By Brenda Fullick

If an Iowa politician on the campaign trail had to choose between kissing a baby or kissing an ear of corn, chances are the baby would be ignored.

Liberals and conservatives these days are pinning hopes on corn-based ethanol as a way to break the United States’ dependence on oil from the Middle East while reducing greenhouse gases and slowing the destruction of global warning.

Ethanol is a safe, easy sell in Iowa. When politicians want to sound Green, the first thing they do is mention how much they support ethanol. And with the instability of the Middle East, supporting ethanol sounds as patriotic as buying war bonds.

Sen. Tom Harkin released a July 10 column that states, “The oil-producing countries think they have us over a barrel, but they will soon get the message: America has had enough, and we are serious about taking charge of our energy future.”

It doesn’t hurt public perception when ethanol blends are cheaper at the pump than straight gasoline, thanks largely to a 51-cent-per-gallon federal subsidy. Then there’s the added allure of buying a product produced by American farmers — particularly here in Iowa, the top ethanol-producing state in the nation, where ethanol plants pump out roughly 30 percent of all the ethanol in the U.S.
More bushels of corn for ethanol mean more farm jobs, right?

More ethanol means less global warming, right?

Actually, scientists who study renewable fuels generally agree that corn ethanol isn’t terrible, but it’s not nearly the solution that some people are hoping.

Ethanol is “probably good for the state of Iowa. But it could be so much better if you would do it the right way,” says David Osterberg, director of the Iowa Policy Project and an associate professor in occupational and environmental health at the University of Iowa.

As the federal government has given consistent subsidies to corn farmers while financing corn-based ethanol research, there has been far less support for another type of ethanol — cellulosic ethanol — which would produce significantly more energy, more cheaply, while causing less environmental damage.

But there are political and social pressures to keep making ethanol out of corn rather than more sustainable fuels, like switchgrass, big bluestem, or even municipal wastes.

“There are people that have vested interests. There are organizations, very powerful in our state, that want to see certain things happen,” says Rich Leopold, director of the Iowa Environmental Council.

At the IEC, “we like renewable energy a lot,” Leopold says. “But there’s a right way and a wrong way to do this.”

Two kinds of ethanol

Pure corn ethanol, as it’s produced today in this country, is basically 200-proof corn whiskey, a combination of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen molecules cooked up in what amounts to a very large distillery.

“The process of fermenting starch into alcohol has been around for thousands of years,” says Dave Miller, director of research and commodity services for the Iowa Farm Bureau. Corn is used in ethanol because its kernels are 80 percent starch — second only to rice in starch concentration, but rice is more expensive, he says. That starch makes corn an excellent candidate for the fermentation process. “There is no better feedstock for doing ethanol right now than corn.”

Corn ethanol is nothing new to the car industry: 100 percent ethanol is the fuel that Henry Ford used to run his Model T. Though America’s cars were soon made to run on fossil fuels, Iowa gas stations began selling ethanol blends in 1979, and Ford came out with its first flex-fuel vehicles in 1985.
Iowa’s ethanol push of the last 20 to 30 years, initially a response to the high Middle East oil prices of the 1970s, translated into a guaranteed market for Iowa’s corn.

One reason Iowa was quick to embrace corn ethanol is that Iowa had the corn farmers to grow it, the silos to store it, the grain elevators to buy the stuff.

“In Iowa, there’s a natural constituency of corn farmers,” Miller says. Plus, liquid fuel is simple to handle. “Ethanol’s easy. We have the infrastructure. We can pump it. We have gas stations.”

“We know corn. We know how to grow corn. We do it very well,” Leopold says. Iowa has seed companies, entire industries built around corn. “That’s why we’re doing corn.

“Most people that I talk to, though, know that corn is not the end,” Leopold says. Scientists and environmentalists agree that the future is in cellulosic ethanol, a process that uses enzymes to digest plant materials, breaking down the cell walls and converting the pulp into fuel.

Cellulosic ethanol can be made from any sort of biomass, including native perennial grasses, fast-growing poplar and willow trees, and paper that can’t be recycled. “Once it doesn’t matter what you grow,” Leopold says, “the world opens up.”

Cellulosic ethanol also is a much more energy-efficient conversion process. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, the energy return on investment typically ranges between 1.29 and 1.65 with corn ethanol. However, the energy return on cellulosic ethanol ranges between 4.4 and 6.61— making it up to five more times more energy-efficient than ethanol made from corn.

So why aren’t cellulosic ethanol plants popping up across the country?

The answer is that cellulosic technology isn’t yet refined enough for processing plants to make a profit. Most people in the industry predict that it’s five to 10 years from becoming commercially viable.

The U.S. has a long history of supporting ethanol with corn price supports, incentives and university research projects. But there’s been less interest, or less pressure, to research cellulosic ethanol, a technology that can produce greater amounts of green energy while causing less environmental damage in the process.

Francis Thicke, a Ph.D. agronomist who worked for the USDA Extension Service before becoming an organic dairy farmer in Fairfield, has a cynical take on the forces at work. Because land-grant colleges like Iowa State University rely on research projects funded by companies like Cargill and Monsanto to pay their salaries and finance their buildings, Thicke suggests that universities actually have a disincentive to develop sustainable fuel technologies that aren’t dependent on marketable products like fertilizers and pesticides.

“There aren’t many things to sell organic farmers,” Thicke says.

However, there is money to be made in the future from cellulosic ethanol, says Norm Olson, manager of BECON, ISU’s biomass energy conversion facility in Nevada.

“Now the oil companies are getting involved,” Olson says, “because they see the profit potential.”

In fact, BP Amoco — also known as British Petroleum — is putting $500 million into cellulosic ethanol research. ISU is one of the universities bidding for the project.

Olson is concerned that BP will tie up the technology by striking a proprietary deal with whatever university wins the project.

Like a lot of people in the renewable fuels field, Olson wishes the government would put more money into alternatives to corn ethanol so the technology would be publicly available to make renewable fuels more lucrative and environmentally friendly.

“We do not need to be subsidizing corn ethanol. But we do need to be subsidizing cellulosic ethanol,” agrees Osterberg. Ideally, those subsidies should be coming from the federal level, he says, but the Iowa Legislature should also be supporting the more responsible cellulosic technology.

Kansas already offers state income-tax credits for cellulosic ethanol plants to encourage investors in that greener technology.

In fact, the Iowa Economic Development Department has already turned the corner. It wasn’t long ago that the state agency was on the same page as the Iowa Corn Promotion Board, gushing to potential investors about Iowa’s natural wealth of corn while helping them line up financing and construction sites.

According to IDED data, Iowa currently has 23 ethanol plants in operation, producing more than 1 billion gallons of ethanol per year. The state has seven ethanol plants being constructed or expanded, and another 36 ethanol plants are being proposed.

If those plants are built, they would produce 2.57 billion gallons of ethanol a year.

About six months ago, IDED’s board decided to no longer offer financial assistance to corn-based ethanol plants. That decision was based partly on the fact that corn-based ethanol plants are growing so quickly, they don’t need governmental help, says Tina Hoffman at the IDED. “The traditional plants obviously have been able to find the financing through the private sector pretty readily,” she says.

The other reason for IDED’s change of heart, Hoffman says, is that the board decided the future of ethanol is cellulosic.

Weighing the options

Experts say there’s no debating the fact that fossil fuels are bad for the planet: Global warming results from burning fossil fuels, which releases carbon that trees and smaller plants had initially trapped in their cells thousands of years ago, before natural processes converted them to oil and coal. Once those fossil fuels are burned, carbon is re-released into the atmosphere, trapping heat from the sun and creating the greenhouse effect.

“Gasoline’s really an inferior fuel,” says Miller at the Iowa Farm Bureau. Converting oil to gasoline is energy-intensive, he says, and gas contains additives like benzene that are both smelly and highly toxic. While gasoline conducts carbon, he says, ethanol conducts hydrogen — a safe, benign fuel source.

As Miller sees it, corn-based ethanol is a much better option.

“The technology is getting better and better the more we do it,” he says. Plus, corn hybrids are being developed with higher starch contents to make corn ethanol production increasingly efficient.

Some day, Miller and those of like minds would like to see corn stovers — the stalks and leaves — processed with cellulosic technology once that becomes cheaper and more effective.

But one problem with corn as an ethanol fuel source is that relatively little fuel is produced per acre of land. At BECON, Olson is finishing a two-year study showing that ethanol should be produced from a variety of sweet sorghum that grows 15 feet tall, producing more tons of plant material per acre than other potential crops. “I don’t know of anything else that can come close to it,” he says.

Sweet sorghum basically looks like corn, but without the ears. It’s easier on the soil than corn, Olson says, and it’s more drought-tolerant and disease-resistant.

Americans are stuck on the idea of corn ethanol, but that’s because “we’re by far the largest producer of corn in the world,” Olson says. Other companies are working on cellulosic ethanol from plants like switchgrass and fermented ethanol from grains like barley and whey.

Some analysts are predicting that Europe and China will be producing cellulosic ethanol for consumers in 2007, Olson says.

Meanwhile, Brazil expects to be totally energy-independent by 2007, relying on a combination of domestic oil and fermented ethanol from sugarcane.

Brazil was able to pull that off after 20 years of government investment in the technology, Olson says. Plus, Brazil has flex-fuel vehicles that are not available in the U.S.

And then there’s the fact that Brazilians don’t drive and light up their houses the way Americans do. The Natural Resources Defense Council estimates that the U.S. consumes 25 percent of the world’s total oil production.

“The fact is, we like cheap energy in this country,” Miller says. “There are implications of that.”

How green is green?

It’s fashionable in Iowa to be pro-ethanol these days.

“Everybody’s for it right now,” says Leopold at the Iowa Environmental Council. “Everybody’s tripping over themselves to be more for renewable energy. It’s like saying, ‘I’m for breathing.’

“The only people that are not talking about the environmental benefits of ethanol right now [are the people in] the environmental community,” Leopold says.

Iowa’s environmentalists generally don’t like to criticize corn ethanol, because it’s better than fossil fuels. “You have to start where you’re at. Right now we know corn,” Leopold says. However, “I think we should be doing everything we can to encourage cellulosic ethanol, as quickly as possible.”

Corn needs to be replanted every year, and it relies on agrichemicals that cost money while polluting the environment. Harvesting corn leaves the topsoil vulnerable to erosion.

Some corn ethanol plants are powered with coal, reducing the net environmental benefits.

Plus, it takes about six gallons of water to process each gallon of ethanol produced, Leopold says. Much of that water from Iowa’s rivers and groundwater supplies is lost to steam, leaving water that has higher concentrations of chemicals and suspended solids, he says. “If you’re a fish, that’s important.”

If Iowans were using cellulosic technology to produce fuel from native prairie plants, the roots of those plants would prevent runoff while improving the soil, Leopold says.

Plus, plants remove carbon dioxide from the air and take that carbon down into their deep root systems. It’s a process called “carbon sequestration,” and it further slows global warming.

Harvesting native prairie perennials would require little fertilizer and no pesticides, which would be cheaper for farmers and easier on the environment. It would reduce runoff and lower the nitrate pollution in Iowa’s waters.

Leopold is concerned that Iowa is investing in fermentation ethanol plants when better technology is just around the corner. “We need to look 10, 20, 30 years out,” he says. Though it is possible to convert corn-based ethanol plants once the cellulosic technology becomes cheaper, Leopold is concerned that Iowa will keep its focus on corn.

“As Bill Northey says, we grow corn and soybeans in Iowa because we’re good at growing corn and soybeans,” says Thicke. “Our whole infrastructure is set up for corn and soybeans. Farmers have the equipment for corn and soybeans.”

Thicke, like Leopold, is concerned that Iowa will begin making ethanol from corn stovers.

In that process, “we’re leaving the soil very bare, open to erosion,” he says. “It depletes the soil of organic matter as well.”

Making money

The city of Des Moines is in the process of deciding between two competing companies, Lincolnway Energy of Nevada and Vision Fuels of Des Moines, both of which want to build a fermentation ethanol plant in the city.

Both companies have assured the city that they will be able to retool the plant to use cellulosic technology once that becomes commercially available, says City Manager Rick Clark. The Des Moines City Council plans to sell city property at fair market value to the winning company, and the city has no plan to offer financial incentives, Clark says.

“Ethanol plants have a very good return on investment,” he says, “and thus there is no justification for public incentives.”

City leaders view an ethanol plant in Des Moines as a potential catalyst for other value-added agribusiness development, he says.

A lot of Iowa millionaires are being made in ethanol right now, says Jeff Carter of Clive, co-owner of BFC Gas & Electric Companies, which operates a biomass plant on the south side of Cedar Rapids.

“I think Iowa’s positioned very, very well as far as being in the energy business,” Carter says. “We’ve got the wind. We’ve got the grain-based materials, at least short term. … It’s exciting times for Iowa, it really is.”

However, the big money is behind cellulosic technology, Carter says. “That’s really where the future is. Everybody knows it.”

Instead of processing corn into ethanol, BFC Gas & Electric converts about 150 tons of wastes every day into fuel, providing electricity for about 4,000 homes. The company uses biomass that other people would throw away, like sawmill wastes, burning it without oxygen to create a gas to drive turbine generators.

Lately, Carter says, he’s been getting a lot of calls from ethanol plants wanting to get rid of their distillers’ grains. Typically, that byproduct could be fed to livestock, but the market is so glutted right now that ethanol plants can’t get rid of it fast enough.

Carter predicts ripple effects from the current ethanol boom, including more expensive cornflakes for breakfast, as the price of corn rises.

“Wall Street’s finally gotten behind some of these green technologies,” Carter says. Although corn may not be the smartest option, he says, at least it’s a start.

“People are sick and tired of paying for overseas oil,” he says. “If we’re going to misdirect efforts, we might as well misdirect them in a way that makes our friends and families rich.”

The importance of diversity

“Ethanol is not a silver bullet,” warns Don MacKenzie, a vehicles engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists based in Washington, D.C. “We’re not going to be able to grow our way to energy independence.

“I think that corn-based ethanol has potentially a very important role to play” in the transition to renewable fuels, he says. “It’s good because it’s an established technology. It’s something we can do right now. And it does give us a modest reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

“The limitation is the amount of corn ethanol we can produce,” MacKenzie says. “We don’t have enough corn in this country to fuel all our cars and trucks—not even close.”

Even if Americans stopped eating corn and stopped feeding corn to livestock, the U.S. would still be able to produce ethanol to fulfill just a small percentage of this country’s fuel needs, he says.

The National Resources Defense Council estimates that 95 percent of U.S. ethanol comes from corn. In 2004, this country used 11 percent of its total corn crop for ethanol.

On average, it takes one acre of land to grow enough corn for to provide a year’s supply of ethanol for four cars driving on 10 percent ethanol blends.

If those cars were using 100 percent ethanol, their greenhouse gas emissions would be lowered by 30 percent. However, the 10 percent blends are reducing harmful emissions by a mere 3 percent.
Yet this country keeps putting money into corn. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, American corn farmers will receive $6 billion in assistance in 2006.

“We need to be looking at broader strategies nationwide,” MacKenzie says. Americans need to travel fewer miles, and rely more heavily on alternatives like wind and solar power, he says. Ethanol is important, he says, but it is just part of the overall picture.

The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that if the U.S. tripled its use of biomass for fuel production, it could provide $20 billion in new income for farmers while reducing global warming by as much as if we had taken 70 million cars off the road.

However, it’s very difficult for the free market to make a major change like that, Osterberg says. That’s why he thinks the federal and state governments should be doing more to support cellulosic ethanol and other alternative fuels.

“Corn-based is not terrible,” he says, “but it’s just not as good as it could be.” CV

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