Pimentel: Corn can’t save us: Debunking the biofuel myth

Dwindling foreign oil, rising prices at the gas pump, and hype from politically well-connected U.S. agribusiness have combined to create a frenzied rush to convert food grains into ethanol fuel. The move is badly conceived and ill advised. Corporate spin and pork barrel legislation aside, here, by the numbers, are the scientific reasons why corn won’t provide our energy needs:

First, using corn or any other biomass for ethanol requires huge regions of fertile land, plus massive amounts of water and sunlight to maximize crop production. All green plants in the U.S. — including all crops, forests, and grasslands, combined — collect about 32 quads (32 x 1015 BTU) of sunlight energy per year. Meanwhile, the American population currently burns more than 3 times that amount of energy annually as fossil fuels! There isn’t even close to enough biomass in America to supply our biofuel needs.


Second, biofuel enthusiasts — including agribusiness lobbyists and PR firms — suggest that ethanol produced from corn and cellulosic biomass (like grasses), could replace much of the oil used in the United States. But consider that 20 percent of the U.S. corn crop was converted into 5 billion gallons of ethanol in 2006, but that amount replaced only 1 percent of U.S. oil consumption. If the entire national corn crop were used to make ethanol, it would replace a mere 7% of U.S. oil consumption — far from making the U.S. independent of foreign oil.

Third, ethanol production is energy intensive: Cornell University’s up-to-date analysis of the 14 energy inputs that go into corn production, plus the nine energy inputs invested in ethanol fermentation and distillation, confirms that more than 40 percent of the energy contained in one gallon of corn ethanol is expended to produce it. That expended energy to make ethanol comes mostly from highly valuable oil and natural gas.

Some investigators conveniently omit several of these energy inputs required in corn production and processing, such as energy for farm labor, farm machinery, energy production of hybrid corn-seed, irrigation, and processing equipment. Omitting energy inputs wrongly suggests that a corn-ethanol production system offers a more positive energy return. In reality, corn is an inefficient choice from an energy-cost and transport standpoint.

Kennebec Journal