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.

No Comments »

A recent article on the University of Minnesota Alumni Association’s website entitled Five Reasons Corn Ethanol Won’t Save the Planet makes some sobering claims about corn-derived ethanol. I’m not going to retype the article but will let you read it for yourself (that’s what links are for) but basically the article goes on for several paragraphs about the environmental damage caused by using corn to make ethanol and makes the claim that soy-based biodiesel beats out ethanol by a wide margin in overall environmental impact. The claims are quoted from a December 2006 Science article.

If soy-based diesel is so much better than corn-based ethanol as a vehicle fuel, why is there so much more excitement in America about ethanol than about biodiesel? One possible reason could be that Americans aren’t exposed to many diesel passenger vehicles in the first place. Fewer than 5% of new cars sold in the US run on diesel whereas about 50% of cars sold in Europe use diesel; that discrepancy alone could help account for the lack of biodiesel awareness in the US market. US manufacturers more or less abandoned diesel engines in the 1980s and left it to the Europeans to refine (no pun intended) the technology. Beginning in 2008 Mercedes, Volkswagen, and Audi will offer diesel vehicles for the US market that meet emissions standards in all 50 states. Perhaps this marketing push will increase the awareness of pure biodiesel and biodiesel blends as alternatives to gasoline.

Related links:

National Biodiesel Board

American Coalition for Ethanol

No Comments »