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The author of this piece has an obvious bias (Geoff Cooper is the president and CEO of Renewable Fuels Association), but does he also have a valid point?
Let's prioritize American renewable fuels over foreign oil and minerals:
After suffering through more than a year of quarantines, stay-at-home orders, and travel lockdowns, millions of Americans have eagerly returned to the nation's highways this summer for long-awaited vacations and road trips. As a result, gasoline demand has surged to record highs and pump prices are at levels not seen since 2014.
In recent weeks, regular-grade gas prices averaged $3.17 per gallon, up almost 50 percent from the same time last year. With higher fuel prices threatening to undermine the nation's ongoing economic recovery, it's easy to see why the Biden administration is looking for ways to ease America's pain at the pump.
[...] Before the Biden administration looks to OPEC+ countries or mineral-rich nations like Afghanistan, China and Bolivia for help, it has an opportunity to turn to America's heartland for a homegrown solution. Renewable fuels like ethanol have a 40-year proven track record of success in helping to lower prices at the pump while simultaneously reducing carbon emissions, supporting good-paying clean energy jobs and curtailing crude oil imports.
Four decades' worth of investment and innovation by ethanol producers has resulted in real breakthroughs in lower-carbon transportation fuels. Today's corn-based ethanol reduces carbon emissions by 52 percent when compared directly to gasoline, according to a recent study from the Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory. Another study by scientists from Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Tufts University similarly shows corn ethanol achieves an average carbon reduction of 46 percent compared to gasoline, with some ethanol in the market today achieving a 61 percent carbon reduction.
[...] Before we turn to the Persian Gulf for answers to our nation's energy and climate challenges, let's give the American heartland a shot. The solution to high pump prices and decarbonization lies in the farm fields of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa and other Midwest states — not in the oil fields of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and other Middle East nations.
Journal Reference:
Uisung Lee, Hoyoung Kwon, May Wu, et al. Retrospective analysis of the U.S. corn ethanol industry for 2005–2019: implications for greenhouse gas emission reductions [open], Biofuels, Bioproducts and Biorefining (DOI: 10.1002/bbb.2225)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Tuesday August 24 2021, @04:33PM (38 children)
Do they include the environmental and economic costs of producing ethanol?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Informative) by fustakrakich on Tuesday August 24 2021, @04:35PM
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 4, Interesting) by requerdanos on Tuesday August 24 2021, @04:43PM (4 children)
I don't see any reason why you couldn't power your ethanol production with wind, solar, or unicorn faerie dust.
Not saying that's typically done, just pointing out the envirocleanliness potential.
(Score: 3, Informative) by fustakrakich on Tuesday August 24 2021, @04:56PM
Sorry, I was talking more about the agricultural aspects, water consumption, harvesting, soil damage, pesticides, chemical fertilizers, etc...
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 24 2021, @06:20PM
whale oil to ethanol. now that is renewable.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday August 24 2021, @08:13PM (1 child)
Ethanol should be past the point where it is self sustaining - if desired. Thing is, the infrastructure is all built out using coal, oil, nuclear, etc. The more ethanol is produced, the more infrastructure will be built to use it.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 25 2021, @07:09PM
It takes two barrels of oil to produce one barrel-equivalent from field corn*. It is impossible for such a model to become self sustaining. The only reason it can exist at all is because the law requires it.
*Brazil is the only country in the world with sustainable ethanol fuel production because they make it from sugar cane.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 24 2021, @04:47PM (16 children)
Ethanol from corn is totally unsustainable. The amount of fuel that goes into producing 1 gigajoule of ethanol is more than half a gigajoule, mostly in the form of natural gas to produce nitrogen fertilizers. It's not viable at all.
I'm not saying all ethanol fuel is bad. In areas where sugarcane grows, it can be a lot better. But corn ethanol in the US is worse for the environment than gasoline.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Tuesday August 24 2021, @04:53PM (6 children)
The question addressed doesn't seem to be which is better for the environment, but rather whether the U.S. should focus on producing fuel domestically or increasing reliance on OPEC.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by fustakrakich on Tuesday August 24 2021, @04:59PM (5 children)
We are exporting oil now. We are an OPEC nation
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 4, Funny) by DannyB on Tuesday August 24 2021, @05:09PM
I didn't know America wanted to become one of those OPEC'ers.
Don't put a mindless tool of corporations in the white house; vote ChatGPT for 2024!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 24 2021, @05:20PM (1 child)
I don't know who "we" are for you, but the US is expressly not part of OPEC because the US and various European countries were the enemy against which OPEC was created.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday August 25 2021, @12:57AM
:-) What "enemy" is that?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday August 24 2021, @05:21PM (1 child)
We're not in OPEC but we are a net exporter.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Tuesday August 24 2021, @05:29PM
Yeah, it's just one of those things that makes the story more like a plain old political lobbying effort.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ElizabethGreene on Tuesday August 24 2021, @07:11PM (2 children)
It doesn't have to be sugarcane either, there are legume (nitrogen-fixing) biomass crops e.g. alfalfa that could be used to make Ethanol too. I'm unclear on why we put all our eggs in the corn basket. It used to be subsidies, but the direct payment subsidy program has been gone for a while now.
Inertia?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 24 2021, @08:49PM (1 child)
Machinery for planting/harvesting/processing. Corn requires no new R&D, no change to agricultural practices, and no new investment for processing to ethanol.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 25 2021, @02:07PM
This is why republicans were so against Obama's investments into renewables.
They knew that if they could get over the initial cost barrier that it would overturn the energy sector and THEN what excuse could they use to invade the Middle East?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 24 2021, @07:21PM (3 children)
The "waste" from ethanol plants are high protein animal feed also known as distillers grains. You see, the problem with feeding cows and pigs corn is all the sugar. In cattle this sugar results in the nasty strains of e.coli that then poison people. Remove the sugar, and cows don't become breading grounds for it. Fermentation of the corn breaks down the sugar and allows the proteins to be used as feed. It's a win-win.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distillers_grains [wikipedia.org]
https://www.hubbardfeeds.com/blog/pros-and-cons-supplementing-distillers-grains [hubbardfeeds.com]
The problem is not the ethanol, it's always the other chemicals like when some ethanol plant used neonicotinoid coated seeds which then cannot be used as animal feed. It basically becomes toxic waste
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/10/mead-nebraska-ethanol-plant-pollution-danger [theguardian.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 24 2021, @10:52PM (2 children)
Yes, the magical muppets don't want you eating meat either.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 25 2021, @12:28AM (1 child)
Well why would you, plants are delicious and nutritious with all the vitamins you need.
(Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Wednesday August 25 2021, @04:03AM
something to remember about meat from cattle and other ruminants, they convert grass, inedible by most Humans, into a concentrated high protein food that Humans can eat. Cows are adapted to eat grass, not corn. Feeding them corn is the cause of most of the problems attributed to cows, in particular the methane and e-coli issues.
Same can be said of several other meat producing animals. They convert things Humans can't or won't eat into a foods that Humans can eat.
Humans are omnivores, our bodies are adapted to and work best on a varied diet that includes more than just plants.
And on a personal note I've yet to eat a vegiburger that tasted anywhere near as good as a waygu beef hamburger. So I'm not going to give those up anytime soon.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 24 2021, @11:47PM (1 child)
"The amount of fuel that goes into producing 1 gigajoule of ethanol is more than half a gigajoule"
Math is hard. 1 > 0.5. looks totally sustainable to me.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday August 25 2021, @02:06AM
If you rely only on math, it may look sustainable to you.
I suggest you upgrade your toolset to include at least physics and ecology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Interesting) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday August 24 2021, @04:59PM (11 children)
Yes.
FTA:
Retrospective analysis of the U.S. corn ethanol industry for 2005–2019: implications for greenhouse gas emission reductions [wiley.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Tuesday August 24 2021, @05:18PM (5 children)
Sure hope the climate cooperates, and it just pushes the prices way up when it doesn't. And later, when all the warm weather moves to Canada, we'll be importing corn from them. I wish we would just go electric. It requires the simplest, safest infrastructure, and can be minimally offensive to the environment on the largest scale. Transporting electrons is cheaper than moving all that mass around from one refinery to another.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday August 24 2021, @05:36PM (4 children)
We can do both.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday August 24 2021, @05:50PM (3 children)
The ethanol can serve local needs, the infrastructure is too demanding, even if it is lighter than oil. Electric can be produced and delivered anywhere
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 24 2021, @06:10PM (2 children)
Plus you can drink it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 24 2021, @07:00PM (1 child)
What part of "serves local needs" did you not understand? :P
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 24 2021, @07:05PM
The part where you can drink it.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 24 2021, @11:11PM (4 children)
Yes, but also no.
The paper you linked discusses only CO2 emissions, not other environmental costs, among them water and land use.
The improvement in production efficiency comes from: Higher agricultural productivity; credits for waste production; and more efficient extraction of refinable biomaterials from the corn produced. All of these have problems. Another factor is more efficient farming operations and less carbon-intensive fertilizer, resulting in lower CO2 emissions during actual farming. This is a benefit, but it's not a benefit specific to ethanol production: this benefit belongs to the farming sector as a whole. If the same land were used to grow other crops, the same CO2 emissions reduction would still occur.
Most of the corn is produced in states irrigated with water from the Ogallala Aquifer, a rapidly depleting and not-very-renewable resource. http://duwaterlawreview.com/crisis-on-the-high-plains-the-loss-of-americas-largest-aquifer-the-ogallala/ [duwaterlawreview.com] It's possible to draw some water from this aquifer sustainably, but not nearly as much as is currently being used. This is a serious problem that is going to be addressed, it's just a question of whether it's addressed intentionally or forced when the water runs out. And it means switching to less water-intensive crops. Corn is one of the worst crops for water use, requiring over 120 gallons of water per pound of corn produced. A gallon of ethanol takes 26 pounds of corn. That's about 3100 gallons (26000 pounds) of water consumed per gallon of ethanol produced.
Land use is another serious issue. There is only so much crop-growing land, and crops used for biofuel are crops not used for anything else. About ten years ago there was a famine in Mexico, caused by the US convincing Mexico to stop growing their own corn and buy it from the US instead. Then the US decided to set the corn on fire, and Mexicans starved. If the land had been used to grow food crops, this could have been prevented. We are not on the brink of a Malthusian catastrophe, but everyone knows that highly intensive agriculture is damaging. Farmers and scientists do a good job of managing this - we're probably not going to have another Dust Bowl - but there's a hazard here.
Some of the waste from corn ethanol is converted to pig and cattle feed. They discount their actual emissions because of this because they assume that this is free and that the animals would instead be eating purpose-grown crops. But the reverse is actually the case: Animals were eating corn waste before, and now that the process for extracting refinable biostock from the corn has become more efficient, the waste has become deficient in calories, requiring supplementation with purpose-grown crops. https://theicct.org/blog/staff/if-we-use-livestock-feed-biofuels-what-will-cows-eat [theicct.org]
I also did not review the value they use for the well-to-wheel CO2 emissions they use for gasoline. It's possible that this is a cause of inaccuracy. Furthermore, some of the data in the paper's sources show much less reduction than the paper claims. The four sources include CARB, EPA, USDA, and Argonne National Lab; EPA and CARB show worse results than USDA and ANL. The paper relies on the more-favorable USDA and ANL data. I did not attempt to evaluate the reliability of the different sources.
Remember though that the whole idea behind biofuels is that they'd be close to carbon-neutral. "Hey, maybe we can do a little better than gasoline" is a serious case of moving the goalposts. The paper claims to be 46% better than gasoline, but this drops to about 30% if you eliminate the "livestock feed credit," and even that isn't sustainable because of the farming practices needed to achieve it. (Feed waste loss probably doesn't warrant throwing out the credit entirely, but it very likely shouldn't be taken at face value either). And there's the conflicting data. If you use the EPA data, ethanol isn't any better than gasoline at all.
So, overall, it looks like corn ethanol is still trash. Sugar cane ethanol is better, but you can't grow sugar cane in Nebraska.
Electric vehicles are great, but at least half of the transportation industry's fuel consumption is ships and airplanes, which can't realistically run on electricity. The long term solution has to be synthetic fuel produced using energy from nuclear fusion or space-based solar power.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday August 25 2021, @03:04AM (2 children)
Ships can run on nearly anything burnable. They've got very large combustion chambers and typically don't need a really high pressure. Airplanes are a much more difficult matter.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Wednesday August 25 2021, @04:14AM (1 child)
Ships can also use small molten salt nuclear reactors [366solutions.com].
Or even just good old sails.
both methods are a lot cleaner and safer than burning anything. With the added benefit that the space that would have carried fuel can carry cargo.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday August 25 2021, @01:28PM
Nobody can reasonably use molten salt reactors yet. And sails require a highly skilled crew that is not available. (OTOH, there's some high-tech sailish things that might work.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday August 25 2021, @04:47AM
That's ok. Let's work with the half we got. Go electric where we can, when we can. Overland is a good place to start. Coastal shipping shouldn't have much difficulty either, and can be done more autonomously than a car. That will clean up the cities a lot. Some day you'll be able to see across Beijing...
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 4, Informative) by khallow on Tuesday August 24 2021, @05:18PM (1 child)
So I imagine they're thinking a lot about how to get us to foot the bill for the environmental and economic costs of producing corn ethanol.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday August 25 2021, @12:36AM
Bastards! [soylentnews.org]
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 24 2021, @10:13PM
NO THEY DO NOT. Stop trying to grow "gasoline"
1) Grow food that is what is needed world wide.
2) Grow windmills and solar farms above the food,
3) Turn left over plant material in feed - I love my cows
4) Turn cow poop and left over plant material - compost and used for 1)
Yes, plants grow well below solar farms. Not all plants like full sun. Solar farms (20' ~6m) above corps do not block all sunlight. Also the "roof" helps during heavy rain not to crush corps. Lastly the control of run off can be held used later water corps. So it rained a month of water in 1 days. The ground and plants cannot store it for that month. But WE CAN.