Rethinking the Value of Corn Ethanol Co-Products in Lifecycle Assessments
by Dave Vander Griend (Ethanol Across America) …As commodity prices have returned closer to norms prior to the dramatic speculation-driven increase, we need to take a deep breath and understand the truth. We are meeting the increase in demand for fuel, while feeding more people through exports — and unleashing technology in every aspect of corn production. American farmers are using less land to produce more corn — continuing a 50-year trend of more bushels per acre (Fig.1). And there is every reason to believe this trend will continue. Figure 3 illustrates the historical use of U.S.-produced corn from 2000, with projected use to 2015.
… Corn to industrial use for food and animal feed (meat production) will likely remain flat or decrease in coming years, due primarily to changing diets in the U.S., where meat consumption is falling. Corn exports are expected to remain relatively flat at 2 billion bushels annually.
Corn used for ethanol will flatten at about 5.3 billion bushels per year as corn ethanol is essentially capped by the Renewable Fuels Standard. As noted in this paper, the DDGs produced by ethanol plants will likely replace nearly one-half of the raw corn diverted from the feed market and used for ethanol.
Combined with a higher feed conversion and lower price than raw corn, DDG is likely to displace raw corn in feed to the largest extent possible, pushing approximately 2.6 billion bushels of corn equivalent back into circulation!
Those 2.6 billion bushels will join the already enormous projected carryouts of between 2 and 3 billion bushels, resulting in total annual carryout (surplus) of the U.S. corn supply of 5 billion bushels per year in 2015. This relentless growth in corn production (and thus supply) is driven mainly by the evergrowing average corn yield, as U.S. farmers continue to grow more corn on less land. While corn acreage has fallen over the past eight decades, yield per acre has more than tripled, and yield growth is accelerating. READ MORE
