Okay, I'll be upfront about my point of view. I think corn ethanol is a bad idea. Yesterday I read about the construction of a coal-fired, corn ethanol plant in Heron Lake, Minnesota. That's right, a group of farmer investors are behind a $97 million corn ethanol plant that will burn greenhouse gas producing coal in the process. Why are they doing this? Because the price of natural gas is increasing, and coal is cheaper. The Heron Lake plant, located in an area known for its duck hunting, will save $5 million each year by burning coal rather than natural gas.
Folks, this is nuts! I am as committed as anyone else to reducing our energy dependence, but we need to question our rush to corn ethanol. Robert Rapier, one of the main bloggers on The Oil Drum, recently wrote a lengthy overview of energy options which pointed out that the energy return on corn-based ethanol is very low,
Published studies put this number at around 1.3, but the return for fossil fuels in and ethanol out averages less than 1.1,
Rapier said. This means that for every one unit of energy input we expend on producing the energy, we get only 1.3 units of energy output.
To understand the impacts of corn ethanol, it helps to understand how it is produced. According to the American Coalition for Ethanol, the corn is milled, mixed with water and alpha-amylase, and then heated, usually using natural gas, but now coal, in the Minnesota plant. Then the mixture is cooled, fermented, distilled, and finally dehydrated (at which point it is 200 proof!), and then denatured so it is unfit for human consumption.
The Heron Lake plant will produce 50 million gallons of ethanol per year. According to a report, published by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy in Minnesota, ethanol plants consume 3.5-6 gallons of water per gallon of ethanol produced. Using conservative figures, the Heron Lake plant will consume 175 million gallons of water per year. To compare, an average household consumes 12,000 gallons per year. So Heron Lake is facing the added water demand of 14,500 households! Tell me my math is incorrect. Today I received a forwarded email from a resident in a rural area near Northfield, Minnesota, where Advanced Bioenergy is apparently considering another new ethanol plant. The resident charged that Minnesota Governor Pawlenty has MPCA and DNR scrambling to permit these ethanol plants with inadequate data and little or no communication to the public. She is concerned about the effect of the drawn-down water on local wells in the area.
Yet another concern about corn ethanol plants is how they will effect farmer participation in the Conservation Reserve Program. A great diary on this topic was recently published by strobusguy. Because the price of corn is increasing, farmers are taking marginal land out of the CRP program and putting it back into corn.
Could there be a silver lining behind the news of a coal-fired ethanol plant? Could it finally remove all illusions that we are actually trying to solve our energy problems by producing ethanol? Instead, let's look at ethanol plants as what they are: an elaborate scheme to prop up corn prices in the Midwest, and to heck with any of the negative side-effects, including soil erosion, pesticide and herbicide use, dropping CRP participation, massive increases in water use, increase in food prices, nitrogen run-off into the Gulf of Mexico, the drop in the Mexican peso and the rise in Mexican poverty due to the increasing price of tortillas, and on and on.
Democratic and Republican politicians alike are catering to the corn ethanol crowd. The standard party line is: "ethanol is a transitional fuel, until the technology improves so that we can..." and then they fill in the blank with something like cellulosic ethanol. Cellulosic ethanol could come from a variety of materials, including prairie grass, wood chips, or agricultural waste. Credible people argue for the feasibility of cellulosic ethanol, but the fact is, the wisdom of the markets has yet to support commercial production of cellulosic ethanol. If politicians really believe that corn-based ethanol plants are a transitional energy source, then they are perpetuating the same throw away mentality that got us into all this trouble in the first place.