The Ethanol Myth

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.