A recent study by the US Department of Energy (DOE) found that U.S. corn ethanol has 44-52 lower greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions than gasoline. This is a significant reduction from the previous year, when corn ethanol was mixed in large quantities into gasoline sold at U.S. pumps. The study also found that corn ethanol produces fewer greenhouse gas emissions than gasoline and is fully regenerative.
A new USDA report, “A Life-Cycle Analysis of the Greenhouse Gas Emissions of Corn-Based Ethanol”, found that the lifecycle carbon intensity of today’s ethanol is about 46 percent lower than gasoline’s carbon intensity. The policy was intended to reduce emissions, support farmers, and cut U.S. dependence. The use of corn ethanol from 2005 to 2019 has reduced the carbon footprint in the United States and diminished greenhouse gases.
A separate study in 2019 found that ethanol refined at natural gas-powered refineries reduced greenhouse gas emissions to 43 lower than gasoline. Renewable ethanol from ePURE members reduced GHG emissions by more than 78 compared to fossil fuel in 2022. An analysis by Argonne National Laboratory found that using corn-based ethanol in place of gasoline reduces life cycle GHG emissions on average by 40. Grain-based ethanol cuts greenhouse gas emissions significantly—by 44 to 52 compared to gasoline, according to the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory.
In conclusion, corn ethanol is a promising alternative to gasoline, as it has been found to have fewer greenhouse gas emissions than gasoline. However, further research is needed to determine its true environmental benefits and potential benefits.
📹 This tool will help us get to zero emissions
The world needs to get to zero emissions by 2050 if we’re going to prevent the worst effects of climate change. In my book “How to …
What substance has the highest GWP?
Hydrofluorocarbons are used in various products, including refrigerants, aerosol propellants, foam blowing agents, solvents, and fire retardants, as a replacement for chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs). These gases are potent greenhouse gases with high GWPs and are released into the atmosphere during manufacturing processes and through leaks, servicing, and disposal of equipment.
The American Innovation and Manufacturing Act of 2020 directs the EPA to address HFCs by providing new authorities in three main areas: phase down the production and consumption of listed HFCs in the United States by 85 over the next 15 years, manage these HFCs and their substitutes, and facilitate the transition to next-generation technologies that do not rely on HFCs.
Perfluorocarbons are produced as byproducts of aluminum production and are used in semiconductor manufacturing. Sulfur hexafluoride is used in magnesium processing and semiconductor manufacturing, as well as a tracer gas for leak detection. Nitrogen trifluoride is used in semiconductor manufacturing, while HFC-23 is produced as a byproduct of HCFC-22 production. Sulfur hexafluoride is used as an insulating gas in electrical transmission equipment, including circuit breakers, with a GWP of 23, 500, making it the most potent greenhouse gas evaluated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Fluorinated gas emissions in the United States have increased by 105 between 1990 and 2022, driven by a 349 increase in HFC emissions since 1990.
What is the CO2 emission factor of ethanol?
The 2021 GHG Emission Factors Hub provides information on the emission intensity of stationary combustion of fuel, including CO2e (68. 5 kg/MMBTU) and CO2 (68. 04 kg/MMBTU). The emission intensity of stationary combustion of fuel is 44 kg/MMBTU, while the intensity of methane (CH4) is 0. 0011 kg/MMBTU, and that of nitrous oxide (N2O) is 0. 00011 kg/MMBTU. These figures were originally published by the US EPA in a report on CO2e calculations for LCA activity fuel combustion.
What is a disadvantage of ethanol?
Ethanol is a renewable, domestically produced fuel source that produces fewer greenhouse gas emissions than non-renewable sources like oil and gas. It is biodegradable, meaning it won’t harm the environment if it spills or leaks. Ethanol can be produced locally, unlike oil and gas, which are often imported from other countries. Ethanol also burns cleaner than gasoline, producing fewer pollutants that can harm the environment.
However, ethanol has its drawbacks. It is less energy-dense than gasoline, making it less efficient and less attractive for consumers looking for more fuel-efficient vehicles. Additionally, ethanol production requires significant investment in infrastructure and technology, which can be costly. Ethanol production also requires large amounts of water, which can be a scarce resource in some areas.
The production process can have negative impacts on the environment, such as contributing to water and air pollution and using fertilizers and pesticides on crops used to produce ethanol. As the world grapples with climate change and the negative impacts of non-renewable sources of energy, there has been a growing interest in renewable fuel sources, including ethanol.
Ethanol has both pros and cons as a renewable fuel source. While it is renewable, domestically produced, and produces fewer greenhouse gas emissions than non-renewable sources, it is less energy-dense, expensive to produce, and can have negative impacts on the environment. As the world continues to search for renewable energy sources, it is important to carefully consider the benefits and drawbacks of each option. Ethanol may not be a perfect solution, but it can be an important part of a larger effort to reduce our dependence on non-renewable sources of energy and mitigate the effects of climate change.
Is ethanol eco-friendly?
Renewable fuels like ethanol and other renewables recycle atmospheric carbon by absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere during growth and releasing it when produced and combusted in engines. This process results in significant greenhouse gas (GHG) savings compared to fossil fuels. In July 2021, Renewable Fuels Association members pledged to achieve ethanol’s net-zero carbon footprint by 2050 or sooner.
Ethanol already reduces greenhouse gas emissions by half compared to gasoline, but more efforts are needed to decarbonize transportation fuels and combat climate change. Ethanol has a proven track record of reducing GHG emissions from transportation, with the use of ethanol in gasoline in 2023 reducing CO2-equivalent emissions by 56. 5 million metric tons.
How much does ethanol reduce greenhouse gas emissions?
Argonne National Laboratory has found that using corn-based ethanol instead of gasoline reduces life cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by an average of 40. Cellulosic ethanol offers even greater benefits, with average emissions reductions ranging from 88 to 108 depending on the feedstock used. Studies have also examined the life cycle energy balance of ethanol. Evaporative emissions, which occur when fuel evaporates from open-air conditions, are highly dependent on temperature, vehicle activity, and vehicle system materials. Low-level ethanol blends can increase evaporative emissions in vehicles, but vapor pressure can be adjusted to adhere to the same volatility standards as gasoline.
Is ethanol greener than petrol?
Green and blue methanol are the most environmentally sustainable alternatives for reducing well-to-tank CO2 emissions compared to fossil fuels like diesel. However, the challenge for maritime decarbonisation lies in the fact that most methanol is either grey or brown. All types of methanol can reduce CO2 emissions by about 7 compared to diesel. However, the CO2 impact of grey and brown methanol is worse than diesel, making green and blue methanol the only real alternatives for well-to-tank GHG reduction.
Methanol is a liquid at atmospheric pressure and is relatively new as a marine fuel. Production is expected to increase as shipping industry demand grows, with renewable green methanol becoming a growing proportion of the supply.
Does ethanol reduce air pollution?
Ethanol is a sustainable alternative to traditional fuels, reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 30-50%. In 2014, 14. 3 billion gallons of ethanol produced reduced greenhouse gas emissions from on-road vehicles by 39. 6 million metric tons, equivalent to removing 8. 4 million cars and pickups from the road. New technologies are increasing ethanol yields, improving efficiency, and allowing biorefineries to better utilize natural resources. A recent analysis by the University of Illinois at Chicago shows decreased energy requirements, electricity demand, and water use.
What is the GWP of ethanol?
The Global Warming Potential (GWP) per litre of ethanol varies from -253 g CO2 eq./L for poplar to 19 g for wheat straw. The production stage contributes the most to GHG emissions, particularly enzymes, DAP, and DDGS. The GWP refers to fossil carbon, not biogenic carbon storage, as it is released during ethanol use in vehicles.
The Human toxicity potential (HTP) is negative for three feedstocks: poplar (-49 g DCB eq./L), forest residue (-31 g), and miscanthus (-18 g). The highest value is found for straw, largely from fertilisers and pesticides used for cultivation.
The Marine aquatic ecotoxicity potential (MAETP) is negative across all feedstocks, with ethanol from poplar having the greatest savings (-188 kg DCB eq./L), and wheat straw and forest residue the lowest (-129 and -131 kg, respectively). The majority of the impact before system credits is from processing, ash disposal, and materials used for pre-treatment and fermentation.
Is ethanol good for climate change?
A report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicates that the process of harvesting and producing corn-based ethanol results in the emission of more harmful substances than the combustion of conventional gasoline.
Can ethanol be considered as a greenhouse gas?
The greenhouse gas (GHG) performance of ethanol from wheat feedstock depends on four factors: cultivation efficiency, fuel used in the ethanol plant, by-product handling efficiency, and land type. The efficiency of cultivation and emissions of nitrous oxide, the efficiency of the ethanol plant, and the type of land used for production are key factors in determining the GHG performance of wheat. All rights reserved for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies.
Does ethanol absorb CO2?
The combustion of ethanol, a fuel, results in the release of CO₂; however, the plants or biomass utilized for its production also absorb CO₂ during their growth.
📹 America Was Wrong About Ethanol – Study Shows
Ethanol makes up 10% of most of the gasoline sold in the United States. A large part of why Ethanol is so prevalent is that the …
Petrol Heads and College Professors have been talking about this since the early 2000’s. What we all agreed on was that the 10% ethanol requirement was pushed through congress by the corn lobby to grow and sell more corn with the help of government subsides. Also, the 1st state to vote in the US primaries is Iowa and that state is a huge corn grower. Politicians promised to vote the 10% requirement into to law to get the Iowa vote and help their chances at the wining the presidential nomination.
In Brazil, engines are “flex”, meaning that they offer the flexibility to burn 100% gasoline or 100% ethanol, and also any mix in between. Most people drive on 100% ethanol, just because it is cheaper overall. In the early days of the technology, these engines were pretty bad when burning 100% ethanol, in particular when the engine was cold. However, nowadays, with sophisticated electronic injection systems, you don’t feel much difference, even when the engine is cold. The technology dates back to 1970’s, in response to the oil crisis which put Brazil on its knees. Being a vast country with a lot of sun, Brazil implemented a large scale program of producing ethanol from sugar cane.
Switchgrass ethanol has been known for years, the corn standard continues and will likely continue because it is a MASSIVE government hand out to Archer Daniels Midland, the basically sole producer of corn ethanol in the US. Given the current geopolitical situation the RFS should be suspended entirely so the farmland currently devoted to ethanol production can be used to produce food instead as the two largest grain producers in Europe are currently at war with each other.
I studied in Energy Engineering, and this was something that I have been explaining to people for years that a lot of this stuff can be greenwashed and isn’t necessarily as good as someone might think it is. The corn growers were subsidized which made it profitable to do so, but it increased food prices by reducing food crop space, the greenhouse gas reduction also depends on how detailed the scope is, but it also might not consider pollution due to fertilizers in land, water, and especially land use change effects. I think one of the most efficient ones was sugar at the time, but it also caused some places to have rainforest deforestation due to its profitability. The last I heard someone was developing algae for biofuel as well.
The funniest part of this whole ethanol affair is that before 1920 a huge portion of internal combustion engines ran on ethanol. Ethanol was cheaper and more ubiquitous than gas which made it the preferred fuel. It was, however, heavily taxed in certain countries, including the US before 1906, which did make it more expensive than gas. Ford’s Model T ran on ethanol by default (though it could be adjusted to run on gasoline as well). Especially all performance/race engines ran on various alcohols, due to their huge octane rating. And one of the major reasons for prohibition was lobbying by oil/gasoline companies, Standard Oil in particular. It was very effective indeed.
I work near an auto repair shop and consider this: all the emissions equipment costs mega money to repair and cannot be recycled. No only that, but the damage and unnecessary service, tags, licenses, paperwork, gov employees, the energy from the buildings, electricity, CO2 tied to what the goverment spends enforcing the codes to get to that 20% is more than they could ever hope to offset.
I work at a ethanol plant in 2014 they use a coal fired boiler to generate steam, the plant also used natural gas and electricity. Plus because of ATF regulations gasoline has to be hauled to the plant and mixed with the ethanol before it can be transported. After seeing it first hand I would guess ethanol does very little to reduce carbon emissions.
I was directly involved in the effort to avoid the EtOH mandates on the oil and gas side. We specifically told all members of Congress we could make cleaner burning fuel without EtOH. We showed them we could do it. We said they could set whatever fuel standard they wanted as for how clean it needed to burn, and we could develop a fuel to meet it. But that is not what they wanted to hear. Most Congressmen refused to even speak to us about it. It was the period of time where I gave up on the US Government as a whole and realized it had nothing to do with actually helping anyone. The only language that spoke was money and whoever was willing to give more of it wins.
The corn lobby is insanely powerful. 10 years ago, I wrote a paper for an undergraduate economics class. TL,DR corn subsidies pay companies to jam high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) into our processed food. HFCS causes significantly more obesity than cane sugar. We are using our tax dollars to make people fat. My professor suggested that I should write a different paper, because no politician will ever cancel corn subsidies.
I would like to know more about how they calculated the land-use for ethanol. Farmers generally don’t react to market changes by simply clearing and planting virgin land. They usually just change what gets planted on the acres they already have, and maybe plant low-yield acres which are unprofitable when prices are low. And in terms of corn markets in general, if corn based ethanol is elevating prices, that means other corn consumption goes down. High feed prices mean reduced meat production, or high HFCS prices mean more substitution of cane sugar. The Ag markets are not in some steady state where increased demand can only be met by clearing virgin land. It’s a really messy economics problem to model how many virgin acres are really being cleared and plowed in an ethanol vs non-ethanol US energy policy. This is true in a lot of CO2 modeling when it comes to setting policy. It’s really straight forward to calculate the emissions of a defined industrial process. It’s hard to model what happens out in the real world which is governed by market forces. But perhaps that reinforces your point that it’s not a good idea to undergo huge policy programs when the modeled payoff is only marginal. The focus should be on solutions which offer very clear and very large advantages such that it doesn’t matter if your calculations or assumptions were off by a few percent here and there.
This discussion we took in Brazil in the 90’s. Here we grow sugarcane (with second generation fermentation) thats waay more productive than corn ethanol. The results of the discussion here is: no need to increase the crop area. Sugarcane DESTROYS the soil and the iimpact is huge. But where the damage is already done worth continue cropping. Also, we have flexfuel cars, that run purely in hidrated ethanol, what also increase the impact. Our gas have 27% of ethanol too. It’s not perfect tho, in big cities, like Sao Paulo, the ethanol burn produces aldehydes that worsen the city smog
I know here where I live, the amount of waterways, tree lines, and grass decreased big time when farmers realized they could grow corn if they could address certain limitations of the land here in Nebraska. They put center pivot irrigation systems into use which also operate from largely fossil fuels or electricity generated by fossil fuel. There is a large amount of energy used to produce the anhydrous ammonia used to fertilize that ground every year to get a crop of corn from it. I’m pretty sure that the UWM study could’ve gone even further in identifying carbon released by some of these other inputs required to grow a decent crop of corn.
In 2005 when my dad became convinced that ethanol was bad for Iowa. His main reasoning is, it has caused the consolidation of the farming industry and has eliminated small family farms because corn easy harvest and this create a Walmart like affect on farming. I don’t think gov is gonna change because farmers will be mad about short term losses even though it’s bad for them in the long run. I am Iowan farmer.
I’m a little late, but Brazil (where I’m from) does use ethanol as fuel. And probably we’re the only country in the world that does that in large scale. Here, at any gas station you have both options (ethanol or gas) and of course Diesel too. Our gasoline is mandatory 27% ethanol mixed or we use E100 (even BMWs now are flex fuel). We started it back in the 1970’s due to oil crisis, but environment and sustentability wasn’t a concern. We did it for economic purposes and we have a domestic control of an energy resource. In Brazil we use sugar cane and it take 17 years to breakeven the carbon release. Many, many studies have been conducted here. One thing, decades of inovations made the whole chain to be 30% more cleaner since early 2,000s when 2nd gen ethanol began. We also have to consider ethanol from sugar cane has a better ratio of gallons per hectare than corn. But any inovation or gain you only can have if any country really adopts ethanol in large scale and then as expected, invest to make it way cheaper, relase less greenhouse gases, etc. That’s what happened here. Let’s be real. If you wanna think about environment and sustentability we can only have by reducing private vehicles (ICE or EV) to public transportation. Tesla wont1s save us. What will save is our change in behaviour and consumption. You can’t beat physics: 4,000lb car to carry 1 or 2 people is not efficient.
There was a large biomass project utilizing switchgrass in southern Iowa several years ago. The switchgrass was ground and burned in a coal fired power plant as a renewable fuel. I spent a lot of time mowing and picking up switchgrass bales. If memory serves, the BTU comparison between coal and switchgrass by the pound was small (coal > switchgrass). The whole project was shut down when “someone” came in and stated they were going to commercialize it. I think it needs a second, very, serious look. Switchgrass provides excellent erosion control (up to 20′ deep root systems) and habitat for wildlife. If the push for electric cars is going to continue, the need for better fuels at power plants will become paramount.
I’m a little late to the comments, but my comment is that not all of the negative things were mentioned. 1 very big negative is the amount of water needed to grow Corn. The irrigation needed lowered the water table greatly, that water took many years to be deposited in the underground. It’s gone. Kansas has started limiting the amount of water that can be pumped, it’s a little late but it will take many years to rebuild the water table. I’m old so I’ll never live to see any difference. Thank you for your article. Thank you Sir
YAY! I’ve been a ineffectual proponent of switchgrass since the early 2000s. It’s awesome to see this topic presented. Please now make a article showing alcohol production from switch grass vs from corn, especially showing the amount of leftover waste produced by both (just make two piles of the leftover biomass).
They knew the corn based ethanol math was horseshit. The politicians cooked the numbers to make it fit what they wanted, which was a way to require more dollars to be funneled to their corporate corn-growing friends. He says “farmers” but in the US almost all the corn is grown by corporations and the farmers are little more than employees.
I’m a chemical engineer. One of the projects we did in my plant design class was a corn based ethanol plant. You could tell who couldn’t get their head around it being a net energy loss and losing money. A few groups tried to say their plant was profitable. Since corn has such low sugar concentration, it takes more energy to make the ethanol than you get from it’s use as fuel. Need to use something like sugar cane or sugar beets like Brazil does to make it profitable. My professor made it a point that we all knew back when these regulations were rolling out that it was worse just from that aspect. Any savings in emissions at the tailpipe is lost in the production of the ethanol. Not to mention, all the corn being gobbled up for fuel made food manufacturers move to soy which caused food prices to increase. Now, biodiesel plants are moving to soy bean oil, so there are more food price increases as they compete with heavily subsidized biodiesel plants for soy.
One more thing. The feed value of the corn in animal rations, which remains after fermentation, was ignored and is a vital component of the ethanol equation. Suggesting agricultural lands could be returned to non agricultural uses would lead to a sharp increase in food prices and have a ripple effect on global hunger. Converting agricultural lands to subdivisions, parking lots and malls represents a far greater threat to life and quality of life and is a permanent loss of land that could be used for food production.
This “quantifies” what many have been arguing for years- the costs to till, plant, fertilize, harvest, transport and refine ethanol must be considered. The resultant emissions from farming, the emissions from refining, plus the reduction in fuel economy know to exist with ethanol-based fuels (you burn more of it than gasoline) further calls into question ethanol’s economic as well as environmental viability. And, I’d question the viability of switchgrass (etc) as the “flower” of the plant (i.e., the corn “cob” vs. the flowering head of other vegetation) would seem to require more real estate to produce. So why corn? I maintain that, when in doubt, follow the money as there’s huge federal dollars going to subsidize the farmers to produce the required volume of corn!!!
If you’re going to argue that ethanol isn’t necessarily a poor choice aside from the emissions resulting from land clearing and production, I’d be interested in seeing a similar scrutiny applied to the process of refining oil. Specifically, consider the emissions impact of constructing drilling platforms and transporting oil in container ships across oceans compared to a farmer clearing land just once. It seems you’ve overlooked the fact that our energy demands are growing, and we must address today’s needs. If, as you mention, the lifecycle of ethanol proves to be more favorable than the linear journey of oil from extraction to atmosphere, then the one-off impact of land clearing could potentially be less detrimental than the ongoing processes involved in importing foreign oil or erecting infrastructure for refining oil into gasoline. Considering a container ship’s journey from the Middle East to the United States, spanning roughly 8,000 nautical miles at an average speed of 23 knots with a daily fuel consumption of 150 metric tons, the voyage consumes about 13.78 million gallons of fuel. Intriguingly, this amount of fuel—the same consumed by a cargo ship on such a trip—could be used to clear approximately 1,722,861 acres of land with a bulldozer that uses 8 gallons of diesel per hour and clears an acre an hour. I’d appreciate your perspective on this.
This is a very good presentation with good supporting documentation. In the 1975 my engineer/farmer father along with a friend that was a plumber built the largest ethanol still in our county. It was a highly efficient packed column and could distill ethanol to a fraction of a degree. It could produce near 95% ethanol. It was powered by a boiler that burned firewood from dead trees on the farm so the fuel cost to distill was nearly zero except gas for the chainsaws and a little fuel for the farm truck to haul it to the still. He even raised the corn which was used to make the ethanol which was quite cheap at the time. The left over mash was donated to a neighbor to feed his hogs. After two years of experimenting with different ethanol mixtures from 10 to 95% including a trial run of 50% ethanol and 50% water he found that he could not break even with just using straight gasoline. The fuel consumption was greater with any mixture of ethanol in his gas tractors and didn’t even come close to the efficiency of his diesels. Even though his only real cost was the corn he used instead of taking it to market, It was a money losing proposition. He did not even count the cost of the large still which was built from surplus materials nor the expensive government permit to distill ethanol nor his hours of labor building and running his project. Running ethanol was a waste of resources and it was rusting his metal storage tanks including the metal tractor fuel tanks. When they started building ethanol plants in our area a couple years later, we knew they were a money losing business as the cost of corn doubled and their fuel and labor costs to distill were much higher than ours.
It’s funny, when I was 10 years old i did a paper for a literary competition discussing the effects of ethanol in Gasoline, the only difference is mine was based on sugar cane (grew up on an island, that’s where we get our ethanol). i did the argument against ethanol in gas and surprisingly won. That paper listed all the negatives which far outweighed the positives. Im 24 soon. This information has been out for a long time but the government doesn’t care
There are some errors in the UW-Madison study, based on a few smaller Ethanol plants which do use the same processes as the larger ethanol plants. Corn has a higher starch content than other grains. Second in the US cornbelt where most of the corn is grown, they have converted land to agricultural use in about 100 years, the actual number of acres has been reducing because of urban growth. The difference is made up by increasing yields on the land used, Tillage is not quite the carbon sin you make it out to be (and don’t listen to lawyers talking about farming in the 1st place). Grasslands are not as effective at collecting atmo. CO2 as corn fields. Corn plants grow a lot faster and the corn kernels make up a small portion of the corn plants weight. All that corn plant is made from CO2 taken from the air and water. Tillage of the corn ground after harvesting the grain sequesters a significant amount of CO2 in the form of Soil Organic matter which further increases soil productivity.
If most farmers were to use a no-till system for growing corn like they do in North Dakota, not only would they accumulate carbon in the soil at a much higher rate than ever thought possible but they would also save an enormous amount of fuel necessary for the farm equipment. Gabe Brown is an excellent example for this kind of farming practice.
I remember reading how switchgrass was so much better 30 years ago in Successful Farming. Not only does it have a good conversion, it also is very low maintenance so not much fuel is used to produce the switchgrass, you just cut it every year or 2x a year. Successful Farming talked about how it would be so much cheaper to grow switchgrass because you don’t need the till, cultivation, reseed and so on. They actually had a chart of a lot of many different ethanol fuel sources and seed corn was the worst of them all.
I live on the border of NE/IA in the heart of corn country. What is noticeable (but rarely discussed) is the loss of habitat from the increase of corn production. There has been an extreme drop in the pheasant (and grouse/quail) population in the last 30 years that coincides with the growth of corn. The boundaries of cornfields have been pushed out to the limits, and land that may have sat idle is now plowed and planted. Shrubs, tall grasses and growth around fence lines used to surround cornfields and provide cover for pheasants. But that’s gone, and corn cover only lasts until harvest. When modern ag equipment harvests, the resulting field is barren until the following spring.
Well done. One factor that I’d like to hear more about is the fact that in order to grow corn, we need massive amounts of nitrogen based fertilizers. Corn naturally takes an enormous amount of nitrogen out of the soil. Without ammonia fertilizers we may get one or two seasons of economically viable crops and then the soil is depleted for quite a long time. So where does ammonia fertilizer come from? Ammonia is NH3. The nitrogen comes from the air. It has to be separated from the air with massive amounts of cryogenic cooling. That takes electricity. Wich in the U.S. means most likely from coal. Next, the hydrogen comes from natural gas, i.e. methane. The byproduct of turning methane into hydrogen is..CO2. So long before the corn is planted with diesel burning farm equipment, we have already dumped thousands of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere just to make the fertilizer. I’d be curious to find out if that CO2 was taken into account when calculating the carbon emissions of ethanol.
There is another factor that I didn’t hear you address. When comparing reduction of emissions between E10 and E0 gas, you also need to factor in reduced fuel mileage due to the ethanol. So while I’m polluting 2% less on E10, I’m burning 5% or more E10 fuel overall to travel the same number of miles I would on E0. I’m curious if that was something Tyler’s study factored in. Because if you factor in burning MORE fuel per mile, then it’s apparent that ethanol doesn’t do what they claim it will. And never did.
You left out the fact that ethanol doesn’t contain the same amount of energy as gasoline thus reducing the efficiency of internal combustion engines resulting in more fuel being consumed in the pursuit of conservation. It’s also bad for many engines, especially small engines, causing them to run too lean. Another wonderful known byproduct is that ethanol is hydroscopic which leads to fuel system problems and internal corrosion. Rubber and plastic can swell or lose their structural integrity causing seals to leak or fail. Some manufacturers will void the warranty if E15 is used. Everything about this substitute adds to more energy being consumed to compensate for it. If it worked there would be no need to mandate it. “As a result, taxpayers have spent billions of dollars over the last 30 years subsidizing the production of corn ethanol, while at the same time creating unintended costs for consumers and the environment.” This was always politics. It’s been well known since its inception that the unintended consequences outweighed any theoretical good.
When I first visited an ethanol production facility and saw the amount natural gas they had to use to boil the mash and other heating operations didn’t seem to make sense. Using fossil fuel to save fossil fuel I knew at least cut down on the benefit. It didn’t make sense to the owner of the oil company that was operating the big still, but he said they government was paying him to offer it so it only makes sense for the oil company.
I know this is an older article but iv’e got to say as a UK citizen I really like the style of this article, quick start, straight into the subject matter no heavy guitar riffs at the beginning no ‘in article’ ads for PCB manufacturers or VPN suppliers etc…love it, and i’ll subscribe just for that, and of course for the very well presented subject…
I’m waiting for the study on diesel emissions and what impact it’s had in the industry. From decreased reliability, increase in demand for large parts like engines and rare earth minerals in catalyst, it should be quite the study. We can burn diesel clean and efficiently without the particulate filters and catalyst. But then we would have reliable engines that get 25 mpg and don’t burn down houses. Instead, many new engines struggle to reliably get more than 5000 hours on them before failure and an increasing amount failing near the 1000 hour mark due to increased exhaust temperatures.
I don’t think it ever was a secret that ethanol had less energy density and more costly to produce per BTU. I always took it as a way to subsidize the farmers’ surplus and replace foreign oil supplies. What really wasn’t apparent to the user was since State and Federal gas taxes are based on a fixed cost per gallon, the lower mpg results in paying a higher tax per mile.
I remember them pushing e85 really heavily in the mid to late 00’s. Started seeing gas stations put in new e85 pumps and car makers pushing new flex fuel vehicles. The price for e85 was much lower than regular gas ( especially in 08) but you needed to either have a flex fuel vehicle to use it or have your car outfitted for it. It died out pretty quickly once people noticed that it gave worse mph and waa not great for the environment (this has been known for a while). It was nothing more than to giving money to agro and government while riding the massive green movement in the late 00’s.
I’ve been saying this for 15 years. Ethanol is a great fuel, but corn is a poor feed stock. Switchgrass, sugar cane, and wood pulp are all significantly better options. Honestly, they only produce ethanol from corn due to lobbyists pushing it so hard. Thank you for drawing more attention to this and for sharing this new study!
Great article. Could you do one using the Brazil’s case? Here we use a mixture of 27,5% Ethanol / 82,5 pure gasoline, but the catch is in Brazil the Ethanol comes from sugar cane, something Brazil’s has been farming since 1700s and sugar cane is far more richer to create ethanol (or sugar), also the by-product is burned to run the Ethanol/Sugar mills and to produce electricity in thermoplants.
The way you always integrate the mathematics into the science of your articles makes you one of the few credible sources on the internet. ‘Science’ has been a term thrown around excessively over the past couple of years and it often gets intermingled with political and emotional ideas. You don’t do that and we all appreciate the facts you provide. Thank you.
I grew up in Iowa. Entire state’s economies are built on corn production. Prices are always very low per bushel, so farmers need to create many bushels to turn any kind of profit. The problem is, we don’t need nearly as much corn as is produced. So we are stuck trying to find ways to use it. Problem is, most of these usages just aren’t very good or healthy: corn-fed beef, high fructose corn syrup, ethanol, etc. Since the 80s, the government has actually paid farmers money NOT to produce more crop. The alternative is to drive entire economies into bankruptcy. I think what really needs to happen is that alternative crops be found for these farmers. But that would be heresy if I went back to Iowa and said that.
This doesn’t take into account the increase in fuel consumption when ethanol is added. Volume for volume, ethanol generates about 30% less energy than hydrocarbons fuels, so you have to use more fuel to travel the same distance. The difference may only be a couple of percent, but as you have shown, small percentages matter.
Very much appreciate the breakdown. Seems to me this whole “corn ethanol” thing began with the idea that we’d take surplus corn and break it down for fuel. Of course the natural human reaction to this was to make it into a huge separate industry to make a truckload of money. I think that’s the part we keep missing when speculating the results of stuff like this.
Two or three decades ago I read a National Geographic article asserting that ethanol from corn had negative benefits in terms of oil usage reduction, that is, it produced less energy in the form of ethanol than the oil energy used to produce it. Brazil’s ethanol from sugar cane produced 8 times the oil input energy due to a better suited crop and better integration of the biofuel into the production process. Ethanol from corn is largely a political bonus for farmers.
One thing that is often forgotten about in the ethanol debate is the byproduct of ethanol production. When corn is converted into ethanol the carbohydrates in the corn are turned into ethanol leaving behind the protein, fats, and micronutrients creating a product called DDG’s or dried distillers grains. DDG’s are a very valuable feed for cattle and other livestock as it is rich in protein which is typically the most in demand, and expensive macronutrient. The beneficial by products created during the distillation of grains is often completely disregarded in the cost/benefit analysis of ethanol.
Thanks for the article that brings up a lot of important points. I want to suggest one correction. Soil carbon does not all come out in the first year. It continues to decline over decades of farming, depending on the practices. No-till farming and cover-cropping can conserve soil carbon. You do get a large release from the initial conversion from the standing biomass and some of the soil carbon, but soil carbon is usually somewhat recalcitrant and doesn’t all oxidize at once. The fertile Midwestern prairie soils that were brought into agriculture long ago are often still losing carbon today. One other thing that I think was missed is the large amount of energy required to distill fermented corn into fuel-grade ethanol.
There are a couple things here I would like to point out: The land transition study said that the increase in land use was 26% more than the EXPECTED INCREASE in land use, NOT 26% more TOTAL land use. In other words, if the otherwise expected land use increase was 10,000 acres/ year, the actual increase was 12,600 acres/year. Acres planted to corn fluctuates by as much as 10 million acres/year depending on weather, input costs and the price of corn, and this generally happens in a several-years-long cycle. During this study, corn acreage went from 86M acres in 2008 to 94M in 2016. However, the peak was 2012 with 97.25M acres, where it began to fall off until hitting a low of 89M in 2018. (Source: USDA Crop Acreage Reports) Also, the vast majority of the “new” acres of corn are from farmers choosing to plant more corn and less soybeans or wheat in fields based on prices for that year, from converting unused grass pasture to row crop fields, or from planting fringe ground that had been idled during years where the price of grain was not high enough to justify planting that land. There is very, very little truly new land being converted into farmland. In fact, farmland acreage has been slowly and steadily declining for decades, as urban and suburban areas continue to grow and take up land that was previously farmed. In fact, there were 48 MILLION fewer acres of farmland in 2018 than in 2000 (USDA).
The fermentation chemistry itself results in the production of one metric ton of carbon dioxide for every 333 gallons of ethanol produced from corn. I’ve not seen this included in the various calculations of ethanol carbon impact. Perhaps this will be corrected when the disinformation board is up and running.
The impact of using corn was indeed considered and this is why considerable effort went into using the stalks and other associated materials, much harder to do than using corn kernels but using genetic modification of the fermentation systems this was done. This then allowed biofuel to occur during the production of normal corn crops. The challenge was again cost in that this process was expensive and this is more the reason it failed as a venture despite some big name companies investing billions in this research. Ultimately, systems must not only be carbon positive but also economic. Plastics can be made from sugarcane but the cost of such materials is 3-4X the cost of hydrocarbon feed stock. The carbon argument is important but the king of it all ends up as economics.
Perhaps I missed it, but cornfields need to be tilled each and every year, so the release of carbon from the root system is an ongoing problem. As with most government-run/designed programs, it’s not about the actual benefits as stated by the people writing the bill, it’s really about the money going to certain individuals who have the means to build large production plants. It’s good to have friends in high places.
The complexity of using biofuels has been in study for a while, and the indirect impact really seem to be deal killers in some instances (or some are way better). Land use as such a big impact. in all agriculture, land use is the biggest impact of it. that is why agricultural Sciences want to increase yield. Producing more on less land has big positive impact on emission reduction. In any case, this is a excellent article, and I have to say, I like how, at the end, you went for a testing in the negative of that study ( what if they are wrong). which is the proper way of analysing Science. Real good scientific skepticism here. This is not a just car website, but a proper science website 🙂 great work, again. Also, I had a friend being impressed with your lighting setup skills. it seem that having a white board with no reflection seem to impressed him haha 🙂
As a farmer and conservationist in Nebraska, I can tell you there’s a glaring piece missing from these calculations. Prior to ethanol, corn was previously being raised to feed livestock. The largest volume by-product of ethanol production is animal feed via corn mash, so corn that was destined to be fed now has the sugars extracted, and is still used to feed animals. In my area, no new land was converted to corn production, and we have no-tillagel farming practices with crop rotation and cover crops, to keep plants growing and consuming CO2 and enriching the soil year round. No-tillage farming practices turn the Wisconsin study on it’s head. Also, in this part of the country, the idea of virgin forest or grasslands being tilled or burned to produce ethanol is some kind of myth. There’s no such thing in Nebraska and Iowa. If ground COULD be farmed it already was. There’s some CRP fields that may have come out of contract and were put into production, but, usually an equal number of marginal production fields are put back in CRP. If you want to talk about environmental impact, it’s meat production, not ethanol. But, bacon tastes good… pork chops taste good!
I haven’t read the Wisconsin study but does it factor in the food benefit of using corn instead of another biofuel crop? Many media outlets give people the impression that when ethanol plants process the corn for fuel, the rest is thrown away. I don’t think they take the steps to tour an ethanol plant to see how efficient they are. Corn used as a biofuel has a byproduct called DDG (Dried Distillers Grain). This byproduct, at the ethanol plants, is used as a highly efficient feed additive in livestock feed. Ethanol plants also capture their CO2 and it is sent to places that use CO2 to create products that we use or consume. Farmland is reduced every year due to suburban expansion. There are programs out there to incentivize agriculture to minimize tillage (no till, strip till) to keep carbon stored (carbon sequestration). If we use another source for biofuel such as switchgrass, does it have a food byproduct?
Have you done a follow-up to this article? How did the RFS change after 2022 and are those changes for the better? Etc. Others have commended about the corn lobby influencing related policies, which I’d agree with – Monsanto and other GMO corn producers seem to benefit the most, since if I recall 92% of all corn grown in the US is GMO. The farmer only gets scraps for profits.
Welcome to the club dear millennial engineer. The inefficiency of corn ethanol was widely discussed around the time of the bill. The problem is that corn farmers are a strong lobby and have made a lot of money from this. Let it serve as a warning for looking for government regulation to solve our problems.
Excellent article. – As an engineer, I know that there are many more reasons why adding ethanol to gasoline is a bad idea. For one thing, ethanol makes gasoline MUCH more difficult to store over several months. Once the ethanol separates from the gasoline, it can’t be forced to mix properly again. That gas becomes virtually useless. – It will be almost impossible to stop the use of corn-based ethanol in the USA. Huge companies are making many billions of dollars each year from this business. These companies have hundreds of big lobbyists with huge budgets. This will be VERY hard to change.
It was created to help boost the price of corn and reduce the cost of subsidies to the farmers going broke right and left. They were paying farmers to not grow, and they were paid to idle acres. Farmers did not clear land back then. Places like Brazil were clearing forest, maybe based on what effect the raising corn prices caused globally
Agricultural land use in the U.S. has decreased from 1949 to 2012 by 11%. The new breaking of land for corn production did not happen, which is a fundamental error in the calculation used to calculate the net benefit of ethanol. It’s also important to note that the new emphasis of long term storage of carbon in the soil, by climate change alarmists, is also debunked by the Harvard study. Bottom line, agricultural food production is essential to living and quality of life. Agricultural economics is an important part of the equation.
One of the top ethanol fuel-using nations is Brazil, which derives their supply primarily from sugar cane. Based on studies I read years ago the environment footprint of sugar cane is much smaller than corn. That’s what America is best at, though, telling farmers to grow a certain crop in massive volumes then rushing to figure out what to do with it. (See also: corn syrup.)
You gotta love how the pitch for ethanol fuel is “corn grows, we ferment it, a miracle occurs to make white lightning, and then we stick it in a car.” Anyone who’s ever even looked at home brewing has had that brief moment of consideration of going one step further and making moonshine. And it quickly becomes apparent that you have to dump a metric ton of thermal energy into the mash to boils off the alcohol and distill it. Which should prompt the question, “what is behind that heat source and is that being included in the carbon figures?” It obviously wasn’t, there’s no way in hell they could have pitched ethanol as a less carbon intensive fuel source than 87 octane when you consider how much natural gas or coal is needed to generate enough electricity to distill that fuel.
There is a lot of good information here, I feel they miss an important point, (maybe he said it and I missed it?) To a point, a lot of corn is going to be grown no matter what, corn used for ethanol doesn’t get used up, only about 20% of it, the remaining amount left over goes to livestock feed as distillers grain. In a way, we are making corn more efficient by getting more benefits out of it, fuel and feed. No matter what we do on this planet, something has to be used to produce something, the challenge is to be the most efficient at that conversion as we can.
Brazil has an Ethanol program since the early 80’s. It got to a point where most cars were running with cheap 100% Ethanol from sugarcane. I remember being in Sao Paulo and traffic smelled like a Rum factory… The initial program ran into problems with injectors, carburetors and other gaskets going bad. With time all these were substituted with ethanol proof materials and the cars started to run fine. The only gas they use is a small, like a windshield wiper container, with regular gasoline that is used to start the car in cold weather. Brazil was basically independent of Petroleum gasoline for a few years – until politics screwed things up…(I dont believe the Petroleum companies like that idea). At a point there were Tri-fuel cars running all over: gasoline, pure ethanol and natural gas…you picked any of these and the car would run fine by changing the ECU specs at a press of a button. These were Ford and GM cars. Why here is the US nobody ever heard or done anything similar??
In Brazil we have been using sugar-cane ethanol as fuel since the 70’s, and it is great. You can choose which fuel to use when filling the tank (most cars here can run on both), and the gas has about 25% sugar-cane ethanol on it, so the new high compression engines either NA or turbo, can get more horsepower and better overall efficiency.
There’s a lot of additional information from an agricultural standpoint that justifies corn having been chosen. Most notably, the equipment, farming practices and infrastructure already existed and were widely in place in America for corn production and handling, which would not be the case with the alternatives. And while this may not have met the stated goal of reduced carbon footprint, prior to fracking, using corn-based ethanol was the quickest and easiest way for America to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. (As an aside for those who don’t know, field corn – also called dent corn – is not the same thing as sweet corn that we buy at the grocery.)
I’d like to see you cover the ocean shipping industry’s pollution footprint. Did you know 1 container ship emits more sulfur oxides than 50 million vehicles each year?!? There’s around 1.4 billion vehicles in use around the world today that means 28 container ships emit the same amount of pollution as every single vehicle around the world! What’s even worse is there’s currently 5461 container ships in active service globally! Seems like if global leaders actually cared about global emissions the shipping industry would be the place to start. Even if we switched every single vehicle in the world to an EV that would only offset what just 28 container ships emit out of 5461.
Every study i have seen on this always includes the input and processing cost of ethanol but ignores the input and processing costs of petroleum based fuels, leaving the impression of a biased result. If you are going to include the carbon costs of growing more corn, you also have to include the carbon costs of exploring, drilling, fracking and transporting oil. BTW; I am not a fan of ethanol.
You did a good job in this. I am an applied mathematician with 50 years experience and I regulalrly see one dimensional analyses at a policy level of issues. Sometimes (indeed many times in my experience ) this is cynical but in many other cases it is just poor logic. Economists are taught to look at all the costs and benefits to “weigh the scales” and that logic is at the heart of these types of policies. It takes specialised knowledge to accurately estimate all the costs and there also has to be a commitment to honestly finding out what they are. That assumes you believe in an objective reality which of course many people don’t.
Interesting article. While the “emissions” angle has long been cited by proponents of this product in attempts to get the public to “buy in”, I believe that two other factors were the true driving forces: 1) the agriculture industry saw it as a way to grow and sell more corn (and at prices tied to the price of gasoline!) and 2) political leaders wanted to reduce our alliance on “foreign” oil (and the export of US dollars).
Back in the 1970’s(my engineering college years) I read studies in my engineering/science magazines about the energy output of ethanol. All the estimates were that the ratio of energy INPUT(to plow, plant, grow, harvest, process, ferment, distill) – to – the energy OUTPUT(when the resulting ethanol is burned). That ratio was estimated as very near 1:1. With ethanol advocates claiming 1:1.2 at their high end and the detractors claiming 0.7:1 at their low end. And what’s more is the energy INPUT is mostly from burning fossil fuels which produce CO2. And then the ethanol is burned which produces more CO2. The entire process from end to end nearly doubles the CO2 instead of reducing it.
Good discussion – Not much novel information; we should increase efficiency of agriculture, and probably revert to petroleum/petrochemical industry for a replacement of corn ethanol. In our area we used MTBE, which was found deleterious to our fresh water aquifer(s). Another aspect of ethanol additive – for some time(6 – 18 months), Mobil paid for weekly opinion advertisements in the New York Times, arguing that ethanol was a bad option, in part because it generates formaldehyde residues in exhaust. A biosynthesizer of a replacement fuel oxidizer might be a better solution.
I was working on a dairy in the 80’s when this was being pushed the things you are missing that came up at the time corn was being grown for feed and only about 20% was being digested by the animals eating it the original idea 💡 when you fermented the corn the corn mash was used for feeding the animals and it was better to digest for the animals and they got around 25% more food value from the corn PLUS you got the alcohol for fuel this was not a loss because they were already growing the corn anyway and now you’re saying they started growing corn only for gas the only farmers who are not farming is because the government paid them not to farm trying to keep prices higher
Nice article. In high school (in the 70’s – think gas crunch) I had a hydroponic algae farm and harvested it to make ethanol for a Volkswagen beetle that I converted to run on pure ethanol. I chose a chlorella algae strain because it has one of the highest rates of photosynthesis and hydroponic farming made harvesting more efficient. There are also processes like fischer-tropsch to make fuel from almost any carbon based source. The ultimate greenhouse friendly fuel is hydrogen but it has it challenges for storage; creation of Hydrogen from natural gas(NG) is actually fairly viable and we have an abundance and can make it by decomposing almost any biomass source. Thanks for starting discussion on these issues.
I know in Kansas we saw a dramatic increase in corn production. But it quickly died off in the western half of the state because of how much irrigation it required. It’s already pretty dry out there. I’m sure the study mentioned CO2 emissions from fermentation. I’m curious if we’ve considered some kind of waste product as a feedstock for alternative fuels. Renewable is always difficult because it often yields small returns or a negative net gain.
I’m not advocating for or against corn ethanol here but I do have a question. According to the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service in 1997 there were 445.3 million Cropland acres in the US, in 2007 there were 407.4million acres and in 2017 it was 396.4million acres. The amount of land under crop in the US has been on a steady decline in the US since it peaked in the 1930s, while it would be foolish for me to say that no farmer has turned woodland into cropland, I think it’s equally silly to assume that just because more farmland has been dedicated to corn for ethanol that all of that land was converted from non-cropland. Many farmers switched from other crops because of subsidies/demand to grow corn for ethanol so some of that cropland is definitely not new. For example, from the same data source above, from 2007 to 2017 total acres of all types of wheat harvested in the US dropped from over 50million to 38.8million. So is it possible that the idea that “land-use conversion” is the bugaboo here may be misleading? I’m not an expert in agriculture but maybe the study that the EPA did took this into account but the other one did not and made a bad assumption about where the new acres for new corn production were coming from?
I am really curious as to where the land use equation came from? I have lived in farming communities my entire life and the only time I see land being reworked to be farmable is when commercially grown trees are harvested and the land is returned to being farm land. Aside, corn is a type of grass and many farmers I know have swapped over to the no-till method of planting due to it being both easier and more cost effective since the land doesn’t have to be ran over multiple times. Generally in the fall they simply use a shallow till ( less than 1 inch deep) to chop up and integrate the crop residue into the soil, thus improving the soil conditions. This is land that has been tilled for generations and as such, the “centuries old carbon” was released long before any of us were born, and I am not exactly a youngster.
Also, the US government was already subsidising corn growers and placing tariffs on sugar imports and had been for some time (1970s). It’s the main reason the US uses so much high fructose corn syrup while the rest of the world doesn’t. So this would let them reduce subsidies by essentially mandating its use for fuels.
As a teen, I trusted the adults. I thought everything being done was thoroughly researched, tested, and debated. As an adult I now know that all it takes is some guy in a garage with a notepad doing basic math, then making it pretty charts for it to change something. And of course, some shady movements of money. Engineering, the actual truth!
One of the many issues I have with using ethanol blend fuels is that I get considerably less fuel efficiency when it is used. I also have major issues with the ethanol absorbing moisture causing rust in my metal line and fouling out my injectors. Even when run through completely and regularly, I still have issues.
Back when this was first being discussed, I distinctly remember someone talking about how the sugar beet was a better choice for two reasons: Higher sugar content for fermentation, and the fact that they can be regrown from their own clippings. The idea of using switchblade grass sounds vaguely familiar, but it never made it into the main discussions that I heard. Nobody made it sound that special at all. I also remember talk of how the world food supply was slightly disrupted over the first few years of these policies taking effect, presumably this was before the new fields were cleared, and farmers that didn’t have any adjacent untouched land had repurposed existing fields to take advantage of the new tax break associated with this change in policy.
I moved to Brazil from England with my late wife in November 1999. I spent around 3 months in São Paulo then we moved north to Recife, Pernambuco. Many cars, usually 4 cylinder Fords, Chevrolets & VWs ran on pure ethanol. Since Brazil is a world leader in growing sugar cane & ethanol is quite cheaply & easily distilled from sugar cane, ethanol was a good & much cleaner alternative to gasoline (petrol). Sadly, two problems were associated with this: 1 Cars were NOT tuned to use this fuel correctly, so explosive backfires were commonplace. 2 The USA via the UN suppressed the use of ethanol & forced the Brazilian government to refrain from using it. The newer cars with fuel injection could NOT been tuned to use ethanol. Cars with carburetors could easily be tuned to use ethanol by increasing the size of the carburetor jets & expirating the motor correctly.
Sugar cane/wheat is used in Australia, we have E10, E85, plus 91, 95 and 98 octane unleadeds which don’t use ethanol. It has kept the sugar cane industry afloat for now. But E10 isn’t used greatly. It also causes issues with the vehicle because of our humidity. I thought I read that smog was greatly reduced in Brazil when they used E100.
I personally care very little about the emissions impact but I feel like for the sake of energy independence if we worked to make full ethanol fuel transition to possibly hybrids made to use 100% ethanol we could actually have a sustainable reasonable energy solution which would in 50-100 years reduce emissions and we would have a renewable fuel source. Also ethanol doesn’t have to be corn based, it could be any old plant matter because it’s just refined alcohol really. So maybe we experiment with different plants and find which is the easiest to grow in large quantities with minimal emissions and maximize ethanol output
Okay, there are several factors that are being overlooked in favor of ditching Ethanol: 1. The 24% more emissions do NOT account for the total volume of carbon emission. That percentage doesn’t account for factors of carbon emissions drawn out of the atmosphere, thus to ignore that fact would be misleading. When the overall amount of emissions may be significantly less than traditional methods of gasoline production or even has a positive effect and reduces carbon already IN the atmosphere, this is a potential that traditional gasoline production cannot replicate in any way, shape, or form. 2. To produce corn you need land, but to acquire land, you must deforest and till land which causes all sorts of emissions from decay and farm usage and for forth. This argument also neglects to accurately represent efficient methods that employed by regenerative farming which not only have a smaller footprint but can SAVE decayed farmland destroyed from years of tilling, tilling is NOT A NECESSARY COMPONENT of farming in order to yield corn for production, so in effect, using efficient methods would once again not only reduce our carbon footprint but because we can use the existing forest material to regenerate dead farmland, and produce corn to reduce emissions we can have a DRAMATIC impact of how we not only deal with emissions but draw Carbon from the atmosphere. But what about the equipment you’re using to prep the farmland and move materials? Again, this would only be an issue if you were using Gasoline because Gasoline production can only reduce emissions, never reaching zero or negative emissions so that’s a moot point!
It has been especially perplexing to me, to use a food stock for transportation purposes. When corn first started being cultivated for ethanol use it fueled the rise in prices of a lot of food. So there was an inflationary pressure Placed upon groceries by the displacement of corn to make ethanol. Today that’s all I figured into the price of food and gasoline and we hardly think about the fact that food cost more than it did before we actually went down this corn to ethanol path.
The efficiency of corn in converting sunlight to energy is measured in tons of corn per acre farmed. However, the moisture at harvest must be right or dryers burning propane or other fuels must be used to fix the problem. Things like maturity, weather forecasts, combine availability and other variables make things less than ideal. It appears that science is so fragmented that it reminds me of my fathers gripe about cost cutting in corporations: Each department must show a cost savings no matter how much it costs the company as a whole. Very little cost cutting occurs, its mostly cost shifting. Magic numbers are generated which have unintended future effects.
Being an older guy, seems I remember when we were running out of gasoline and under the thumb of OPEC there was a notion we could “stretch” the gas supply by offsetting some of the gas with ethanol – with the US literally awash in corn at the time, and with all the “benefits” sited it seemed like the Holy Grail of solution. I can remember stories of South American countries switching to 100% ethanol (some using switchgrass) which effectively rasing a nationwide middle finger to OPEC. Oh, and the “Is there any real value to this” story was debated then – and from your report it feels like there are as many questions 40 years later as there was then …
In an MSE class (materials science & engineering) back in 1996, my professor walked us through the chemical breakdown of using ethanol, proving it was worse. The only additive which worked to reduce emissions was MTBE (used by Texaco), but MTBE was subsequently banned around 2000. ALSO, in step 1, you’re not even considering all the diesel fuel (tractors, combines) and energy that goes into tilling, planting, harvesting, etc.
One thing that you didn’t mention but I assume is likely covered in the study is the lower energy density of ethanol which leads to a loss in fuel efficiency. An extreme personal example from 2007 when Oregon adopted ethanol. My 1999 Nissan Frontier went from getting 19 MPG to 17 MPG with the switch to 10 percent ethanol. It doesn’t make sense to me why the decrease was so large but it was consistent.
I have always wondered what plants take the most CO2 from the atmosphere fastest. There is a lot of talk about tree planting. Trees take a long time to mature. However, I have seen how fast switchgrass grows, and have wondered why that is not a better solution. That it can be converted to ethanol for use as a fuel is a big plus.
Corn based ethanol = political dogma! Jason = info genius! Thanks Jas! Excellent information. There have been some interest and studies in grass as opposed to corn, (although I cannot site them as I don’t have them) which seemed promising years ago, but political interests quashed those indicators. Thanks again, Jason.