Point/Counterpoint: Is It Time for Greens To Reassess Their Opposition to Ethanol?

by Senator Timothy Wirth and C. Boyden Gray (Yale Environment 360) The criticism of ethanol by environmentalists is misguided and just plain wrong. In fact, thanks to improvements in farming techniques, increasing the amount of corn ethanol in U.S. gasoline would reduce air pollution, provide significant health benefits, and lower greenhouse gas emissions.

A few years ago there was a flood of articles and reports about the allegedly disastrous ecological impacts of growing crops for biofuels. But we believe that ethanol has been unfairly stigmatized in the conventional wisdom and that the reasons for concern about corn ethanol deserve reexamination.

In the U.S., now is the time for that second look. In June, the Environmental Protection Agency will begin a mid-course evaluation of President Obama’s ambitious fuel economy target, established in 2012, to have cars and light trucks reach 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. Increasing the ethanol blend in gasoline from the current 10 percent to roughly 30 percent would not only help boost gas mileage, it would significantly cut U.S. carbon emissions and air pollution. And because higher-ethanol blends greatly reduce the need to use toxic additives — known as aromatics — to gasoline, increased reliance on ethanol would sharply cut the emissions of deadly fine-particle pollutants.

New studies show that, thanks to ever-improving agricultural productivity, the food-versus-fuel debate appears to be over, and the verdict is in: There is no conflict. Increased demand for corn has not dramatically increased the cost of grain. Only a small share of corn is grown for human consumption, and global food prices are more affected by the cost of petroleum than they are by the price of corn. If anything, ethanol, by reducing the demand for gasoline, may lower the price of food by lowering the price of oil.

More corn is grown for animal feed than any other use. The ethanol process takes only the starch from the corn and leaves a high-protein byproduct — dried distillers grains — for animal feed, so cattle are not short-changed by ethanol production, either.

As for the environmental impact of corn, a quiet revolution — aimed at restoring the health of the land — has been taking place on American farms. The iconic image of endless fields of bare, furrowed soil ready for planting in the spring is no longer the norm. More and more farmers are choosing to leave the summer’s residues — corn stalks, for example — on their fields after harvest, injecting seeds into the undisturbed soil in the spring. Some are planting winter cover crops to further stabilize and enrich the land.

These practices have many names — “no-till” or “low-till” or “precision” agriculture, for example — but they are reversing decades of soil depletion and are turning cropland into a carbon sink.

The Obama administration’s fuel economy rule is one of the pillars of the president’s climate legacy, but it does not take into account the carbon content of the fuels in use. Crediting the life-cycle carbon footprint of fuels would provide an economic incentive for ethanol blends and encourage farming practices that enrich the soil by storing carbon: Carbon credits could be based on an annual field-level certification process. Even without those benefits included, the use of “mid-level” blends — up to 30 percent ethanol — would reduce greenhouse gas emissions under the new fuel economy standards by at least 10 percent.

In addition, higher ethanol blends are rich in octane, and higher-octane fuels enable automakers to increase the “compression ratio” of an engine without damage from knock — creating more power with less fuel. (Race cars in the IndyCar series use blends of 85 percent ethanol.) Mid-level blends would thus make it easier for automakers to achieve the 2025 fuel economy targets (and go beyond them after 2025), while at the same time delivering more greenhouse gas reductions.

U.S. automakers have advocated for higher octane in fuels while remaining neutral as to the octane source. Designing cars to accept mid-level ethanol blends with a higher compression ratio is a simple engineering task, and many cars that require premium fuel today would require little or no modification. A senior Mercedes-Benz engineer said such a combination would be attractive to car buyers because it would provide “ridiculous power and good fuel economy.”

The successful phase-out of leaded gasoline in the 1990s suggests that the same could be done with aromatics, and the fuel economy rule provides a ripe opportunity. READ MORE / MORE