Sludge Watch ==> Corn fuel - not the clean green choice - New York Times

[maureen.reilly at sympatico.ca]

Michael Pollan
New York Times http://pollan.blogs.nytimes.com/
May 24, 2006
The Great Yellow Hope
I've been traveling in the American Corn Belt this past week, and
wherever I go, people are talking about the promise of ethanol. Corn-
distillation plants are popping up across the country like
dandelions,
and local ethanol boosters in Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa and even
Washington State (where Bill Gates is jumping into the business) are
giddy at the prospect of supplanting OPEC with a homegrown,
America-first corn cartel. But as much as I'd like to have a greener
fuel to power my car, I'm afraid corn-based ethanol is not that fuel.

In principle, making fuel from plants makes good sense. Instead of
spewing fossilized carbon into the atmosphere, you're burning the
same
carbon that a plant removed from the air only a few months earlier -
so, theoretically, you've added no additional carbon. Sounds pretty
green - and would be, if the plant you proposed to make the ethanol
from were grown in a green way. But corn is not.

The way we grow corn in this country consumes tremendous quantities
of
fossil fuel. Corn receives more synthetic fertilizer than any other
crop, and that fertilizer is made from fossil fuels - mostly natural
gas. Corn also receives more pesticide than any other crop, and most
of that pesticide is made from petroleum. To plow or disc the
cornfields, plant the seed, spray the corn and harvest it takes large
amounts of diesel fuel, and to dry the corn after harvest requires
natural gas. So by the time your "green" raw material arrives at the
ethanol plant, it is already drenched in fossil fuel. Every bushel of
corn grown in America has consumed the equivalent of between a third
and a half gallon of gasoline.

And that's before you distill the corn into ethanol, an energy-
intensive process that requires still more fossil fuel. Estimates
vary, but they range from two-thirds to nine-tenths of a gallon of
oil
to produce a single gallon of ethanol. (The more generous number does
not count all the energy costs of growing the corn.) Some estimates
are still more dismal, suggesting it may actually take more than a
gallon of fossil fuel to produce a gallon of our putative alternative
to fossil fuel.

Making ethanol from corn makes no more sense from an economic point
of
view. The federal government offers a tax break of 54 cents for every
gallon of ethanol produced, and this incentive is what has generated
the enthusiasm for ethanol refining: the spigot of public money is
open and the pigs are rushing to the trough. (At the same time, the
government protects domestic ethanol producers by imposing a tariff
of
54 cents a gallon on imported ethanol.) According to the Wall Street
Journal, it will cost U.S. taxpayers $120 for every barrel of oil
saved by making ethanol. Some "savings." This is very good news
indeed
for Archer Daniels Midland, the agricultural processing company that
controls about 30 percent of the ethanol market. (And, it would seem,
a comparable percentage of the U.S. Congress, which has been
showering
the company with ethanol subsidies since the days when Bob Dole of
Kansas was known as the senatorfrom A.D.M.)

Absurd as it is, the rush to turn our corn surplus into ethanol
appears unstoppable, and the corn belt, laboring under the weight of
falling corn prices for the past several years, is celebrating the
great good fortune of $3-a-gallon gas prices. We're desperate for
alternatives, and all that corn is waiting to be distilled. As corn
prices rise (and the giddiness has already given them a bump),
farmers
will be tempted to produce yet more corn, which is not good news for
the environment this whole deal is supposed to help. Why not? Because
farmers will apply more nitrogen to boost yields (leading to more
nitrogen pollution) and, since soy bean prices are down, they will be
tempted to return to a "corn-on-corn" rotation. That is, rather than
rotate their corn crops with soy beans (a legume that builds nitrogen
in he soil), farmers will plant corn year after year, requiring still
more synthetic nitrogen and doing long-term damage to the land.

It's not easy being green.
But just because making ethanol from corn is an environmentally and
economically absurd proposition doesn't mean ethanol made from other
plants is a bad idea. If you can make ethanol from a plant that
doesn't take so much energy to grow in the first place, the economics
and energetics begin look a lot better. The Brazilians make ethanol
from sugar cane, a perennial crop that doesn't require nearly as much
fossil fuel to grow. Switch grass, too, is a perennial crop that
grows
just about anywhere, requires little or no fertilizer and needs no
plowing or annual replanting. And although the technology for making
ethanol from grasses (cellulosic ethanol - distilled from plant
cellulose rather than starch) is not quite there yet, it holds real
potential. So why the stampede to make ethanol from corn? Because we
have so much of it, and such a powerful lobby promoting its
consumption. Ethanol is just the latest chapter in a long, sorry
history of clever and profitable schemes to dispose of surplus corn:
there was corn liquor in the 19th century; feedlot meat starting in
the 1950's and, since 1980, high fructose corn syrup. We grow more
than 10 billion bushels of corn a year in this country, far more than
we can possibly eat - though God knows we're doing our best, bingeing
on corn-based fast food and high fructose corn syrup till we're fat
and diabetic. We probably can't eat much more of the stuff without
exploding, so the corn lobby is targeting the next unsuspecting beast
that might help chomp through the surplus: your car.


Michael Pollan is the author, most recently, of "The Omnivore's
Dilemma: A Natural history of Four Meals," which was published in
April. His previous books include: "Second Nature," "A Place of My
Own" and "The Botany of Desire," a New York Times bestseller. A
contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, Mr. Pollan is
the
Knight Professor of Journalism at the University of California,
Berkeley. Many of his food articles can be found at
michaelpollan.com.



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