Old, Dirty Ethanol must Innovate not Litigate
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Photo: Flickr, beccafromportland
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Though disappointed, I’m hardly surprised that some in the ethanol industry have chosen litigation over innovation. While not all ethanol is created equal, this lawsuit is about old, dirty ethanol’s attempt to stifle competition from newer, cleaner sources of fuels that can be produced right here in the U.S. By choosing lawyers over engineers, old, dirty ethanol is headed down the same disastrous road Detroit took when it sued California over its seminal Clean Car Law (sometimes known as the Pavley Program).
Some quick background to the lawsuit. In April of 2009, the California Air Resources Board adopted the latest in a series of common sense standards to cut global warming pollution and steer the existing energy industries to a cleaner, more sustainable path. Predictably, the old, dirty ethanol industry filed both federal and state lawsuits last December.
This first in the nation program, called the Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS), originally proposed by Governor Schwarzenegger in January 2007, requires the oil industry to reduce the carbon pollution from its products by an average of 1 percent per year for the next 10 years. The LCFS gives fair treatment to all fuels based on their pollution performance – it does not single out any particular fuel or industry. Like all pollution standards, it simply rewards cleaner fuels and penalizes the dirtier fuels.
The LCFS is the only standard in the country that will force the oil industry to provide a suite of cleaner fuels, including electricity, hydrogen and advanced biofuels. Needless to say, victory for old, dirty ethanol on this lawsuit would be a huge victory for Big Oil too.
The old, dirty ethanol industry is dominated by big companies like Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and Poet. It’s baffling why an industry that benefits from $4 billion a year in government subsidies can’t find a way to compete on environmental merits. Increased production efficiencies, using more of the corn plant, and switching to cleaner fuels in its refineries are all known ways to make current ethanol cleaner. Advanced ethanol, made from waste materials and other more sustainable feedstocks, promise even greater reductions.
California drivers are already spending roughly $375 million a year subsidizing the 950 million gallons of ethanol that is currently blended into our gasoline supply. The LCFS is critical part of the state’s overall strategy to cut global warming pollution, reduce our dangerous dependency on oil, and to unleash clean fuels innovation. Global warming unchecked will worsen our air quality, threatens our coastline with rising sea levels, and diminishes our water supply by shrinking snow packs. To protect our health and our economy, Californians should demand more in return from the old, dirty ethanol industry than lawsuits and excuses for why it can’t compete in a clean energy economy.
* * * This post originally appeared on NRDC's Switchboard.
Roland Hwang is Transportation Program Director for Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco. NRDC is a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting the environment, people and animals. NRDC was founded in 1970 and is comprised of more than 300 lawyers, scientists and policy experts, with more than one million members and e-activists.
I agree, many farmers in the U.S. make decisions based on price movements of corn, soybeans, wheat, etc. And yes, ethanol definitely affects those prices, but to charge a global carbon "fee" using global imaging or a discount formula does not add up.
Additionally, crude oil has no indirect land-use change per the LCFS. For whatever reason drilling off the coast of California would cause no carbon emmissions? Corn is affected by supply and demand, but crude oil isn't? By CARB's calculations that makes ethanol, made from corn grown yearly, nearly as worse as crude oil extracted from the ground that has an indefinite supply. How is that logical?
While you may be trying to sway some opinions by using old, dirty tricks, telling half truths that completely miss the point of the lawsuit won't help your argument.
I support the development of all kinds of alternative energy, with a strong preference given to those that are currently viable. Alternative energy is competing against a very rich, powerful and strongly entrenched petroleum industry. We cannot afford to throw these still developing technologies to the wolves just yet. Look at the volatility the market speculators created in the corn commodity market, and the results this had on the fledgling ethanol industry.
When you say old & dirty, it gives the impression that innovation and development is stagnant in the ethanol industry, and nothing could be further from the truth. Ethanol production has improved so significantly that most researchers have no idea how well the new processes work, and base their studies on data that is not just old, but wildly inaccurate. Water consumption at a current plant is often less than the municipal golf course down the road, and one by-product of the process is tremendous volumes of a high protein livestock feed. It loses only the starches in the trip through the process.
Finally, the corn-based ethanol industry is leading the charge to develop cellulosic ethanol. They are taking their meager fractions of the federal subsidies (most of it goes to the oil company that blends the ethanol with it's gasoline) and creating new and innovative ways to produce alternative fuels from other feedstocks. There are others working on this, of course, but please understand that if cellulosic ethanol comes to fruition, chances are good that the corn-based producers will play a major supporting role in driving it forward.
Your perception of the ethanol industry as "old, dirty" could not be further from reality. It is progressive, innovative, and already is a key player in helping the world get the oil monkey off our backs.
The primary factor holding back the production of ethanol from biomass is not technology but the lack of investment capital and financing for new facilities. We will need more than $150 billion over the next 12 years to build the plants needed to meet the 36 billion gallon biofuel mandate required by renewable fuels standard.
Ironically, we are spending $400 billion per year for imported oil, much of which is used to fund terrorism and anti-American activities.
Where is the logic?
Indirect land use effects are important and easy to understand. If I take land that was being used to grow food and instead grow biofuels there, the demand for the food that used to grow there doesn't go away, so food prices go up and previously uncultivated land (i.e., ecosystems) is cleared and plowed to make more farmland. This causes a huge release of greenhouse gases. The only reason this is controversial is that it makes clear that most conventional biofuels, especially corn ethanol, actually cause the release of more greenhouse gases than simply burning petroleum-based fuels.
It is ironic that supporters of corn-to-ethanol, who are often conservative and thus speak of the wonders of the market, suddenly stop believing in market economics when it reflects badly on their chosen technology...
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