Consumer Reports on Ethanol

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The future of ethanol

Most experts don’t see the future of the ethanol industry taking root in America’s cornfields. A more promising long-term solution is cellulosic ethanol, which can be made from a variety of other sources such as corn stover (leaves, stalks, and other leftover parts), rye straw, wood pulp, and possibly switchgrass (commonly used for hay). In Brazil, ethanol is made from sugarcane.

“If this country is going to go big into ethanol, we need to tap into cellulosic ethanol,” says Friedman of the UCS, “because it’s cleaner and requires less fossil fuels than corn” to produce.

Cellulosic ethanol also holds the promise of much higher capacity than corn, possibly as much as 45 billion gallons. In terms of greenhouse gases, “cellulosic ethanol, we think, has the ability to reduce CO2 emissions by close to half” compared with corn ethanol, says Jerry Martin, communications director for the California EPA’s Air Resources Board.

Creating cellulosic ethanol requires expensive enzymes--about 25 cents’ worth per gallon of ethanol. But the federal government’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) expects the price to drop by half in the next few years. Iogen, a Canadian biotechnology company that produces the enzymes, says it plans to build the first full-scale commercial cellulosic ethanol plant by 2010.

A 2005 study conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Oak Ridge National Laboratory estimates that by 2030 ethanol from corn and cellulose could replace 30 percent of U.S. oil consumption--about the same as the U.S. currently imports from OPEC nations. Called the Billion Ton Study, it assumes that 1 billion tons of organic material could be used, with no loss of corn for food or feed, from resources such as forest waste and organic residue, and from energy crops such as switchgrass.

But there are major challenges. Friedman, at the Union of Concerned Scientists, estimates that to replace one-third of gasoline demand with ethanol even by 2050 without overwhelming land use would require three times the land currently used for crops and doubling both the efficiency of making ethanol and its fuel economy--a tall order. Moreover, there is dispute over whether it is even feasible to produce ethanol from switchgrass.

The important backdrop to the ethanol debate, of course, is that petroleum is a finite resource that’s rapidly being depleted. So even if running cars on E85 doesn’t make financial sense now and there are still serious questions about ethanol production, proponents say that ethanol should still be developed as a long-term hedge against oil shortages. Its advantages over other alternatives are that it can be produced in larger amounts than biodiesel and requires fewer technological breakthroughs and less infrastructure development than batteries or fuel cells.

“The big challenge is that we are going to reach a peak in world oil production,“ says Michael Pacheco, director for the NREL’s National Bioenergy Center. “We need to start working toward replacement fuels 20 years before that peak.”

Ann Wright, senior policy analyst for Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports, says: “We support the pursuit of more efficient ethanol production in combination with other policies intended to reduce America’s oil consumption. We question the use of CAFE credits that result in an increase in gasoline consumption at a time when the U.S. should be finding ways to decrease it.” CU would prefer incentives that motivate automakers to build more fuel-efficient models that today’s buyers want.

Rather than using CAFE credits, for example, Don MacKenzie, UCS vehicles engineer, says, “mandating flexible-fuel vehicles would be a lower cost to the country overall in terms of oil dependence,” because it wouldn’t result in additional gasoline consumption.

Even with the most optimistic estimates, ethanol on its own will never be able to provide Americans with energy independence. “Even if you could replace one-third to one-half of gasoline demand with cellulosic ethanol,” Friedman says, “that still leaves the rest.”

It’s more likely that ethanol will be only one in a portfolio of choices that could include biodiesel, diesel, electric, hydrogen, natural-gas, and efficient gasoline cars. “We have multiple problems: oil security, global warming, and smog,” Friedman adds. “To think one solution can take care of all of those is naive.”

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