GoodFuels

Time Flunks Ethanol Fact Test

The same guy who brought us “The Clean Energy Myth” cover story in Time magazine last year has a similarly biased story in this week’s issue filled with inaccuracies and down-right falsehoods.

I hope that “Stress-Testing Biofuels: How the Game Was Rigged” by Michael Grunwald is supposed to be commentary, rather than actual reporting, since it clearly features the writer’s anti-ethanol bias and opinions.

Grunwald cites “Princeton scholar Tim Searchinger” as his primary resource for the evils of ethanol, the same environmental lawyer and author who was the basis of last year’s cover story, despite the fact that his theory of international land use change has been refuted by actual scientists. Grunwald writes as if Searchinger’s “work” is proven fact:

Yet the real problem with farm fuels, as Searchinger and others have shown, is in the indirect effects on land use: when an acre of land is used to grow fuel instead of food, an extra acre somewhere else is probably going to be converted into farmland to grow food. And that acre may well be an acre of wetland or forest that would otherwise store loads of carbon. So farm fuels become a lose-lose deal: exacerbating the deforestation that already creates one fifth of the world’s carbon emissions, and driving up global food prices.

More than 100 scientists and researchers disputed this assertion in a letter to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger earlier this year, saying the science of indirect land use is “in its nascent stage, is controversial in much of the scientific community, and is only being enforced against biofuels.”

Regarding deforestation, the letter from the scientists noted that “most primary forest deforestation is currently occurring in places like Brazil, Indonesia and Russia as a direct result of logging, cattle ranching and subsistence farming. Adding an iLUC penalty to biofuels will hold the sector accountable to decision-making far outside of its control (i.e. for decisions related to the supply chains of other products), and is unlikely to have any effect on protecting forests or mitigating GHG emissions as a result of land management practices.”

In blaming biofuels for driving up global food prices, Grunwald links to a February 2008 Time photo essay which paints a dire, heart-rendering picture of starving people around the world. The implication is that ethanol is responsible for children rummaging though garbage for food in Somalia. This goes beyond irresponsible reporting into downright lying, especially considering a recent Congressional Budget Office report found that ethanol was responsible for just 10 percent of last year’s increase in domestic food prices while oil prices were responsible for 36 percent. In addition, the U.S. exported a record amount of corn last year even with higher ethanol production, which belies the notion that because we are making food into fuel we are depriving the world of needed sustenance.

Renewable Fuels Association president Bob Dinneen has written a letter to Time magazine “objecting to the unbalanced and factually inaccurate reporting/editorializing on biofuels by Michael Grunwald” and attempting to set the record straight. We’ll see if it gets published.

Nonsense Percents

Here’s a riddle for you. When does 61% become 16%?

When you are talking about the lifecycle analysis of greenhouse gas emissions for ethanol as calculated by the EPA under its proposed rulemaking for the Renewable Fuels Standard, the correct answer is when you add in presumed international indirect land use changes.

According to the Renewable Fuels Association, if you just compare “apples to apples” - that is, the direct impacts of corn ethanol’s carbon footprint compared to petroleum, ethanol is 61 percent better than gasoline at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. However, when “international land use changes” are factored into the equation, you get 16 percent - a difference of a whopping 45 percent.

RFA VP for Research Geoff Cooper explains, using one of the many tables included in the 800+ page rule promulgated by EPA that splits out the emissions by phase for both the gasoline baseline and a dry mill corn ethanol plant producing dried distillers grains. “They look at the emissions by phase from the net domestic agricultural phase, international agriculture, domestic land use change, international land use change, fuel production and transportation of fuel and feedstock,” Cooper said during a press conference after the rule was released. “When you total all of those up and subtract the international land use change emissions out of there, that’s where the 61 percent reduction comes from.”

Listen to Geoff explain here:

That is because the international land use change number is the biggest of all in terms of lifecycle GHG emissions, at over 1.9 million CO2-eq/mmBtu. Take it out and the equation is significantly different.

That’s why there is such a huge concern over the indirect land use change issue. Especially since it is based on a model that assumes specific price levels, crop yields and how much land will be put into agricultural production in countries around the world based solely on the use of a certain amount of biofuels in the United States. There is simply no way those calculations can be foolproof accurate. It therefore stands to reason that any inaccurate and unproven model should not be used to penalize ethanol to the tune of 45 percentage points, which puts it four points below the required 20 percent threshold for improvement of greenhouse gas emissions.

If you have the time or the inclination, take a look at the EPA’s proposal. The link here is to the PDF of a 549 page document on the rulemaking, not the 800+ version that Geoff references in his comments. The table he refers to is on page 315 of this document. The entire section on lifecycle analysis starts on page 268.

Flood of Negative Headlines from Water Study

A University of Minnesota study on water usage and ethanol production is already generating a flood of negative headlines and it hasn’t even been officially published yet.

“Biofuel Production Threatens Water Supplies,” “Bioethanol’s Impact On Water Supply Three Times Higher Than Once Thought,” and “Ethanol Production Consumed 861 B Gallons of Water in ‘07″ are just a sample of the headlines from the report which is scheduled for publication Wednesday in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. However, the headline on the press release from the U of MN (which was supposedly embargoed until 12:01 a.m. Wednesday) reads more positively - “Midwestern ethanol plants use less water than western counterparts.”

The study is the first to compare water use in corn-ethanol production on a state-by-state basis - which they found ranges from as little as six gallons of water for each gallon of ethanol in Iowa - the number one ethanol producing state - to as much as 2,100 gallons in California, which produces very little ethanol. The authors used agricultural and geologic data from 2006-2008 to develop a ratio showing how much irrigated water was used to grow and harvest the corn and to process it at ethanol plants. The study “highlights the need to strategically promote ethanol development in states with lower irrigation rates and less groundwater use,” the authors say.

As always, the problem with this issue is perspective. Check out some of the EPA’s Water Trivia Facts, which includes this little tidbit: How much water does an acre of corn give off per day in evaporation? The answer is 4,000 gallons. Is that counted when determining water usage for corn ethanol production?

And how does ethanol production compare to gasoline production? According to the same trivia facts (converted to gallons from barrels) it takes at least 44 gallons of water to refine one gallon of crude oil. Does that count the water used to pump the oil out of the ground?

Here’s another little fun trivia fact. A typical 40-million-gallon-a-year ethanol plant uses almost exactly the same amount of water per as an average 18-hole municipal golf course. But then, golf courses don’t have to defend their water usage - only the people who are trying to produce food and fuel for our country do.