Subject: [permaculture] more re ethanol production
Date: Thu, 02 Feb 2006 12:54:57 -0800
From Plan b:2.0 by Lester Brown (earthpolicy.org)
Another perhaps more promising option for producing ethanol is to use
enzymes to break down cellulosic materials, such as switchgrass, a
vigorously growing perennial grass, or fast-growing trees, such as
hybrid poplars. Ethanol is now being produced from cellulose in a small
demonstration plant in
Canada. If switchgrass turns out to be an economic source of ethanol, as
some analysts think it may, it will be a major breakthrough, since it
can be grown on land that is highly erodible or otherwise not suitable
for annual crops. In a competitive world market for crop-based ethanol,
the future belongs to sugarcane and switchgrass.
The ethanol yield per acre for switchgrass is calculated at 1,150
gallons, higher even than for sugarcane. The net energy yield, however,
is roughly 4, far above the 1.5 for corn but less than the 8 for
sugarcane. Aside from the prospective use of cellulose, current and
planned ethanol-producing operations use food crops such as sugarcane,
sugar beets, corn, wheat, and barley. The United States, for example, in
2004 used 32 million tons of corn to produce 3.4 billion gallons of
ethanol. Although this is scarcely 12 percent of the huge U.S. corn
crop, it is enough to feed 100 million people at average world grain
consumption levels.
In an oil-short world, what will be the economic and environmental
effects of agriculture's emergence as a producer of transport fuels?
Agriculture's role in the global economy clearly will be strengthened as
it faces a vast, virtually unlimited market for automotive fuel.
Tropical and subtropical countries that can produce sugarcane or palm
oil will be able to fully exploit their year-round growing conditions,
giving them a strong comparative advantage in the world market.
With biofuel production spreading, the world price for oil will, in
effect, become a support price for farm products. If food and feed crop
prices are weak and oil prices are high, commodities will go to fuel
producers. For example, vegetable oils trading on European markets on
any given day may end up in either supermarkets or service stations. The
risk is that economic pressures to clear land for expanding sugarcane
production in the Brazilian cerrado and Amazon basin and for palm oil
plantations in countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia will pose a
major new threat to plant and animal diversity. In the absence of
governmental constraints, the rising price of oil could quickly become
the leading threat to biodiversity, ensuring that the wave of
extinctions now under way does indeed become the sixth great extinction.
With oil prices now high enough to stimulate potentially massive
investments in fuel crop production, the world farm economy-- already
struggling to feed 6.5 billion people--will face far greater demands.
How the world manages this new incredibly complex situation will tell us
a great deal about the prospect for our energy-hungry twenty-first
century civilization.
hey, wait a minute
Corn Dog
The ethanol subsidy is worse than you can imagine.
By Robert Bryce
Posted Tuesday, July 19, 2005, at 8:12 AM ET
For the last generation, ethanol has been America's fuel of the future.
But there has never been more hype about it than there is today.
Green-energy analysts like Amory Lovins, environmental groups like the
Natural Resources Defense Council, neoconservatives like James Woolsey,
and farm groups like the American Coalition for Ethanol
<http://www.ethanol.org/> are all touting the biofuel.
Making ethanol, they claim, will help America achieve the elusive goal
of "energy security" while helping farmers, reducing oil imports, and
stimulating the American economy. But the ethanol boosters are ignoring
some unpleasant facts: Ethanol won't significantly reduce our oil
imports; adding more ethanol to our gas tanks adds further complexity to
our motor-fuel supply chain, which will lead to further price hikes at
the pump; and, most important (and most astonishing), it may take more
energy to produce a gallon of ethanol than it actually contains.
The greens, hawks, and farmers helped convince the Senate to add an
ethanol provision to the energy bill--now awaiting action by a
House-Senate conference committee--that would require refiners to more
than double their use of ethanol to 8 billion gallons per year by 2012.
The provision is the latest installment of the ethanol subsidy, a
handout that has cost American taxpayers billions of dollars during the
last three decades, with little to show for it. It also shovels yet more
federal cash on the single most subsidized crop in America, corn.
Between 1995 and 2003, federal corn subsidies totaled $37.3 billion
<http://www.ewg.org:16080/farm/region.php?fips=00000>. That's more than
twice the amount spent on wheat subsidies, three times the amount spent
on soybeans, and 70 times the amount spent on tobacco.
The stickiest question about ethanol is this: Does making alcohol from
grain or plant waste really create any new energy?
The answer, of course, depends upon whom you ask. The ethanol lobby
claims there's a 30 percent net gain in BTUs from ethanol made from
corn. Other boosters, including Woolsey, claim there are huge energy
gains (as much as 700 percent) to be had by making ethanol from grass.
But the ethanol critics have shown that the industry calculations are
bogus. David Pimentel, a professor of ecology at Cornell University who
has been studying grain alcohol for 20 years, and Tad Patzek, an
engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley,
co-wrote a recent report that estimates that making ethanol from corn
requires 29 percent more fossil energy than the ethanol fuel itself
actually contains.
The two scientists calculated all the fuel inputs for ethanol
production--from the diesel fuel for the tractor planting the corn, to
the fertilizer put in the field, to the energy needed at the processing
plant--and found that ethanol is a net energy-loser. According to their
calculations, ethanol contains about 76,000 BTUs per gallon, but
producing that ethanol from corn takes about 98,000 BTUs. For
comparison, a gallon of gasoline contains about 116,000 BTUs per gallon.
But making that gallon of gas--from drilling the well, to
transportation, through refining--requires around 22,000 BTUs.
In addition to their findings on corn, they determined that making
ethanol from switch grass requires 50 percent more fossil energy than
the ethanol yields, wood biomass 57 percent more, and sunflowers 118
percent more. The best yield comes from soybeans, but they, too, are a
net loser, requiring 27 percent more fossil energy than the biodiesel
fuel produced. In other words, more ethanol production will increase
America's total energy consumption, not decrease it. (Pimentel has not
taken money from the oil or refining industries. Patzek
<http://petroleum.berkeley.edu/papers/patzek/CRPS416-Patzek-Web.pdf>
runs the UC Oil Consortium
<http://petroleum.berkeley.edu/UCOil/structure.htm>, which does research
on oil and is funded by oil companies. His ethanol research is not
funded by the oil or refining industries*
<http://www.slate.com/toolbar.aspx?action=print&id=2122961#correct>.)
Ethanol poses other serious difficulties for our energy economy. First,
8 billion gallons of ethanol will do almost nothing to reduce our oil
imports. Eight billion gallons may sound like a lot, until you realize
that America burned more than 134 billion gallons of gasoline last year.
By 2012, those 8 billion gallons might reduce America's overall oil
consumption by 0.5 percent. Way back in 1997, the General Accounting
Office concluded that "ethanol's potential for substituting for
petroleum is so small that it is unlikely to significantly affect
overall energy security." That's still true today.
Adding more ethanol will also increase the complexity of America's
refining infrastructure, which is already straining to meet demand, thus
raising pump prices. Ethanol must be blended with gasoline. But ethanol
absorbs water. Gasoline doesn't. Therefore, ethanol cannot be shipped by
regular petroleum pipelines. Instead, it must be segregated from other
motor fuels and shipped by truck, rail car, or barge. Those shipping
methods are far more expensive than pipelines.
There's another problem: Ethanol, when mixed with gasoline, causes the
mixture to evaporate very quickly. That forces refiners to dramatically
alter their gasoline to compensate for the ethanol. (Throughout the
year, refiners adjust the vapor pressure of their fuel to compensate for
the change in air temperature. In summer, you want gasoline to evaporate
slowly. In winter, you want it to evaporate quickly.) In a report
released last month, the GAO underscored the evaporative problems posed
by ethanol, saying that compensating for ethanol forces refiners to
remove certain liquids from their gasoline: "Removing these components
and reprocessing them or diverting them to other products increases the
cost of making ethanol-blended gasoline."
In addition to the transportation and volatility issues, ethanol will
add yet more blends of gasoline to the retail market. Last year,
American refiners produced 45 different types of gasoline. Each type of
gasoline needs specific tanks and pipes. Adding ethanol to the 45 blends
we already have means we will be "making more blends for more markets.
That complexity means more costs," says David Pursell, a partner at
Pickering Energy Partners, <http://www.pickeringenergy.com/> a Houston
brokerage.
There's a final point to be raised about ethanol: It contains only about
two-thirds as much energy as gasoline. Thus, when it gets blended with
regular gasoline, it lowers the heat content of the fuel. So, while a
gallon of ethanol-blended gas may cost the same as regular gasoline, it
won't take you as far.
What frustrates critics is that there are sensible ways to reduce our
motor-fuel use and bolster renewable energy--they just don't help the
corn lobby. Patzek points out that if we channeled the billions spent on
ethanol into fuel-efficient cars and solar cells, "That would give us so
much more bang for the buck that it's a no-brainer."
Correction, July 20, 2005: The article originally stated that ethanol
critics David Pimentel and Tad Patzek received no oil-industry funding.
Pimentel receives no such funding, but Patzek runs the UC Oil Consortium
<http://petroleum.berkeley.edu/UCOil/structure.htm>, which does research
on oil and is funded by oil companies. His ethanol research is not
funded by the oil industry. Return
<http://www.slate.com/toolbar.aspx?action=print&id=2122961#in> to the
corrected sentence.