Support for Ethanol (Not just Corn)
After my last post, let’s get back onto dry land where we can get some farming done. We know that we need to move to an alcohol economy so that we can grow our own fuel instead of being dependent on hostile foreign countries for it. That’s a multi-step process. It would be great if we could just turn a valve somewhere in Missouri and have a billion barrels of ethanol come flowing out, but it doesn’t work that way. We have to develop the ability to make alcohol-based fuels, like ethanol, in economical and environmentally sustainable ways. We also have to give the transportation and heating infrastructure time to adapt to the changing fuel base of the country. A trillion barrels of ethanol does us no good if there are no cars that can burn it; right now we scrape by with adding a bit of ethanol into regular gasoline so that engines can burn it, but the millions of ethanol-friendly cars we need simply aren’t on the road yet. They can’t get on the road without a fuel base already in existence. Corn-based ethanol is the first step on a stairway that leads upwards to fuel independence for our country; it isn’t the whole stairway.
Bad press about the deficiencies of ethanol – some real, some exaggerated, and some just plain invented – has caused some people to sour on the concept of alcohol fuels. This is just wrong; it would be like deciding that basketball is a terrible sport because certain players behaved badly in their hotel rooms after the game. Corn-based ethanol will not be the salvation of our fuel economy, but it will be the first step in developing the cellulosic ethanol technologies that can save us.
Cellulosic ethanol is the production of an alcohol fuel from cellulose. Unlike current ethanol technologies, which requite a very high grade of organic product as feedstock, cellulosic ethanol can use really terrible plants (otherwise useless) and organic matter – stuff that farmers pay to have hauled away from the fields after harvest, it’s so useless at the moment. Cellulosic ethanol can also be created from old phone books, sawmill/paper mill and cotton gin byproducts, lawn clippings and all the fruits and vegetables that your grocer throws away after they expire. (–think flux capacitor from the 80’s movie Back to the Future) The waste-to-energy potential alone of cellulosic ethanol is staggering – and that’s just using the stuff that we throw away now. Crops formulated for cellulosic ethanol potential, like switchgrass and miscanthus, actually have far more energy per acre than our current corn-based feedstock. Even preliminary test results are impressive. It would take 25% of US cropland converted to corn in order to produce enough conventional ethanol to meet 20% of US energy needs, but only about 9% of cropland planted with miscanthus – a 250% improvement over the yield from corn. And unlike corn, miscanthus is very tolerant of poor soil and weather conditions – it doesn’t need to be planted on prime agricultural land. We can grow it on garbage land that would otherwise simply be barren – expanding the farm economy, rather than just redirecting part of its output into energy.
Cellulosic production is not economically feasible at the moment – but it is getting better every year. The existence of an ethanol economy based on corn is providing the driver for research and development into cellulosic ethanol, because companies, individuals and entrepreneurs can see that there is a market for their product if they can get the processes working. Like the sailing ship economy, corn-based ethanol provides a structure for the development of new and better technologies – technologies that wouldn’t be developed in a vacuum.
Corn won’t get us to the finish line, but we need it in order to get off the starting line.