Ethanol is Not Green

The biggest lie being told concerning the War Against Oil in the year 2007 is that ethanol is a green fuel.

(Pictured is an ethanol fire, from a page detailing environmental disasters involving ethanol.)

It comes from green things, but it is not a green fuel.

Ethanol is alcohol. Ethanol produces energy by burning. Ethanol factories release  carbon monoxide, methanol and some carcinogens at levels "many times greater" than promised.

Ethanol is popular because it requires no change in our energy-using infrastructure and because it rewards political interest groups. Already, the industry is pressing the government for relief on pollution standards and the government is responding favorably.

Ethanol first came to public prominence as a substitute for another additive, MTBE. Whether it is, on balance, better or worse for the environment than MTBE is a matter for dispute. It's generally worse for the air, a little better for the water, than MTBE. That's not a revolutionary improvement. It is, at best, evolutionary.

Ethanol is part of a re-branding campaign which seeks to substitute carbon-for-carbon by calling non-oil carbon "alternative fuels." The impact is the same as calling followers of the Religious Right "people of faith," and demanding they be respected. Those of us who support immediate work for a hydrogen cycle are thus branded with being "against alternative fuels," just as those who disagree with the Religious Right in the other argument are branded as opposing "people of faith."

A benign term can hide some evil meanings.

Then we come to the question of raw materials. In the U.S., it's corn, solely because of politics. Archer Daniels Midland has been pushing corn ethanol for years, and domestic sugar producers have tariffs that keep foreign sugar out. It's a comfortable arrangement, but comfort does not solve problems. While efforts to produce ethanol from other biomass sources sounds great in theory, it's actually an enormous scam, because in the end you're still burning alcohol, and distilling alcohol, rather than moving away from the carbon cycle in any way.

The most efficient way to produce ethanol is the way they did it in the 17th century, with sugar. But sugar as a crop is horrible to the soil, and the workers who produce sugar are uniformly exploited. It's a labor-intensive crop, and the same conditions under which south Florida's cane workers are exploited exist in Brazil, in trumps and doubled. Add to that the fact that cane growers are destroying the rain forest in order to destroy the underlying soil for their crop and there's no bargain here -- none at all.

So while it's possible that some ethanol can substitute for some additives and make some gasoline burn a little sweeter (at a price) that does not mean that ethanol is green. It is the color of its best-known product, molasses, and just as clear.

The only real answer in The War Against Oil is to eliminate hydrocarbons entirely, and move toward hydrogen. Producing hydrogen takes energy, but that energy can come from the Sun or the Earth or the wind or the water. You turn electricity into hydrogen through electrolysis, separating it from the oxygen in H2O. You then transfer that hydrogen in either tanks or pipelines to where it can be used in fuel cells, where the process is reversed, hydrogen and oxygen producing water and energy.

This is basic rocket science, but rocket science, in the end, isn't really rocket science. That is, it's not that complex.

Comments

[Lisa]

Agreed. I thought we had this conversation about how craptacular ethanol is as an alternative energy back in the 90s and everyone agreed that it was not so great.

Now suddenly, we are looking at ethanol as if it is a fresh new item in the alternative energy cornucopia.

I have noticed similar attempts to push coal and nuclear energy as fresh new and revolutionary alternatives to oil. What is going on?

[Gary Dikkers]

Lisa said,

"I thought we had this conversation about how craptacular ethanol is as an alternative energy back in the 90s and everyone agreed that it was not so great."

You're right, we did. The key point to understand is that the current momentum for corn ethanol has nothing to do with national energy policy, but instead has everything to do with politics.

The truth is that corn ethanol is not green, efficient, or sustainable. At every stage of industrial corn farming and reforming that corn into ethanol, the process is dependent on consuming fossil fuels.

If industrial corn farms and ethanol plants were not allowed to use fossil fuels, there would be no corn ethanol.

Think about it: Have you ever heard of a farmer driving a tractor or corn picker that runs on ethanol? Have you heard of a farmer spreading synthetic nitrogen fertilizer made from ethanol instead of natural gas? How many ethanol plants get their thermal energy from a source other than natural gas or coal? In fact, ethanol plants don't even use ethanol-powered trucks to deliver the ethanol they make. (Something they would surely do if it made sense. Why do they spend money on expensive fossil fuels instead of using the fuel they make?)

[Brad Hutchings]

How funny. In an article you recently criticized as astroturfing, the author who you called a shill for the carbon industry makes the same point about the economics of ethanol. Of course, he offers a more eloquently expressed and informed opinion, having a PhD in economics and access to a wide circle of economists who have actual data. But since Arnold Kling isn't all burka'd up for your oil jihad, you can't see if there might be some commonality in your positions.

When you see the recurring and spectacularly negative effects of all the do-good regulation of the oil industry (MTBE, ethanol tariffs, subsidies, price floors, regional blends, etc.), what makes you think that the government could pull the levers right to create a hydrogen economy? It's the problem with your entire argument. You're completely off the reservation on this. Even die hard So Cal liberals start rioting when gas hits $3/gallon.