The Biofuels Trap

My Kingdom for a Horseless Carriage

We must move our nation beyond fossil fuels. But let’s not be suckered by the promoters of biofuel alternatives like corn ethanol and soy biodiesel.

Large companies that stand to reap billions in subsidies and tax breaks from these energy “sources” are selling them as the way to a healthy planet and energy independence for the United States. For two reasons, don’t believe it.
First, consider “energy return on energy invested,” or EROEI. This is how much energy we “earn” for every unit of energy we “spend” to get it.

Gasoline’s EROEI ranges between 6-to-1 and 10-to-1, says Cutler Cleveland, director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies at Boston University. In other words, we get anywhere from six to 10 gallons of gasoline for every gallon we use to find oil, pump it out of the ground and refine it. But the EROEI of corn-based ethanol, the most common U.S. biofuel, is a mere 1.34-to-1, the Agriculture Department says. So even though an acre of corn can make 360 gallons of ethanol, only 90 gallons of that is “new” fuel.

Expand this to a larger geographic scale. Researchers at the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics calculate that planting the entire state of Iowa to corn and using it for ethanol would give us enough new fuel for about five days’ worth of U.S. gasoline use. For policy-makers, this should be a red flag signaling that even enormous increases in ethanol production would do basically nothing to improve America’s energy independence.

Counterpunch