EPA's New Biofuel Standard: No Joy in Cornville

In its newly proposed rules for biofuels, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency concludes ethanol is a loser when it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It's a finding that upset one Congressman so much that he won't "trust anybody anymore."

Corn Ethanol and Washington: The Backstory

The relationship between corn ethanol and the U.S. government has been long and checkered. For nearly three decades the government has subsidized [pdf] ethanol production (and by extension corn growers) by incentivizing its production, even though a gallon of ethanol is typically more expensive than a gallon of regular fossil fuel-based gasoline. (The government has also effectively blocked the import of potentially cheaper ethanol like Brazil's sugar-based variety through high tariffs.)

The arguments in favor of ethanol have been two-fold -- it's supposedly a winning formula for:

1. national security - using ethanol displaces conventional gasoline and therefore lowers our dependence on foreign oil; and
2. the planet - because the carbon in ethanol comes from plants that removed it from the atmosphere during photosynthesis, burning ethanol does not add more carbon dioxide (CO2), the main greenhouse gas pollutant, to the atmosphere.

The scientific community has never been entirely sold on these virtues. And many have suspected that the federal largess for corn ethanol has had more to do with putting extra dollars into the hands of farmers. The corn lobby is rather, shall we say, influential. And don't forget that presidential campaigns always start in Iowa -- a corn state if there ever was one. Can you imagine trying to win the Iowa caucuses on a campaign position against subsidies for corn ethanol?

Those Pesky Scientists -- Giving an Earful About the Downsides of Corn

Scientifically speaking, the problem with corn ethanol is that growing corn, transporting it to a factory, and converting it to ethanol all require energy, the vast majority of which comes from fossil fuels that lead to greenhouse gas emissions. So every gallon of ethanol does not displace a full gallon of gasoline, and burning a gallon of ethanol does not avoid all the CO2 emissions from conventional fuel. The question for more than a decade has been: on which side of the balance sheet does corn ethanol lie. Does it end up saving gasoline or using more? Does it lead to less or more greenhouse gas emissions?

To answer these questions, scientists use a life-cycle or cradle-to-grave assessment. And here is my take on where these assessments lead.

The gasoline savings from corn ethanol appear to be significant. For example, in a paper published in Science in 2006, Alexander Farrell of the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues estimated that corn ethanol cuts petroleum use by as much as 80 percent or more. (Note that the total energy savings of corn ethanol relative to all fossil fuels used, including natural gas and coal, were estimated to be much more modest.)

Will the new biofuels rules proposed by EPA spell trouble for the cozy relationship the corn states have had with the federal government? (NREL)

The stickier question has been whether corn ethanol saves any greenhouse gas emissions. As I described in a previous post, complications arise because the corn that that goes into ethanol is obviously not being used to feed humans or livestock.

In two separate papers published in Science in 2008, Tim Searchinger (from Princeton University) and Joseph Fargione (of The Nature Conservancy) et al. argued that taking cropland out of food production requires converting forest land to cropland (primarily in Brazil) to make up for the food deficit, a conversion that results in huge emissions of CO2 to the atmosphere. The authors calculated that it would take many decades of ethanol use to offset or pay back the greenhouse gas emissions from the destruction of those forests. In other words, from a global warming point of view, corn ethanol is not a winner.

Congress and EPA Take Biofuels into the New Millennium

With the Energy Policy Act of 2005 [pdf] Congress decided to get serious about energy independence, mandating a renewable energy standard requiring ever larger amounts of biofuels in the gasoline sold in the United States with ever larger increases in production from year to year.

In the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act [pdf], Congress amended the Renewable Fuel Standard to include even more biofuels and went one step further. It added language addressing climate change:

• The new biofuels requirement mandated that corn ethanol must reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent.
• EPA was charged with implementing the program.
  

Last week, EPA came out with new proposed regulations governing the Renewable Fuel Standard. And lo and behold, they concluded the same thing that Searchinger and colleagues found last year: when land use changes are accounted for, corn ethanol ends up emitting a lot of greenhouse gases. EPA reported results for two scenarios:

• Over a 30-year horizon, corn ethanol emits five percent more greenhouse gases than conventional gasoline when the ethanol is made using natural gas, and 34 percent more if it is made using coal.
• Over what seems to me to be a rather long 100-year horizon, corn ethanol reduces greenhouse gas emissions by only about 16 percent, when made using natural gas -- or four percent shy of the Congressional standard. (Ethanol made using coal still emits 13 percent more greenhouse gas than conventional gasoline.)
  

Corn State Unhappiness?

The corn-producing states are used to special treatment from the federal government. Now, EPA's proposed ruling threatens to shut them out of future biofuels markets.

House Agriculture Chairman Collin Peterson (D-MN) was angered. Upon hearing of the proposal he stated: "I will not support any kind of climate change bill. ... I don't care. Even if you fix this. I don't trust anybody anymore." Somebody needs to find that man a binky.

Will that spell trouble for the Obama administration? Maybe so, if you listen to folks like Robert Dinneen, president of the Renewable Fuels Association, who criticized the proposed rule for not comparing apples to apples (shouldn't that be corn to corn?).

But wait a minute: the administration has moved to soften the blow by announcing a bunch of new federal handouts to the ethanol industry. Will that work? Maybe so if you listen to folks like ... well ...  Robert Dinneen, who praised the administration for sending "an incredibly important signal that biofuels are going to be a key component in his strategy to address energy, economic, and environmental challenges."

Isn't politics great.

Dr. Bill Chameides is the dean of Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He blogs regularly at theGreenGrok.com.

Comments

[GoldEnergy]

The Ethanol industry continues to have to face the inherit bias toward the oil industry. The truth is that ethanol is a renewable, sustainable, positive energy return on energy invested, and green house gas reducer....and the opposite is true for gasoline.
Argonne National Labs prove it as well as every other credible scientific source. http://www.chicagocleancities.org/PDFs/Wang2005Summary.pdf

Indirect land use mythology is based on absolutely no scientific model because it cannot be measured. Only a theory that is shaky at best...do you not think that the oil from the Canadian tar sands or from shale have an even greater indirect land use effect?
Ethanol makes sense no matter how you look at it when compared to gasoline.

[Biodiversivist]

The comments here included a lot of the standard ethanol myths.

1) The environmental impact of oil is greater than that of crop-based biofuels

2) Deforestation has dropped in the years since ethanol came into production

3) There are billions of acres of idle cropland across the world that are unused

4) The variety of corn used for ethanol is not the same as that used for food

5) Shills for Big Oil have infiltrated Internet comment fields

[Indra]

Corn ethanol also uses too much water in processing and indeed takes up too much crop land that could be used for food. It raises the prices of food and was a rather bad idea from the start.

[pm247]

Corn ethanol is a loser, but the sugarcane variety is a different story.

Remove the tariff on imported ethanol. We should be buying every drop that Brazil can send us.

[trimom]

According to my research and that of others, ethanol production also creates very large amounts of toxic chemical emissions - primarily in the form of air emissions. The EPA should also take a look at TRI emissions from this process not that it looks like the agency is finally getting some funding.

[GuyRC]

I'm just encouraged that the EPA came out with a conclusion that the Adminstration didn't want to hear. How refreshing to see that our government has returned to its tradition of checks and balances. Sure, an individual congressman will have his agenda, but politics is all about giving him some earmark in exchange for selling his integrety. He wouldn't be a politician if you couldn't buy him.

[pwintersatbiodotorg]

"And lo and behold, they concluded the same thing that Searchinger and colleagues found last year: when land use changes are accounted for, corn ethanol ends up emitting a lot of greenhouse gases."

You note correctly earlier in the post that Searchinger "argued that taking cropland out of food production requires converting forest land to cropland (primarily in Brazil) to make up for the food deficit." This is in fact an assumption of the model that Searchinger proposed and that EPA has adopted for measuring the lifecycle emissions of biofuels. Evidence to support this zero-sum calculation of food productivity and land use is still lacking, and neither Searchinger nor EPA are capable of concluding that the assumption is correct or proven.

It really doesn't matter whether you use a 30-year or 100-year timespan when the calculation is drawn directly from an unproven assumption.

[Bill Chameides - Huffpost Blogger]

pwintersat­biodotorg: take a look at the correlation between soybean futures and land area cultivated for soybeans in Brazil. It certainly argues for the existence of a relationship.

[mamacat]

Sounds like this issue is more complicated than it first seemed to be.

Seems to me that at the very least, if and when there is excess corn (or any other food crop) produced, and the means does not exist to use it for food, rather than till it back into the soil, or rather than let it go rotten, the means should exist to convert it into needed fuel.

[Bill Chameides - Huffpost Blogger]

mamacat - That's one of the advantages of cellulosic ethanol -- you can use the waste from the crop like the corn stover to make the ethanol. So, no extra tillage and no diversion of crops from food.

[spkout1]

Why aren't we hearing about how much water, carbon emissions produced & fuel is used to get oil out of the ground, transport it across the world, refine it into gas and deliver it to gas stations. We should also figure in the cost in money and lives of the wars in Iraq and Afganistan (all in the name of protecting our oil source) plus the potential environmental impact (anyone remember the Exxon Valdez or seen pictures of the oils sands operation in Canada)?

Deforestation has dropped in the years since ethanol came into production and there over 1 billion acres of idle crop land acres across the world that could be used for corn or food production. Also consider that the corn ethanol is made from is not used directly to feed people. It is mostly used as feed for livestock and low and behold the byproduct of ethanol production is a high protein dried distillars grain that can be fed to animals often at a lower cost than buying corn!

Wake up people, oil has had their way for over 100 years and they're not ready to give up the fortunes they've built on the backs of consumers. Ethanol is a threat to their livelyhood and they'll do anything, say anything and pay anybody to get rid of it.

[Bill Chameides - Huffpost Blogger]

spkout1:
1. Just because overall deforestation rates may be decreasing does not mean that ethanol production is not leading to greater deforestation. There are many factors that encourage and discourage deforestation, and all operate at the same time. Pressures from ethanol production are just one of many.
2. It is not at all clear that deforestation rates in the tropics -- and especially in Brazil -- have been decreasing. It is true that the 2005 FAO reported a decrease in global deforestation but not for South America (http://www.fao.org/forestry/foris/data/fra2005/kf/common/GlobalForestA4-ENsmall.pdf). Satellite data including measurement of carbon monoxide, a product of biomass burning, suggest that there has not been a slowing in deforestation over South America (see http://www.acd.ucar.edu/mopitt/MOPITT/data/plots/mapsv3_mon.html).
3. There is significant evidence that when the acreage of corn used for biofuels goes up in the United States, the acreage of soybean production goes down, and as a result, the acreage of soybean production in Brazil goes up with a concomitant loss of forests. See Searchinger's paper in Science.

[doctorkosan]

The EISA 2007 says that by 2022, 22 billion gallons of non-corn/food alternative fuels will be in our fuel systems. They will be a derived from a variety of technologies including biomass/cellulosic conversion to ethanol, gasoline and diesel as well as possibly algal oil converted to biodiesel.

The fuels so derived have a much larger impact on lowering GHG as well as replacing imported oil that provides cash to terrorists. Decide who we should subsidize: sheiks or entrepreneurs.

[Bill Chameides - Huffpost Blogger]

doctorkosan: Agreed. Other forms of biofuels, such as cellulosic ethanol, look to be far more promising. But see my recent TheGreenGrok post on bioelectricity (http://www.nicholas.duke.edu/thegreengrok/biofuelsprimer).

[Henry]

"even though a gallon of ethanol is typically more expensive than a gallon of regular fossil fuel-based gasoline."

I had always thought that the argument at the margin for corn based ethanol was the alternative to abuse from cartel pricing or abuse from the human bloodshed involved with middle east / NY oil market pricing. When oil attained a price of $150 per barrel, then indeed there was some form of renewable that would attain cheaper alternatives. This rationale precludes your statement above.

[LeftRight]

Re-read that sentence. You will see that it says TYPICALLY. Except at the height of last summer, a gallon of gasoline has always been cheaper than a gallon of ethanol, and you would know that were it not for the subsidies that ethanol producers receive.

Having said that, I doubt very much that even at the height of the oil bubble a gallon of gasoline cost more to produce than a gallon of ethanol, since that gallon of gas was produced by a company that owns the ENTIRE LINE OF PRODUCTION, from pulling it out of the ground, through transportation, refining, more transportation, and into your tank. Do you REALLY think that they were buying oil for $150 per barrel???

[MRF21]

First, ethanol producers don't receive the $0.48/gal subsidy, the person who's blending it into gasoline does... i.e. the oil company does because it is the oil companies who buy the majority of the ethanol on the market.

Second, the oil industry is probably the most subsidized industry in our nation (http://cleantech.com/news/node/554). Without all the help oil gets from the government a gallon of gas would be thru the roof.

In conclusion: Oil gets oil subsidies and Oil gets ethanol subsidies... wonderful

[Bill Chameides - Huffpost Blogger]

Henry: You are correct that the externalities in gasoline are significant. The point I was making is that given the current market structure, subsidies, incentives and mandates are needed to make corn ethanol viable in the marketplace.