The great danger of confronting peak oil and global warming isn't that we will sit on our collective asses and do nothing while civilization collapses, but that we will plunge after "solutions" that will make our problems even worse.
Like believing we can replace gasoline with ethanol, the much-hyped biofuel that we make from corn.
Ethanol doesn't burn cleaner than gasoline, nor is it cheaper. Our current ethanol production represents only 3.5 percent of our gasoline consumption -- yet it consumes twenty percent of the entire U.S. corn crop, causing the price of corn to double in the last two years and raising the threat of hunger in the Third World. And the increasing acreage devoted to corn for ethanol means less land for other staple crops, giving farmers in South America an incentive to carve fields out of tropical forests that help to cool the planet and stave off global warming.
Three factors are driving the ethanol hype. The first is panic: Many energy experts believe that the world's oil supplies have already peaked or will peak within the next decade. The second is election-year politics. Interestingly enough, the primaries started in Iowa so all the candidates except one or two that have integrity suddenly became huge fans of Ethanol! .
The third factor stoking the ethanol frenzy is the war in Iraq, which has made energy independence a universal political slogan. Unlike coal, another heavily subsidized energy source, ethanol has the added political benefit of elevating the American farmer to national hero. As former CIA director James Woolsey, an outspoken ethanol evangelist, puts it, "American farmers, by making the commitment to grow more corn for ethanol, are at the top of the spear on the war against terrorism." So, if you love America, how can you not love ethanol?
Well, I love America but I sure as heck don’t love ethanol! There are many fundamental problems with Ethanol as a substitute for gasoline: Its energy density is one-third less than gasoline, which means you have to burn more of it to get the same amount of power. It also has a nasty tendency to absorb water, so it can't be transported in existing pipelines and it must be distributed by truck or rail, which is tremendously inefficient.
Nor is all ethanol created equal. In Brazil, ethanol made from sugar cane has an energy balance of 8-to-1 -- that is, when you add up the fossil fuels used to irrigate, fertilize, grow, transport and refine sugar cane into ethanol, the energy output is eight times higher than the energy inputs. That's a better deal than gasoline, which has an energy balance of 5-to-1. In contrast, the energy balance of corn ethanol is only 1.3-to-1 - making it practically worthless as an energy source. "Corn ethanol is essentially a way of recycling natural gas," says Robert Rapier, an oil-industry engineer who runs the R-Squared Energy Blog.
But as today's "New York Times" reports, some people living in River Bend Farm, an Alabama suburb which is in the vicinity of a biodiesel plant, saw a black yucky goo that was drifting in the Black Warrior River. It turns out that the stuff was 450 times higher than permit levels allow and that it had traveled two miles from its source.
It was a unholy mix of oil and glycerin, byproducts of biodiesel production. The muck and mire depletes oxygen in waters very rapidly, leaving dead fish behind. And the slime is just as lethal to birds as Exxon's Valdeez spill in Alaska. Alabama isn't the only state facing this environmental hazard. In January a businessman in Missouri was indicted by a grand jury for a leakage that killed 25,000 fish and commited genocide on the population of fat pocketbook mussels, which is on the endangered species list. Can you say... "OOOPS"???
Only yesterday, a study from the University of British Columbia predicted that a boost in growing corn for ethanol will worsen what is known as the "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico, the dead zone is a location with such a small amount of oxygen that sea life literally suffocates. And today's "Des Moines Register" announced that Cargill, Inc., has been levied a $100,000 environmental fine--the biggest an Iowa biofuels plant has ever been penalized--for multiple environmental misdeeds involving harmful discharges.
Despite the serious drawbacks of ethanol, some technological visionaries believe that the fuel can be done right. "Corn ethanol is just a platform, the first step in a much larger transition we are undergoing from a hydrocarbon-based economy to a carbohydrate-based economy," says Vinod Khosla, a pioneering venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. Next-generation corn- ethanol plants, he argues, will be much more efficient and environmentally friendly. He points to a company called E3 BioFuels that just opened an ethanol plant in Mead, Nebraska. The facility runs largely on biogas made from cow manure, and feeds leftover grain back to the cows, making it a "closed-loop system" -- one that requires very few fossil fuels to create ethanol.
In the end, the ethanol boom is another manifestation of America's blind faith that technology will solve all our problems. Thirty years ago, nuclear power was the answer. Then it was hydrogen. Biofuels may work out better, especially if mandates are coupled with tough caps on greenhouse-gas emissions.
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