Food, or Fuel? Is the government ignoring the math?

We've been making good time, covering 400 miles in the last 5 days, trying to get to Omaha for a break before we push on to Chicago. Eastern Colorado and the first half of Nebraska were not the perfectly flat regions we had envisioned. Instead, they consist of endless rolling hills covered in corn.

I don't think I have the vocabulary to express the sheer magnitude of the volume of corn that is produced here in the center of the country. For the last 500 miles since we left Boulder, CO corn has lined the road, stretching as far as I can see in every direction. Individual towns are only identifiable by the community grain elevator and/or ethanol plant where local farmers store or sell their harvests as feedstock for cattle, ethanol or for human consumption.

As of August 2006, the U.S. had 101 ethanol plants in operation, with a capacity of 4.8 billion gallons per year. 39 bio refineries are under construction and 7 existing plants are expanding. This will add more than 2.5 billion gallons of capacity when complete. That 7.3 billion gallons of ethanol would fill up over 11,000 olympic swimming pools. And each gallon of ethanol requires 3.5-6.0 gallons of water to produce.

Ethanol is being touted as a solution to both our dependence on foreign oil as well as global warming, so I think it's worth taking a look at this so called renewable energy source. To push the expansion of the industry, ethanol gets the largest government handouts of any energy source. Corn ethanol subsidies totaled $7 billion in 2006 for 4.9 billion gallons of ethanol. That's about $1.50/gallon This breaks down to:

1. 51¢ per gallon federal blenders credit for $2.5 billion
2. $0.9 billion in corn subsidies for ethanol corn
3. $3.6 billion extra paid at the pump

It only costs 38¢ more per gallon to produce ethanol so why the enormous subsidy? Can you imagine if we had put that $7 billion in subsidizing wind, solar, geothermal and raised mileage standards of american cars to 30mpg? What did all this money and production really do for us? Well, it reduced american dependence on foreign oil by 1.1% more and supposedly reduced US greenhouse gas emissions by 1/19th of 1%. There is full laundry list of environmental and social drawbacks to ethanol production from corn. These range from astronomical water demands in already dry areas with decreasing rainfall, to nitrogen runoff from fertilizers that create enormous dead zones, NO2 off-gassing from soils, doubling of the price of corn which has caused food riots in Mexico, etc.

What tends to throw people off when looking at, say, ethanol vs oil is that five years ago a U.S. General Accounting Office report showed that ethanol had received $11.6 billion in tax incentives since 1968, while the oil industry had received over $150 billion in tax benefit over the same period. So one has to assume oil is getting the better deal. However, the oil industry produced 1,068 times more energy so the subsidy rate per unit of energy was 54 times higher for ethanol. That's like ethanol gets 54¢ and oil gets 1¢.

Maybe we should start looking elsewhere.

Further Reading:

• Biofuels - It's Getting Annoying Now
• Biofuels - The 8-Track Tape of Transport Energy Solutions

Note: Interview/itinerary suggestions for the trip can be emailed to me.

Ride To Sustain will pass through the following cities: San Francisco, CA – Sacramento, CA – Reno, NV – Salt Lake City, UT – Denver, CO – Omaha, NB – Des Moines, IA – Chicago, IL – Detroit, MI – Cleveland, OH – Pittsburgh, PA – Washington, DC – Philadelphia, PA – New York City, NY – Hartford, CT – Boston, MA