Fertilizing the Ethanol Problem Posted by Adam Blickstein

As we've hit our agricultural stride on Democracy Arsenal, there's another aspect of the corn, ethanol, energy and agricultural policy debate that is often overlooked: fertilizer. While those who drive gas-guzzling SUV's are often derided for excess oil consumption, you never hear complaints about folks that eat Wheaties or Twinkies or drink Coke as part of the petroleum problem.  Even independent of the oil used in shipping, nearly all our corn-based products, including most of our beef, soft drinks, produce, junk food and chemical byproducts (essentially everything in your average supermarket) is derived in part from oil and produced using petroleum-based fertilizer.  The basis of our agricultural system is oil, and instead of primarily relying on the sun as the energy source of nitrogen for our crops, we use petroleum. 

The U.S. is the second largest consumer of petroleum based fertilizer in the world (behind) China, but we use more petroleum based fertilizer for feed, produce and pasture purposes than any other nation. But while lawmakers in Congress are eager to hold hearings to rail against the automobile industry for its gasoline addiction, or deride our over-dependence on foreign oil, you will never see  inquiries into why the foundation of our agricultural industry is indeed petroleum. It's an integral piece to the energy puzzle that has been missing in the political dialogue. And instead of trying to solve it, we enable the problem through the illogical policies of federal corn subsidies and support for ethanol.

It strikes me as a little more than ironic that we'll need to consume more petroleum via fertilizer in order to grow more corn to produce more ethanol, which has destabilized  the global food markets, all in the name of decreasing our dependence foreign on oil, which we simply can't accomplish by increasing our use of ethanol from any of the sources commonly discussed (see chart below). There is simply nothing about these policies that makes good, practical sense and we've all become children of the corn in more ways than you might think.

(And yes, I just read Omnivore's Dilemma)

• corn requires 29 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced;
• switch grass requires 45 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced; and
• wood biomass requires 57 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced. (From a 2005 Cornell study)

Comments

[Don Bacon]

from Scientific American (excerpt):
Switchgrass ethanol delivers 540 percent of the energy used to produce it, compared with just roughly 25 percent more energy returned by corn-based ethanol according to the most optimistic studies.

"Cost competitive, energy responsible cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass or from forestry waste like sawdust and wood chips requires a more complex refining process but it's worth the investment," Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said at the Range Fuels facility groundbreaking in November. "Cellulosic ethanol contains more net energy and emits significantly fewer greenhouse gases than ethanol made from corn."

In fact, Vogel and his team report this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA that switchgrass will store enough carbon in its relatively permanent root system to offset 94 percent of the greenhouse gases emitted both to cultivate it and from the derived ethanol burned by vehicles.

The use of native prairie grasses is meant to avoid some of the other risks associated with biofuels such as reduced diversity of local animal life and displacing food crops with fuel crops. "This is an energy crop that can be grown on marginal land," Vogel argues, such as the more than 35 million acres (14.2 million hectares) of marginal land that farmers are currently paid not to plant under the terms of USDA's Conservation Reserve Program.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=grass-makes-better-ethanol-than-corn

[Zathras]

Does this post have a point?

Honestly, a major reason critics of American farm policy regularly fail in their efforts to change it is because they don't make the effort to learn anything about it, or about agriculture. Their criticisms therefore tend to degenerate into undirected rants like this one.

Since this is primarily a foreign policy blog, here's a useful idea toward the cause of easing the upward pressure on corn prices while improving our foreign relations: end the federal sugar program. The soft drink, confectionary and other industries use as much corn sweetener as they do for a reason, namely that the government forbids them from importing as much sugar as they need. In the absence of sugar import restrictions, many corn sweetener users would start to switch back to lower priced sugar, much of which would come from some of America's better trading partners in Latin America and the Pacific. Ending the sugar program would have the added bonus, for liberals, of being a talking point against the argument that liberals view all government programs, no matter what they do, as eternal (it's only one talking point, against an argument with an impressive body of evidence behind it. I don't make miracles here).

Sens. Clinton and Obama are competing right now to show how populist (that is, protectionist) they are, and I'd lay odds that Clinton at least has sugar interests on the list of her Florida fundraisers, so this idea is probably a non-starter with the Democratic Presidential candidates. As a contribution to the policy debate, though, it beats displays of rank ignorance and bad writing.

[Adam Blickstein]

The limits on the importation of sugar, largely implemented in the early 1980's and paralleling the rise of corn syrup in soft drinks, is only part of a broader issue which tracks back to the 1970's. Between 1971 and 1974, Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, completely revamped our nation's agricultural industry, dismantling New Deal-era farm support and reforms. One of his biggest initiatives was to expand the corn industry, which he was largely successful in accomplishing. For the first time, corn prices dropped and supplies soared. Where did the excess corn go? Besides animal feed, it was developed into a variety of chemical byproducts that are now mainstays in our diet. One of the largest of these byproducts, corn syrup, created a cheaper alternative to sugar, one which had a longer shelf life and was easier to transport as liquid than sugar as solid. You can see why, at the time, restricting sugar imports was good policy: it supported farmers, it supported mega-companies like Coca-Cola, and it supported the trucking industry. So, while you can look at the sugar issue from the superficial vantage point of "just end the restrictions on sugar importation and all will be fine," it becomes more complex when you see that our entrenched domestic agricultural policies - artificial support for corn and the industrialization of our food supply - would make this foreign policy shift almost impossible.

[Frank]

Amen. I would also point you to Richard Manning's wonderful 2004 piece in Harper's, The Oil We Eat, which goes into this issue in depth.

[Zathras]

If one doesn't have the belly to tackle tough policy issues, and one needs an excuse, "complexity" works really well. In this case, though, sweetener users themselves -- particularly the confectionary industry -- regularly make the case that they would rather use sugar than corn sweetener if it were available at something closer to the world price.

The interpretation of agricultural history in the post above, incidentally, displays creativity. That it does not mention a role for fertilizers using petroleum-based ingredients in increasing corn yields was probably an oversight.

[David Eoll]

To say that the conclusions of the switchback grass studies:
factor of -.45 energy sink in the Cornell study vs.
factor of +5.4 energy source in the USDA study
are wildly divergent is an understatement. How could the two studies come to such different conclusions? I'd be very interested in seeing the details.

Since the federal government has been heavily invested in perpetuating ethanol production for decades, I'd say, off the cuff, that the USDA study is more suspect. But that's just a hunch. I question their motives in all cases just as a starting position. The Bush administration have so corrupted the executive branch that I just don't trust what any of these agencies says. Maybe they conducted 20 other studies that showed results closer to what Cornell sees, and they just cherry-picked the one study that supports what they want the policy to be. So they publish this one and bury the others. It'd be par for the course with these guys.

Of course academics can have their own agendas as well. So who knows? Somebody's way off, its just a question of who.