There’s a popular myth about food costs going up because of ethanol production. Yeah, they’ll probably spike for a short time, until people catch on that there isn’t really a shortage of either food or feed corn, and then they’ll settle down again.
**Renob’s ** prophecy of forest land being denuded to plant corn is a non-starter. Farmers have been paid to not grow crops for decades. There is enough artificially-idled cropland available now to produce all the corn needed for livestock, Cheetos, and ethanol for the forseeable future. The foodlike stuff that’ll become more expensive consists of cheap calories with little or no nutritional value, so nobody is going to starve if it becomes expensive.
Ethanol production was long a goal of the farm states, and for 30 years we’ve been hearing about all the energy we could be harvesting if we just had a way to convert the “food” to energy. For 30 years nobody said a damn word about how empty that promise was; either the promise wasn’t taken seriously, or nobody bothered to do the research on whether it was economically feasible (it probably isn’t.) Now, with gasoline prices destined for $5 a gallon before the end of the decade, some guys have finally put together the financing to build ethanol plants. Now we’ll find out whether it’s economically feasible, whether it’s as green as it’s supposed to be, and whether it will really reduce our reliance on imported crude oil. It probably won’t do any of those things, but we won’t know until we’ve established a track record of large-scale ethanol production. So since the naysayers were utterly silent for all those years we were hearing about how great ethanol would be as a fuel, I see no reason to give them any credibility now.
Here’s what I see actually happening: Eighty new jobs were created when the local ethanol plant went online a year ago. Construction of the plant poured a little more than two million dollars into the local economy over the course of a year. One new trucking company has been created to haul the corn mash to cattle feeders in the area, and another company has hired a half-dozen new drivers and bought several new trucks to serve that need. More grain trains are coming into our town, which means BNSF is hiring more train crews (some are for the growing coal traffic, too) so young people who had planned to move away are staying here, buying homes and raising their families in my town. The agriculture support segment (fuel, chemicals, equipment, repairs, etc.) has improved. How is any of this bad?
Really? A lot of the land in the Conservation Reserve Program (the federal program that pays farmers to take land out of production) is now growing trees or doing other things that are environmentally friendly. Furthermore, there is only 30 million acres in this program. It is estimated that to replace 10% of U.S. gasoline with corn ethanol would require an additional 55 million acres of corn. If that is to happen, it will happen by planting where timber is now growing.
No, no one will starve, but rising food prices will certainly hit poor people much harder than more wealthy folks. And to think that only junk food will rise in price and that regular produce will not is ridiculous.
It’s a common economic fallacy to just look at what can be seen. You also have to consider the unseen. This ethanol boom is based solely on political consideration. There is no money to be made without government support. As such, the government policies that divert money into ethanol production steer money away from more productive uses.
Take where I live, the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Artificially-high corn prices are significantly raising the cost of feed for chickens. That impacts our region’s largest employer, Perdue. You raise the price of chicken feed and you raise the price of chicken. People may cut back on chicken, leading to local job loss. Or Perdue may move their production to another state where it is cheaper to raise chickens and lead to job loss here.
What are the trees used for? If they’re deliberately planted, somebody plans to harvest them for pulp, lumber or some other use. How is that different from raising corn?
The way you state it, it sounds like forests in Oregon and Georgia are going to be levelled to plant corn. Theyr’e not. Instead, the tree crops will be replaced with corn crops. It happens all the time – one crop becomes more lucrative than another crop, so it gets planted. I’d really like to see an example of cropland being reverted to wilderness or unharvested forest on a large scale.
This is a topic that deserves its own debate. Cheap, empty calories go hand-in-hand with obesity and health costs, and are one of the most shameful legacies of our nation’s “cheap food” policy – a legacy for which my farming family and friends are starting to have deep regrets.
When grazing fees were raised so more federal land could be dedicated to recreation, cattle producers took it in the shorts. With fewer calves being born, feedlots diminised, corn and hay went unsold. That was just one impact on our economy here in northeast Colorado, and not even the worst. Massive hog, chicken and turkey production farms forced hundreds of family farms out of business (the swine and poultry often provided the only profit margin for family farms.) Corporations bought the family farms, maximized their profits by lowering overhead, forcing still more family farms out of business. Everyone said, “Well, that’s the way of the future – adapt for fail.” We have experienced a decades-long slide in farm and ranch profitability, accompanied by massive job loss, population loss, and economic loss. We begged the state to build its largest prison at the outskirts of town just to reverse the constant loss of jobs. Now we’re starting to heal the damage to the agricultural economy, and you’re seeing a possible impact on the poultry industry where you live. Forgive me if I’m not all that sympathetic.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that all CRP land is being planted to trees. What I’m saying is that some of the land is planted to trees. A lot of the land is merely left unused, though, and that has its own set of environmental benefits.
As to the environmental benefits of tree farming vs. corn farming, I’d have to say that tree farming is much more environmentally friendly. For one, you aren’t out there planting and harvesting every year. You plant one year and then, twenty to sixty years down the road, you harvest. During that time this “forest” also serves the needs of the ecosystem.
Again, there are only 300 million acres in CRP. Even if all this were converted back to farmland, that’s not enough to replace even 10% of our gasoline needs with ethanol.
You also need to consider that the acreage in CRP is generally of poorer quality than the acreage currently being farmed. When farmers put acres in CRP, they put their poorest acreage first.
Irrelevant. What I’m saying is that the cost of both junk food (made with corn syrup) and good food (corn and healthy products made from corn) will rise. Also, the price of other food will rise when acreage being used to grow it is converted to corn fields.
Forgive me if I take a different view of economic dislocation caused by government policy enacted solely to please the farm lobby (ethanol production) vs. economic dislocation caused by changing economic trends. I think that the government disrupting the lives of a lot of people to allow a few farmers (or agribusinesses) to make a mint is a much worse situation.
Plus, the production of ethanol in this way will cause imports of diesel fuel to rise: it takes more energy to produce the ethanol than it provides-so you creat jobs that exist at the cost of HIGHER oil imports! STUPID!!
Well, while we’re all bickering over minor inconveniences and piddling nuances,William Saleton has a better handle on the facts and what-ifs than anybody. And for once, the Fraysters have done better research than us Dopers. Shame on us.
The controversy seems to be that ethanol packs less energy per unit than oil does, has a lower energy return per energy investment than oil, and that there may not be adequate resources and land to create the ethanol to meet demand that switching from oil would cause.
Actually, sun, that article doesn’t have much in the way of facts. It can basically be summed up by the sentence “don’t give up on biofuels” but it offers little in the way of new information.
Plus, it acknowledges that those of us who oppose ethanol are right on a variety of issues: “The critics are right about several things. Corn-based ethanol isn’t very economical or environmentally helpful. It inflates food prices, and it’s propped up by foolish subsidies and tariffs.”
No, there is some debate about it. David Pimentel, a professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell, has conducted research that finds the following: “corn requires 29 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced; switch grass requires 45 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced; and wood biomass requires 57 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced.”
Studies that reported negative net energy incorrectly ignored coproducts and used some obsolete data. All studies indicated that current corn ethanol technologies are much less petroleum-intensive than gasoline but have greenhouse gas emissions similar to those of gasoline.
:rolleyes: Nothing better than someone trying to point out a “mistake” and doing something idiotic as they do. Sheesh.
Anyway, back to the subject …
Using biomass to produce a liquid fuel requires energy. Yes, less energy than producing gasoline, but it is a loss in efficiency compared to using biomass to generate power more directly. That energy use also produces CO2. Again less than gasoline but not by much and significantly less than using biomass to generate power more directly. Ethanol also means more stops to fillerup. (Wow. That’s not really a word either. OH my.)
$1.7 billion in direct tax credits to make the ethanol more competitive. That’s beyond what the industry receives in direct reseach support.
Meanwhile there is little incentivization to the power industry to use biomass. And research support? Well, speaking of using biomass for electricity generation the DOE has put this disclaimer on a review paper
We will get there anyway. Battery technology is being done anyway, driven by the laptop industry (no help to the feds). The cost per mile with today’s technology is a fraction when driving off of grid derived power than with gas or ethanol even underwritten $0.51/gallon. Plug-in hybrids will allow most driving to be done off of grid derived power and a carbon cap and trade or a carbon tax will get quite a few utilities to quickly realize that biomass used with their coal is a very cost efficient way to reduce their carbon footprint and preserve their profits. Yes cellulosic ethanol will also help but so much more power in America is made at power plants than by cars that even inefficent carbon emitting cars do not produce the bulk of carbon in America. The bulk is from power plants. Incentivizing biomass use there would have a much larger impact even if plug-cars (hybrid or otherwise) never take off.
It just seems we could get there a bit faster if we quit pandering and went twhere the biggest bang for the buck is.
Several folks have noted the fallacy that corn-based ethanol uses more energy to produce than it provides, and generates more CO2 than gasoline. That has been shown to be untrue. However, the amount of energy to produce a Btu (kWh, whatevery unit you prefer) is significantly higher for corn-based ethanol than for petroleum, sugar-based ethanol, or biodiesel. The use of corn as a transportation fuel source is at best a short-term solution. There are numerous adverse impacts of its use, including increased soil erosion and pesticide use. The air quality benefits are also questionable - a recent paper by Jacobson (Stanford) in Environmental Science and Technology estimated that high use of E85 (85% ethanol, 15% gasoline) would actually increase air pollution related mortality. There are some questionable assumptions in that paper, but the bottom line is that ethanol is not a panacea for all that troubles us relative to automotive fuels.
It may well be a short-term solution, but we in the US seem to be heading down the same path we always do with big energy sources - give 'em subsidies and tax breaks and ignore those sources that are much more renewable. Eventually we’ll have to go electric in one form or another, whether that’s fuel cells or plug-ins, but we’re a ways away from having something that is affordable for the general public.
You still seem to be confused. I was not stating the actual EROEI for ethanol, which is why I said “for example” and showed a counter example with positive gains. All I was doing was explaining what the “ethanol uses more energy than it produces” crowd meant, and why your “basic physics” argument was meaningless in that context. I do happily note that you have immediately abandoned your physics argument by now stating that ethanol produces more energy than it consumes, thermodynamics be damned!
Anyway, wasn’t it YOU who said this
Were you deliberately misleading in this statement, claiming that negative energy return is technically true, or did you just not know the answer and decided to research it and call me a purveyor of untruths (instead of yourself) when you read the wiki article?
It is of course possible to produce ethanol without using any fossil fuels at all, so the ‘basic physics’ argument (which it’s not clear anyone here has committed) can’t be correct.
No you pedants, I was not looking for “wherefore” … I was just trying to make a title with a bit more fun of a hook to it. Although I am hereby educated that “wherefore” means “why” and that Juliet was asking Romeo why he had to be born a Montague and discussing if one or the other of them could change their allegience. I did not know that before. I thought it was just asking where Hell that boy was. So “wherefore” would have made sense but that would have come off merely as pretentious and confused the question even if it would have actually been grammatically and literally correct. I was aiming for slightly sarcastic instead of aiming for sounding like I have a bug up my ass. Its a total hijack but seriously the point of language is to communicate. A thread title is not a report to my old English teacher. Done.
) point. I think the word the OP was looking for is “