a perspective on etahnol by Michael Pollan

[timouse]

i got this from a listserv i'm on.

Michael Pollan has written a number of books on agriculture and the food industry, and is a professor of journalism at UC Berkeley.

Michael Pollan

New York Times http://pollan.blogs.nytimes.com/

May 24, 2006

The Great Yellow Hope

I've been traveling in the American Corn Belt this past week, and

wherever I go, people are talking about the promise of ethanol. Corn-

distillation plants are popping up across the country like

dandelions,

and local ethanol boosters in Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa and even

Washington State (where Bill Gates is jumping into the business) are

giddy at the prospect of supplanting OPEC with a homegrown,

America-first corn cartel. But as much as I'd like to have a greener

fuel to power my car, I'm afraid corn-based ethanol is not that fuel.

In principle, making fuel from plants makes good sense. Instead of

spewing fossilized carbon into the atmosphere, you're burning the

same

carbon that a plant removed from the air only a few months earlier -

so, theoretically, you've added no additional carbon. Sounds pretty

green - and would be, if the plant you proposed to make the ethanol

from were grown in a green way. But corn is not.

The way we grow corn in this country consumes tremendous quantities

of

fossil fuel. Corn receives more synthetic fertilizer than any other

crop, and that fertilizer is made from fossil fuels - mostly natural

gas. Corn also receives more pesticide than any other crop, and most

of that pesticide is made from petroleum. To plow or disc the

cornfields, plant the seed, spray the corn and harvest it takes large

amounts of diesel fuel, and to dry the corn after harvest requires

natural gas. So by the time your "green" raw material arrives at the

ethanol plant, it is already drenched in fossil fuel. Every bushel of

corn grown in America has consumed the equivalent of between a third

and a half gallon of gasoline.

And that's before you distill the corn into ethanol, an energy-

intensive process that requires still more fossil fuel. Estimates

vary, but they range from two-thirds to nine-tenths of a gallon of

oil

to produce a single gallon of ethanol. (The more generous number does

not count all the energy costs of growing the corn.) Some estimates

are still more dismal, suggesting it may actually take more than a

gallon of fossil fuel to produce a gallon of our putative alternative

to fossil fuel.

Making ethanol from corn makes no more sense from an economic point

of

view. The federal government offers a tax break of 54 cents for every

gallon of ethanol produced, and this incentive is what has generated

the enthusiasm for ethanol refining: the spigot of public money is

open and the pigs are rushing to the trough. (At the same time, the

government protects domestic ethanol producers by imposing a tariff

of

54 cents a gallon on imported ethanol.) According to the Wall Street

Journal, it will cost U.S. taxpayers $120 for every barrel of oil

saved by making ethanol. Some "savings." This is very good news

indeed

for Archer Daniels Midland, the agricultural processing company that

controls about 30 percent of the ethanol market. (And, it would seem,

a comparable percentage of the U.S. Congress, which has been

showering

the company with ethanol subsidies since the days when Bob Dole of

Kansas was known as the senatorfrom A.D.M.)

Absurd as it is, the rush to turn our corn surplus into ethanol

appears unstoppable, and the corn belt, laboring under the weight of

falling corn prices for the past several years, is celebrating the

great good fortune of $3-a-gallon gas prices. We're desperate for

alternatives, and all that corn is waiting to be distilled. As corn

prices rise (and the giddiness has already given them a bump),

farmers

will be tempted to produce yet more corn, which is not good news for

the environment this whole deal is supposed to help. Why not? Because

farmers will apply more nitrogen to boost yields (leading to more

nitrogen pollution) and, since soy bean prices are down, they will be

tempted to return to a "corn-on-corn" rotation. That is, rather than

rotate their corn crops with soy beans (a legume that builds nitrogen

in he soil), farmers will plant corn year after year, requiring still

more synthetic nitrogen and doing long-term damage to the land.

It's not easy being green.

But just because making ethanol from corn is an environmentally and

economically absurd proposition doesn't mean ethanol made from other

plants is a bad idea. If you can make ethanol from a plant that

doesn't take so much energy to grow in the first place, the economics

and energetics begin look a lot better. The Brazilians make ethanol

from sugar cane, a perennial crop that doesn't require nearly as much

fossil fuel to grow. Switch grass, too, is a perennial crop that

grows

just about anywhere, requires little or no fertilizer and needs no

plowing or annual replanting. And although the technology for making

ethanol from grasses (cellulosic ethanol - distilled from plant

cellulose rather than starch) is not quite there yet, it holds real

potential. So why the stampede to make ethanol from corn? Because we

have so much of it, and such a powerful lobby promoting its

consumption. Ethanol is just the latest chapter in a long, sorry

history of clever and profitable schemes to dispose of surplus corn:

there was corn liquor in the 19th century; feedlot meat starting in

the 1950's and, since 1980, high fructose corn syrup. We grow more

than 10 billion bushels of corn a year in this country, far more than

we can possibly eat - though God knows we're doing our best, bingeing

on corn-based fast food and high fructose corn syrup till we're fat

and diabetic. We probably can't eat much more of the stuff without

exploding, so the corn lobby is targeting the next unsuspecting beast

that might help chomp through the surplus: your car.

Michael Pollan is the author, most recently, of "The Omnivore's

Dilemma: A Natural history of Four Meals," which was published in

April. His previous books include: "Second Nature," "A Place of My

Own" and "The Botany of Desire," a New York Times bestseller. A

contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, Mr. Pollan is

the

Knight Professor of Journalism at the University of California,

Berkeley. Many of his food articles can be found at

michaelpollan.com.

[SmoothedShredder]

I like the looks of that water engine...

Until then, there should be a tax on anyone who drives into a city daily to get to work... to drive home the point that a daily communte can take more out of the world than one can possibly put back into it with their 'bueruacratic' or 'sales' job.

As far as oil, isn't it made from "million year old corn/forrest/animals" all decomposed... TO THE EXTREME? Ethonol per se, wouldn't exactly remove air borne emissions, rather it would only remove the dependance on foreign sources. The gains are political and economical, but not neccesarily environmental.

Try to live near where you work if you're in a city people! And if that's challenging, get yourself living on or near a high flow trasit system! Cars + Cities = Poison.

[Alexis]

nice article, thanks for posting it. it's definitely got some interesting full circle points.

[paisley]

enjoyed the one episode of the CoolFuel RoadTrip I caught... they brought up that ethanol isn't a totally practical fuel yet but also said that there are high hopes for improved refinement technologies

(you can download pdf alternative fuel lessons off that site too)

about the best vehicle they showed on the episode I saw was a car that used ethanol biodiesel when necessary but mostly ran off of fuel cells powered by the waterfall in the owner's backyard (it also supplied all the power for his house and generated income for him when he sold his surplus power back to "the grid")

waterfall "micro hydro" power makes me smile :cool:

Edited May 28, 2006 by Guest
Micro Hydro Power!

[paisley]

those pdf lessons mentioned above are really for kids (or big kids, if you feel so inclined) but if you're interested in alt fuel topics the "CoolFuel Allied Organizations Links" section is a pretty good starting point

couple of clicks brought me to Willie Nelson's Farm Fresh Biodiesel page

currently enjoying reading a "Layman's guide on how to develop a small hydro site" downloaded from the "Books" section of micro hydro power.net

waterfall power here I come!