The Ethanol Hoax
In the past couple of years, as the price of a gallon of gas rose above $2, beyond $3 and past $4 the clamor for alternate sources of energy has become louder and louder. In our desperation some people have reached out for corn based ethanol as a solution to our energy problems. While at first this sounded like a good solution many serious problems have become evident. It turns out that corn based ethanol is not the bargain we were told it would be.
We should have smelled a rat from the start. The production of corm isn’t free. A lot of energy intensive resources are required to grow every acre of corn. Aside from man made fertilizers, farmers have to use a lot of expensive pesticides both of which damage the environment and leave lasting damage. The production of corn also requires the use of machinery that burns fossil fuels. The tractors and other farm machines run on diesel refined from oil. We have used a lot of fossil fuels and we haven’t produced an ounce of ethanol yet.
Ethanol is produced by fermenting the sugar found in corn. Corn starch can also be used to produce ethanol but it must first be turned into sugar. While yeast will happily sit and ferment sugars into alcohol without human supervision, processing the starch into sugar requires more energy and resources. To make things harder yeast cannot convert 100% of the sugar into alcohol. Ethanol id toxic to yeas and it can only tolerate about 15% before it is killed. The ethanol has to be removed before the yeast can make more. This extraction is achieved by distillation. The heat required for the distillation kills the yeast. Ethanol boils above 173°F and even the hardies of yeast passes away at temperatures above 158°F. To ferment the remaining sugar, the whole concoction has to coo down. While yeast can survive in much warmer temperatures its optimum range is between 50°F and 86°F. Above 98.6°F yeast stop producing alcohol altogether. Therefore the entire concoction has to be heated, cooled and let sit to ferment again and again in order to turn as much sugar into ethanol as possible. All that repeated heating (and cooling if refrigeration is used to speed up the process) requires even more energy. So far a hell of a lot of energy has bee used to turn corn seeds into ethanol and more will be used to transport it to customers. By the end of this process an ethanol burning engine would have to output a miraculous amount of energy in order to offset all the energy that was required to produce that ethanol. But alas, gallon per gallon ethanol produces less energy than gasoline. Instead of saving energy, we spend more energy by making ethanol. Perhaps if we produced ethanol in a greener process we may reduce its energy footprint but it would not take away the downsides of ethanol.
We could perhaps live with a less efficient fuel if it made us independent from oil. Unfortunately ethanol pollutes more than gasoline. Gasoline mixed with ethanol releases more toxic compounds and increases green house gas emissions. But ethanol will not make us independent from oil. In order to replace oil we would have to turn all crop land over to the production of ethanol and even then we would need 20% more to satisfy our needs. Never mind that we wouldn’t have any land left to grow our food. We may become energy independent only to become dependant on other nations for our food. If you think the recent salmonella outbreak was bad, wait until all of our food is imported from South of the border. Can you say “Montezuma’s revenge?”
Aside from the resource and energy costs involved in producing every gallon of ethanol there are other hidden costs and unintended consequences that make its use as an alternate energy source doubtful at best. The US government taxes imports of ethanol for fuel and gives a tax break for fuels that use ethanol. This policy increases the profits from making ethanol artificially, increasing demand for ethanol fuels in the process. This has the doubly perverse effect of increasing food costs while wasting our tax money. The increased cost of grains brought on by the heightened demand for corn has made raising farm animals far more expensive. Another perverse result of the increased demand for ethanol is that more land is being used in the US and abroad. Badly needed forested lands are being cleared in order to produce more ethanol thus increasing greenhouse gases by the reduction of CO2 sequestering trees. Instead of being a solution to our energy needs, ethanol has turned out to be a malicious hoax that has diverted precious resources from real solutions while making the problems it was supposed to solve even worse.
