ecoresearchers

Sixteen percent of the corn grown in the United States is not used to produce edibles (delicious items such as corn dogs and candy corn) but rather used to make ethanol. Even though that’s a heck of lot of corn, it only ends up supplying less than one percent of the liquid fuel needs in the US. If every last ear of corn were turned into ethanol, we would be able to displace 4 to 5 percent of other liquid fuels. In a way, that’s kind of scary and it tells us that corn-based ethanol is not going to replace oil. It has done an admirable job as a fuel additive gradually replacing MTBE and, especially in the Midwest like here in Minnesota, there are a lot of filling stations that sell gasoline mixed with 10% ethanol. Not many people right now can fill their tanks, however, with E85 before we run out of ethanol.

Two MIT professors have gone on record saying that ethanol could have a bright future. The road to that future is more a complicated maize (pun intended) than a straight road, however. The energy-efficient ethanol of the future will come from things like agricultural wastes and grasses and not from energy- and resource-intensive corn production. The MIT researchers estimate that it will be between 10 and 15 years before we can get back to enjoying tortillas without bringing our transportation system to its knees. By the way, the conflict between eating and fueling is not far fetched - in fact it’s already happening in Mexico. Don’t drive your flex-fuel vehicle into Mexico unless you want it keyed.