This article claims that making biofuels is worse for the Gulf than the oil leak.
What is the Straight Dope on this? Is this article correct, and if it is wrong, where does it wrong?
“Ethanol from corn” is not the same as “alternative energy”. However inefficient wind turbines might be, I fail to see them polluting the mississippi. I was also under the impression that bio-fuel based on corn was already widely regarded as a stupidly inefficient idea (even compared to other bio fuels) that exists mainly to provide corn farmers with some government subsidies.
Addendum: AFAIK fertilizer leaching is going to be a problem for agriculture in general aside from the environmental issues. Phosphates especially are leaked into the ocean because we (“modern agriculture”) are using more than is really needed, but we will run out eventually. If we want a cleaner and more sustainable production in the long run*, we’ll probably need to be much more efficient in the use of fertilizer compounds, and we’ll probably also need to capture much more of them from “waste” instead of relying on mineral deposits.
- ETA: I’ve seen estimates indicating 60 - 130 years of available mineral “artificial” fertilizer for world-wide current use patterns.
TANSTAAFL. Every form of energy has drawbacks. However, as we use more and more alternate energy, it gets cheaper and better.
Ethanol from corn doesn’t appear to be such a great idea- but there are other plants that work better, and then there’s the bio-waste from corn etc, where we can also get energy from.
The Gulf has had a pretty big dead zone, caused by fertilizer runoff in the Mississippi. About half the country drains into the Mississippi, including most of the corn and soy fields in the US. When that fertilizer hits the Gulf it causes algal blooms, which then rapidly decay and consume all of the oxygen in the water. This, as you might imagine, is a bad thing for marine life, and a significant ecological disaster.
Corn is a huge contributor to this, since it gets lots of fertilizer application under current agricultural practices. Soy is less of a problem, since it doesn’t need as much fertilizer. So it is true that there are ecological costs associated with corn ethanol production. But corn ethanol is already a really poor way to make biofuel, since (depending on the estimate) it doesn’t actually have a positive energy balance. We would be better off burning the fuel used to plow and harvest fields, synthesize fertilizer, and transport the corn. Corn ethanol is a losing proposition, and mostly exists because of government subsidies.
That’s why sawgrass, soybeans, or algae will potentially be better sources of biofuel. They need less fertilizer, which means there’s less energy input and fertilizer runoff with all of the ecological consequences that entails.
So, back to the linked article. It’s mostly correct in the factual details, but the author clearly has an agenda and specifically omits any mention of other biofuel technologies. And it’s not at all correct to attribute the entire gulf dead zone to biofuels – most of that fertilizer runoff was from food and livestock feed crops.
And on top of mined mineral fertilizers, farmers now use huge amount of chemically synthesized nitrogen fertilizers. These are produced from fossil fuels by the incredibly energy-hungry Haber-Bosch process.
What would actually happen if the cartels, the afghans, (anybody else) started producing biofuel instead of of cocaine or opium. would we be beefing about fertilizers?