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The American dream is to consume and we do it better than almost any other nation. Lately, prices have risen sharply on an item we all use - oil. We are consuming oil at an alarming rate and despite legislation to increase the gas mileage on cars we are pushing record levels of consumption. As a result of the spike and the lack of new refinery construction we have seen prices at the pump rise to record highs. We have sought ways to make ourselves more energy dependent and one of those ways is through biofuels. The most popular biofuel is ethanol - a product that is grown and produced in my alma mater, Iowa.

So - you’re probably wondering - what the heck is my problem with energy independence? Nothing. I believe that if we reduce our dependence on foreign oil our economic and political decisions will be based more on our needs than those of an other nation. Its a good thing for national security and stability to control our energy prices.

So - you’re probably still wondering - whats my problem with biofuels? That answer is slightly more involved. In order to offset the carbon needed to produce ethanol we are actually polluting more than we are saving by growing the fuel and converting it. Growing cellulose based fuel isn’t as efficient as other types of ethanol (ethyl-alcohol). If we had the appropriate climate, we should be growing as much sugar cane as we possibly can - and I say this with a caveat - we don’t want to do this and negatively impact the environment or food prices as we are currently seeing with traditional ethanol production. Why sugar cane? - it provides larger quantities of fuel while using fewer acres of land and resources to grow. I read an interesting piece at Time magazine and found the following excerpt.

Why is so much money still being poured into such a misguided enterprise? Like the scientists and environmentalists, many politicians genuinely believe biofuels can help decrease global warming. It makes intuitive sense: cars emit carbon no matter what fuel they burn, but the process of growing plants for fuel sucks some of that carbon out of the atmosphere. For years, the big question was whether those reductions from carbon sequestration outweighed the “life cycle” of carbon emissions from farming, converting the crops to fuel and transporting the fuel to market. Researchers eventually concluded that yes, biofuels were greener than gasoline. The improvements were only about 20% for corn ethanol because tractors, petroleum-based fertilizers and distilleries emitted lots of carbon. But the gains approached 90% for more efficient fuels, and advocates were confident that technology would progressively increase benefits.

What should we do with ethanol production in the future - spend more money on research. Food prices have risen sharply and we have seen the start of a global food shortage. Many countries, that depend on our surplus food, have seen prices rise sharply as more of our output was diverted to fuel production. Hopefully, these countries will quickly increase their agriculture production and avert a crisis. They might do as some farmers in Brazil have done and grow food for fuel - thus compounding the problem. You can read a further detailed explanation of the issues at Time magazine.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 30th, 2008 at 9:06 pm and is filed under ahh the news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.