Today's question: "Should we be using ethanol as a replacement fuel for oil?"




As it turns out, the "Word Problems column is becoming "Hippie Jesse and his Groovetactular Enviro-Mania".  Don't worry, I'm sure we'll fix the environment soon and I can move on to another topic to obsess over.  As for the question at hand: the answer is yes if you are a corn grower or oil company, no if you enjoy eating food.

The price of food is on the rise, and one of the causes could be biofuels, according to a UN expert and an Asian development bank.

Wait, wait, wait.  You are saying that if we stop using corn for food, and start using it to drive our trucks around, we're going to run out of corn to eat?

Uh, no shit.

This is where I would usually spend some space doing the math, but a little searching revealed that somebody had already done the work for me - last summer.  This excellent Slate article from last June, titled "The Great Corn Con," details everything that is wrong with trying use ethanol to replace oil as a transportation fuel.  Here are a few choice details:

"[Last June], the Senate passed an energy bill mandating the production of 36 billion gallons of ethanol per year by 2022--a sevenfold increase over current levels."

"According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, distillers can produce about 2.7 gallons of ethanol per bushel of corn. In 2006, U.S. farmers produced about 10.5 billion bushels of the grain. So, even if Congress mandated that all of America's corn be turned into ethanol, it would yield only about 28.3 billion gallons, far less than the mandated volume."

I'm going to briefly pause here to re-iterate the author's point: all the corn in the United States cannot generate enough ethanol to meet the Congressional mandate in the last energy bill.  All the corn. ALL OF IT. WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE DOING, EVERYBODY.  Continuing:

"Thirty-six billion gallons of ethanol a year sounds like a lot, but it's only 2.34 million barrels per day. And given ethanol's lower heat content--about two-thirds that of gasoline--the effective production would be equivalent to 1.54 million barrels of oil per day. The United States uses nearly 21 million barrels of oil per day, of which 12.54 million barrels are imported. Thus, even if American ethanol producers can miraculously achieve the Senate's goal of 36 billion gallons per year by 2022, they will be producing the equivalent of just 7.4 percent of America's total current oil needs and just 12.2 percent of its imports. That quantity of ethanol will not take America very far toward the oft-repeated goal of energy independence."

I will repeat again: even IF we took ALL of the goddamn corn and made it into ethanol, we'd still only be displacing 12% of the oil that we import every year.  Sometimes I think Congress passes legislation just to fuck with me. 

So why does anyone even bother in the first place? What exactly is going on? If you ask me, it looks like a way for politicians to look like they are doing something for the environment without actually risking the status quo.  But what do I know, just because I can do basic arithmetic.  Let's move on, because there is another important reason that ethanol sucks more balls than the machine at the batting cages.

Oil, as you should know, is a fossil fuel.  There is only a certain amount in the earth, and once it is gone, it is gone forever.  However, ethanol is a renewable resource.  We can keep growing that corn.  But where does the energy in the corn come from? Like all (non-nuclear) energy, it comes from the sun.  So when you grow corn and turn it into ethanol, you are turning your field into a large solar collector and converting solar energy into stored energy.  But how efficient is it?

Tune in tomorrow to find out!