BIOFUELS: Corn for Ethanol
We can use it, but should we?
Among my favorite movie quotes is this profound observation delivered by Jeff Goldblum’s character, Dr Ian Malcolm, in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 classic film, JURASSIC PARK:
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
Good advice in every situation that springs to mind and especially important in scientific endeavors that converge at the intersection of food, fuel, economy and the environment.
While corn may be a viable fuel source, its production into ethanol may be neither economical or environmentally friendly.
It would surprise most people to learn how much fossil fuel energy it takes to grow and harvest corn and soybeans — another popular ethanol feedstock — on a large scale. To be sure, farm tractors burn a lot of fossil fuels, but the biggest fuel hog of all in the ethanol production cycle is synthetic fertilizer. Nitrogen fertilizer, for example, requires 1.5 tons of fossil fuels — mostly coal and natural gas — to produce one ton of nitrogen [source: Oliver].
Some scientists argue that widespread biofuel production is a negative-sum game [source: Pimentel]. If the tractors burn 75 gallons of fuel in a season to tend the field, the truck that transports the corn to a processor burns 20 gallons on each trip, and the processor uses 40 gallons of fuel to run its distillation equipment, is the ethanol produced really an environmentally friendly, low-emission, cost-saving fuel?
Adding other resource costs into the equation — the gallons of fresh water needed to grow the plants and the amount of fertilizer needed to keep them healthy — and it becomes even harder to equate biofuel with real energy and carbon emission savings.
A 2005 study suggested that, using current farming and production technology, it takes anywhere from 27 to 118 percent more energy to produce a gallon of biodiesel than the energy it contains [source: Pimentel]. While technology will eventually narrow these ratios, the input-output energy ratio of modern biofuel production is a major drawback to its widespread use.
Alkane thanks Matt Cunningham, writing for http://auto.howstuffworks.com/ and Greenfacts.org for the content of this article.
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