Word: ethanol
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Last week, while the financial world was obsessing over stress tests for fragile banks, the environmental and agricultural worlds were watching the results of the Obama Administration's stress tests for renewable fuels. An outgrowth of the 2007 energy bill, the tests were supposed to document whether corn ethanol and other biofuels designed to replace fossil fuels would accelerate or alleviate global warming overall. But like the much-criticized bank checkups, these stress tests don't seem particularly stressful...
...every acre of land planted with an energy crop - like corn or switchgrass - turning that biomass into electricity gives you more "miles per acre" than converting it to liquid ethanol, which is how biomass is used today, according to the study. A small SUV powered by bioelectricity could travel nearly 14,000 miles on the energy produced by an acre of switchgrass, while an ethanol-powered SUV could go only 9,000 miles. "It looks like converting biomass to electricity, instead of using it to make ethanol, makes the most sense for both transport and the climate," says Elliott Campbell...
...carbon, too, bioelectricity was a winner. On average, the carbon offset from using bioelectricity is 100% bigger than the offset for using ethanol. (Even though biomass releases carbon when it is burned, just like oil, when new plants are growing they absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, reducing the overall carbon footprint.) "It's simply the case that bioelectricity is just a lot more efficient than using ethanol, in most ways," says Campbell...
...Science study doesn't take into account other impacts that bioelectricity might have compared to ethanol, like water consumption or air pollution. Growing biomass, even on marginal agricultural land, does require water, as does making electricity. There's a bigger problem - electric cars still remain few and far between, while there are already millions of U.S. vehicles on the road that can run on an ethanol blend. Creating the sort of infrastructure that can support electric cars on a mass scale won't be cheap, and it's not a cost that Campbell and his colleagues included in their study...
Still, the ethanol industry's days may be numbered. Ethanol wouldn't exist but for government subsidies, yet in the 2007 energy bill, Congress ruled that to be eligible for support, corn ethanol has to emit 20% less climate pollution than gasoline. If you include the indirect land-use effects of ethanol - the increase in deforestation caused by using land to grow fuel - it's unlikely to hit that target. On May 5, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a proposed rule that would take into account indirect land-use effects when judging just how green corn ethanol is. Unless...