The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [33]
The most common biofuel today is ethanol made from corn (in the United States), sugarcane (Brazil), and sugar beets (European Union). Making ethanol is essentially the ancient art of fermenting sugars to make alcoholic drinks, meaning that corn-based car fuel is very similar to moonshine. It is commonly mixed with gasoline, and in Brazil, cars run on flex-fuel mixtures containing up to 100% ethanol. Ethanol has higher octane than gasoline and for this reason was used in early racing cars. In fact, when cars were first being developed about a century ago, their makers strongly considered fueling them with ethanol. 123
The world’s two largest ethanol producers are the United States and Brazil, together producing more than ten billion gallons per year. That may sound like a lot, but it’s less than 1% of the liquid-fuels market. The good news is that Brazil is becoming quite expert at making sugarcane ethanol. Production is rising rapidly and is expected to double by 2015. 124 Sugarcane plantations are expanding and, contrary to popular belief, represent little deforestation threat to Amazon rain forests because they are found mostly in the south and east of Brazil.125 Improved agricultural practices have more than doubled the ethanol yield per unit area, and new genetic methods called marker-assisted breeding suggest further increases of up to 30% in the future. The price Brazilians pay for ethanol has steadily fallen for the past twenty-five years even as the price paid for gasoline has gone up.126 In 2008, for the first time in history, Brazilians bought more ethanol than gasoline. 127
The United States is also ramping up ethanol production. The 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act calls for a tripling of U.S. corn-based ethanol production by 2022, a goal reaffirmed by the Obama administration in 2010. Ethanol also comprises a large part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s official goal to replace 30% of gasoline consumption with biofuels by 2030. The European Union hopes to derive a quarter of its transport fuels from biofuels by the same year. 128
Unfortunately, there are tremendous differences in production efficiency among the different plant crops used to make ethanol. Sugarcane is a high-value feedstock, yielding up to eight to ten times the amount of fossil-fuel energy needed to grow, harvest, and refine sugarcane into ethanol. Corn-based ethanol, in contrast, is terribly inefficient, usually requiring as much or more fossil fuel in its manufacture as is delivered by the final product. Therefore the greenhouse gas benefit of corn ethanol over oil is negligible.129 While often pitched otherwise, American subsidies for it are for objectives other than greenhouse gas reduction. For that goal, a far smarter biofuel investment would be production of sugarcane ethanol in the Caribbean, a potential “Middle East” for ethanol export to the United States.130
Another problem is that current technology requires ethanol to be made from simple sugars and starches, putting biofuel crops in direct competition with food crops. The U.S. corn ethanol program was widely blamed in 2007 for a worldwide rise in food prices, because it subsidized farmers to plant fields with corn for fuel rather than with wheat and soybeans for food.131 This notion that biofuels threaten global food supply reared up again in 2008 in response to a series of food riots in Haiti.132 While this fear is probably overblown—the share of arable land currently used for biofuel