(Editor's Note: This is the first in a two-part series on ethanol.)
Have you been infected yet? I mean with ethanol mania?
It's not clear yet whether it started with Midwest corn farmers, hippie do-it-yourselfers or Brazilians who swear that ethanol will soon free them from foreign oil. But now it's spread to Washington and Wall Street, and no political persuasion appears to be immune. President Bush, Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates and the traders at Goldman Sachs have all become ethanol maniacs.
Gates and Goldman are investing big money in ethanol producers. Clinton wants to put ethanol pumps at half of all U.S. gas stations by 2015. And last year's energy bill, supported by Bush, requires refiners to buy a minimum of 7.5 billion gallons of ethanol by 2012, which is almost double today's production.
With Peak Oil here and gas prices spiking as world oil supplies begin their long-feared, final decline, supporters say there's a lot to love about ethanol - ethyl alcohol - a liquid biofuel distilled from food crops to replace gasoline. In the U.S., most ethanol is made from corn.
Instead of pumping dollars over to Arab oil sheiks and Al-Qaeda, we help American farmers when we fill up with ethanol. As gas goes up in price, ethanol will be relatively cheaper. Our current cars can already use ethanol in various mixtures with gasoline. Fuel trucks can deliver it, and gas stations can start selling it right away. And best of all, ethanol burns clean, which reduces global warming and local air and water pollution.
"We've got to be aggressive about finding alternative sources of fuel," Bush told the Energy Efficiency Forum in June last year. "And one such source is ethanol. Ethanol comes from corn - and we're pretty good about growing corn here in America, we've got a lot of good corn growers."
Those corn growers are where the politics comes in.
Skeptical of anything that comes from the agricultural lobby - with its uncanny ability to win lavish government subsidies while keeping family farmers dirt poor - vocal critics have denounced ethanol as just another scheme for big corn-producers to feed at the public trough.
The focus of criticism has been Archer Daniels Midland, the politically connected agricultural conglomerate that dominates U.S. corn processing.
Financial reporter Tom Philpott has dubbed ADM the "Exxon of Corn" for its huge profits and ambitions to become a major player in the fuels industry. ADM controls 43 percent of the ethanol market, making it the top U.S. producer.
After ADM hired former Chevron exec Patricia Woertz as its new CEO in April, Philpott wrote on the Gristmill blog that "the move eloquently signals ADM's intention to continue its rush into the auto-fuel market. The company has made billions over the years extracting the Midwest's soil fertility and transforming it into cra/ppy food products like high-fructose corn syrup, buoyed by government commodity policy and the sugar quota. Now it intends to do the same in service of the internal combustion engine."
"Agriculture should mainly be about producing food," Philpott told me. "The burden of running a domestic fleet of 211 million cars should not fall on agriculture and, in fact, it can't. The idea that we're going to significantly replace crude oil with biofuels is wrong."
Philpott says that of all the main crops that have been turned into ethanol so far, corn is the worst choice. It produces the least net energy. Brazil gets much more energy from sugar cane, and crops like switchgrass would work better than corn in the U.S. But ADM and other big producers like corn because it's cheap.
Lester Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute and author of Plan B 2.0, fears that biofuels will raise demand for crops and prices of food beyond what consumers can pay.
"Once oil gets up to $60 a barrel, it becomes profitable to convert agricultural commodities into automotive fuels," Brown told Grist magazine in March. "In effect, the price of oil becomes a support price for agricultural commodities, and therefore food prices. If at any point the food value of the commodity drops below the fuel value, the market will move that commodity into the energy economy."
Cornell University's David Pimentel agrees that it's morally wrong to grow crops so the wealthy can drive cars if it takes food out of the mouths of the world's 3.7 billion malnourished poor. He also says that harvesting corn stover (stalks and leaves) to make ethanol instead of plowing it back into farm fields risks accelerating already dangerous rates of erosion. But most of all, Pimentel doubts that ethanol can really be produced efficiently.
In March 2005, Pimentel coauthored a report with Tad Patzek of UC-Berkeley that accused biofuel proponents of hiding many costs of production, particularly fossil-fuel inputs required to grow crops like corn.
Failing to account for the diesel fuel to run tractors and natural gas for fertilizers makes ethanol production seem more efficient than it really is. But when these and other costs are included, ethanol from most crops provides a negative net energy return, with corn at the bottom.
"As an agriculturalist," Pimentel told me, "I wish that biofuels were a real success because it would help agriculture. But it will not." He supports more research on biofuels, but says the $3 billion in current federal subsidies should be moved over into truly renewable fuels.
In April, Patzek put out another report on his own claiming that the true cost of corn ethanol to taxpayers - factoring in special subsidies for fuel production along with ordinary subsidies to grow corn - was equal to gas at $4.74 a gallon. He claimed that ethanol from corn took six times more energy to make than it provided when used.
Ethanol proponents have rejected Patzek and Pimentel's findings and have questioned the duo's motivation. The American Coalition for Ethanol has accused the two of aiding "foreign oil apologists to derail important ethanol legislation working its way through Congress."
Pimentel denied any ties with the oil industry and defended his research, which was published in refereed scientific journals and underwent outside peer review.
Patzek, who has served as a petroleum consultant for 20 years, says he is not paid to talk about ethanol. He uses his expertise in fluid modeling to help oil companies use water to pump more oil out of nearly dry wells. "When I don't do that," Patzek told me, "I embark on my long-standing hobby of nature, for which I am paid zero and only get grief and abuse. Since these people don't have meaningful arguments, they accuse me of being an oil industry shill."
It is difficult, if not impossible, for a layperson to sort out the claims and counter-claims about ethanol’s net energy. Against skeptics like Patzek and Pimentel, the USDA and major university labs claim that ethanol from corn and other crops yields anywhere from 35 to 67 percent more energy than it consumes in production.
Patzek concedes that researchers disagree on what costs to include in calculating the net energy of ethanol, and he recognizes that using two different budgetary models can lead to honest disagreements.
"But the reality is actually much worse. Neither model captures how bad the situation is," Patzek told me. He thinks that quibbling about ethanol's net energy is a distraction from the real problem, which is that our industrial agricultural system is unsustainable because it destroys the environment and relies on massive subsidies of fossil fuels at every stage, from making fertilizers to driving machinery to drying, refrigerating and distilling crops.
"Completely unsustainable monoculture is wreaking havoc with one-half of our country," Patzek says. He calls for reform of our food system and our whole lifestyle to use less energy. "The right question to ask is how to save 7 million barrels of oil per day, not how to replace them with ethanol. That's the wrong question. The answer is, don't replace the oil with anything."
So it may be time move beyond ethanol mania. Our leaders seem to be planning to replace Big Oil with Big Ethanol, but this path raises many questions.
Is ethanol just a scheme by big agribusiness to sell corn and get subsidies, or does it have real potential to make America more energy independent? Can ethanol be made without using so much fossil fuel? Can we make enough of it to replace gasoline and preserve our lifestyle?
Next week, part two: Moonshine over a thousand farms.
Erik Curren is a regular contributor to The Augusta Free Press. Curren is the author of Buddha’s Not Smiling: Uncovering Corruption at the Heart of Tibetan Buddhism Today. More information about Curren's works is available on-line at www.alayapress.com. The views expressed by op-ed writers do not necessarily reflect those of management of The Augusta Free Press.
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