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The biofuel's bipartisan support isn't about science, but politics:
Two decades ago, when the world was wising up to the threat of climate change, the Bush administration touted ethanol — a fuel usually made from corn — for its threefold promise: It would wean the country off foreign oil, line farmers' pockets, and reduce carbon pollution. In 2007, Congress mandated that refiners nearly quintuple the amount of biofuels mixed into the nation's gasoline supply over 15 years. The Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, projected that ethanol would emit at least 20 percent fewer greenhouse gasses than conventional gasoline.
Scientists say the EPA was too optimistic, and some research shows that the congressional mandate did more climatic harm than good. A 2022 study found that producing and burning corn-based fuel is at least 24 percent more carbon-intensive than refining and combusting gasoline. The biofuel industry and the Department of Energy, or DOE, vehemently criticized those findings, which nevertheless challenge the widespread claim that ethanol is something of a magic elixir.
"There's an intuition people have that burning plants is better than burning fossil fuels," said Timothy Searchinger. He is a senior researcher at the Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment at Princeton University and an early skeptic of ethanol. "Growing plants is good. Burning plants isn't."
Given all that, not to mention the growing popularity of electric vehicles, you'd think ethanol is on the way out. Not so. Politicians across the ideological spectrum continue to tout it as a way to win energy independence and save the climate. The fuel's bipartisan staying power has less to do with any environmental benefits than with disputed science and the sway of the biofuel lobby, agricultural economists and policy analysts told Grist.
"The only way ethanol makes sense is as a political issue," said Jason Hill, a bioproducts and biosystems engineering professor at the University of Minnesota.
Although the 15 billion gallons of ethanol mixed into gasoline each year falls well short of the 36 billion that President Bush hoped for, the number of refineries in the U.S. has nearly doubled to almost 200 since his presidency. Between 2008 and 2016, corn cultivation increased by about 9 percent. In some areas, like the Dakotas and western Minnesota, it rose as much as 100 percent during that time. Nationwide, corn land expanded by more than 11 million acres between 2005 and 2021.
"A quarter of all the corn land in the U.S. is used for ethanol. It's a land area equivalent to all the corn land in Minnesota and Iowa combined," said Hill. "That has implications. It's not just what happens in the U.S. It's what happens globally."
Journal Reference:Jan Lewandrowski, Jeffrey Rosenfeld, Diana Pape, et al. The greenhouse gas benefits of corn ethanol – assessing recent evidence [open], Biofuels (DOI: 10.1080/17597269.2018.1546488)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by zdammit on Tuesday May 09, @07:08PM (10 children)
How is it possible that by burning something that grows using carbon from the atmosphere you end up with more carbon emitted into the atmosphere than by burning something that you dug up?
(Score: 4, Informative) by ChrisMaple on Tuesday May 09, @07:20PM
Making fertilizer can be energy-intensive. Being an inferior fuel, it takes more energy to transport it from field to gas tank, because there is more corn/alcohol mass per unit finished fuel energy.
(Score: 4, Informative) by RS3 on Tuesday May 09, @08:12PM (2 children)
Adding to ChrisMaple's post: it takes energy to process the corn: harvesting, transporting, milling it, mixing and heating it for fermentation, then heating for distilling, etc.
https://www.e-education.psu.edu/egee439/node/673 [psu.edu]
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Wednesday May 10, @10:17AM (1 child)
you can use green energy for that!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RS3 on Wednesday May 10, @03:03PM
I like your blend of truth and sarcasm. I notice, in almost everything, that people look at things as if there were no timeline. Right now we're still making too much CO2, but as we build up solar, wind, maybe better implementation of nuclear, and whatever else is "green", maybe someday in the future the energy required to produce ethanol will be a net reduction in CO2.
We (USA) have large deserts. We could, if we had enough collective determination, build ethanol processing plants in the desert where we can use solar energy to power the plant, and preferably railroads to transport the raw ingredients to and products from. Locomotives could run on ethanol.
(Score: 2) by corey on Tuesday May 09, @10:37PM
I came to say the same thing. Fundamentally we need to leave fossil fuels in the ground, burning stuff on the surface is reemitting what was already there. But I get the energy cost due to production. The mandate that the companies reduce their carbon emissions and they’ll build solar plants to power it.
We just need to electrify cars, skip this step.
(Score: 2) by higuita on Tuesday May 09, @11:10PM (1 child)
The problem is that corn transformation to ethanol will produce x energy
but for transporting and producing that ethanol you spend y energy, as the process is much more complex than, for example, sugar cane... x is still larger than y, but by very little, that makes this inefficient... it is actually only possible because the US support the corn production, in much other countries, they would lose money trying to do the same.
This was just a agriculture lobby, pushing way to justify the money they got from the states and wishlist from some politicians that a scaling corn to ethanol production would make the process more efficient, but they are wrong, corn is not a good base product to produce ethanol
(Score: 3, Interesting) by higuita on Tuesday May 09, @11:29PM
read this:
https://grist.org/article/biofuel-some-numbers/ [grist.org]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday May 10, @11:51AM (1 child)
That's a big improvement on a decade ago where it took about two barrels of crude oil to manufacture one barrel of ethanol.
There are thermodynamic limits such that it'll "probably" always be a net loss, but it MIGHT improve over time. Maybe.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday May 10, @03:08PM
Excellent point. Above I posted the idea [soylentnews.org] that we could build ethanol processing (or anything) in the desert where we can easily harvest solar energy to power the process.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Wednesday May 10, @12:01PM
The ratio you don't know to google for is "EROEI" or Energy Returned on Energy Invested.
For old oil wells last century it ran above 100:1. Gotta burn about 10 barrels of crude to drill and pump out 1000 barrels of crude, back in the old days. Much worse ratio now, LOL.
The energy returned on a field of tulips is about zero, the energy invested is endless barrels of diesel used to plow, harvest, transport, enormous amounts of natgas turned into fertilizer and pesticides, don't forget processing and storage costs, etc. The energy returned on cucumbers and apples is also zero.
You can VERY inefficiently turn corn into ethanol. Not unsurprising an uneconomic plant like "corn" could generate maybe only 1 barrel of crude equivalent for every 2 barrels of crude burned. Apparently a propaganda piece from 2022 claims you have to burn 1.24 barrels of crude to create the equivalent of 1 barrel of crude in the form of ethanol, which I find hard to believe but "maybe" under ideal conditions with spherical cows etc.
You can see why "big oil" strongly supports ethanol production. Ethanol means burning more oil.
For a good laugh check out food. You eat crude oil. It takes about 10 calories of crude oil to get 1 calorie of food on your dinner plate. So thats one problem with the zero-carbon greenwashing goal, zero carbon means zero food for most of the population.