GoodFuels

Corn Grower Concerns About Indirect Land Use

The National Corn Growers Association hosted a conference last week in St. Louis on “Land Use and Carbon Impacts of Corn-based Ethanol” to highlight the problems associated with trying to measure indirect land use change using models based on subjective assumptions and unproven science.

NCGA CEO Rick Tolman says the main problem is vague direction that was put in the 2007 energy bill’s Renewable Fuels Standard. “We had some arcane language put in there that said we’ll take a look at indirect land change and its implications as an unintended consequence,” Tolman said. “What we think is there’s an unintended consequence of the unintended consequence, which may be that we may in fact start using more imported oil because of this language we have regulation that exceeds our ability to measure.”

Geoff Cooper with the Renewable Fuels Association moderated the first panel at the conference which focused on the modeling used to determine land use change and how difficult this can be. “It’s a new area of study and certainly new to a regulatory framework,” Cooper said. “Using these models for these purposes involves lots of subjective decisions and judgement calls and when you put that in the context of a regulation, that’s problematic.”

This edition of “The Ethanol Report” features comments from Tolman and Cooper, as well as NCGA Director of Biofuels & Business Development Jamey Cline and North Dakota grower Bart Schott.

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