According to the popular press and other media sources, ethanol and ethanol-gasoline blends are going to be the solution to the current and future oil crisis. TV ads point out that corn, one of our most abundant farm products, can be used to produce ethanol so that we can decrease our dependence on foreign oil. Brazil's success with converting their cars to ethanol has been held out as an example on how easy it is to switch from gasoline to ethanol and ethanol blends. Is this a realistic goal for the United States? What would it take for our car oriented nation to switch to ethanol based fuels, how long would it take and what would be the economic trade offs?
According to a CNN report, the US produced a total of four billion gallons of ethanol in 2005, one percent of the volume needed to totally replace the gasoline we now use. It took seven percent of the total corn production to produce the four billion gallons of ethanol. Therefore, using corn as the source, it would take seventy percent of the US corn crop to produce enough ethanol to replace just ten percent of the gasoline being used in our 150 million plus cars. I hope you are willing to give up your cornflakes, corndogs and popcorn. It would also take almost as much fuel (natural gas or oil) to produce that amount of ethanol from corn.
In order to completely replace our current gasoline consumption with ethanol, we would have to plant corn on every available plot of land in the nation. The next problem would be to actually produce the ethanol and distribute it to the gas stations we all use. Ethanol cannot be pumped through pipelines because it its volatility, so it would have to be trucked to every fueling station, which would have to be retrofitted to handle the ethanol. The biggest problem of all is the inventory of over 150 million cars currently on the road. If we started building 100 percent of our new cars as flex-fuel vehicles, it would take at least 10 years to replace gasoline powered cars with vehicles that would operate on ethanol-gasoline blends. The big three auto manufactures do have several million flex-fuel vehicles on the road today, but have only committed to building about one million new ethanol cars per year. Why so few? Simple, because the volume of ethanol now available is limited and availability spotty, with most outlets located in the mid-west. In my hometown of Greenville, SC, we have one locally owned chain of gas stations that sell the E85 blend of ethanol and gasoline. In Charlotte, NC, a much larger city only 100 miles to the northeast, there is almost no E85 available. We have to build up the production and distribution channels for ethanol blends before we start producing the flex-fuel cars in volume.
Brazil has a twenty- year hard start on the US, and they use sugar cane to produce ethanol, sugar and electricity. They have developed special type of sugar cane, which produces higher yields of ethanol, and currently plant it on 45,000 square kilometers (about 28,000 square miles) of land. Brazil is slightly smaller that the US and has a population of 186 million, compared to our 300 million. In Brazil there is one car for every three people compared to the one car for every two people in US. This means that they started replacing their cars with flex-fuel vehicles years ago and now are building as much as 70% of their news cars with the capability to use ethanol blends. They started an integrated program years ago to match the availability of ethanol with car production and now are reaping the benefits.
The smartest thing the Brazilians did was to design their ethanol production plant to use the waste from the sugar cane to power the plants that make the ethanol and electricity with co-generation plants. The waste sugar cane is burnt to produce the heat needed to process the ethanol, other by products and to power electric generators to produce salable electric power. No crude oil products are used. In our corn- based process, substantial amount of fossil fuels have to be used to power the conversion process.
The US grows sugar cane on about 900,000 acres of land in Florida, Louisiana, Hawaii and several other southern states and Puerto Rico and probably could grow substantially more. Sugar cane is a sub-tropical plant that grows without needing a great deal of attention, but the US has limited sub-tropical areas when compared to Brazil.
There have been suggestions that the emphasis on corn-based ethanol production in the US is the result of lobbying by agribusinesses such as ADM who would reap substantial financial benefits from using corn to produce ethanol. America needs to develop a new approach to producing ethanol, one that uses biomass (cellulosic conversion process) instead of corn. This process could use abundant renewable resources that contain cellulose to produce large volumes of ethanol. Conversion processes are in development and could deliver substantial volumes of ethanol by 2015. The critical issue is that the process must use as little crude oil products as possible to generate the largest savings of fossil fuels.
The bottom line is that the US will be challenged to expand the ethanol substitution to ten percent from the current one percent of gasoline usage in the next ten years. If you live near a reliable source of E85 ethanol you can buy a flex-fuel vehicle now and start reducing your crude oil demands. The flex-fuel vehicles available today can be found at the following website:
http://www.e85fuel.com/e85101/flexfuelvehicles.php?topic=For%20Fleets
The substitution of ethanol for gasoline has been greatly oversold. There are currently over 500 millions cars worldwide, and the number will increase substantially as the economies of China and India continue to grow. Conservation and exploration for new sources of fossil fuels are still our short-term solutions, with the emphasis on conservation. One thing we can count on is that the price of crude oil, and its by-products like gasoline and heating oil, will continue to increase.
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Comments: 7
The biggest problem Americans have is that we've built our entire national infrastructure around cheap oil and there is nothing that can easily replace it once it runs out.
Worse, nothing is being done to plan ahead other than to go and invade countries in the Middle East to secure the remaining world's oil supplies. At some point the "gas" will hit the fan and we'll be forced to stop using cars so much...it's going to be a huge mess at best.
Great article. Very well researched and right on target. We absolutely need to be developing technologies for cellulosic ethanol production. In addition, as you point out, we should be using non-fossil techniques to power the conversion processes.
Conservation is also part of the picture. It's a combination of minimizing our consumption, and then optimizing the resources. The less we are using, the less we'll have to invest in the optimization phase.
Corn based ethanol does have a vital role to play in the transition, however. It is helping to get at least some political dialogue started. It is helping companies to refine their processes for producing ethanol, and it providing a base from which to research new enzyme technology that can be applied to specifically developed bio-fuel crops.
The bottom line is that there we've taken a long time and many paths to develop the problem. We may not have as long, but we'll still have to take many paths to develop the solutions. Every effort helps.