U.S. May Free Up More Land for Corn Crops

[phantom power]

CHICAGO — Signs are growing that the government may allow farmers to plant crops on millions of acres of conservation land, while a chorus of voices is also pleading with Washington to cut requirements for ethanol production.

The Midwest floods have washed out an estimated four million acres of prime farmland, crimping this year’s harvest as the world desperately needs more grain. With corn prices setting records and soybean prices not far behind, the Bush administration is under intense pressure to do what it can to bolster the food supply.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/21/business/21ethanol.html?adxnnl=1&ref=science&adxnnlx=1214139955-zpD8Ul59sk5BxL50+Q1K5Q

[natrat]

1. ya know why they push ethanol-cuz it reduces mpg and they sell more at elevated prices

[msongs]

2. eliminate all corn/farm subsidies now - we will pay for it multiple times whatta scam nt

[Skink]

3. Good we won't run out of corn syrup.

[amandabeech]

4. If we start running out of corn syrup,

some marginal land in the northern midwest and northeast will return to sugar beet production.

Or we'll knock some of the tariff off sugar, and the stuff will flood in.

Lifesavers left a small city near where I grew up and went to Canada because sugar there is much, much cheaper. If the cost of sugar drops with the tariff, maybe they'll come back.

[AndyTiedye]

5. Maybe We Can Get Sugar in our Soda Pop Again

I have to buy Coca Cola from Mexico to get it with real sugar.
(Costco sells it).

[amandabeech]

8. Sorry. I buy American.

My uncle grows corn.

[tom_paine]

6. This a complete scam, a total con. If we used 100% of our corn for ethanol

meaning people would cease to eat corn EVERYWHERE, it would supply anywhere between 8% (the lowest I have heard)-20% (the highest I have heard) of the world's fuel needs.

Good God, even the HIGHEST shows the math behind the biofuels industry proves it's a scam before it even begins.

Plus, add in rapid soil degradation from removing crop "residues" (the root system that is typically left in the soil to return nutrients to said soil) to make ethanol barely over a 1.2 EROI and the thing is not just a scam but a grotesque one.

And grotesque? Wanna talk about groitesque? How about the grotesquerie of our fat American asses shoving the food that once was eaten by the world's poor into our fat-assed SUVs.

Disgusting and a scam all around.

:mad: :grr:

[GliderGuider]

10. It's a tricky calculation, but the number is a lot less than 8%

According to grains.org the world grows 26.5 billion bushels of corn in a year. At 2.8 gallons of ethanol per bushel turning all the world's corn into ethanol would give us 4.8 million barrels of ethanol per day. The world uses 85 million barrels of oil a day, so that means ethanol could provide 5.7% of the world's fuel volume.

It gets tricky because first of all ethanol is only 2/3 as energetic as oil, so we could get only 4% of the world's oil energy from corn ethanol. When net energy is taken into account (currently we need some oil to produce the ethanol), the picture gets even worse - it probably means the world would get only 2% additional energy from turning all the corn into go-juice.

People who claim 20% are indulging in seriously creative accounting.

[GreenGreenLimaBean]

13. i think your equation is flawed....

barrels of ethanol cannot be compared to barrels of oil....i would suggest finding out how many gallons of gasoline/diesel a day is used and then you can figure roughly 1 gallon ethanol == 1 gallon gasoline....not perfect, but closer....

[GliderGuider]

15. On a volume basis the barrels are the same, however...

A more careful analysis shows the outcome is even worse than my original chicken-scratching.

A standard barrel of oil is 42 gallons, which formed part of the divisor I used when converting billions of gallons of ethanol into millions of barrels per day -- I divided up all the ethanol into 42-gallon barrels to give an even volumetric basis for comparison.

Let's walk through the calculation more carefully:

You can make about 2.8 gallons of ethanol from a bushel of corn. So 26.5 billion bushels of corn (the world's total 2006 production) turns into 26.5 * 2.8 = 74 billion gallons of ethanol.

Divide that by 42 gallons per barrel and you get just under 1.8 billion barrels of ethanol a year.

To average that out over a year, divide 1.8 billion barrels by 365 and you get 4.8 million barrels per day by volume.

Now correct for the one-third-lower energetic content of ethanol (4.8 * 0.67) and you get the equivalent energy of 3.2 million barrels of oil per day.

However, the standard EROEI of oil is over 10:1, while for ethanol it's about 1.3:1. That means that you only get about a 25% energy profit (1-(1/1.3)) from ethanol.

So in the end you wind up with a net energy available to do useful work equivalent to about (3.2 million * 0.25) = 800,000 barrels of oil per day.

The world uses about 85 million barrels per day, so the net energy available from all the world's corn is less than 1% of the energy we currently use from oil.

Now I'm quite sure the local ethophiles will find nits to pick with the specifics of this calculation, so let me close with a slightly broader statement:

By turning all the world's corn into ethanol we could replace only a minuscule fraction of the oil wee now use, no matter what your definition of "minuscule" is. Food makes lousy fuel for anything except animals, and in using it to fuel machines we are committing a crime against humanity

[melody]

11. I agree with your basic statement

But why pick on fat people? Poor people tend to be fat. Rich people are mainly skinny.

[tom_paine]

12. In most countries today and throughout history, the opposite has been true.

If Peak Oil and Climate Change hit us like I think they are, it won't be long until this unique reversal of an age-old paradigm is itself reversed back to the norm.

Apologies if you were offended, but we are a morbidly obese nation and I myself have a pretty good belly, so if anything I was being self-deprecating, as well.

[JohnWxy]

14. There is NO technology currently available that will replace all the gasoline the world uses.

To say ethanol is not worth developing because it can't replace all the gasoline tomorow is a false argumant. Even plug in hybrids which will be an important part of reducing petroleum fuel usaage will take about 15 to 20 years to make much of an impact on the use of gasoline and therefor the price paid for it.

Regarding ethanol's energy content, the BTUs are not the whole picture. Ethanol has an octane rating of 113- 115 whereas high test gas is 92-93. THis means you can use ethanol in high compression engines which outperform the detuned low compresssion engines we must use with gasoline.

Ford Motor co. has plans to build an http://www.greencarcongress.com/2006/10/startup_working.html">ethanol direct injection engine which is turbo-charged to pressures that gasoline (alone)could not handle. The engine (originally developed by http://lfee.mit.edu/public/LFEE%202006-01%20RP.pdf">MIT researchers) produces so much power per cubic inch that it can be downsized by about half. THe result is 25% to 30% less gas consumption. And how much ethanol does the engine use 5% - the other 95% is gasoline. To put this in perspective if all the cars and light trucks on the road were using this engine you could reduce total gasoline consumption 25% to 30% with a supply of ethanol equal to about 5% of the total fuel supply. WHen does Ford plan to have this engine for sale? 2011. And before then the amount of ethanol being produced in the U.S. will be about 5% of the total fuel supply (for transportation).

BTW when ethanol is made from corn only the starch is used to make ethanol. THe protein is recovered and sold as Dried Distillers Grains and Solubles - a high protein feed supplement used by beef and pork farmers. There is no loss to the food supply.

The reason for the rapid increase in ALL commodity prices (enrgy and crops) is that our economy is going into the tank. THis was foreseen last fall (and earlier) by money managers who started pulling out of commmon stocks (except for energy company stocks and materials companies stocks) and started puttin g billiions of dollars into commodities. Once they started runninng the price of commodities up and stocks were looking worse others piled on and drove the prices up even more. REnewable fuels demand has been a part of the price rise in food but only a small part compared to thte movement of money out of common stocks and into commodities. (wheat and rice prices have gone up tremendously too, and I don't know of anybody making fuel out of wheat or rice).

Also, the decline in the dollar caused by the Federal Reserves laarge reductions in interest rates (to help a faltering economy as well as to save the banking industry) has driven up the prices of everything traded in international markets. As the dollar goes down the price of commodities priced in dollars goes up.

[tom_paine]

17. Good post, but my thinking that ethanol is a scam goes well beyond the math.

It goes well beyond the oversimplified way you framed my concerns, To say ethanol is not worth developing because it can't replace all the gasoline tomorow is a false argumant.

It has to do with crop residue removal killing the soil, and shitty EROI (Energy Return on energy input/invested) for ethanol.

It has to do with the basic immorality of taking corn poor people could be eating and and shoving up our fat-assed SUV's, getting oh about 10 miles to 10,000 meals or so (I haven't done the math so this is a guess to make a point; Glider Guider has, though and could probably calculate just how many 1,000 calorie dishes of corn meal will take a Cadillac Escalade or even a Honda Civic one mile).

As to the use of ethanol production NOT imapcting the food supply, I am skeptical and will have to see some data on this from a neutral source (NOT a "study" comissioned by the Ethanol Lobbyists of Amerika, thank you) before I buy it.

I will say this, though: if you can show hard data that ethanol production does not impact the food supply, I would reconsider my position.

[XemaSab]

7. Corn is SUCH as scam

Anyone who hasn't read it should check out "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan. It's about how corn is in everything we eat.

[bhikkhu]

9. Fill your tank once, or eat corn for a year

That's the scale of the choice...one tankful is a year's consumption. I'd rather eat, myself, or leave it for someone else who needs it more than I.

[NickB79]

16. One more casualty of the ethanol boom: wildlife

Anyone who's walked in a cornfield knows that it is a dead zone, lifeless except for the cornstalks themselves.

CRP land (which, BTW, is MARGINAL land that doesn't give very high yields anyway) is usually planted in with prairie grasses, shrubs and trees that provide a myriad of wildlife habitat. I've walked through CPR land that was field only 5 years before, and the change is astounding. Pheasants, wild turkeys, songbirds of all sorts, gophers, ducks, deer, you name it.

The CRP program has been one of the most successful wildlife habitat programs we've ever devised.

AND NOW WE'RE GOING TO PLOW IT ALL UNDER FOR A FEW MORE FUCKING GALLONS OF ETHANOL!!!