Ethanol and Green Energy: An Absurdity By James Reed
One of the great Green energy myths is that corn-base ethanol has net zero carbon emissions, and that it is preferable to the use of petrol. As Dr Mercola shows in a now deleted post, studies have shown that this is a myth of carbon neutrality. A study published in 2016 found corn grown for ethanol only offset 37 percent of carbon dioxide emissions produced by burning biofuels. Thus, ethanol as a fuel for vehicles resulted in net-positive carbon dioxide emissions that are greater than petrol.
The reasons for this come from how the actual corn is produced, which requires land to be ploughed, corn watered, usually by sprinkler systems that are backed by pumped water (requiring energy), and the corn transported and processed. All that background processes get conveniently forgotten by the Greens in their manic attacks upon fossil fuels.
Other studies have shown that carbon dioxide emissions from corn-based ethanol are 24 percent greater than petrol. It is a losing fuel, not even considering that the corn is needed for human consumption in this age of food shortage.
“Carbon neutrality is the holy grail of the biofuel industry. It refers to a product that has net zero carbon emissions. In the case of ethanol, the corn or soybeans grown to produce it would have to remove as much carbon dioxide from the environment as is given off when the ethanol is burned.
The manufacture and use of ethanol in the U.S. has been allowed to expand based on the assumption that it’s carbon neutral and therefore far better for the environment than gasoline. However, a 2016 study1 by professor John DeCicco, Ph.D., at the University of Michigan, showed that such assumptions were categorically false.
Ethanol Is Far From Carbon Neutral
What DeCicco and his team discovered was that biofuels such as corn ethanol are associated with a net increase in carbon dioxide emissions — even more so than gasoline. It turns out that the crops only offset 37% of carbon dioxide emissions produced by burning biofuels. At the time, DeCicco explained:2
"The name of the game is to speed up how much CO2 [carbon dioxide] you remove from the air … The best way to begin removing more CO2 from the air is to grow more trees and leave them. Prior to settlement, Michigan was heavily forested.
A state like Michigan could do much more to balance out the tailpipe emissions of CO2 by reforesting than by repurposing the corn and soybeans grown in the state into biofuels. That is just a kind of shell game that's not working."
Granted, DeCicco's study was funded by the American Petroleum Institute, which obviously has reason to want to discredit the sustainability of biofuels. However, the research reiterates what other, more independent researchers have found before.
Ethanol Raises Net Carbon Emissions
For example, in 2014, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) released a report titled "Ethanol's Broken Promise,"3 which reached similar conclusions as DeCicco's study. It too concluded that corn ethanol is worse for the environment than gasoline.
One of the primary reasons why growing corn for ethanol has a net-positive carbon impact is because farmers are plowing up native grasslands to make more room for corn. The failure to take this change in land use into account is how proponents of biofuels have been able to perpetuate the myth that it’s carbon neutral.
According to EWG, more than 8 million acres of grassland and wetlands were converted to corn between 2008 and 2011 alone, and every time an acre of grassland is plowed, 60 tons of carbon dioxide are released into the environment.4
So, while the ethanol fuel program was designed to reduce carbon emissions, the loss of grasslands does just the opposite. Estimates showing corn ethanol's positive influence on the environment have also failed to consider the water needed to grow the corn.
“Ignoring water constraints underestimates emissions from land-use change by 28%,” EWG reported.5 According to agricultural economists at Purdue University, when corn plants' water needs are considered, corn ethanol is worse for the environment than gasoline.6
The EWG also cited data debunking the false claim that ethanol has no impact on the price of corn and other agricultural commodities. According to scientists with the National Academies, the radical change in the proportion of corn used for ethanol resulted in the price of corn rising by 20% and 40% between 2007 and 2009 alone. This is partly why anti-hunger organizations have been so against corn-based ethanol.
The Many Downsides of Biofuels
A five-year study7,8 published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) in February 2022 also came down hard on corn-based ethanol, concluding its CO2 emissions are at least 24% greater than that of gasoline. On top of that, it has led to increased fertilizer use, resulting in greater water pollution and a growing dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. As reported by Civil Eats:9
“Despite the promise that the RFS [renewable fuel standard] would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, a new study ... finds that expansion of U.S. corn cultivation has come at eye-popping environmental costs.
Corn production expanded by 8.7%, or 2.8 million hectares (6.9 million acres), between 2008 and 2016. As a result, the researchers found that nationwide annual fertilizer use surged by 3 to 8% and water pollutants rose by 3 to 5%.
The sheer extent of domestic land use change, however, generated greenhouse gas emissions that are, at best, equivalent to those caused by gasoline use — and likely at least 24% higher.
That’s because the RFS caused corn prices to spike by 30% and soybean and other crops by 20%. As a result, farmers planted corn everywhere they could, replacing other crops and pastureland, and plowing up land that had previously been reserved for conservation purposes. They also often skipped the soybeans in their rotations, despite the potential impacts on their soil ...
Previous studies ... dramatically underestimated the impacts those land use changes had on carbon emissions; in fact, the models treated the land that was converted from conservation or pasture as if there was little change in the amount of carbon stored once it was planted with corn — which runs counter to existing empirical evidence10 ...
In 2008 ... Timothy Searchinger, a senior researcher at Princeton University’s Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment, was one of several who predicted11 that using U.S. croplands for biofuels would increase greenhouse gas emissions through land use change.
Now, his assessment has been validated by the new study. Searchinger says the new study boils down to a simple, inescapable truth: Using land has a cost. And some uses simply don’t make sense because the cost is too high.
‘It’s crazy to use this very limited resource — highly productive land — for energy,’ he said. ‘It’s almost spectacularly inefficient.’ Corn ethanol converts 0.15% of solar energy into usable energy, while a solar cell today converts 15 to 20% of sunlight to energy. ‘And the good news is you don’t need to put a solar cell on the best available farmland.’”
Will Large-Scale Carbon Capture Worsen the Situation?
Fertile farmland may soon also be sacrificed for large-scale carbon capture and sequestration projects that are being implemented in South Dakota, North Dakota, Iowa, Minnesota and Nebraska. A 700 mile pipeline will pump waste from multiple ethanol plants in these states to a final destination in North Dakota where more energy will be required to inject it into the ground. The experts guarantee no problems will occur with underground water sources or other potential hazardous leaks. Eminent domain laws will allow the governments to trench this pipeline without the farmers permission.
In a March 4, 2022, interview with SDPB Radio, Chris Hill, director of permitting for the Summit Carbon Solutions project, explained how they intend to capture and sequester the carbon emitted during the ethanol fermentation process:
“The science behind it is relatively straightforward ... fermentation is not a new process ... The bugs eat the sugars or the starches that are from the corn. They ultimately produce alcohols. They release CO2 in that process. That CO2 bubbles up through the fermentation tanks and ultimately leaves the tanks and it's currently being emitted to the atmosphere. So that's the science and where the CO2 is coming from.
We'll be pulling the CO2 off its current emission point, which is the stack. And what we're doing with that is, we're going to use multistage compression to pressurize the CO2 into a dense phase ...
After the CO2 is compressed into a dense phase ... where it behaves similar to a liquid, it's going to be injected into a pipeline that will range between 4 inches and 24 inches depending on where you're at in the system, ultimately to transport that CO2 up to North Dakota, just west of Bismarck in the Oliver/Mercer county area, where it will be injected for safe and permanent sequestration ...
The USGS's study estimates that the state of North Dakota has a capacity to store approximately 250 billion metric tons of CO2 ... And our annual capacity of 12 million metric tons. You can easily calculate ... that there's ... over 100 years of capacity in that area ...”
Summit Carbon Solutions is the largest of three companies seeking to pipe CO2 from ethanol-producing plants into porous rock, deep underground. The two others are Archer-Daniels-Midland and Navigator CO2 Ventures.12
What Can Go Wrong?
According to Hill, the science behind this ridiculous plan has been carefully analyzed and the process deemed 100% safe. Does that mean nothing can go wrong? Hardly. If history tells us anything, it’s that anything that can go wrong probably will, sooner or later, and when it comes to liquefied CO2 gas under pressure, it just so happens to be explosive when exposed to heat above 125 degrees Fahrenheit (52 degrees Celsius).13
Could liquefied CO2, under pressure, deep down in a rock formation, possibly get heated to combustible temperatures under extreme conditions? Something to ponder. Exposure to this CO2, say if a pipe were to bust a leak, also has severe health impacts, ranging from dizziness and increased heart rate to nervous system damage, frostbite and rapid suffocation.14
Aside from that, there’s the direct and immediate threat to farmers — and anyone who needs food — as usable farmland may be seized through eminent domain for these pipelines.15 Seizing the land of small farmers to install CO2 sequestration pipelines hardly seems to be a wise move, seeing how all the signs point to severe food shortages and, potentially, worldwide famine in coming years.
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