Biofuels Part I: Corn Ethanol Isn’t the Solution
Written by Dr. Bill Chameides, dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment and lead author of the forthcoming blog The Green Grok.
This post is Part 1 of a 2-part series on biofuels. Today’s post looks at corn; Part 2 will examine the most promising biofuels.
Who doesn’t want to be green? But beware of automobile ads claiming environmental benefits from home-grown ethanol. Almost all U.S. ethanol comes from corn and, as a fuel, corn just isn’t as “amaizing” as they say.
“What if we could live green by going yellow?” one TV spot asks. “What if we could lower greenhouse gas emissions,” it continues, promisingly, “with a fuel that grew back every year?” Sounds great doesn’t it? Sorry folks, it’s just not so.
With corn ethanol, we are barking up the wrong stalk. This so-called yellow fuel is not green and the rush to it is misguided. The negatives of turning corn into fuel far outweigh the positives. First a little background.
A short history of ethanol
Ethanol has been around for a long time. Some of the earliest forms of life on Earth — anaerobic bacteria — used fermentation to produce ethanol and in the process extracted energy to drive their metabolic functions. In prehistoric times humans fermented grains and other biomass to make ethanol. Most of you have encountered ethanol in your lives — in beer, or wine, or the harder stuff. Ethanol is simply alcohol.
Using ethanol as a fuel dates back to the nineteenth century. It powered some of the earliest automobiles, including Henry Ford’s first car, the Quadricycle. Interest in reviving and expanding the usage of ethanol in cars today has grown, in part, because of its perceived climate benefit.
When we burn fossil fuel, excess carbon dioxide (CO2), the chief global warming pollutant, is released to the atmosphere. This, at least in principle, should not be the case for ethanol or other biofuels (fuels produced from plants and wastes). When ethanol is burned, its carbon is converted to CO2, just as in fossil fuels. But because the carbon in biofuels is pulled directly from the atmosphere via photosynthesis, it would seem that burning ethanol does not, in and of itself, represent a net source of new CO2 to the atmosphere. (See the Department of Energy’s diagram below.)
As it turns out, it’s not that simple.
Why ethanol is not effective at fighting global warming
To get the whole picture you have to consider ethanol’s entire life cycle — the energy inputs and global warming pollution arising from every step in the production process, such as:
- • cultivating and harvesting the crop,
• refining the crop to ethanol, and
• its transportation to market.
Corn is a particularly hungry crop — it requires lots of water and nitrogen fertilizers. The application of fertilizers creates nitrous oxide. Though it’s called laughing gas in the dentist’s office, in the atmosphere it is no laughing matter — nitrous oxide is about 120 times more potent than CO2 at trapping heat.
As you can start to see, corn ethanol is ineffective at fighting global warming. A research team from Princeton University led by Tim Searchinger pointed out an obvious but little appreciated fact about biofuels in a recent study. Growing crops for fuel requires cropland dedicated to that purpose. That can create a market imbalance.
For example, the seemingly simple decision to grow corn instead of soybeans creates a demand for soybeans that can only be met by someone else adding cropland to grow soybeans. Typically this entails destroying important rainforests or grasslands. This transformation of land spews huge reservoirs of carbon stored in that land into the atmosphere in the form of CO2, leading to further global warming. It is mind-boggling but probably true: U.S. farmers growing more corn drives the destruction of tropical rainforests in Brazil as more land is converted to soybeans. Now that’s a global economy.
The Searchinger team’s results suggest that when land-use changes are factored into the equation any possible climate benefit from corn ethanol is canceled out. Searchinger’s models stunningly show that it would take 167 years of continuous corn ethanol production before it would begin to switch from a climate loser to a climate helper. That’s way too long to wait with global warming bearing down on us.
So, for the huge environmental price of growing corn for ethanol, what do we get? An increase in the very emissions we need to reduce — the precise opposite of what is needed.
The silver lining of biofuels: Degraded or abandoned land and waste
While ads might encourage you to go green by going yellow, I recommend caution. Given the present source of ethanol in the U.S., it is a bad environmental bet. Going yellow isn’t easy either. Sure you can buy an E85 car (one that runs on a mix of 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline). The car companies would love you to because they get a break from the federal government on meeting national fuel economy standards. But try filling your new car with ethanol. As of January 2007, there were only about 1,100 E85 pumps in the U.S. My own take on this is that we could accomplish a lot more, a lot faster by zeroing in on fuel economy.
So that’s the bad news about corn ethanol. But there is a bright spot on the biofuels landscape; it involves using biomass waste and growing feedstocks on land that stores very little carbon. We’ll discuss these solutions in our next post. Stay tuned.
Read more about Dr. Bill Chameides, Dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences at Duke University.
See also:
Green Options: The Big Dark Cloud in the Ethanol Silver Lining
CleanTechnica: First Sustainable Ethanol to Mass Market?
Gas 2.0: First Cellulosic Ethanol Plant Goes Online, Makes Fuel from Wood Waste
It’s good that you are addressing the environmental side of ethanol. The conversation keeps getting dragged away because the ethanol *program* has had lots of unintended effects (corn prices, food prices, etc.) You claim that raising fuel efficiency will do more than ethanol in terms of saving the environment, but take another step back and consider the easiest way to save the environment — taxing carbon emissions. Tax emissions, and then let people/businesses figure out how to get from A to B as cheaply as possible. (Ironically, high gas prices are doing more for conservation than any of these “smart” methods.) Read more here: http://aguanomics.com/search?q=carbon+tax.
To suggest “taxing carbon emissions” reeks of a political agenda. When has leveeing any sort of “sin” tax resulted in it actually serving its intended purpose? You could almost ask the same question of any tax that is based upon simple wealth redistribution. When will people learn that taxing the upper and middle class wage earners in a given society at a disproportionate rate generally does nothing to help the poor or the needy?
Think about it. Who is in a better position to buy an overpriced hybrid vehicle to avoid a carbon emissions tax? Who is in a better position to buy the pricier water saving appliances, tankless water heaters, modern insulations, etc. for their homes? Who can better afford to package their spent CFLs in bubble wrap and pay freight charges to the regional recycling centers that have yet to be built? Taxes for a better tomorrow is based upon a flawed formula.
I realize that Corn ethanol is not as good as leaving the trees to clean up the enviroment, but one must understand also, that corn ethanol is not going to replace our oil resources by it self. Anyone that believes that it can, is misguided.
It may be PART of the answer but, it will not be the hole answer. The answer will be a combanation of all alternative energy sources together.
As far as the CO2 and NO produced from the production of E85, as it was said before, Gasoline also produces the same in its production.
The difference is not in the amount of trees we save, it’s in the amount of pollutants produced being cut back. How ever the reduction in trees/forests is a good point aginst production of E85. Also the crop land management issue as well. Also the food verses energy issue.
Will trees remove more CO2, then the amount of CO2 produced from E85, and the production processes of corn to E85?
I believe your point in this issue is saying that trees will remove the pollutants and keep them, where as the production of E85 will put the pollutants back into the air, if I understand you correctly, at lest in part.
Oil to fuel does not involve the removal of trees/crop land, production of E85 does. Refining of eather produces pollutants, but the production of E85 also destroys rain forests and allocates crop land differently.
Will the reduction difference of CO2 pollution in E85 versus gas from oil, equal or be grater then the amount of CO2 the trees can withhold from the atmosphere? I believe you think not. You might be right.
Petrolium resources are growing more scarce everyday. Soon the natural (Mother nature) enviroment cleaner will become the same too I believe if we contenue with the current course on production of E85.
The purpose of the mention of the other alternate energy sources was to mention that many of them will probably be used in the production of converting Corn to E85 where as this is not the case with oil refining into Gasoline. To cut the chase, The convertion of Corn into E85 process is not the same as the process used to convert oil into gasoline. The current process, though it may cancel out any progress towards a cleaner enviroment, in time the pollution it creates will be reduced with other alternate energy systems that may change this point.
It appears that electricity will be a major player in the very near future so I don’t believe that “corn to E85″ is going to last long as far as an idea alternete energy source. Besides, as I understand it, E85 doesn’t produce as much energy per gallon as regular gasoline does. So there are losses.
If I’m off topic, I do appoligize. In regards to Jean-Yves Landrys input on the subject at hand , The idea of hemp (hemp, aka cannabis, aka marijuana) as a better idea, is possably true. I do know that back about 75 years ago, it was used a lot in the production of many things, rope was one of the things made from it. However, This would result in a lot of legal matters that would take a long time to over come. Allthough this would not involve crop changes, trading dependencey on over seas oil capitalests for Columbian drug lords to power my furnace in the basement is not my idea of an alternete energy source. Sorry, Geting high off of running the furnace is not a wise trade off.
As far as rain forest depletion goes, I’m trying to understand why people dont use hydroponic systems to grow corn. One could build buildings in the desert areas of the country, instead of floors for offices, make floors for hydroponics. Corn will grow in a hydroponic system. Like a multi level parking structure, they could build a stacked hydroponic farm building and draw the water from underground water tables for Aggregation systems, and for a geo-thermo energy source to heat it at night and for electricity.
I believe this would help save the rain forsets and reduce the CO2 produced in the “corn to E85 process”.
There is a lot of deserts in the world out there.
Thank you for reading.
So let me ask a simple question here–does production of 1 gallon (or 50 for that matter)of corn ethanol from a facility in Iowa produce the same or lower CO2 emissions than the same amount of gasoline produced from oil from say, Saudi Arabia, in a total Life Cycle Analysis?
When you ask you question that way, the answer is always corn ethanol produces less. Even when you factor in the less mileage you get per gallon, you still get less CO2. Even if it’s by only a small fraction it still is less, and that is a good thing.
The additional benefits of corn ethanol increase its value–improved national security, less foreign oil, less CO2 than gasoline, and a positive impact to American farmers.
And lets be clear here–the Brazilian rainforest deforestation is declining through legislation. Brazil also uses sugar cane as their ethanol source, not corn.
And if forestland is being cleared in the developing world for growing corn, it’s to feed the billions of people coming to the dinner table, not to soley make ethanol. See the connection here?
My problem with your analysis is that it seemed to be presented as an ‘either/or’ scenario…’dont do this, do THIS.’ And using increased fuel economy standards is part of the solution, but to say this INSTEAD of corn ethanol is to me, not the correct way to proceed. How about both? And to use your scenario, INSTEAD of increased fuel economy, which will cost billions of dollars, and create millions of pounds of CO2 in the process of creating engines that get increased mpg, how about people DRIVING SLOWER and properly infating their tires? A much easier solution available to us right now.
In regards to hemp as a biofuel crop:
“However, This would result in a lot of legal matters that would take a long time to over come. Allthough this would not involve crop changes, trading dependencey on over seas oil capitalests for Columbian drug lords to power my furnace in the basement is not my idea of an alternete energy source. Sorry, Geting high off of running the furnace is not a wise trade off.”
Please inform yourself before you choose to speak about something. It is impossible to get high off of industrial hemp, and it is a domestic crop capable of being grown in every state of the union.
Hemp produces 1000 gallons of methanol or 500 gallons of gasoline from every acre. It requires no fertilizer and can be grown on the same cropland for decades with no reduction in yield.
When grown for fiber it produces 3 - 4 tons per acre and an additional 2 - 3 tons of cellulose can be retrieved from the leftover hurd. Cellulose can be used to make many products ranging from plastics to… More fuels!
Even hemp fiber can be charcoalized and burned in coal-fueled power plants… With none of the acid rain causing sulfur emissions!
Hemp is the future. There is no alternative. Research it.