks to nitrogen fertilizer, hybridization and the crop's suitability for large-scale mechanized agriculture, corn production in the United States long ago outstripped consumer demand. For a while, the surplus was hidden in livestock, as beef and pork producers shifted from grass and other home-grown food sources to cheap and fattening corn.

That wasn't enough to absorb the surplus, so American farmers sent their corn abroad, often undercutting prices in the receiving countries and bankrupting less-well-capitalized growers there. Even exports, however, proved inadequate to absorb the U.S. corn crop. So, after failing to sequester the surplus in animals and foreigners, the food industry found another place to hide it: inside the bodies of Americans themselves.

More than 40 percent of the American field-corn crop is used to produce high-fructose corn syrup. Corn syrup is everywhere, particularly in soft drinks and in the processed items that account for much of the American diet. Open your kitchen cupboard and grab a few containers at random; you will find it listed as one of the top ingredients in salad dressing, soup, cranberry sauce, ketchup, cookies, fruit juice and a host of other products. The caloric overdose provided by the ubiquitous sweetener, which turns mere condiments into diet-busters, accounts for a significant share of the fat encircling American waistlines.

And still there's corn to spare, thanks to taxpayer-funded programs that make growing it profitable regardless of demand. Corn is the most heavily subsidized U.S. crop, accounting for nearly $42 billion in federal handouts from 1995 through 2004, according to the Environmental Working Group. Very little of that trickles down to individual growers, going instead to the handful of major companies that dominate processing and distribution.

Now, thanks to the skyrocketing price of crude oil, agribusiness and its lobbyists see an opportunity to solve the problem of insufficient corn consumption once and for all.

The federal government has long subsidized the production of ethanol from corn, reasoning (without much evidence) that this keeps farmers in business and reduces gasoline consumption. The technology is well-established, involving fermentation and distillation, and yields a liquid fuel, which fits easily into the existing distribution system. Bush has called for further ethanol "investment" - subsidies by another name - to reduce American dependence on oil.

The opposite is likely to happen. Numerous studies have concluded that producing ethanol consumes more energy than the fuel yields. Taking into account all the inputs - from the natural gas used to produce nitrogen fertilizer, to the diesel fuel used by tractors to plant, till and harvest the grain, to the energy required for fermentation and distillation - producing ethanol consumes 29 percent more energy than the fuel generates, according to a recent analysis by David Pimental of the University of California, Berkeley and Tad Patzek of Cornell University. Some studies have purported to find energy gains with ethanol, but they typically disregarded some of the inputs.

The ratio is even worse when using other types of vegetation, Pimental and Patzek concluded. Ethanol production from switchgrass, which Bush singled out as promising in his State of the Union speech, consumes 50 percent more energy than it yields. Most of that energy comes from fossil fuels.

There are other problems, too. Adding one more subsidy to an already distorted system would simply encourage expansion of corn production, rather than redirect the surplus from our stomachs to our fuel tanks. Replacing even a third of U.S. gasoline consumption with corn-derived ethanol would require more cropland than is currently used to feed the nation.

Americans don't have to drive gas-guzzling cars, but they do have to eat. From a national-security perspective, it might not improve matters much if the United States imports more food so it can import less oil.

http://www.abqtrib.com/albq/op_commenta ... 97,00.html

2006 © The Albuquerque Tribune. Used under "Fair use act" For free dissemination and educational purposes.


THIS article barely touches on EROE (energy returned on expended energy, and out of numerous studies only ONE finds any benifit from ethanol, all the rest say it is an INEFFICIENT Use of our food or vegitive stocks, even "waste" needs trasportation energy. A better use for waste stocks would be to grow cows, sheep/goats on the surplus LOCALY.)

BTW most of our Chemical Fertilizer is made from METHANE, and that is a bigger crissis in Noth America than liquid Pertoleum is due to its heavy demand in home heating and electricty usage.

[scottc]

This was a good read, though no where as entertaining as my bathroom story.

[IZZY_T]

Scott,

When you can bottle that gas and sell it by the pound ala "Beyond Thunderdome", I'll nominate you to win a lifetime supply of Iodine Pills.

[scottc]

So does lighting my farts on fire give me the runner up prize?