Ethanol

[Michael Madden]

Wait until Ethanol costs you in the end.
Worse fuel economy.
Higher prices a products across the board.
Damage to your engine/catalytic converter.
Damage to you small engines.

Ethanol also has a negative energy balance. Ethanol from corn, switchgrass, and wood biomass requires 29%, 50%, and 57% more energy, respectively, to create the ethanol than the energy contained within the fuel.
Because ethanol production requires a significant amount of energy, and most energy in the US is produced from coal, the small reduction in CO2 and other polluting emissions from burning ethanol versus gasoline will be more than offset by the power needed to produce the ethanol.
Ethanol crops have a notoriously low energy yield per hectare. Thus, it requires a large amount of land to produce a meaningful amount of ethanol. Last year, 20% of the total corn crop was used to produce ethanol, and it offset only 1% of US oil use.
I don’t think that ethanol is a viable fuel of the future unless huge, unlikely technological advances are made. But if we absolutely had to use ethanol, corn is not the biomass we should be using to produce it.

First, corn farming is very hard on soil. It requires nitrogen fertilizer, petroleum-based pesticides, and is very energy intensive (source). Secondly, it also requires a lot of water, water that is in scarce supply in the Midwest, where a lot of corn is grown. Finally, because corn is food, and is an input in the production of many other types of food, ethanol production is driving up food prices all over the US and the world.

Cellulosic ethanol, produced from trees or switchgrass, is a lesser evil. Although cellulosic ethanol production still has a negative energy balance like production from corn, trees and switchgrass are much easier to cultivate. Switchgrass can grow pretty much anywhere, and is harder to kill than corn. In addition, it requires very little fertilizer and herbicide (wikipedia).

I don’t think that ethanol would have so much support from politicians if we were only talking about trees and switchgrass. Corn is the name of the game for many politicians because they’re getting money from corn businesses… why else would a new energy bill support ethanol production from corn when there are better ethanol alternatives out there that avoid many of corn’s problems?