Ethanol isn’t any cleaner or better than gasoline. It’s denatured whiskey. Stay with me; you may have to unlearn some things.
Being grown from corn, ethanol is renewable. This is all very well and good, but it needs space to grow. It needs 20 percent of America’s cropland, to be exact. And that only accounts for a mere 3.5 percent of America’s total gasoline consumption. To produce one 15-18 gallon tank of ethanol, the process requires 450 pounds of corn and only provides a third of the power of an equal volume of pure gasoline. You’ll have to fill up three times as frequently, burn three times as much fuel (produce three times as much CO2) and force corn prices higher the world over.
Corn, being the most subsidized U.S. crop already, is further subsidized when made into fuel. Since the government pays so well, the farmers aren’t going to leave any money on the table. They will abandon other staple crops to plant more corn, driving up prices of food all over the world. Tortilla prices in Mexico are 60 percent higher this year, as compared to last year, while pork prices in China rose 20 percent. The world’s poorest people are footing the bill for America’s addiction to gasoline.
As terrible as that is, in order to meet a new energy bill just signed into law, the U.S. will have to produce 65 billion gallons of biofuels by 2025. This translates to 1.5 million barrels per day, or 6 percent of total demand. Expand that into amount of land needed for the corn, and you’ll begin to see the problem.
The start of this craze was set in place back in the 1970s, by Archer Daniels Midland, a corn producing company looking for more ways to profit from its chief profit center. When ADM got to know former Kansas Senator Bob Dole (a corn state), he secured money for them to use in research.
ADM tried to present ethanol as a fuel additive to refining companies; it took up volume and was cheaper than gas. It was filler – and was treated as such. Oil companies jumped at it, but for some reason it just didn’t catch on. The most likely reason is that it has a 1.3:1 energy balance, as opposed to 5:1 for gasoline. 1.3 is not much greater than one, and thus provides a terrible return for the volume used.
Switchgrass and other inedible plants can be made into ethanol, and would not require any extra cropland, but the technology needed to make switchgrass an economically vi able alternative is in its infancy. Sugar cane in Brazil is more than twice as efficient as corn as far as ethanol is concerned, but takes up land.
Ethanol is a step in the right direction, but there are better alternatives. Don’t be fooled into thinking this is the end of our dependence on foreign oil, nor the end of smog.
Right now, ethanol is good for two groups: politicians looking to be considered "green" and farmers looking for more green in their pockets.
Conant, an entrepreneurship freshman, can be reached via [email protected]
