With all of the public interest and media attention surrounding green technologies, it is easy to get caught up in the hype and sloganeering. The trend towards greenness, which began around 2001 with the introduction of hybrid cars, has ballooned substantially over the past few years. Proponents of technologies ranging from hydrogen fuel cells to biodiesel have offered myriad conflicting viewpoints about America's energy future, and politicians have intensified the green frenzy by making environmental friendliness a cornerstone of their political platforms. With all the attention surrounding these new developments, it is easy for the merits of a new energy technology to be exaggerated-people are quick to buy into anything that promises sustainability, even if the technology itself is inefficient or underdeveloped.
One example of such an over-hyped technology is corn-based ethanol. Over the last year, ethanol has garnered support from an eclectic mix of causes-liberals love it because it promises less pollution, conservatives back it because it reduces America's dependence on foreign oil, and farmers stand behind it because it drives up the price of corn, allowing them to earn more from their land. Even President Bush has jumped on the bandwagon with the statement that ethanol and related technologies could "replace more than 75% of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025."
Some farmers, scientists, and policy makers, however, are not so enthusiastic. While most farmers are thrilled by the rising price of corn (as more ethanol refineries have sprung up across the country, the price has more than doubled to over $4 per bushel), others see price increase as a "bubble" that could burst at any time, just like the internet "bubble" that crippled the IT industry around the turn of the millennium. As the price of a crop increases, farmers tend to grow more of it, which means that they must take out long-term leases to acquire more land. If the price of the crop then drops, the farmers are left with expensive land that they cannot use. With thousands of farmers quite litterly "betting the farm" on the high price of corn, a price drop could have disastrous consequences for the industry.
The rising price of corn presents challenges to other industries as well. As the price of corn goes up, as does the price of animal feed, and thus the price of meat. The beverage industry could suffer as well-soft drinks contain large amounts of corn syrup, so rising corn prices could make beverage producers' already razor-thin margins even thinner. Although these increases could seriously harm small producers, most of the extra expense would end up being passed on to customers.
As much as these price increases could hurt the American consumer, they don't even begin to scratch the surface of a bigger ethical dilemma surrounding ethanol production. Corn is a food crop--with 13% of the world population facing malnourishment or starvation, is it really ethical for America to sequester millions of tons of corn each year in order to produce ethanol?
To address these questions, it is important to understand ethanol's potentials and drawbacks. Ethanol is simply grain alcohol-it is fermented in much the same way as grapes used for wine, or grains used for whiskey. When combined with a certain percentage of gasoline, it can be burned in an internal combustion engine and used to power a car. Most modern cars can burn fuel with up to 10% ethanol (E10), and specially designed "Flex Fuel" vehicles can burn fuel with up to 85% (E85).
Ethanol has gained widespread support chiefly because of its environmental benefits. Since it comes from corn rather than mined fossil resources, it is considered renewable, and it produces less carbon dioxide than gasoline or diesel fuel. According to the EPA, it can also improve gas mileage by 3-5%. Another benefit of ethanol is that it is here now-unlike hydrogen or electrical cars, millions of ethanol ready vehicles are already on the road today.
However, the energy benefits of using ethanol are slim. Even though the corn used to grow ethanol itself is renewable, growing, harvesting, transporting, and refining it requires the use of fossil fuels, chemical fertilizers, and dirty electricity from sources like coal and natural gas. Based on these other factors, several studies have concluded that producing ethanol consumes more energy than burning it, and even those studies that show an energy gain from corn-based ethanol put the gains at only a few percent.
Based on corn-derived ethanol's tiny margins, the vast logistical challenges involved in producing it, and the ethical problems surrounding it, corn-based ethanol will likely never replace gasoline-nor should it. However, that is not to say that ethanol itself is insolvent. Since ethanol production is based on fermentation, the fuel can be made from anything that contains a large amount of sugar.
Corn, though the most sugar-intensive large-scale crop in the United States, pales in comparison to sugarcane or beets, which are already being used successfully to make vast quantities of ethanol in countries like Brazil. Although using these crops boost ethanol's energy margins greatly, they too suffer from the same environmental and ethnical problems as corn-derived ethanol. In order for ethanol to truly rival gasoline or diesel fuel, the sugar for fermentation would have to come from a politically neutral, truly sustainable, completely inedible source. What kind of source could match such criteria?
The answer lies in simple plant cellulose. Cellulose, which makes up the stalks and branches of most plants, cannot be fermented directly. However, with the use of enzymes, it can be transformed into fermentable sugar, which in turn can be used to be produce ethanol. Unlike sugarcane, beets, or corn, cellulose is everywhere-switchgrass and other fast-growing weeds contain ample cellulose, as do waste products from normal farming, such as corn stalks. Although methods for making cellulose-derived ethanol are not yet capable of functioning on a commercial scale, developing this technology would allow farmers to produce ethanol and grow food crops at the same time, or to use fast-growing plants to yield multiple ethanol "harvests" in a single season.
It is excellent that people are embracing green technology, but with all the hype, it is easy to lose sight of the ultimate goal. Sustainable technologies should eventually replace dirty technology altogether, lessening humanity's environmental footprint and leaving us free to address other issues. In the struggle to replace fossil fuels, developing demand for corn-based ethanol is important, but it is not the ultimate goal. Rather than jumping on the ethanol bandwagon and dramatically altering our infrastructure to realize tiny gains, we should focus on slowly building support for corn-based ethanol while aggressively pursuing the technologies that will make future ethanol technology truly sustainable, ethical, and environmentally friendly.
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Comments: 12
Electric cars, electric heating, electric power...........
You don't have to grow it, but you do have to build nuclear plants. Something we Americans haven't done in almost 30 years.
From what I've read about switchgrass, it sounds like a great idea to me. However, if we keep insisting on building on every square inch of land, where the heck are we going to grow it?
How about using grass clippings from parks, golf courses, and highway mediums?
Housing developers could recycle trees and bushes that they clear before building houses.
Switchgrass is a weed. When farmers rotate their crops, they could harvest switchgrass that grows in the fallow plots.
Don't forget the massive subsidies corn farmers are paid which is making ethanol prices even close to reasonable right now.
Meanwhile, the din over ethanol, wind, solar and all the other bio-fuels is overwhelming. The only problem is : those technologies are inefficient suppliers of constant-stream energy that we need going into the national grid. Plus, they force up the price of stables such as corn and soybeans. Great for farmers, bad for consumers.
Nuclear is also the safest form of electricity generation, by far..........even though the Lefties still tell us that "The China Syndrome" (movie from the early 80's about a fictional nuclear catastrophe) is possible. It would be funny if it weren't so pathetic - and just at a time when we need new ideas. Or maybe old ones that make more sense now.
It is well known that every step up the food chain loses a significant percentage of the energy available in the previous step. The only sensible approach then has to be harvesting the original source of all energy or at least as close to that as you can get and that means harvesting sunlight directly or as nearly directly as possible.
There may be some small gains to be made by harvesting energy out of what would otherwise be landfill (of no value for a few million years till it turns to coal or oil) but they will never amount to anything like the energy needs of our current society. The only thing that can possibly help significantly is solar energy directly, or indirectly via wind, wave or hydro-electric power. Gowing stuff, then processing it, then burning the result is simply too inefficient to be of any real advantage over oil.
You are correct about efficiency but the most direct way to get a large amount of energy from the sun is to raise sugar beets and convert them to energy. I agree that a more direct way would be nice and I hope there is research being done in this area. And you could never get enough to move a car down the road on a cell the size of the car top! It isn't there!
Wen,
Alcohol is an energy source by itself. The mix with gasoline is not what they do in Brazil. There are problems with pure alcohol but just light some of it on fire if you don't think it is a pure energy source. That says nothing about the suitability or economy of alcohol.
Bret,
Guess what! I agree with you, we need to utilize all the nuclear power we can! This has nothing to do with lefties or righties, it's just practical sense to me!