Ethanol and Water
If I could offer our soon-to-be Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack one piece of advice, it would be this: "We're already running low on water. Don't make matters worse."
I would offer my advice with hope, but out of fear. My fear is that in Des Monies and in his short-lived presidential campaign, Mr. Vilsack was an ardent supporter of ethanol, so has been President-elect Obama. Once he becomes agriculture's advocate in the new administration, it will mean more and more ethanol plants for America.
Mr. Vilsack is in for an unpleasant surprise.
That's because while many of ethanol's problems (energy inputs, land use, food prices and more) have been thoroughly discussed, we have oddly (or maybe purposely) overlooked its true Achilles heel: water. And if we stick to our current plans to massively boost ethanol, an ethanol-fueled water crisis will come fast and furious.
Producing ethanol requires enormous amounts of water. Water America does not now have. That's true for corn ethanol and its supposedly more efficient and environmental cousin, cellulosic ethanol made from husks, wood chips, and other waste. The most efficient ethanol plants need 4 gallons of water to produce one gallon of ethanol fuel. That doesn't account for the feedstock, and in the case of corn, it takes 2,500 gallons of water to grow enough corn to produce 1 gallon of ethanol. That's right, 2,500 gallons.
Look at what happened in Minnesota: In June 2006, Governor Tim Pawlenty heralded the grand opening of a 40 million gallon-per-year ethanol refinery by Granite Falls Energy. Lost in the excitement was the fact that the plant consumes almost 400 gallons of water per minute. It didn't take long before wells 3 miles away started to run dry leaving families without water.
To "solve" the problem, engineers started diverting water from the Minnesota River, a "solution" which might work until the next drought. To say the least, it portends trouble when one modest-sized plant in, of all places, the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes, is straining water supplies.
Nationwide, there were only 54 ethanol plants in 2000. By 2008 that number had grown to 139, with an additional 62 refineries under construction. Mr. Vilsack and others will oversee an ethanol boom created by large production mandates in the Energy Policy Act of 2005. The existing and proposed plants will have the capacity to produce 12 billion gallons of ethanol. Refining that much ethanol will consume 48 billion gallons of water. And that's just for the production process. First farmers must have water to grow the corn or whatever else will feed the plants.
The state of California has a goal of producing a billion gallons of ethanol a year. To grow enough corn to refine that much ethanol would take as much as 2.5 trillion gallons -- more than all the water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta that now goes to Southern California cities and to Central Valley farmers. The Delta supplies water to two-thirds of the state's residents and irrigates more than 7 million acres of some of the nation's most productive farmland.
In the words of Donald Rumsfeld, this looming water crisis is a "known unknown" that Washington seems determined to ignore even as it creates it.
Across America cities and towns are already struggling to provide residents with clean water. Georgia's Governor Sonny Perdue organized a prayer group on the steps of the state capital in the name of rain. Planners are floating schemes to channel water from the Mississippi across thousands of miles of continent to Las Vegas. Along the South Carolina coast, fresh groundwater is flowing backwards it is being drained so rapidly.
Just wait until we start turning what water we have left into fuel for cars and trucks by the trillions of gallons. It won't work, Mr. Secretary.
Robert Glennon is the Morris K. Udall Professor of Law and Public Policy at the University of Arizona. His new book, Unquenchable: America's Water Crisis and What To Do About It, will be published by Island Press in March 2009.
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A random "Smog Check" inspection & repair audit, ethanol cap and elimination of dual fuel CAFE credit can cut CA car impact over 50% in 2009, 1000 tons per day HC + NOx savings at ZERO cost
* * Should California consider a fee on corn fuel ethanol use?
* * Lower price for food, gas, water, beer, cleaner air and funds for the budget from oil profit.
* * Clean Air Performance Prifessionals
Vilsack and Obama have been wearing Ilinoian political hats. Now they have to coordinate a country. I expect we'll see perceptions change as they try do the right thing for all of us. Also, the profits are not materializing for the big ethanol operators, some of whom have gone bust. Ethanol might be on the way out.
Is it not true that fuel from algae is far more productive per acre than from corn, and that the water involved is retained within a closed system?
Yes, I have been lookinng into a company that is currently promoting Alge bio-fuel. The major problem with alge is that bird droppings and leaves and bags which are blown in must be removed. The company I am looking at says it has solved that problem. The stock sells for a little under a dollar a share when I last looked.
Indeed. Also, biodiesel from algae does not need to be fermented, as ethanol fuels do--you need only run it through a mechanical press. Algae is where the future of fuel is at.
No, it's not true that the water is retained in closed systems for borderline practical algae farms (they are all open ponds or circulated basins). That algae would be better than corn is true but only because corn is such a loser. Neither comes even close to being competitive with solar panels and plug-in electric vehicles. So you want to replace a big loser with a slightly smaller one, again, instead of doing the right thing?
Yes , FOOD FOR FOOD AND DRILL HERE AND NOW FOR FUEL .
Hmm where does the water go? Up the stacks? Let's recapture it and clean it and reuse it. While it is true that things like hydrogen power 'use up' water, most everything else just displaces it from where it was or dirties it. There are things that can be done about that. Will it increase the cost of making fuel? Sure.. we just have to overcome that.
"Will it increase the cost of making fuel? Sure.. we just have to overcome that."
If it costs one gallon of fuel to make one gallon of fuel, that's not something we can overcome. Particulate filters and UV sanitizers only go so far. If there's a lot of petroleum-based agro-chemicals in the graywater, the only feasible way to get it out is distillation, and the heat required for that would easily blow the energy balance for fuel production.
By the way, the hydrogen cycle doesn't "use up" water either. It comes back out the tailpipe, remember?
The problem here is that we're using up groundwater. Once groundwater is gone, the whole basis of a region's ecology is threatened.
Frances Moore Lappe noted in "Diet for a Small Planet" noted that it takes 16 pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef.
That's without counting the astronomical amount of CO2 the cows produce in their belching. If most environmentalists knew about the damage the beef industry causes on the environment, they simply wouldn't touch beef, period.
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