Ethanol - Green Dream Or Ecological Nightmare?

A century ago, Henry Ford's first car ran on alcohol, while Rudolf Diesel fired his namesake engine with peanut oil.

But both inventors soon discovered that "rock oil," when slightly refined, held far more bang per gallon than plant fuel, and was cheap to boot. Oil soon left plant fuels in the dust. Only in periods of scarcity–like the OPEC oil embargo of 1973–did the U.S. and other countries turn back to ethanol, mixing it into gasoline to stretch supplies.

It wasn't until 2000 that fuel alcohol staged a major comeback, largely as an additive in less polluting gasoline blends. For years, ethanol producers had enjoyed heavy subsidies and protective tariffs on imports, while Archer Daniels Midland, the largest U.S. ethanol producer, advocated mixing ethanol into motor fuel. But ethanol ran into stiff competition with the oil industry's own additive, methyl tertiary-butyl ether (MTBE).

Then MTBE, a suspected cancer agent, began turning up in aquifers, prompting many states to ban the chemical and suddenly creating a two-billion-gallon market for ethanol.

Recently, with the Middle East in turmoil and oil security once again a hot issue, Congress gave the ethanol industry another boost, extending the tax credits and tariffs while requiring that 7.5 billion gallons (28 billion liters) of the nation's fuel come from ethanol or biodiesel by 2012. (That figure could rise to 60 billion gallons, 227 billion liters, by 2030 if some senators have their way.) The biofuels boom was on.

Biofuels as currently rendered in the U.S. are doing great things for some farmers and for agricultural giants like Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill, but little for the environment.

Ethanol Facts

1. Corn requires large doses of herbicide and nitrogen fertilizer and can cause more soil erosion than any other crop. And producing corn ethanol consumes just about as much fossil fuel as the ethanol itself replaces.

2. Environmentalists fear that rising prices for both crops will push farmers to plow up some 35 million acres (14 million hectares) of marginal farmland now set aside for soil and wildlife conservation, potentially releasing even more carbon bound in the fallow fields.

3. Around a fifth of the harvest will be brewed into ethanol–more than double the amount only five years ago. Yet such is the thirst for gasoline among SUV-loving Americans that even if we turned our ENTIRE corn and soybean crops into biofuels, they would replace just 12 percent of our gasoline and a paltry 6 percent of our diesel, while squeezing supplies of corn- and soy-fattened beef, pork, and poultry.

4. The U.S. government has ponied up hefty ethanol subsidies, and President Bush has proposed over 200 million dollars for research, with a goal of replacing 15 percent of our projected gasoline use with ethanol and other fuels by 2017.

5. Ethanol enthusiasts point out that the oil industry has also reaped huge subsidies for decades, including billions of dollars a year in tax breaks, as well as tens of billions of dollars annually to defend oil fields in the Middle East–even before the war in Iraq. Not to mention the untallied costs to health and the environment of pollution from cars, trucks, and the oil industry itself. And while oil subsidies flow into the hands of the wealthiest companies in the world, ethanol subsidies are fueling a renaissance in small heartland towns with names like Wahoo, Nebraska.

6. Despite the boom, it's hard to fill up with ethanol in the U.S. It's still mainly a gasoline additive. Only about 1,200 stations scattered mostly across the corn belt sell ethanol, in the form of E85 (85 percent ethanol, 15 percent gas), which can be burned only in specially designed engines.

7. Ethanol delivers 30 percent fewer miles a gallon than gasoline, but at around $2.80 a gallon in the heartland, it is competitive with $3.20-a-gallon gas. Since the U.S. has no major pipelines for ethanol, transportation by truck, rail, or barge drives up the price elsewhere.

8. The distillation process gives off large amounts of carbon dioxide, and that's where ethanol's green label starts to brown. Most ethanol plants burn natural gas or, increasingly, coal to create the steam that drives the distillation, adding fossil- fuel emissions to the carbon dioxide emitted by the yeast.

9. Growing the corn also requires nitrogen fertilizer, made with natural gas, and heavy use of diesel farm machinery. Some studies of the energy balance of corn ethanol–the amount of fossil energy needed to make ethanol versus the energy it produces–suggest that ethanol is a loser's game, requiring more carbon-emitting fossil fuel than it displaces.

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Closing The Energy Loop

"Biofuels are a total waste and misleading us from getting at what we really need to do: conservation," says Cornell University's David Pimentel, who is one of ethanol's harshest critics. "This is a threat, not a service. Many people are seeing this as a boondoggle."

But Wietzki and her colleagues in Mead think they can do better. They hope to improve the energy balance and greenhouse gas benefits of ethanol by creating a closed-loop system–which is where those cows come in. They plan to fire their boilers with methane from two giant four-million-gallon biodigesters fed with cattle manure from the feedlot next door–in effect using biogas to make biofuel.

The increased efficiency, she says, isn't only good for the environment, it's also good business, especially if the price of corn keeps rising or oil drops below $45 a barrel or so, the lowest price at which ethanol backers say the fuel can compete with gasoline in the U.S.

"The last people standing," Wietzki says, "will be highly efficient producers like us."

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10. Volkswagen introduced Brazil's first TotalFlex vehicle in 2003, cars that automatically adjust the air-fuel ratio and spark advance for any mixture of gasoline and alcohol. Today, nearly 85 percent of cars sold in Brazil are flex.

11. Sugarcane, not engine technology, is the real key to Brazil's ethanol boom. The sweet, fast-growing tropical grass has been a staple export for the country since the 1500s. Unlike corn, in which the starch in the kernel has to be broken down into sugars with expensive enzymes before it can be fermented, the entire sugarcane stalk is already 20 percent sugar–and it starts to ferment almost as soon as it's cut. Cane yields 600 to 800 gallons (2,300 to 3,000 liters) of ethanol an acre, more than twice as much as corn.

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Brazil's Green Gold Rush

Usina São Martinho, one of the largest sugar mills and ethanol distilleries in the world. Each year the mammoth plant turns seven million tons of cane into 300 million liters of ethanol for Brazilian cars and 500,000 tons of sugar, bound mainly for Saudi Arabia.

Growers in the emerald desert can get seven harvests from their fields before replanting, and the distilleries recycle their wastewater into fertilizer. Like most of Brazil's usinas, São Martinho consumes no fossil fuel or electricity from the grid; for heat and power it burns cane waste, known as bagasse, typically generating a slight surplus of power.

Even the cane trucks and agricultural machinery burn a blend of diesel and ethanol, while the favorite crop duster, a hot little plane called the Ipanema, is the first fixed-wing aircraft built to burn pure alcohol. "We're obsessed with efficiency," says plant director Agenor Cunha Pavan.

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12. While corn ethanol's energy ratio hovers around breakeven, "we get eight units of ethanol for every one unit of fossil fuel," says Isaias Macedo, one of Brazil's leading sugarcane researchers. Experts estimate that producing and burning cane ethanol generates anywhere from 55 to 90 percent less carbon dioxide than gasoline.

13. Even sugarcane isn't without its problems. While nearly all of São Martinho's cane is machine harvested, most Brazilian cane is cut by hand; the work, though well paid, is hot, dirty, and backbreaking. Cutters die of exhaustion every year, say leaders of their union. And to kill snakes and make the cane easier to cut by hand, the fields are usually burned before harvest, filling the air with soot while releasing methane and nitrous oxide, two potent greenhouse gases.

14. The expansion of Brazil's cane acreage–set to nearly double over the next decade–may also be contributing to deforestation. By displacing ranching in existing agricultural areas, sugar may be adding to the pressures that send cattlemen deeper into frontier territory like the Amazon and the biologically diverse savannas known as the cerrado. "If alcohol is now considered a 'clean' fuel, the process of making it is very dirty," says Marcelo Pedroso Goulart, a prosecutor for the Public Ministry of São Paulo. "Especially the burning of cane and the exploitation of the cane workers."

15. Every biofuel also consumes crops that could be feeding a hungry globe. A recent UN report concludes that although the potential benefits are large, the biofuels boom could reduce food security and drive up food prices in a world where 25,000 people die of hunger every day, most under age five.

16. Demand for both fuel and food is expected to more than double by mid-century, and many scientists fear that in coming decades, climate change will undermine agricultural productivity. "Agriculture should be used to stop the hunger of the people. If one person were hungry, this would be a shame," says Goulart. "There are millions who are hungry in Brazil, and this monoculture does not help."

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The Third Alternative: Cellulosic Ethanol

The only way to reap the benefits of biofuels without squeezing the food supply is to take food out of the picture. Though corn kernels and cane juice are the traditional sources of ethanol, you can also make it from stalks, leaves, and even sawdust–plant by-products that are normally dumped, burned, or plowed back under.

These materials are mostly cellulose, the tough chains of sugar molecules that make up plant cell walls. Breaking up those chains and fermenting the sugars could yield a cornucopia of biofuels, without competing with food crops.

Biofuel visionaries picture a resurgence of deep-rooted perennial prairie grasses like switchgrass or buffalo grass, sequestering carbon in the soil, providing wildlife habitat and erosion control, and supplying a bounty of homegrown fuel.

The principle behind cellulosic ethanol is simple. Making it as cheap as gas isn't.

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17. A small pilot operation at the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) in Golden, Colorado, has been running the longest. It can convert a ton of biomass–shredded cornstalks, switchgrass, wood–into 70 gallons (265 liters) of ethanol in about a week.

18. To unlock the cellulose molecules from the lignin, the feedstock is often pretreated with heat and acid. Then it's mixed with high-tech enzymes to break down the cellulose into sugars. The resulting dark brown goo, with a slightly sweet, molasses-like aroma, is fed into fermentation tanks where bacteria or yeast go to work to make the alcohol.

19. The current process turns just 45 percent of the energy content in the biomass into alcohol, compared with an oil refinery, which extracts 85 percent of the energy in crude oil. The efficiency will have to improve for cellulosic ethanol to compete with gasoline, and researchers are looking for better cellulose-busters. One possibility: genetically modified microbes and enzymes from the guts of termites–nature's own cellulosic energy factories.

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Cellulosic Ethanol's Big Potential

The potential, however, is huge. Exploiting the cellulose in corn plants, rather than just the kernels, could double corn's ethanol yield; switchgrass could produce as much ethanol per acre as sugarcane.

A 2005 study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Energy estimated that by boosting farm productivity and planting 50 million acres (20 million hectares) of fallow land with perennial grasses and fast-growing trees, the U.S. could produce 1.3 billion tons (about 1.2 billion metric tons) of feedstock for ethanol.

Separately, NREL calculated that all that plant matter could replace more than half the transportation fuel currently burned each year.

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Why Slimy Pond Scum Might Be The Perfect Biofuel

There is no magic-bullet fuel crop that can solve our energy woes without harming the environment, says virtually every scientist studying the issue. But most say that algae–single-celled pond scum–comes closer than any other plant because it grows in wastewater, even seawater, requiring little more than sunlight and carbon dioxide to flourish.

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20. Algae not only reduce a plant's global warming gases, but also devour other pollutants. Some algae make starch, which can be processed into ethanol; others produce tiny droplets of oil that can be brewed into biodiesel or even jet fuel.

21. Best of all, algae in the right conditions can double in mass within hours. While each acre of corn produces around 300 gallons (1,135 liters) of ethanol a year and an acre of soybeans around 60 gallons (227 liters) of biodiesel, each acre of algae theoretically can churn out more than 5,000 gallons (19,000 liters) of biofuel each year.

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"Corn or soybeans, you harvest once a year," says Berzin. "Algae you harvest every day. And we've proved we can grow algae from Boston to Arizona." Berzin's company has partnered with Arizona Public Service, the state's largest utility, to test algae production at APS's natural-gas-burning Redhawk power plant just west of Phoenix.

Algae farms around that one plant, located on 2,000 acres (809 hectares) of bone-dry Sonoran Desert, could double the current U.S. production of biodiesel, says Berzin.

The energy farm, as GreenFuel calls it, isn't much to look at, just a cluster of shipping containers and office trailers next to a plastic greenhouse structure longer than a football field and perhaps 50 feet (15 meters) wide. Outside the greenhouse, rows of large plastic tubes filled with bubbling bright green liquid hang like giant slugs from hooks.

After making a few calls to his boss, GreenFuel's security-conscious head of field operations, Marcus Gay, allows me to inspect this "seed farm," which grows algae for the greenhouse. Everything else is off-limits. The company guards its secrets closely.

With good reason: Only perhaps a dozen people on the planet know how to grow algae in high-density systems, says Gay. Algae specialists, long near the bottom of the biology food chain, are becoming the rock stars.

Two of Arizona's largest universities recently started algae programs. Their biggest challenge, as with cellulosic ethanol, is reducing the cost of algae fuel. "At the end of the day for this to work, this has to be cheaper than petroleum diesel," says Gay. "If we're one penny over the cost of diesel per gallon, we're sunk." (In July, rising costs and technical problems forced GreenFuel to shut down the Redhawk bioreactor temporarily.)

Conclusion: Cold, Hard Numbers

Supply, efficiency, and, most important, price at the pump–will determine the future of ethanol and biodiesel. But for now green fuels have an undeniable romance.


In the garage of his office complex in downtown Phoenix, Ray Hobbs, a senior engineer for APS who is leading the company's fuel initiative, walks past a small fleet of electric cars, hybrids, even a hydrogen-powered bus.

He climbs into a big diesel Ford van and turns the key. The exhaust, unlike a typical diesel's, is invisible, with just the faintest whiff of diesel smell from the algae biodiesel made at the Redhawk pilot plant. The superslick plant oil has also quieted a little of that annoying diesel rattle.

"The way I think about these things is I'm sitting in a river in a canoe," says Hobbs. "Now do I want to paddle upstream, or do I want to go with the flow? Algae is downstream, with the flow. We have processes in nature that are honed for us, that have evolved. So we can take those processes and make them faster and more efficient and harness that power. We can't wait generations to screw around with this. We have to do it now."

Hobbs says he has fielded dozens of calls from power companies interested in building an algae plant of their own to scrub emissions and help meet their renewable fuels mandate.

The lure of plant fuels even seems to have reached the petroleum-rich sands of the Middle East, where the United Arab Emirates has launched a 250-million-dollar renewable energy initiative that includes biofuels–perhaps a sign that even the sheikhs now realize that the oil age won't last forever.

Source: National Geographic

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UPDATE

The western appetite for biofuels is causing starvation in the poor world

Developing nations are being pushed to grow crops for ethanol, rather than food - all thanks to political expediency

It doesn't get madder than this. Swaziland is in the grip of a famine and receiving emergency food aid. Forty per cent of its people are facing acute food shortages. So what has the government decided to export? Biofuel made from one of its staple crops, cassava.

The government has allocated several thousand hectares of farmland to ethanol production in the district of Lavumisa, which happens to be the place worst hit by drought. It would surely be quicker and more humane to refine the Swazi people and put them in our tanks. Doubtless a team of development consultants is already doing the sums.

This is one of many examples of a trade that was described last month by Jean Ziegler, the UN's special rapporteur, as "a crime against humanity". Ziegler took up the call first made by this column for a five-year moratorium on all government targets and incentives for biofuel: the trade should be frozen until second-generation fuels - made from wood or straw or waste - become commercially available.

Otherwise, the superior purchasing power of drivers in the rich world means that they will snatch food from people's mouths. Run your car on virgin biofuel, and other people will starve.

Even the International Monetary Fund, always ready to immolate the poor on the altar of business, now warns that using food to produce biofuels "might further strain already tight supplies of arable land and water all over the world, thereby pushing food prices up even further".

This week, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation will announce the lowest global food reserves in 25 years, threatening what it calls "a very serious crisis". Even when the price of food was low, 850 million people went hungry because they could not afford to buy it. With every increment in the price of flour or grain, several million more are pushed below the breadline.

The cost of rice has risen by 20% over the past year, maize by 50%, wheat by 100%. Biofuels aren't entirely to blame - by taking land out of food production they exacerbate the effects of bad harvests and rising demand - but almost all the major agencies are now warning against expansion. And almost all the major governments are ignoring them.

They turn away because biofuels offer a means of avoiding hard political choices. They create the impression that governments can cut carbon emissions and - as Ruth Kelly, the British transport secretary, announced last week - keep expanding the transport networks.

New figures show that British drivers puttered past the 500bn kilometre mark for the first time last year. But it doesn't matter: we just have to change the fuel we use. No one has to be confronted. The demands of the motoring lobby and the business groups clamouring for new infrastructure can be met. The people being pushed off their land remain unheard.

A recent study by the Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen shows that the official estimates have ignored the contribution of nitrogen fertilisers. They generate a greenhouse gas - nitrous oxide - that is 296 times as powerful as CO2.

These emissions alone ensure that ethanol from maize causes between 0.9 and 1.5 times as much warming as petrol, while rapeseed oil (the source of more than 80% of the world's biodiesel) generates 1-1.7 times the impact of diesel. This is before you account for the changes in land use.

A paper published in the journal Science three months ago suggests that protecting uncultivated land saves, over 30 years, between two and nine times the carbon emissions you might avoid by ploughing it and planting biofuels.

Last year the research group LMC International estimated that if the British and European target of a 5% contribution from biofuels were to be adopted by the rest of the world, the global acreage of cultivated land would expand by 15%. That means the end of most tropical forests. It might also cause runaway climate change.

The British government says it will strive to ensure that "only the most sustainable biofuels" will be used in the UK. It has no means of enforcing this aim - it admits that if it tried to impose a binding standard it would break world trade rules.

But even if "sustainability" could be enforced, what exactly does it mean? You could, for example, ban palm oil from new plantations. This is the most destructive kind of biofuel, driving deforestation in Malaysia and Indonesia.

But the ban would change nothing. As Carl Bek-Nielsen, vice chairman of Malaysia's United Plantations Berhad, remarked: "Even if it is another oil that goes into biodiesel, that other oil then needs to be replaced. Either way, there's going to be a vacuum and palm oil can fill that vacuum."

The knock-on effects cause the destruction you are trying to avoid. The only sustainable biofuel is recycled waste oil, but the available volumes are tiny.

If the governments promoting biofuels do not reverse their policies, the humanitarian impact will be greater than that of the Iraq war. Millions will be displaced, hundreds of millions more could go hungry.

This crime against humanity is a complex one, but that neither lessens nor excuses it. If people starve because of biofuels, Ruth Kelly and her peers will have killed them. Like all such crimes, it is perpetrated by cowards, attacking the weak to avoid confronting the strong.

Full article at Guardian