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The Ethanol Chronicles
In preparing to testify before the Illinois State Legislature subcommittee investigating gas price increases, Stephen Corrick and Monica Rix Paxson consulted with several specialists on ethanol production and distribution. Ethanol is a form of liquid fuel produced from grains, wood or other vegetation. In Illinois it is added to gasoline as an "oxygenate" to support cleaner burning of gasoline. In response to one of our queries, we had this interesting e-mail exchange with Ned Ford, who is the Vice Chair of Sierra Club’s National Energy Committee.
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Hi Monica,
I don't think I'm your expert, since I live in Cincinnati, but I was concerned about your message and wanted to make a couple of points:
The environmental community is suspicious of ethanol as an alternative fuel on the grounds that ethanol from corn using current agricultural practices requires such an enormous amount of fossil fuel energy and fertilizer made from fossil fuel that it doesn't really amount to a sustainable fuel. I do not feel confident of the various quantifications I've seen of the energy requirement for ethanol, but am quite sure that this is an open discussion.
Anyone hoping to address greenhouse gas emissions must rely on efficiency for the next fifteen years. There isn't enough natural gas, and it seems to have priced itself out of the market long before it comes close to achieving what potential there is at the present time. Renewables won't be produced fast enough to make a significant difference for fifteen years, give or take five years.
I'd be happy to go into detail, if you wish. Efficiency, when I use the term, assumes net cost savings, and is available in massive quantity today, far more than needed to put us on a net negative CO2 trend. But it defies a lot of common assumptions about the function of the marketplace, and needs creative ideas in order to increase the rate of adoption. At present, the technology is improving in quality and falling in price faster than it is being adopted, so the "efficiency gap" is growing.
- Ned
Ned Ford
Vice Chair, National Energy Committee,
Sierra Club
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Hi Ned,
Thanks for your insight. Obviously you've studied the issue in depth and we'd be very interested in looking at your analysis in greater detail. Generally we support your assertion that a great deal of the savings in the next fifteen years will come through efficiency, but we also need to bolster national security and develop a comprehensive US-controlled national energy production policy, which necessarily includes indigenous sources of liquid fuel for transportation.
Ethanol is one means; hydrogen, natural gas, and MagneGas may be others. Of course, if all we wanted was to control energy supply, we could go to coal gasification, and methane substrate and oil shale extraction-with the inherently unacceptable environmental dangers, damage and the enormous cost involved.
Here's our concern, however. With US transportation systems so tremendously dependent on foreign, often hostile oil suppliers, the possibility for a liquid fuel-based economic and national security crisis is tremendous. This is also an issue on which conservatives may be engaged to participate in the alternative energy development scenarios.
So we're recommending one way or the other (with an eye on moving toward the sustainable future we all desire) that the US begin actively implementing whatever solutions (with the least environmentally damaging ones developed first) for our liquid fuel problems.
Ethanol, perhaps in a more refined future iteration is definitely one of those, and it also has the advantage of enrolling the average US farmer in working of develop energy independence. Yes, we still need to crank numbers to ensure that it isn't just a Ponzi scheme that recycles petroleum though the system and then spews back out a lesser quantity of liquid fuel, but I'm sure you can envision many scenarios in which the production of ethanol would not be dependent on petroleum. Particularly if the goal becomes true energy independence then net energy benefit obviously would need to be made inherent in the calculations.
Obviously, the economizers like fuel cells, heat/cooling/electrical generating systems, and the kinds of building retrofits and advanced greenhouse gas mitigation analyses advocated in the book, Cool Companies, must be at the top of the list, but the solutions require system-wide implementation and we must, in our opinion, utilize biomass conversion solutions as a part of the overall scenario.
Thanks for your reply. We look forward to talking more. In fact, with your permission, we'd love to reproduce this discussion on the fuel and transportation section of GardenEarth.com.
Stephen Corrick and Monica Rix Paxson
for Garden Earth Enterprise
http://gardenearth.com
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Hi Stephen and Monica,
I'm always interested in dialogue. Please remember that while I am a volunteer representative of the Sierra Club, I must often express views and concerns in detail that goes far beyond existing Club policy in detail. Otherwise, feel free to reproduce any of my comments.
Your reply is well taken. However, one of the reasons I choose to promote efficiency to the exclusion of most other resources is that we can't ignore the economics of energy. Any strategy that does not rely first upon efficiency must either rely on a sustainable fuel that becomes cheaper than fossil fuels, or we run the risk that people interested in price over all else will overwhelm sustainable option.
Today, ethanol is too expensive to use as fuel in comparison to gasoline. Rising oil prices shift the relationships. However, rising oil prices bring all sorts of other less desirable resources into play, including oil shale, wells that were uneconomical to produce at lower prices, and extremely energy-intensive processes for increasing oil field production.
Alternately, if we increase our efficiency, we can reduce consumption to the point that it becomes apparent that sustainable fuels are not prohibitively expensive.
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