By now most have seen the faux person on the street interviews promoting both the agenda of the Canadian Renewable Fuels Association – a consortium of large agri-businesses including ADM, Cargil and others, and the Harper government (a brief video clip of a Harper speech is featured in the commercial). The Red Tory blog discusses this commercial in more detail, Big City Liberal Fights Back adds the connection between Brian Mulroney and ADM into the mix for further context.
The advertisement also promotes a fallacy – that Canada must import its fuel, and that bio-fuels would allow Canada to “grow its own” fuels and end the so-called foreign fuel reliance. Nothing could be further from the truth.
While certain regions of the country do in fact import fuel from the U.S., this is only because supply lines in certain parts of the country make it more efficient and less costly to do so.
In fact, Canada is by far a net petroleum fuel exporter. The U.S. on the other hand is a net petroleum importer and has been since the 70’s.
Ethanol fuels are actually more costly to transport than petroleum fuels. Due to the corrosive nature of ethanol, it can’t be shipped over long distances via pipeline (an extremely efficient method), so most transport is via truck and train, both of which are far less efficient than pipeline transport.
The commercial avoids discussing such troubling facts.
Bottom line: the CFRA commercial is spin aimed at promoting their industrial agenda, helping sell policy changes that will benefit ADM and its ilk, and as a by product helping to remake Harper as the next “greenest” prime minister. Anyone who has watched Harper and his behaviour over the years knows otherwise… but that constitutes a minority of Canadian voters.
Plugging ethanol is a vote buying grab and little more.
If the so-called ecoENERGY policies were to have meaning, they would first look at reduction of consumption (requiring civic re-engineering and retooling of the personal and corporate fleet of vehicles in the country). A green renewable energy policy wouldn’t be sold to corn and wheat producers (vote buying) but would first identify holistic use of biosource—its entirely possible to design an ethanol program which pollutes as much as fossil fuels in the growing, refining and waste disposal stages. Instead the government is plugging the every-grower for herself strategy.
Secondly, burning ethanol blended fuels is not “clean” and not necessarily “cleaner”. Witness some politicians in California, driven by necessity and unburdened by personal political IOU‘s to the corn belt of the U.S., who are trying to limit the use of ethanol.
Why? Because ethanol blends are believed to be increasing ozone and smog in California’s already smog choked cities.
[The] switch to ethanol-blended gasoline is considered one of the main culprits in increased ozone. Since ethanolâs volatility increases smog, particularly in the summer, I believe we need to look carefully at its impact on air quality. Senator Diane Feinstein, Western Farm Press
However the U.S. federal government has been an impediment. Bush controls that government, and keeps shovelling out hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies to corn growers in the so-called “red states”, for its this block of farm votes the Republican Party must rely upon to avoid annihilation in the 2008 U.S. presidential, House and Senate races.
Here in Canada we have similar challenges. No one is willing to do the right thing for people and planet. Its only your vote that counts, and as we’ve seen here locally, your vote matters not one bit only seconds after its cast and counted.
Wouldn’t it be nice if facts, not corporate or political agenda, dominated our
discussions?
Issues with ethanol:
- Its extremely inefficient to produce – the amount of energy returned from processing plant material is relatively low, and comes at a significant environmental cost (greenhouse gasses, pollution created, during the growing and manufacturing stages).
- Inefficiencies mean that we can’t grow enough to make a real dent in our energy supply; but governments love to tout such measures as “making progress”, or our latest government says “getting the job done”. The agriculture sector loves the policy – they are the recipients of massive subsidies. But in the end, the investment won’t solve the issue at hand – climate change – and can’t solve a future energy crunch either.
- Politically ethanol is a winner, because an uninformed public believes its positive because they are told so by government and lobby groups. In Canada we now have a series of commercials with an actor playing an on-the-street interviewer dispensing ethanol factoids. The public is being primed to love ethanol. The government will take advantage of that to hide the nature of ag-subsidies – its a vote buying grab and nothing more.
- Ethanol subsidies and the politicians driving this foolish policy are going to result in a swift re-deployment of agricultural resources away from food production to fuel production, regardless of how inefficient it is. This will hit us all in the pocket book, not at your local PetroCanada station, but at your grocery store, as prices on everything from cereal to meat will head higher and at a fairly rapid rate.
Light reading material:
Biofuels Boom Raises Tough Questions Over Environmental Benefits of
Corn-Based Ethanol
For all the environmental and economic troubles it causes, gasoline turns out to be a remarkably efficient automobile fuel. The energy required to pump crude out of the ground, refine it and transport it from oil well to gas tank is about 6 percent of the energy in the gasoline itself. [ed: remember, 6 percent
Ethanol is much less efficient, especially when it is made from corn. Just growing corn requires expending energy—plowing, planting, fertilizing and harvesting all require machinery that burns fossil fuel. Modern agriculture relies on large amounts of fertilizer and pesticides, both of which are produced by methods that consume fossil fuels. Then there’s the cost of transporting the corn to an ethanol plant, where the fermentation and distillation processes consume yet more energy. Finally, there’s the cost of transporting the fuel to filling stations. And because ethanol is more corrosive than gasoline, it can’t be pumped through relatively efficient pipelines, but must be transported by rail or tanker truck.
In the end, even the most generous analysts estimate that it takes the energy equivalent of three gallons of ethanol to make four gallons of the stuff. Some even argue that it takes more energy to produce ethanol from corn than you get out of it, but most agricultural economists think that’s a stretch. [ed: that’s 75 percent, compared to 6% for gasoline from oil]
America’s appetite for corn is enormous. But Americans consume so much gasoline that all the corn in the world couldn’t make enough ethanol to slake the nation’s lust for transportation fuels. Last year ethanol production used 12 percent of the U.S. corn harvest, but it replaced only 2.8 percent of the nation’s gasoline consumption.
From SmartMoney.com There Are Big Problems With Ethanol, Namely Corn Supply
The end result is that corn, traditionally America’s most abundant natural resource, has turned into the focus of a scarcity scare, with futures prices nearly doubling, in just eight months. So taxpayers end up subsidizing this folly thrice: Once in federal payments to corn producers that totaled almost $9 billion last year, again in a tax credit of 51 cents per gallon for ethanol producers and a third time in the supermarket checkout line.
According to U.S. inflation data, consumer prices for the food consumed at home rose 1.2% in January, more than in the previous 11 months combined. Whether that’s a blip or not remains to be seen. But poultry and pork producers are already squealing about the increases in feed costs.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Agriculture expects ethanol’s claim on the corn crop to increase by 50% this year, sucking up more than a quarter of the national output. Legislation passed in 2005 requires the use of “renewable fuels” to rise by more than 50% from current levels by 2012.
Get ready for higher food prices – everything from cereal to lunch meat to anything sweetened or fortified with corn by-products. Harper’s following the same foolish plan.
Instead, we should be focussing on conservation. The AP article neatly sums up the math:
“If we were to adopt automobile fuel efficiency standards to increase efficiency by 20 percent, that would contribute as much as converting the entire U.S. grain harvest into ethanol,” Brown said.
Dealing with the root problem – over consumption in an energy-constrained world – is what really needs to happen but that would take real leadership of the sort that we are most unlikely to see from the leaders of either of our major national political parties, and certainly not from the folks in Victoria who are hell bent on implementing Emerson’s gateway pipe dream, building new roads and bridges and port facilities so that China can produce even more greenhouse gasses and even more pollution as it manufactures even more cheap goods that we ought to be buying far less of in the first place.
According to the author of a new book, if global warming continues at the current rate, life on the planet – all life – could face extinction. Alarmist? Perhaps, but that doesn’t mean the cause for concern is unfounded. From the UK Times
1c Increase: Ice-free sea absorbs ?more heat and accelerates global warming; fresh water lost from a third of the world’s surface; low-lying coastlines flooded. Chance of avoiding one degree of global warming: zero.
2c Increase: Europeans dying of heatstroke; forests ravaged by fire; stressed plants beginning to emit carbon rather than absorbing it; a third of all species face extinction. Chance of avoiding two degrees of global warming: 93%, but only if emissions of greenhouse gases are reduced by 60% over the next 10 years.
3c Increase: Carbon release from vegetation and soils ?speeds global warming; death of the Amazon rainforest; super-hurricanes hit coastal cities; starvation in Africa. Chance of avoiding three degrees of global warming: poor if the rise reaches two degrees and triggers carbon-cycle feedbacks from soils and plants.
4c Increase: Runaway thaw of permafrost makes global warming unstoppable; much of Britain made uninhabitable by severe flooding; Mediterranean region abandoned. Chance of avoiding four degrees of global warming: poor if the rise reaches three degrees and triggers a runaway thaw of permafrost.
5c Increase: Methane from ocean floor accelerates global warming; ice gone from both poles; humans migrate in search of food and try vainly to live like animals off the land. Chance of avoiding five degrees of global warming: negligible if the rise reaches four degrees and releases trapped methane from the sea bed.
6c Increase: Life on Earth ends with apocalyptic storms, flash floods, hydrogen sulphide gas and methane fireballs racing across the globe with the power of atomic bombs; only fungi survive. Chance of avoiding six degrees of global warming: zero if the rise passes five degrees, by which time all feedbacks will be running out of control.
Excerpt from Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, by Mark Lynas
Converting water to H is not going to keep our fat bums in cars. For a dose of understandable science and pragmatism, view The Hydrogen Myth:
The spokesmen for the hydrogen hoax claim that hydrogen will be manufactured from water via electrolysis. It is certainly possible to make hydrogen this way, but it is very expensiveâso much so, that only four percent of all hydrogen currently produced in the United States is produced in this manner. The rest is made by breaking down hydrocarbons, through processes like pyrolysis of natural gas or steam reforming of coal.
Neither type of hydrogen is even remotely economical as fuel. The wholesale cost of commercial grade liquid hydrogen (made the cheap way, from hydrocarbons) shipped to large customers in the United States is about $6 per kilogram. High purity hydrogen made from electrolysis for scientific applications costs considerably more. Dispensed in compressed gas cylinders to retail customers, the current price of commercial grade hydrogen is about $100 per kilogram. For comparison, a kilogram of hydrogen contains about the same amount of energy as a gallon of gasoline. This means that even if hydrogen cars were available and hydrogen stations existed to fuel them, no one with the power to choose otherwise would ever buy such vehicles. This fact alone makes the hydrogen economy a non-starter in a free society.
And even if you are among those willing to sacrifice freedom and economic rationality for the sake of the environment, and therefore prefer hydrogen for its advertised benefit of reduced carbon dioxide emissions, think again. Because hydrogen is actually made by reforming hydrocarbons, its use as fuel would not reduce greenhouse gas emissions at all. In fact, it would greatly increase them. (hat tip: The Oil Drum)
The following chart shows the last 10 years of price movement for Ballard Power, the largest producer of Hydrogen fuel cells in the world (80% market share), and illustrates that the smart money (not the government to be sure) is not sold on Hydrogen – they’ve done their homework. Yet certain governments pour billions into this area of research annually, wasting taxpayer’s funds on pipe dreams that will never be realizable.
Ethanol isn’t going to keep our butts in cars either, by the way. Canada under Harper is joining George W. Bush in paying for votes from the agricultural areas of Canada by pimping ethanol as the next big thing. Subsidized ethanol doesn’t solve energy or greenhouse gas problems – its a shell game of another sort worthy of a post on its own – but what it does do is give a government a tool to literally buy votes.