Ethanol worse than oil
January 24th, 2008 by Jim JustScientists at the University of California at Berkeley’s Transportation Sustainability Research Center told the California Air Resources Board that ethanol could be twice as bad as gasoline, from a carbon-emissions point of view. How? Basically by turning land now covered with trees, grass, and other natural “carbon sinks” into farmland for corn and other crops used for ethanol.
Berkeley profs Alex Farrell and Michael O’Hare summed up the findings:
“Simply said, ethanol production today using U.S. corn contributes to the conversion of grasslands and rainforest to agriculture, causing very large GHG emissions. Even if only a small fraction of the emissions calculated in this crude way [through land use change] are added to estimates of direct emissions for corn ethanol, total emissions for corn ethanol are higher than for fossil fuels.”
Dave Cohen at the Energy Bulletin and ASPO-USA ridicules the politicians’ favorite energy fix:
“[C]orn or cellulosic ethanol, the favored fuel of our politicians, will replace only a very small fraction of American oil consumption by 2022 in the best case. In the meantime, the peak of Gulf of Mexico oil production will have come and gone, U.S. production will have fallen considerably from current levels, Mexico will no longer be exporting any oil, and the OECD nations will be utterly dependent on exports from the unstable Persian Gulf. This is only a partial list of the oil production and export shortfalls Americans can expect to see. These historical circumstances describe a disaster waiting to happen. An authentic understanding of the actual role of cellulosic ethanol and other biofuels as substitutes for oil goes some of the way toward creating the foundation for an appropriate response to our peak oil predicament.”