Gasohol in America: Dubious Present, Promising Future - Assignment Example

Justin Tidwell July 26, 2010 IDS 390VA Final Paper Gasohol in America: Dubious Present; Promising Future? One of the principal technological challenges for humankind today is the effort to reduce our use of fossil fuels by substituting the use of renewable energy sources. Renewable energy promises several important benefits: little or no contribution to global warming, lower environmental impact in general, reduced dependency on finite and declining reserves (particularly of petroleum), economic benefits from reducing the flow of money overseas to pay for oil and natural gas, and political and security benefits from reducing our dependence on resources located in volatile and frequently hostile parts of the world. One of the largest users of fossil fuel – almost all of it petroleum – is the transportation sector. Petroleum products are particularly useful for powering vehicles, since they are “energy dense” (i.e. they have a large amount of usable energy for a given weight and volume of fuel), reasonably safe, easily transported and dispensed, and can be exploited effectively using relatively inexpensive, reliable, and well-established technology (i.e. gasoline and diesel engines). No really attractive substitute for liquid vehicle fuels is available so far; all-electric vehicles are an alternative, but they suffer from high initial expense, limited range before needing to be recharged, and slow recharge times. No battery invented so far has the energy density of gasoline, and even if a network of quick-battery-swap stations is created, it is hard to imagine electric vehicles replacing conventional ones in a large country like the United States with its long distances, huge existing vehicle stock, and traditional love of high performance and convenience. This presents a problem for the renewable-energy movement: none of the “standard” sources of renewable energy is available in a convenient, liquid, energy-dense form. Most renewable energy sources are harnessed as heat (including solar hot-water heating) or electricity (from wind, photovoltaic panels, hydroelectric plants, etc.) – which are elegant solutions to some problems, but are not optimal for transportation. One solution that has been offered to this dilemma is bio-ethanol: ethyl (“drinking”) alcohol produced by fermentation of crops, generally corn (in the United States) or sugar cane (in Brazil and other tropical locations). Ethanol has been touted as a kind of “liquid sunshine” (White Cap Village 2010) which provides the benefits of renewable energy in convenient form; but it has also been decried as a boondoggle or even a scam (Bryce 2010, Wallace 2009), damaging the environment, absorbing billions of dollars in government subsidies, and providing little if any real fossil-energy savings. According to the skeptics, ethanol as a vehicle fuel – at least ethanol based on corn – is really just a scheme to sell more corn. Gasohol: Ethanol as a fuel in the U.S. Ethanol is significantly different from gasoline in its chemical and physical properties; as a result, today’s conventional gasoline engines cannot be run successfully on pure ethanol or even on ethanol-gasoline mixtures with high ethanol content. Accordingly, the standard “gasohol” blend in the United States is E10: 10% ethanol by volume, with the remainder composed of ordinary gasoline; government regulations do not permit higher-ethanol-content mixtures to be sold as regular vehicle fuel. E10 is tolerated by almost all post-1985 gasoline-powered cars, although there have been a number of cases where gasohol has damaged engines; in one case, over 200,000 Lexus cars were recalled because of a vulnerability to gasohol corrosion (NHTSA 2009, p. 6; Wallace 2009, p. 2). While mileage is reduced by a small percentage (American Coalition for Ethanol 2005, Des Moines Register 2006), the difference between E10 and “normal” gasoline as automobile fuels is otherwise negligible. Ethanol advocates claim that the limit on ethanol content for ordinary vehicles could safely be raised to 15% (E15) or even 20% (Bevill 2008), while skeptics, unsurprisingly, claim that even 10% is too much. The ethanol industry has an obvious motive for promoting higher ethanol concentrations: the current 10% limit, combined with reduced gasoline usage as a result of the current recession, imposes an upper limit on ethanol usage that is significantly below the U.S. ethanol industry’s present and planned production capacity (Shumaker & Gardner 2009). This phenomenon is known as the “blend wall” (Bryce 2010): since there is little or nothing ethanol producers can do to increase the overall demand for vehicle fuel, the only option for them to increase ethanol sales (or even to maintain them in the face of an overall slump in fuel demand) is to increase the proportion of ethanol in the fuel sold. To date, the U.S. government has failed to authorize the shift to ethanol levels above 10%, to the frustration of the ethanol industry (Blanco 2010, RFA 2010). Ethanol can also be used at higher concentrations by “flex-fuel” vehicles, or even at 100% strength in vehicles manufactured for that purpose. (Diesel engines can also be manufactured to use ethanol fuel.) There are already several million flex-fuel vehicles in the United States, but these constitute a small part of the overall U.S. vehicle stock; for the medium-term future, the principal market for ethanol in the U.S. will continue to be as a fuel for unmodified gasoline-burning cars. Ethanol Production Technology As explained by the Renewable Fuels Association (RFA undated), the production process for ethanol is essentially the same as that for moonshine: corn meal is mixed with water to form a “mash”, treated with enzymes to break down starch molecules into simple sugars, cooked, and fermented with yeast for three to four days. The yeast convert sugars to ethanol and carbon dioxide. Once fermentation is complete, the resulting brew is distilled to the maximum concentration of alcohol possible – 95% alcohol, or 190 proof. (At this purity, an ethanol-water mixture boils at a constant temperature, so further refinement by distillation is impossible.) A molecular sieve is used to remove almost all remaining water; then enough gasoline or other non-drinkable substance is added to avoid beverage taxes, and the ethanol is ready for use as a fuel. Useful by-products of the fermentation and distillation process include the carbon dioxide released during fermentation, as well as mash residues used as animal feed. Energy/Environmental Accounting “Conventional” renewable energy sources like wind- or solar-generated electricity are relatively easy to “audit”, since once the requisite equipment is built and installed, the energy produced is almost completely “free”. Ethanol, on the other hand, is produced through a very complex procedure involving both farming and processing, with energy and other resource inputs as well as environmental outputs at many stages along the way. For simplicity’s sake, we can assume that sunshine (the source of the energy in ethanol) is free; but since ethanol would corrode most current pipelines, even the transportation and distribution of ethanol involves additional expense and environmental impact (Des Moines Register 2006). We can divide the costs of ethanol into four broad categories: Fossil-fuel inputs, which also result in the release of carbon dioxide and other pollutants; Other resource inputs; Other environmental costs; Environmental and economic opportunity costs. Fossil-fuel inputs include the fuel involved in plowing, seeding, harvesting, transporting the harvested corn, and so on, as well as the energy used in processing the harvested corn into ethanol and transporting the finished product. Some of the other resources required to grow the corn, such as water, fertilizer, and other chemicals, have their own fossil-fuel inputs. Fertilizers require other resources to produce, and fresh water itself is a finite resource. In addition to consuming resources, farming produces pollution: carbon dioxide and other air pollutants, as well as runoff containing fertilizers and pesticides that can damage lakes, streams, and aquifers. Finally, there are opportunity costs: for example, land used for farming could be left wild, helping to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide and providing habitats for wildlife. Further, the use of corn for ethanol fuel has significantly raised the price of corn used as food, with more than 25% of the total U.S. grain crop (and, by implication, a much higher percentage of the U.S. corn crop) devoted to ethanol production in 2009 (Earth Policy Institute 2010; the Des Moines Register gives a figure of roughly 15% for the proportion of the 2005-2006 corn crop used for ethanol, and the ethanol industry expanded rapidly in the intervening years). When consumers pay more for corn and corn products (which are ubiquitous in the American diet, since corn syrup, corn starch, and other corn products are widely used in many foods), this is not normally counted as part of the price of ethanol; but in fact it should be counted as one of the many subsidies the ethanol industry receives, since ethanol processors pay the average market price for the corn they use rather than the marginal cost of producing the additional corn that the ethanol industry requires. With all these complexities, it is unsurprising that – even after billions of dollars have been spent building a massive ethanol industry – there is no consensus on whether corn-based ethanol is really economically and environmentally viable. There are so many variables and assumptions involved that it difficult, if not impossible, to arrive at a single, reliable figure for the energy savings – if any – produced by using ethanol as a vehicle fuel. According to a National Academy of Sciences report (cited in Des Moines Register 2006), ethanol produced from corn provides 25% more energy than the fossil energy used in creating it; considering the direct subsidies provided to the ethanol industry, the indirect subsidies (such as water made available to farmers at less than its true cost), the higher food prices caused by the massive use of corn for fuel, and the other economic and environmental costs of the ethanol industry, this 25% “surplus” is probably a significant real-life deficit – meaning that the U.S. ethanol industry in its current form is not really economically and environmentally viable, “liquid sunshine” claims notwithstanding. (Others disagree, of course; see, for example, Blume, undated, for a rather extreme opinion in this vein. Note, though, that the only expert Blume cites in support of his assertion that ethanol produces a large energy surplus is Isaias de Carvalho Macedo, who appears to have been writing about ethanol produced from sugar cane in Brazil rather than corn-based ethanol produced in the United States.) In order for ethanol to be enthusiastically accepted as a “green” and economic energy source, its energy-surplus level would have to be much higher than 25%. Future Promise While there are possibilities for greater efficiency in the production of ethanol from corn, the biggest energy and environmental costs in the industry are those involved in growing the corn itself – and most of these costs cannot be very significantly reduced. The main problem with ethanol in the United States, then, is what is used to make it. While corn is a more efficient source of ethanol than the other large-scale crops grown in the U.S., it is considerably less efficient in gallons-per-acre terms than the sugar cane used for the purpose in Brazil (White Cap Village 2010a); and even Brazil’s sugar-cane-based ethanol program is criticized by ethanol skeptics an uneconomic in the long run. Existing ethanol production is based around the fermentation of starches and sugars – which means, in effect, that our cars are competing with us for the same food. Although certain crops and technical developments may improve the efficiency of the ethanol industry, there is an inherent weakness in any “solution” that requires crops to fuel the world’s expanding population of vehicles to be grown in addition to the crops needed to feed the world’s expanding population of human beings. Considering that much of the world’s population is already living in a state of “food insecurity” or worse, the current ethanol economy does not appear to be a viable strategy for humankind. Most of the solar energy used by plants does not in fact go into starch and simple sugars; it is processed into cellulose (and, to a lesser degree, the similar compound hemicellulose), which (like starch) is made up of sugar molecules. Cellulose will burn, but it will not ferment and is not digested by most animals – which is why the manure of cows, camels, and other large herbivores is widely used as a fuel in much of the world. If the energy tied up in cellulose and hemicellulose could be efficiently converted to ethanol, the ethanol economy would become truly viable, since a great deal of cellulose is produced either as agricultural waste (e.g. cornstalks and corncobs) or by non-cultivated plants (including trees). Further, there are fast-growing plants that could be very attractive energy crops were a viable cellulose-to-alcohol process available. In order to convert biomass rich in cellulose and hemicellulose to ethanol, several steps must be taken in addition to those involved in producing ethanol from starches and sugars. Cellulose and hemicellulose must be hydrolyzed (i.e. broken up) into simple sugar molecules; this is done by treating the biomass with enzymes to convert cellulose to the simple sugar glucose, and with weak acid to break up hemicellulose. Since hemicellulose is largely composed of five-carbon-atom sugars which yeast cannot ferment, special bacteria (probably genetically engineered) must be used for this stage of the fermentation process (USDE April 2009). This process is currently too expensive to be commercially viable; pilot plants are being built and operated in order to develop the technology towards viability (USDE January 2009). According to the United States Department of Agriculture (2005), the total contribution of biomass to the U.S. energy economy could be huge. If a viable biomass-to-ethanol system can be developed that efficiently converts cellulose (and preferably hemicellulose as well) to ethanol, the United States will finally have a viable biofuel that can replace a substantial portion of the gasoline in use today, reducing carbon emissions and dependency on foreign oil producers. Until then, however, the U.S. biofuel program appears to be more of a welfare program for corn-farmers and corn-processors than a genuine solution to our economic and ecological problems. References American Coalition for Ethanol, “Fuel Economy Study”, 2005, http://www.ethanol.org/pdf/contentmgmt/ACEFuelEconomyStudy_001.pdf . Bevill, Kris, “Overcoming E20's Obstacles”, Ethanol Producer Magazine, September 2008, http://www.ethanolproducer.com/article.jsp?article_id=4601 . Blanco, Sebastian, “RFA says the EPA delaying E15 decision is ‘a dereliction of duty’”, Autoblog, 21 June 2010, http://green.autoblog.com/2010/06/21/rfa-says-the-epa-delaying-e15-decision-is-a-dereliction-of-duty/ or http://tinyurl.com/397rp58 Blume, David, “Busting the Ethanol Myths”, undated, http://www.permaculture.com/node/490 , retrieved 25 July 2010. Bryce, Robert, “The Ethanol Trap”, Slate, 10 June 2010, http://www.slate.com/id/2256461 . Des Moines Register (no author listed), “Ethanol: The facts, the questions”, 27 August 2006, http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20060827/OPINION03/608250397/Ethanol-The-facts-the-questions or http://tinyurl.com/33h7ud9 . Earth Policy Institute, “Data Highlights: U.S. Feeds One Quarter of its Grain to Cars While Hunger is on the Rise”, 21 January 2010, http://www.earthpolicy.org/index.php?/press_room/C68/2010_datarelease6 . National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), “Saftey [sic] Defect/Noncompliance Notices Received During January 2009”, http://nhthqnwws111.odi.nhtsa.dot.gov/acms/docservlet/Artemis/Public/Recalls/2009/RCLMTY-012009-1234.pdf or http://tinyurl.com/24sa85p . Renewable Fuels Association (RFA), “RFA: EPA ‘Dropping the Ball’ on E15”, 18 June 2010, http://www.ethanolrfa.org/news/entry/rfa-epa-dropping-the-ball-on-e15/ . Renewable Fuels Association (RFA), “How Ethanol is Made”, undated, http://www.ethanolrfa.org/pages/how-ethanol-is-made , retrieved 25 July 2010. Shumaker, Lisa & Gardner, Timothy, “ADM says 21 percent of U.S. ethanol capacity idle”, Reuters, 3 February 2009, http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN0351012520090203 . United States Department of Energy, “ABC's of Biofuels”, updated 7 April 2009, http://www1.eere.energy.gov/biomass/abcs_biofuels.html . United States Department of Agriculture, “Biomass as Feedstock for a Bioenergy and Bioproducts Industry: the Technical Feasibility of a Billion-Ton Annual Supply”, April 2005, http://www1.eere.energy.gov/biomass/pdfs/final_billionton_vision_report2.pdf . United States Department of Energy, “Biomass Program / Deployment”, updated 12 January 2009, http://www1.eere.energy.gov/biomass/deployment.html . Wallace, Ed: “The Great Ethanol Scam”, Bloomberg Business Week, 14 May 2009, http://www.businessweek.com/lifestyle/content/may2009/bw20090514_058678.htm . White Cap Village: “Ethanol 101”, 2010 (based on home-page copyright notice). Retrieved 25 July 2010 from http://wcvillage.com/Education/Modules/Ethanol_101.htm . White Cap Village: “Ethanol & Distillation”, 2010a (based on home-page copyright notice). Retrieved 25 July 2010 from http://wcvillage.com/Products/Distillery.aspx . Read More