After Gutenberg

Little reliable data exists to correctly gauge how much feedstock is needed by distilleries. The federal government says that plants making ethanol for fuel will require 60 million tons of corn while Lester Brown and the Earth Policy Institute expect that ethanol plants will require nearly 140 million tons from the 2008 harvest.

This blog previously has warned about cellulosic vaporware. The term, “vaporware“, “implies deception, or at least a negligent degree of optimism since the promoter knows that development of the product is at too early a stage for responsible statements about completion date, features, or even feasibility.” Using the phrase, “cellulosic vaporware” implied that cellulosic ethanol was far from being commercially viable.

Meanwhile, the promotion of cellulosic ethanol proceeds. And, this blog has suggested that such promotion serves an important purpose. There is very big money behind the development of ethanol for automotive fuel. Yet the promoters are unable to defend against scientific arguments that such bio-fuel is dangerously unsustainable. Houston, we have a problem.

The conversion of biomass to liquid fuel, on the other hand, shows a better EROEI (Energy Returned On Energy Invested). Thus, if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them by lumping together of various sources of ethanol as fuel; sometimes it helps to cloud the issue.

And, as if the issue wasn’t confusing enough, there are a variety of feedstock plus different processes to degrade cellulose into sugar. For instance, recent modeling showed that ethanol derived from the conversion of municipal solid waste compares better than either ethanol derived from the fermentation of corn sugar or conversion of the cellulose in crops grown for such energy conversion in terms of “a life cycle total energy use per vehicle”. This was using less desirable strategies to bolster a better, yet still undesirable, strategy. Well, undesirable if you are the architect of Plan B 2.0 rather than someone from CoB, the (Cruise-on-Booze) sector.

There is more to the hidden agenda of cellulosic ethanol. While the conversion of cellulose to sugars, which then are fermented into ethanol, has yet to prove a viable source of liquid fuel, there exist other, more polluting processes, e.g. Fischer-Tropsch conversion of coal to liquid fuel. Thus, with an initiative underway to produce alternative liquid fuels, Big Coal can “step up to the plate” to “pinch hit” for cellulosic ethanol.

So, why bother worrying about the possibility of (further?) such shenanigans, EPI?

“EPI?”

Yes, EPI (Earth Policy Institute) is a small cadre of treehugging, granola-crunching, Birkies-wearing analysts working under the leadership of Lester Brown.

Brown founded the Worldwatch Institute in 1974. One of the first think tanks to focus on the global environmental situation, its yearly, agenda-setting, State of the World reports are highly regarded for their elucidation of key environmental issues. In 2001 Brown left Worldwatch to start the Earth Policy Institute, a small outfit dedicated to envisioning an “eco-economy” and figuring out how to get there.

In 2003, EPI released Plan B, a book synthesizing research on the earth’s multiple converging ecological crises and laying out a step-by-step plan (including a budget — if you’re curious, it’s $161 billion) for how to transition to a sustainable path… In 2005, EPI released Plan B 2.0, a revised, expanded edition incorporating many developments.

The coal miner’s daughter knew to stand by her man, Big Sugar, when the stranger asked them for some food.
Image: Dean MacAdam

Lester Brown now is calling for a moratorium on the licensing of any new distilleries until more accurate data can be accumulated to know the effect of ethanol production on corn harvests. He says the grain needed to fill up a 25-gallon fuel tank with ethanol could feed one person for a full year, a fact that perplexed Christian Tokkelossi:

Where I come from we eat our food, we don’t burn it. Maize meal (usually just with salt and boiling water) is most of Africa’s staple food, eaten three times a day — by the more fortunate.

To go and burn it, albeit in a sophisticated internal combustion engine would be an act of lunacy and suicide for most Africans.

Brown argues that food prices everywhere would be affected by grabbing a large portion of the country’s food supply for fuel. Either other grains would make up for diversion of the corn crop into fuel, affecting other commodity prices, or U.S. exports would decrease, again affecting prices around the world.

Such a recommendation means EPI is faced off against Big Farm, in other words, David versus a Goliath that controls the world market for grain commodities. For those you who did the math, the difference between 140 and 60 million tons equal higher prices. These higher prices mean bigger profits, so science takes a back seat and politics is along for the ride. So, really it is more like Bambi v. Godzilla.

BTW: In a recent interview, Bambi Brown was quick to express that he was in favor of plug-in hybrids. Which is a good strategy for passenger cars with sufficient batteries, yet is an untenable compromise for long distance transport or farm equipment running on bio-diesel made from oil seed. Not to worry, though, Treehuggers, Big Coal is waiting in the wings to make the Big Rescue!