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Tuesday, August 19, 2008
What is the future of biofuels?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The AJC editorial board has criticized corn-based ethanol subsidies and blames the diversion of foodstuff to fuel for the rising cost of food at the grocery store and in restaurants.
Murray Campbell of Camilla, chief executive officer of First United Ethanol Ltd., of Camilla, defended the program Monday at Atlanta’s Commerce Club in a talk titled “Biofuels in Georgia: Fact, Fiction and Future.”
Corn-based ethanol has been in the news … and I wanted to address some of the issues that always come up:
“It costs more energy to make a gallon of ethanol than you get back out of it.” … In 16 major studies on energy balances with different kinds of energy, 14 of them show that corn-based ethanol has a positive energy balance. Two of them did not. One of those used some old numbers, which said that we got 2.2 gallons of ethanol out of a bushel of corn, when it’s 2.8 or 2.9 now. And the other one assumed that farmers would not plant anything on the land if they didn’t have corn. That’s not the way agriculture works. …
“Talk about water usage. … It takes 44 gallons to refine a gallon of gasoline. It takes three to four gallons of water to refine a gallon of ethanol, and 87 percent of the corn in this country is grown on dry land. Grant you, we grow a lot of irrigated crops down in our area, and one of the assets for our plant is the ability to grow irrigated corn. But our yield is significantly higher than the national average of corn grown dry. …
“We’ve had an awful lot of talk about how biofuels, and corn-based ethanol in particular, are driving up the cost of food. … [One expert estimated] that corn-based ethanol runs up the price of food about 3.3 percent. … But at the same time, we’re keeping the price of gasoline down with biofuels because we’re making nearly 9 billion gallons of ethanol that’s going into transportation.”
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