Lofty Matters

Ethanol Will Free Us

What is wrong with pursuing energy independence? First of all, the task of replacing what we import is too huge. Even if, for this discussion, we limit ourselves to focusing only on oil (remember, America also buys large amounts of foreign natural gas, electricity, and coal), this task would be far more overwhelming than many people want to believe.

Even if we turned our entire corn crop into ethanol the fuel produced would equal less than a sixth of the gasoline we currently use. Other fuel candidates such as hydrogen are even less productive. The issue isn’t just quantity, either…the quality isn’t up to snuff either. Oil dominates the energy economy — especially the transportation sector. This is 95 percent dependent on crude oil.

An oil company on average burns the equivalent of 1 gallon of oil to produce 20 gallons of oil. This means that oil’s energy return on energy invested is very high. Conversely, the return for oil’s alternatives is quite low. Hydrogen was once considered the natural successor to oil. Unfortunately, it is so difficult to refine and handle that a gallon of hydrogen contains approximately 25 percent less energy than was consumed to produce it. For ethanol’s energy return, scientists are currently debating whether it may be slightly positive or completely negative.

Oil’s qualities were altogether unbeatable when it was $25 a barrel. Even at $100 per barrel it still has an important advantage. Because it was created years and years ago and left for us deep underground, oil exists essentially in a state of economic isolation. It can be produced, pumped from the ground, and refined…all without directly impinging on other players of the world economy. Many of the alternatives to oil are intricately linked to the larger economy…meaning that to make more of an alternative fuel is to have less of something else (food, for example).

Now eventually, oil’s advantages will prove themselves illusory due to the vast environmental costs as well as the finite supply. Oil’s decline will not make alternatives any less problematic, however. Higher prices do encourage alternatives to expand but these expansions will come at substantial cost. Good U.S. farmland is already scarce as it is. Every additional acre of corn that is allocated for ethanol is an acre that will be unavailable for soybeans or wheat. These prices will then rise…and with this rise we get a ripple effect that next affects meat, milk, etc.

The ripple effect of energy alternatives isn’t just in the economic sphere, either. Eager farmers have expanded their corn crops creating other problems. They’ve utilized land not suitable for intensive agriculture and this has exacerbated erosion and other environmental problems. Corn is also the most chemically intensive commercial grain crop and its runoff is attributable to causing oceanic dead zones and pesticide-laden groundwater.

It’s easy and tempting to lay all of this at the feet of Ethanol. Unfortunately, the sad truth is that all of the alternatives involve at least some environmental or other negative costs. Wind requires large amounts of land. Solar-cell manufacturing is chemically intensive. Nuclear energy carries with it many safety and security concerns.

These problems make obvious a critical flaw in the paradigm of energy independence. We can no longer look at the energy economy as a separate entity to be manipulated. Everything is entertwined, which means that fixing a problem in one part of the system unavoidably creates a new problem, or a whole series of problems, somewhere else.