The ethanol challenge
Read or listen: How "green" is ethanol from corn?. (Photo by danellesheree)
Liz Marshall told Earth & Sky, “If we do ethanol right, people will realize the benefits of it. The challenge will be to figure out how do it right.”
Lindsay Patterson: What effect is the Renewable Fuel Standard, or RFS, having on the economy?
Liz Marshall: The RSF sent a signal to people interested in producing ethanol that the government was also interested in the possibilities of the fuel, and in helping to create a demand for it. And that stimulates the corn sector of the industry. Corn is really the only commercial technology we have for producing ethanol at this point.
But there are environmental implications of that, because corn is a very highly managed crop.
Patterson: What do you mean? What kinds of environmental implications?
Marshall: We end up seeing disproportionate increases in the amount of fertilizer applied, and disproportionate increases in the amount of nitrogen runoff. And we see increases in soil erosion because land is managed more intensively.
Patterson: But aren’t those negative environmental effects balanced out with ethanol’s benefits? Doesn’t using ethanol help reduce greenhouse gas emissions?
Marshall: Ethanol is estimated to have only about a 13 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. One of the reasons is that – in order to produce ethanol from corn – you also need to process energy. And that energy for processing is in large part provided by natural gas and coal. So you’re displacing petroleum demand, but you’re replacing it via other portions of the life cycle of fossil fuels.
Patterson: Is that just a problem that’s inherent in ethanol?
Marshall: No. I don’t think so. My feeling is that increasing our reliance on ethanol exacerbates an existing problem in agriculture itself. It’s not a problem that is inherent with biofuels. It’s a problem that is inherent in agriculture. That makes it a good argument for sustainable agriculture and not necessarily an iron–clad argument against biofuels.
If you want to put additional pressure on agriculture in order to produce a portion of the nation’s fuel supply, then you need to fix agriculture itself. For example, biofuels have the potential to create the same impacts on agriculture as the livestock industry. These are existing problems with agriculture that need to be fixed. They’re not unique to biofuels.
It’s yet another good argument for best management practices in agriculture. We need to try to figure out ways to minimize agriculture’s environmental impact, not just for the production of biofuels.
Patterson: You’ve said that farmers are going to make a lot of money off of ethanol. Will that cause them to overlook the environmental impacts? How are those two things going to weigh out?
Marshall: Farmers have very little incentive to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. There’s always been a difficulty in trying to come up with the right set of incentives to get farmers to try new practices which may ultimately be in their best interest, for example precision nitrogen application and no–till agriculture. In some cases, those may actually increase returns to farmers.
But what may be lacking is the kind of technical support they need to be comfortable trying new practices in an industry where really, year to year, you can’t afford to take a lot of risks.
Patterson: Are there other ethanol options, besides corn ethanol?
Marshall: What’s on the horizon in terms of commercial technologies is cellulosic ethanol.
Starch– or grain–based ethanol, which is predominately produced through corn in the US, is produced through fermentation of simple sugars in the starchy part of the plant. But large portions of the plant, like the leaves and the stalks, are composed of complex sugars, which are much more difficult to ferment. And the technology that’s on the horizon now would allow you to enzymatically break those down from complex sugars into simple sugars and then ferment those simple sugars, thereby using a much larger percentage of the plant to produce ethanol.
The second benefit of this practice is what’s left behind is lignin. Lignin is the structural knot of the plant that can’t be broken down. But it can be burned. That provides processing energy.
In other words, cellulosic ethanol would provide its own energy for processing, through the lignin of the feedstock. So you wouldn’t require the same natural gas and coal input at that critical process stage. You’d have much, much improved greenhouse benefits as a result.
Cellulosic ethanol opens up a whole range of possible feedstocks. It has the potential to provide a much greater yield of ethanol per acre, and the greenhouse gas benefits are hugely improved over corn.
Patterson: Do you think the public would be ready to accept cellulosic ethanol into their cars?
Marshall: If we do ethanol right, I think that people will realize the benefits of it. If we do ethanol wrong, there will be costs associated with it which will certainly tarnish ethanol’s public image.
The challenge will be to figure out how do it right and what policies will have to be in place to produce the feedstock without producing the negative side effects.
What I’d like to see is an impact and return on energy spent study on ethanol vrs biodeisel.
i echo what jere says; i would like to see such a study as well.
A really good link to an overview of scientific study on the efficiency of biofuels can be found at this link, from a book to be published by Michael McElroy, a professor of environmental studies at Harvard University.
McElroy used data from one of Earth & Sky’s science advisors, Cornell University professor David Pimentel, who penned a recent editorial for the American Institute of Biological Sciences website, available here.
Ethanol is a net energy loss. It also is causing a strong rise in the cost of corn. This is having a negative impact on people who eat corn. It won’t hurt us much, we can afford to pay more for corn flakes. However, in rural Mexico, tortillas are going to cost a lot more. The folks will have to head north to eat. That will hurt us.
Also, ethanol could be much more efficiently derived from sugar cane. However, our government is supporting the price of sugar to protect some rather large corpoarate sugar farmers here in the United States. Sugar is roughly double the world price here in the United States.
If government is the answer , it is a stupid question.
We have a lot of oil right here. Our congress will not allow us to drill for it. Garbage can be pyrolized into petroleum like feedstock and fed to refineries. You just can’t get a permit to do it. Nuclear power would cut carbon emmision by an immense amount. Try to get a permit for a nuke (the good news is that some are being permitted now). Try to build a wind farm for electrical pwoer and our esteemed environmental stewards, The Kennedy’s will throw a monkey wrench into the plans immediately.
If we let the price of oil go up as it does finally become scarce, the market and individual entreprenuers will discover and develop innovations that will allow us an even better standard of living. That is, if the local, state and federal governments do not continue regulation that prohibits innnovation.
Again, if government is the answer, it is a stupid question.
PS: Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. I still do not believe there is reasonable, supportable evidence that the present warm period has anything whatsoever to do with SUV’s.
Here is another article that illustrates some predictable problems.
As corn has risen to $3.66 a bushel – more than double the price a yearago – lots of farmers want to plant corn. Anecdotal evidence abounds. From The Wall Street Journal: “As corn prices rise, farmers are racing to cash in. Leon Corzine in Assumption, Ill., is planting 95% corn on his 3,000acre farm, up from 50% in 2002.“That means more trucks, tractors – and fertilizers.Interesting to note, too, that this rise has come amid a bumper crop. The 2006 harvest was the third biggest on record. Demand is high, thanks tothe demand for ethanol. You need lots of corn to make ethanol – not tomention water. Ethanol production also consumes a lot of energy – oil and natural gas. In fact, producing ethanol uses up more energy than ethanol itself provides.With oil at $60 per barrel, maybe the whole ethanol thing is easier tostomach. It won’t be if oil gets to $40, especially if corn edges closer to $4 a bushel. By then, the farmers and ethanol producers will startgetting their heads handed to them.Corn, of course, is an important ingredient for lots of foodstuffs -cereals, syrups and more. It’s also the primary feedstock for raisingchicken, beef and pork. At some point, we’ll have too much corn. Interestingly, the price of oil may have more to do with that than the traditional demands from foodproducers.
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