Ethanol not the Miracle Fuel that Folks Think it Is

Fire of Liberty
James Jordan and James Powell who are research professors in Maglev Research Center at Polytechnic University of New York have an interesting piece(Registration required) in Sunday's Washington Post that points out that all the excitement that has been created over the usage of ethanol as an alternative for petroleum based fuels is pure hype with regards to the usage in the US. Jordan and Powell points out that even if we used our current corn crop of 73 million acres to produce ethanol(25.5 billion barrels)we'd produce only an equivalent of 6 billion gallons of gas. As Jordan and Powell notes, this is a lot of work and usage of a food crop just to produce such a small amount of fuel whose own fuel value is only about 2/3's that of gasoline(1.5 gal. ethanol = 1 gal. of gas). All in all, Jordan and Powell lay out a good argument on why the usage of ethanol is not the silver bullet towards ending our dependency on foreign sources of petroleum and oil in general that the MSM, the Greens, Bill O'Reilly, corn growers and President Bush seem to keep touting about. I'd say that Jordan and Powell summed up the futility of the US trying to take us down a ethanol only highway when they noted the following:

It is argued that rather than using corn to make ethanol, we can use agricultural wastes. But the amounts are still a drop in the bucket. Using the crop residues (called corn stover) from corn production could provide about 10 billion gallons per year of ethanol, according to a recent study by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The net energy available would be greater than with ethanol from corn -- about 60,000 Btu per gallon, equivalent to a half-gallon of gasoline. Still, all of the U.S. corn wastes would produce only the equivalent of 5 billion gallons of gasoline. Another factor to be considered: Not plowing wastes back into the land hurts soil fertility.

Similar limitations and problems apply to growing any crop for biofuels, whether switchgrass, hybrid willow, hybrid poplar or whatever. Optimistically, assuming that switchgrass or some other crop could produce 1,000 gallons of ethanol per acre, over twice as much as we can get from corn plus stover, and that its net energy was 60,000 Btu per gallon, ethanol from 300 million acres of switchgrass still could not supply our present gasoline and diesel consumption, which is projected to double by 2025. The ethanol would meet less than half of our needs by that date.

Perhaps more important: The agricultural effects of such a large-scale program would be devastating.

Recently, there has been lots of excitement and media coverage about how Brazil produces ethanol for its automobile fuel and talk that America should follow its lead. But Brazil consumes only 10 billion gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel annually, compared with America's 170 billion. There are almost 4 million miles of paved roads in America -- Brazil has 60,000. And Brazil is the leading producer of sugar cane -- more than 300 million tons annually -- so it has lots of agricultural waste to make ethanol.

Finally, considering projected population growth in the United States and the world, the humanitarian policy would be to maintain cropland for growing food -- not fuel. Every day more than 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes -- one child every five seconds. The situation will only get worse. It would be morally wrong to divert cropland needed for human food supply to powering automobiles. It would also deplete soil fertility and the long-term capability to maintain food production. We would destroy the farmland that our grandchildren and their grandchildren will need to live.

I'd say the best thing we could do is create a mix of gasoline and alternative fuels rather than junking oil altogether. No matter what, the markets and demands of the people will be a far better judge in determining the viability of these fuels than what the folks in D.C. think is best.