03.11.09
Fuel from food: some drawbacks
… It’s hard to imagine just how much corn is required to make a usable amount of ethanol. Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute has a great quote that sums it up: “The grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV gas tank with ethanol will feed one person for a year.” A year of food for a fill-up? In 2007, the US produced 6.5 BILLION gallons of the stuff. Do I really need to go on?
Fine, I will. Let’s look at those 6.5 billion gallons of ethanol. That’s a lot of gallons. It must be a big chunk of our annual gasoline use, right? Wrong. We used 142 billion gallons of gasoline last year. We grew all that corn – corn that could have fed over two hundred million people for a year – and all we got was less than 5% of the fuel we need…
Read the whole thing. Much interesting information. Another example:
… Meanwhile the climate impact from corn ethanol is staggering. Any study that attempts to take factors into account other than the energy content of corn vs. the energy content of gasoline shows corn ethanol to be a lousy option that offers no climate benefits. That’s because you simply can’t look at corn ethanol in isolation (which is how the corn farms and the ethanol lobby do it). Corn requires lots of fossil fuel-based fertilizer, pesticides, and diesel fuel to grow and harvest. Ethanol is also moved around by truck (rather than pipeline) so you need to take transportation into account – transport from the field to the factory and from the factory to the distributor and from the distributor to the gas station. That’s a lot of trucking.
According to a new study out of Duke University, the greenhouse gas contributions of just farming the corn entirely offset any carbon advantage from burning ethanol instead of gasoline in cars. Their conclusion: you’re better off leaving the soil fallow. But you can’t fully estimate the full effect of corn ethanol unless you take land use into account. Let me repeat that in All Caps: YOU HAVE TO TAKE LAND USE INTO ACCOUNT. And the land use issues are huge…
