Ethanol: Whose subsidy? At what cost?

Foreign Policy, March 7, 2006 features The Green Bullet by Lester B. Lave, W. Michael Griffin. The authors begin: "There's a straightforward way for Washington to end America’s addiction to foreign oil, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions and resolving the impasse on international trade: Turn farm subsides into fuel subsides." Then they offer up minor "economic" and "environmental" roadblocks, that they easily dismiss:

...So what’s the catch? Corn farming is rough on the environment. Soil erosion due to wind and water is rampant. Fertilizer and pesticide runoffs produce algae blooms that result in “dead zones,” including one in the Gulf of Mexico that is so polluted it cannot support aquatic life. Furthermore, building the ethanol processing plants will take 3–4 years, and gas stations would have to commit to providing ethanol. And, because ethanol uses only the starch in corn, not the oil, protein, or other components, converting corn into ethanol is attractive only if there is a market for the byproducts. Opinions differ, but some estimate that byproduct markets could saturate well short of 11 billion gallons of production.

Fortunately, the surplus corn that isn’t economic to convert to ethanol doesn’t have to be grown, because it could easily be replaced with switchgrass. The prairie grass that President Bush mentioned in the 2006 State of the Union Address is naturally resistant to many pests and diseases, requiring far smaller amounts of chemicals and fertilizers. It’s also drought-tolerant and can grow in poor soil. Most important, it can be used to produce ethanol. If the current federal subsidy given to corn were extended to switchgrass, farmers would realize approximately the same income per acre as they do growing corn today. The new crop would use less fertilizer and pesticides, resulting in less erosion. Fertilizer and pesticide runoff would be dramatically reduced, and much of our motor fuel would be renewable.

To be sure, producing ethanol from switchgrass uses new technology that isn’t fully developed. There are pioneer plants in Canada and Brazil, but the costs of commercial production are unclear.

… And the best part: It can be done without Washington spending a dime more than it already does.

Others are not so sanguine. Robert Bryce's Corn Dog, Slate, July 19, 2005, is subtitled "The ethanol subsidy is worse than you can imagine." Bryce cuts quickly to the chase:

...The stickiest question about ethanol is this: Does making alcohol from grain or plant waste really create any new energy?

The answer, of course, depends upon whom you ask. The ethanol lobby claims there's a 30 percent net gain in BTUs from ethanol made from corn. Other boosters, including Woolsey, claim there are huge energy gains (as much as 700 percent) to be had by making ethanol from grass.

But the ethanol critics have shown that the industry calculations are bogus. David Pimentel, a professor of ecology at Cornell University who has been studying grain alcohol for 20 years, and Tad Patzek, an engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, co-wrote a recent report that estimates that making ethanol from corn requires 29 percent more fossil energy than the ethanol fuel itself actually contains.

See also Science Daily, April 1, 2005 , Study: Ethanol Production Consumes Six Units Of Energy To Produce Just One,
And, especially, Ted Patzek's collection of Biofuel Literature.

Obviously my bias lies with the skeptics. Are we wrong?

Posted first on Ecological Economics

Comments

[John]

Yea I was thinking the same thing about switchgrass, it can be used to burn in place of coal, and can be made into ethanol. It seemed like a much better partial solution to the energy crisis than corn. So I bought up the domain switchgrasscrops.com /info ect.. Not spamming the sites here just trying to make a point. I have emailed just about every alternative energy maker, Iowa, canada, just about anyone I could think of that would be interested in them. Know what, no one wants anything to do with it. As far as I can tell in the real world switchgrass is already dead, they are going with corn for some reason I have yet to find. In truth if we ever hope to get off of oil, we will need multiple energy sources. Including coal, ethanol, methane, nucleur power(just steam), hydrogen, solar!, and many yet to be determined. Spending the money on the research is the most important of all. Before it turns into a crisis lets get a nice head start.

[Sestina]

Howard Simons had an interesting piece on thestreet.com a while ago on this topic. His issue was capacity rather than efficiency.

http://www.thestreet.com/_tscs/stocks/energy/10275900.html

Key (unsourced) quote:

If we distilled the entire U.S. corn crop and used none of it for human or livestock consumption, we could displace 85 days of gasoline consumption.

[Robert Rapier]

You are correct to be skeptical. I have been involved in ethanol for a long time, and it is about politics, not good science. I have blogged extensively on the technical issues and pseudoscience behind the ethanol advocates claims at http://i-r-squared.blogspot.com/ .