The Peak Oil Crisis: Saving the Chesapeake Bay

A couple of years back the Congress decided that a good way to deal with our dependency on foreign oil was to start using lots and lots of domestically produced ethanol in our cars.

The government, with some help from farm lobbyists, decreed that by 2022 we should burn 36 billion gallons of ethanol a year of which 15 billion gallons was to come from corn. Now this is all well and good, except that corn-based ethanol production will be about 9 billion gallons this year and will require a major increase in corn planting in order to reach 15 billion gallons a year and keep us eating at the same time.


The other part of this story is the Chesapeake Bay Commission, a regional governmental organization that was set up in 1980 by Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania with some help from New York, West Virginia, Delaware, and the District of Columbia, to see what could be done about the deteriorating condition of the water in the Chesapeake Bay. The goal of producing 35 billion gallons of ethanol each year did not pass by the Commission unnoticed, so a study was done that concluded that an additional 300,000 acres of corn might be planted in the Bay’s watershed.

If the usual quantities of fertilizer were dumped on these new acres of corn, an additional 5 million pounds of nitrogen could end up in the Bay each year. Improve the Bay? The Commission might as well fold its tents, for the Chesapeake would be on the way to becoming another Dead Sea like the one forming at the mouth of the Mississippi. In reviewing the options, the Commission’s first study looked at the possibility of biofuel production using cellulosic feedstocks rather than corn and other feed grains to make the ethanol.

Falls Church News-Press