| Subject: Re: The boondoggle called ethanol revealed ... |
Author:
Duncan7
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Date Posted: 06:42:26 01/28/07 Sun
In reply to:
Curmudgeon
's message, "The boondoggle called ethanol revealed ..." on 15:50:22 01/27/07 Sat
Sustainable? I never said it would be sustainable.
>Very, Very Big Corn
>Ethanol and its consequences.
>
>Saturday, January 27, 2007 12:01 a.m.
>
>President Bush made a big push for alternative fuels
>in his State of the Union speech Tuesday night,
>calling on Americans to reduce gasoline consumption by
>20% over 10 years. And as soon as the sun rose on
>Wednesday, he set out to tour a DuPont facility in
>Delaware to tout the virtues of "cellulosic ethanol"
>and propose $2 billion in loans to promote the stuff.
>For a man who famously hasn't taken a drink for 20
>years, that's a considerable intake of alcohol.
>A bit of sobriety would go a long way in discussing
>this moonshine of the energy world, however.
>Cellulosic ethanol--which is derived from plants like
>switchgrass--will require a big technological
>breakthrough to have any impact on the fuel supply.
>That leaves corn- and sugar-based ethanol, which have
>been around long enough to understand their
>significant limitations. What we have here is a
>classic political stampede rooted more in hope and
>self-interest than science or logic.
>
>
>
>
>
>Ostensibly, the great virtue of ethanol is that it
>represents a "sustainable," environmentally friendly
>source of energy--a source that is literally homegrown
>rather than imported from such unstable places as
>Nigeria or Iran.
>That's one reason why, as Jerry Taylor and Peter Van
>Doren note in the Milken Institute Review, federal and
>state subsidies for ethanol ran to about $6 billion
>last year, equivalent to roughly half its wholesale
>market price. Ethanol gets a 51-cent a gallon domestic
>subsidy, and there's another 54-cent a gallon tariff
>applied at the border against imported ethanol.
>Without those subsidies, hardly anyone would make the
>stuff, much less buy it--despite recent high oil
>prices.
>
>That's also why the percentage of the U.S. corn crop
>devoted to ethanol has risen to 20% from 3% in just
>five years, or about 8.6 million acres of farmland.
>Reaching the President's target of 35 billion gallons
>of renewable and alternative fuels by 2017 would, at
>present corn yields, require the entire U.S. corn
>harvest.
>
>No wonder, then, that the price of corn rose nearly
>80% in 2006 alone. (See the chart nearby.) Corn
>growers and their Congressmen love this, and naturally
>they are planting as much as they can. Look for a
>cornfield in your neighborhood soon. Yet for those of
>us who like our corn flakes in the morning, the higher
>price isn't such good news. It's even worse for
>cattle, poultry and hog farmers trying to adjust to
>suddenly exorbitant prices for feed corn--to pick just
>one industry example. The price of corn is making
>America's meat-packing industries, which are major
>exporters, less competitive.
>
>In Mexico, the price of corn tortillas--the dietary
>staple of the country's poorest--has risen by about
>30% in recent months, leading to widespread protests
>and price controls. In China, the government has put a
>halt to ethanol-plant construction for the threat it
>poses to the country's food security. Thus is a
>Beltway fad translated into Third World woes.
>
>As for the environmental impact, well, where do we
>begin? As an oxygenate, ethanol increases the level of
>nitrous oxides in the atmosphere and thus causes smog.
>The scientific literature is also divided about
>whether the energy inputs required to produce ethanol
>actually exceed its energy output. It takes fertilizer
>to grow the corn, and fuel to ship and process it, and
>so forth. Even the most optimistic estimate says
>ethanol's net energy output is a marginal improvement
>of only 1.3 to one. For purposes of comparison, energy
>outputs from gasoline exceed inputs by an estimated 10
>to one.
>
>And because corn-based ethanol is less efficient than
>ordinary gasoline, using it to fuel cars means you
>need more gas to drive the same number of miles. This
>is not exactly a route to "independence" from Mideast,
>Venezuelan or any other tainted source of oil. Ethanol
>also cannot be shipped using existing pipelines (being
>alcohol, it eats the seals), so it must be trucked or
>sent by barge or train to its thousand-and-one
>destinations, at least until separate pipelines are
>built.
>
>Even some environmentalists cry foul. Steve Sanderson,
>president of the Wildlife Conservation Society, tells
>us that intensive, subsidized sugar farming in
>Brazil--where the use of ethanol is most
>widespread--has displaced small tenant farmers, many
>of whom have taken to cutting down and farming land in
>the Amazon rain forest.
>
>In the U.S., there is now talk of taking the roughly
>40 million acres currently tied up in the Agriculture
>Department's conservation reserve and security
>programs and putting them into production for
>ethanol-related plants. "The land at risk under this
>ethanol program is land that's shown by the USDA to
>have had great results for the restoration of
>wildlife," Mr. Sanderson says, pointing especially to
>the grasslands of eastern Montana and the Dakotas.
>Hello ethanol, goodbye bison.
>
>But what about global warming, where ethanol, as a
>non-fossil fuel, is supposed to make a positive
>contribution? Actually, it barely makes a dent.
>Australian researcher Robert Niven finds that the use
>of ethanol in gasoline--the standard way in which
>ethanol is currently used--reduces greenhouse gas
>emissions by no more than 5%. As Messrs. Taylor and
>Van Doren observe, "employing ethanol to reduce
>greenhouse gases is fantastically inefficient,"
>costing as much as 16 times the optimal abatement cost
>for removing a ton of carbon from the atmosphere.
>
>
>
>
>
>It's true that scientific advances will probably
>improve and perhaps even transform the utility of
>ethanol. Genetic modification will likely improve corn
>yields. And the President insists we are on the verge
>of breakthroughs in cellulosic technology, though
>experts tell us the technical hurdles are still huge.
>We'd be as happy as anyone if DuPont researchers
>finally discover the enzyme that can efficiently break
>down plants into starch, but betting billions of tax
>dollars and millions of acres of farmland on this hope
>strikes us as bad policy. If cellulose is going to be
>an energy miracle--an agricultural cold fusion--far
>better to let the market figure that out.
>Not that any of these facts are likely to make much
>difference in the current Washington debate. The corn
>and sugar lobbies have their roots deep in both
>parties, and now they have the mantra of "energy
>independence" to invoke, however illusory it is. If
>anything, Congress may add to Mr. Bush's ethanol
>mandate requests.
>
>So here comes Big Corn. Make that Very, Very Big Corn.
>Sooner or later, our experience with this huge public
>gamble may make us yearn for the efficiency, capacity,
>lower cost and--yes--superior environmental record of
>"Big Oil."
>
>
>
>href="http://www.opinionjournal.com/weekend/hottopic/?i
>d=110009587">http://www.opinionjournal.com/weekend/hott
>opic/?id=110009587
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