What does Corn have in Common with a Sailing Clipper? – Sounds like the start of a joke…
I’ve been getting a lot of good comments on an earlier post about the viability of ethanol fuel. Many commenters seem to feel that corn-based ethanol is not a realistic long-term solution to our fuel problems, and it always seems to surprise them when I acknowledge that in fact, that’s true.
Corn-based ethanol cannot possibly become the primary, or even a primary, fuel source in the United States. The reason is obvious: even if we took every acre of arable land that wasn’t absolutely required for food production and planted corn on it wall-to-wall, the amount of fuel that would be produced would only be a fairly small fraction of the fuel we use. There just isn’t enough available land; plant-based fuels are relatively low in energy density and so you need a lot of plant feedstock to make a gallon of good fuel.
Why, then, should we be pursuing corn-based ethanol? The answer is simple: it is a bridge to an alcohol economy. Bob Zubrin’s excellent book “Energy Victory” lays out the case for transitioning the US to an alcohol-based, rather than petroleum-based, economy for our heating and transportation needs. He makes the case far better than I could, so although I won’t promise not to blog about it, I will forego the ten-page lecture for now. The bottom line is that the US can very easily become self-sufficient in fuel if we have an alcohol-based fuel economy, a self-sufficiency that we simply cannot attain with a petroleum economy. We should use our oil to make plastic, and use our staggering agricultural power as the basis for our fuel needs. At the very least, we need an alternative fuel source.
But wait – didn’t I just say that we can’t do it with corn? Yes, I did. But right now, corn is the feedstock of choice for the ethanol technologies that we have. We have to start somewhere; it’s very difficult for both technological and economic reasons to just declare a full-fledged alcohol economy. The analogy I like to use is the development of oceangoing ships. We started with sailing vessels, which over time became larger, more complex, more powerful, and more capable. Eventually sailing ships became obsolete as wood- and then coal-burning steamships were developed – and for a long time, both sailing ships and steamships plied the same trade lanes. Coal-burners were in turn made obsolete by oil-burning ships, which used the same basic technology but which were much easier to refuel at sea and could go longer distances without refueling. Those ships were in turn made obsolete – although again, there are still plenty of them in the ocean – by nuclear-powered vessels that drew on the power of the atom and never need refueling.
In terms of the alcohol economy, we are at the sailboat stage. We’ve begun to develop the next generation of coal and wood-burners – but we’re still quite dependent on the sailing ships we already have sitting out at the dock. We still have to trade with countries overseas, and we can’t just shut down the trading economy while we wait for the steamships to get better – because the steamships will never get better if there is no trading economy for the researchers to sell into. We go to sea with the ships we have, and we constantly work on making the next generation better.
On Monday I’ll tell you more about why we need corn in order to get to the next stage of ethanol development.