Fill 'er up with ethyl, uh, make that ethanol???

I've been following the discussion of ethanol as a fuel for awhile now, and it's interesting how much momentum the idea of turning corn into fuel is gaining. The general belief that I've always had, which to some degree originated with the research of Cornell professor David Pimentel, is that ethanol as a fuel results in a net energy loss, i.e. that more energy is used to plant, harvest, and process corn than contained in the resulting fuel. His analysis isn't universally accepted, however, as noted in this blogpost about the government's National Renewable Energy Laboratory's response to some of Pimentel's findings.

Iowa farmers and big agribusinesses like Archer Daniels Midland are moving rapidly to capitalize on the wave, sparking a building boom of processing plants based on the current technology, the one that Pimentel believes is ultimately a step backwards.

Morningstar, on the other hand, is recommending that investors exercise caution, noting that the viability of ethanol as an alternative to petroleum is still being debated and that a huge investment in infrastructure will be required to match the petroleum distribution system already in place. But they also remind readers that:

... there is a very powerful ethanol lobby behind this push. At the end of the day, expanding ethanol's use may be more a matter of political will and special interest influence than anything driven by fundamental economics.

An article in last Friday's Salt Lake Tribune also casts some doubt on the wisdom of using corn as an alternative fuel but points to another approach, the conversion of cellulose into ethanol. This technique would be significantly more efficient and could be used with a wide variety of fuels, including switchgrass which President Bush somewhat opaquely alluded to in this year's State of the Union address. (A more indepth article on cellulosic ethanol can be found here.)

I had been already been thinking about writing on this topic when I ran across a post from James Kunstler on The Huffington Post. Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency (which I highly recommend), makes the point in his post that we are trapped in the paradigm of the car. Rather than inquiring into more fundamental approaches to addressing the problems associated with dwindling reserves of fossil fuels, we're simply taking the approach of replacing one liquid fuel with another:

The idea that it's all about cars is probably natural for a nation that has succeeded in literally driving itself crazy with driving. And so a great wish arises for a rescue remedy, some alternative fuel that will allow us to keep the easy motoring fiesta going.

One of the key premises of The Long Emergency is that no alternative fuel is going to save us. Simply put, the energy content of the oil, coal, and natural gas that we burn each year is the result of many years worth of solar energy captured and stored by ancient plants. This would suggest that we're not going to be able to match that fossil fuel energy content by using crops as fuel, since those crops can capture only a fraction of the solar energy available in the fuels they would be replacing. (I'll let you read the book to see how he dismisses the idea of hydrogen as an alternative fuel.)

Further, and as also noted in Against the Grain, Kunstler points out in his Friday post that our food supply is also at risk:

As we get into big trouble with our oil and gas supplies, we will concurrently get into big trouble with food production. Our mode of industrial agriculture requires vast "inputs" of fossil fuel based fertilizers and pesticides to keep those seemingly endless truckloads of Cheez Doodles and Pepsi Cola coming. Just in the past five years, due to steeply rising natural gas prices, more than half of our fertilizer production has moved out of the country -- much of it to the Middle East, making us now hostages to them for our food as well as our motoring fuel. We are going to have to make other arrangements for feeding ourselves, and the signs all point to a much more profoundly localized, smaller scale, organic mode of farming, probably requiring a lot more human labor. I would go as far to say that farming will come closer to the center of American mainstream economic life than anyone now living in this country can remember. This will have enormous implications, by the way, for how we regard the remaining undeveloped rural land outside our towns and cities.

Kunstler's central message is that our entire way of living is built on cheap fossil fuels, and while civilization may not fall when they inevitably run dry, we won't be able to find any solution that lets us go on with business as usual:

Now, the plain sad truth of the matter is that no combination of alternative fuels or energy systems that we know of will permit us to continue the easy motoring fiesta in the face of the permanent global fossil fuel crisis. You can state this categorically, too. We are not going to run the interstate highway system, Wal-Mart, and Walt Disney World on any combination of tar sands and oil shale distillates, bio-diesel, ethanol, hydrogen, solar power, wind power, uranium, or used french-fry oil. We'll use all these things -- we'll use everything possible -- but we're not going to run the current set-up with them. They will not add up to compensate for our losses in oil and natural gas. They would be very useful in helping us make other arrangements, but first we have to get over the wish to keep the current set-up running.

Finally, I'll point you at Michael Ventura's column, "The Million Mile Commute," which illustrates the almost unimaginable mountain of resources, not to mention waste and pollution, that a lifetime of driving entails.