Food vs. Fuel: Is There a PR Campaign Against Ethanol?

Demand for ethanol and other biofuels is a "significant contributor" to soaring food prices around the world, World Bank President Robert Zoellick says. Droughts, financial market speculators and increased demand for food have also helped create "a perfect storm" that has boosted those prices, he says.

Source: World Bank Chief: Biofuels Boosting Food Prices

DuPont and Genencor have just announced a $140M venture to produce cellulosic ethanol, which made from crop remnants rather than actual corn.

In terms of energy density (or Watt hours per liter), ethanol isn't that great a choice. Diesel is far better, and just as capable of being produced by renewable sources. It's amazing to me that the gas companies want to charge premium prices for ethanol or gas/ethanol mixtures that deliver lower mpg than regular old gasoline, and far lower than diesel fuel.

Add to that the fact that under current development are methods for producing bio-diesel from algae that pretty much just eats carbon and water and produces diesel, thereby sidestepping the whole food/fuel question entirely. And when the algae is processed for the diesel, the remains can be processed for cellulosic ethanol, if so desired.

We could switch to largely diesel-powered fleet of vehicles in a short amount of time, decrease the total gallons of fuel which we consume through improved mpg over gasoline or ethanol, and still produce ethanol/gas mixtures for those without the means to switch over to diesel-powered vehicles quickly, with minimal changes to our infrastructure, but apparently the thought seems too scary for politicians to consider.

As a result, we have initiatives to push the worst of the alternative fuel choices, and will wind up paying top dollar for it. Sad, really.

Yes, I can tell you as someone on the front lines, there is a huge anti-ethanol campaign under way. But did you know:

1. Almost every country can become energy-independent. Anywhere that has sunlight and land can produce alcohol from plants. Brazil, the fifth largest country in the world imports no oil, since half its cars run on alcohol fuel made from sugarcane, grown on 1% of its land.

2. We can reverse global warming. Since alcohol is made from plants, its production takes carbon dioxide out of the air, sequestering it, with the result that it reverses the greenhouse effect (while potentially vastly improving the soil). Recent studies show that in a permaculturally designed mixed-crop alcohol fuel production system, the amount of greenhouse gases removed from the atmosphere by plants—and then exuded by plant roots into the soil as sugar—can be 13 times what is emitted by processing the crops and burning the alcohol in our cars.

3. We can revitalize the economy instead of suffering through Peak Oil. Oil is running out, and what we replace it with will make a big difference in our environment and economy. Alcohol fuel production and use is clean and environmentally sustainable, and will revitalize families, farms, towns, cities, industries, as well as the environment. A national switch to alcohol fuel would provide many millions of new permanent jobs.

4. No new technological breakthroughs are needed. We can make alcohol fuel out of what we have, where we are. Alcohol fuel can efficiently be made out of many things, from waste products like stale donuts, grass clippings, food processing waste-even ocean kelp. Many crops produce many times more alcohol per acre than corn, using arid, marshy, or even marginal land in addition to farmland. Just our lawn clippings could replace a third of the autofuel we get from the Mideast.

5. Unlike hydrogen fuel cells, we can easily use alcohol fuel in the vehicles we already own. Unmodified cars can run on 50% alcohol, and converting to 100% alcohol or flexible fueling (both alcohol and gas) costs only a few hundred dollars. Most auto companies already sell new dual-fuel vehicles.

6. Alcohol is a superior fuel to gasoline! It's 105 octane, burns much cooler with less vibration, is less flammable in case of accident, is 98% pollution-free, has lower evaporative emissions, and deposits no carbon in the engine or oil, resulting in a tripling of engine life. Specialized alcohol engines can get at least 22% better mileage than gasoline or diesel.

7. It's not just for gasoline cars. We can also easily use alcohol fuel to power diesel engines, trains, aircraft, small utility engines, generators to make electricity, heaters for our homes—and it can even be used to cook our food.

8. Alcohol has a proud history. Gasoline is a refinery's toxic waste; alcohol fuel is liquid sunshine. Henry Ford's early cars were all flex-fuel. It wasn't until gasoline magnate John D. Rockefeller funded Prohibition that alcohol fuel companies were driven out of business.

9. The byproducts of alcohol production are clean, instead of being oil refinery waste, and are worth more than the alcohol itself. In fact, they can make petrochemical fertilizers and herbicides obsolete. The alcohol production process concentrates and makes more digestible all protein and non-starch nutrients in the crop. It's so nutritious that when used as animal feed, it produces more meat or milk than the corn it comes from. That's right, fermentation of corn increases the food supply and lowers the cost of food.

10. Locally produced ethanol supercharges regional economies. Instead of fuel expenditures draining capital away to foreign bank accounts, each gallon of alcohol produces local income that gets recirculated many times. Every dollar of tax credit for alcohol generates up to $6 in new tax revenues from the increased local business.

11. Alcohol production brings many new small-scale business opportunities. There is huge potential for profitable local, integrated, small-scale businesses that produce alcohol and related byproducts, whereas when gas was cheap, alcohol plants had to be huge to make a profit.

12. Scale matters—most of the widely publicized potential problems with ethanol are a function of scale. Once production plants get beyond a certain size and are too far away from the crops that supply them, closing the ecological loop becomes problematic. Smaller-scale operations can more efficiently use a wide variety of crops than huge specialized one-crop plants, and diversification of crops would largely eliminate the problems of monoculture.

13. The byproducts of small-scale alcohol plants can be used in profitable, energy-efficient, and environmentally positive ways. For instance, spent mash (the liquid left over after distillation) contains all the nutrients the next fuel crop needs and can return it back to the soil if the fields are close to the operation. Big-scale plants, because they bring in crops from up to 45 miles away, can't do this, so they have to evaporate all the water and sell the resulting byproduct as low-price animal feed,which accounts for half the energy used in the plant.

By combining permaculture, smart agriculture and market forces, we can turn Peak Oil on its ugly head and not have to have a collapse.

Regards,

Randy White
Marketing Director
Alcohol Can Be A Gas
randy@alcoholcanbeagas.com

Uh, natural gas anyone?

We can use it to get begin the transition away from oil, and this time, use what we have learned about limited and natural resources to actually plan for the depletion of natural gas.

There seems to be some sort of outside force making it difficult for companies like Honda to sell their CNG vehicles outside a select couple states. However, where available the CNG Civic comes with an at-home refueling station that plugs into your gas line in your garage. The unit is about $2,000 and the car run $9-10k more than the base model.

With that said, the price would come down if there were competition. Here is Arizona the State gave huge rebates to folks that converted their vehicles to CNG. The issue was and still is this; with CNG your vehicle will still run on gasoline. At the time the state adopted their rebate policy was still cheap and no one bothered to run CNG and the State lost billions (arguably though, I don't think they were trying to make money, they were trying to be pioneers).

Ethanol as a fuel is energy neutral. This is another case of "do something, anything" in response the the environment. Studies have been done that differentiate between the fuel costs and diversion of corn to ethanol. The lowest grade of corn that used to be fed to the animals is now being converted to fuel. The result is that the farmers have to buy a higher grade of corn (more expensive BEFORE shipping costs) to feed the animals.

I agree that there are many reasons to reduce dependence on foreign oil. I prefer better research being done.

Your statistics on the energy fail to mention that the ethanol is less efficiently converted to energy in most automobile engines. This is the end point that makes it a negative result.

"People are now starving to death because of this transfer from food to fuel," said Sen. James Inhofe, R-Oklahoma,

First rule when weighing the value of a statement, especially emanating from the Capitol region, consider the source and the source of financial advantage. Inhofe has been solidly behind petrochemical and industrial interests with regard to lower standards and higher revenues.

He is so extreme that he blocked an act to reduce the toxicity of chemicals stored around the nation as a Homeland Security measure. The rare bit of good logic is that the less dangerous the facility the less disastrous the worst would be. Anyway Inhofe is no friend of the environment.

Dang it, I've got a call and won't wait and will not have it in me to do justice, until tomorrow...thank you it's a fabulous discussion piece, so glad you linked me in!! I'll be baak, tee hee. :~)

This is not the first time oil companies are faced with a threat of biological additives. Last time 'round it was alcohol. In Europe this was quite popular, though people were not talking about the environment but overproduction of wines and a smooth running engine. The answer to this threat was something given the innocent name "ethel" which was what the oil companies called it to avoid the ominous sounding "lead".

What we are now witnessing is a bad guy doing what the good guys are telling him - but doing it in such a way as to create a crisis. The environmentalists are like the kid who says: "I'd like some chewing gum" and the bad guy unwraps a pound of the stuff and forces it down the kid's throat, saying "You asked for it". Note that this corn production is being subsidized and production of agricultural produce is shifting to take advantage of the artifically high prices. Also, the alternative - sugar cane ethanol from Brazil (or even Cuba) is being blocked.

We've got two goals mixed together:1) an environmentally friendly fuel, and 2) self sufficiency. Actually there two goals have nothing to do with each other, they just happen to co-incide.