08/22/2002
Corn to Fuel Your Car?
I''m surprised to hear that the movie "Signs" is generating so much interest given that those crop circles are strictly manmade, as we discussed a few weeks ago in this column. I pity the poor farmers who will be waking up to find their crops flattened by a new wave of crop circle pranksters spawned by this movie. Then there are farmers like the one I saw mentioned on the news last night. This farmer has manipulated his cornfield so that an aerial view reveals a likeness of Babe Ruth! Last week, we spoke of corn''s intrusion into various aspects of our lives, notably into our food chain. Now it seems to be primed for expansion as an artistic medium for portraying portraits of sports heroes.
Let''s explore further corn''s role in the production of alcoholic libations. In addition to providing the raw material for Canadian whiskey, corn may also be used in making beer. If, instead of drinking the beer, you distill it and remove the water, you end up with ethanol, the alcohol that gives all our alcoholic libations their kick. Ethanol has many other uses in the chemical industry and a substantial amount of the ethanol for drinking and industrial uses comes from corn. Having gone to all the trouble to get pure ethanol from beer, we don''t want anyone drinking it so we sometimes "denature" it by adding compounds to make it undrinkable. One additive might be methanol, also known as wood alcohol (it used to be made primarily from wood or wood products).
Methanol differs from ethanol by having one less carbon and two less hydrogen atoms. That slight difference makes methanol a compound not to be messed with. According to the EPA Web site, a couple teaspoonfuls and you''re blind - a few tablespoons and you''re dead! During Prohibition, moonshiners sometimes made wood alcohol instead of ethanol. Those who imbibed the methanol were not too smart or were certainly ill informed!
With the cost and availability of gasoline waxing and waning over the past 30 years, there have been intermittent peaks of interest in alternate fuels. One suggestion has been to stretch out the use of gasoline by diluting it with ethanol or methanol. Some would have gasoline replaced totally by one of these two alcohols. In California, which is typically in the forefront of environmental issues, there are thousands of passenger cars and a few hundred buses fueled with methanol. When you''re watching the Indy 500, those racecars are running on pure methanol.
According to the Methanol Institute''s Web site, methanol today is typically made from natural gas. Worldwide, there are over 90 methanol plants capable of producing more than 11 billion gallons of the stuff a year. The process typically involves reacting the methane in the natural gas with steam in the presence of a catalyst to form a mix of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and hydrogen. This mixture is then reacted further to give methanol and some water and hydrogen. Bottom line - the cost of methanol is comparable to the cost of gasoline.
Well, with the huge automotive fuel market thirsting for new fuels, you know that corn wouldn''t stand idly by. So, corn has gotten its enthusiasts to propose that ethanol is the way to go, again either as an additive to gasoline or in a mixture with methanol or standing alone. With a surplus of corn, it seems an ideal situation. Farmers just grow more corn and we can forget about the Mideast.
I might have taken this at face value if I hadn''t happened upon the Cornell University Web site and an article in that institution''s Chronicles. The article, by Roger Segelken, cites the work of David Pimentel, a professor in Cornell''s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Pimentel served as chairman of a Department of Energy panel on the various aspects of ethanol production and has conducted a thorough analysis of ethanol''s possible role as an automotive fuel. Pimentel’s analysis says that corn''s future in the fuel arena is not bright.
When we make ethanol made from corn, we have to invest more energy than you would get back if you burn the ethanol in your abominable SUV or in my little VW Jetta. Pimentel concludes that an acre''s worth of corn, ready for processing into ethanol, will have required something like 140 gallons of fossil fuel to make the necessary fertilizer, power the machinery to harvest, etc. After processing, the acre of corn will have yielded about 328 gallons of ethanol.
Pimentel calculates we’ve already spent $1.05 a gallon just to get the corn grown and harvested. We haven’t begun to crush it up, ferment it to make our beer and then take the water out of the beer. To do this, we may have to distill the beer three times and then go through some purification steps to get ethanol pure enough to power our vehicle. Adding up all the costs, Pimentel concludes it will have cost us $1.74 to produce our gallon of ethanol versus about 95 cents to produce a gallon of gasoline.
With such economics, it’s clear that ethanol won’t replace fossil fuels any time soon, especially since we’ve used fossil fuel to grow and harvest the corn in the first place! But Pimentel isn''t finished. He thinks that the environmental consequences of growing corn should be considered and wants to add another 23 cents to the cost. Corn is a greedy crop, eroding the soil much faster than it can be reformed and consuming water faster than the ground water can be replaced. All this bodes ill for corn’s plan to infiltrate our fuel system.
However, there’s a wild card here. Remember those government subsidies to the farmers for growing corn. If the government decides to subsidize the production of ethanol sufficiently, real costs could go by the board. Let''s now consider the worst case scenario and see what happens if corn-based ethanol becomes the only fuel used by American drivers. Pimentel calculates that, for a driver driving 10,000 miles a year, 11 acres of corn would be required. These 11 acres would have fed seven of us Americans. If we all used ethanol from corn to power our vehicles, corn will have taken over so much land that in the U.S. we would only have 3 percent of our country left for our own use! In other words, 97 percent of our land would be devoted to corn!
I have the feeling that well before this happens, the populace will have revolted and crop circles in corn fields would be appearing all over the country. Corn flakes and corn on the cob will have disappeared from our menus. Sometimes calculations that reveal absurdities are quite useful in pointing out the danger of projecting various trends into the future. Most of us have suffered from the fact that ridiculous projections of the prices of stocks led to the bubble that has burst, leaving our portfolios in shambles. I plead guilty to ignoring the absurdity of stock prices in that bubble, listening to my wife when she said no to selling our Lucent stock when it was hovering around 80!
There are other cases where analyses such as Pimentel''s corn study might prove very illuminating. For example, along with the interest in alternate fuels came renewed interest in the battery-powered Electric Vehicle. The idea of battery-powered cars is certainly laudable in that pollution in cities would be markedly reduced. But where does all that electricity used to charge the batteries come from? And what are the real costs involved? What fuels are used to generate the electricity? If coal or natural gas, what are the pollution consequences? What are the costs of controlling the pollution? Is the pollution just shifted from the cities to the rural areas? Is the pollution truly localized? We know now that pollutants from various processes are being spread all over the world by circulation patterns in our atmosphere.
Ok, I promise to get off my soapbox and next week you won''t see a word about corn. All this talk about it makes me realize I haven''t had a good corn fritter in years.
Allen F. Bortrum
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