American Energy Partners Inc (AEPT)

[docrew0]

OT: Stanford Expert Sees Rush To Ethanol As Premature

2007 January 25 Thursday

George W. Bush wants to scale up ethanol production in order to reduce gasoline use by 20% in a decade. I continue to think this is a bad idea. David Victor at Stanford University tells MIT's Technology Review that a big scaling up of ethanol production is premature without cellulosic technology.

TR: One of the technologies the president emphasized is converting wood chips and grasses, known as cellulosic feedstocks, into ethanol. Could that make his goals achievable?

DV: You have to be careful because a very large part of our biofuels policy is not about energy at all. It's really about the heartland and farm politics because the current corn-based biofuels don't really save us that much energy. Cellulosic biomass [which is potentially much more efficient] is still really some distance off in the future. If we try to meet these aggressive targets very quickly, what we're going to end up with is a much, much larger version of the current, already inefficient, corn-based ethanol program.

TR: Documents released by the White House said that the vast majority of the 20 percent reduction in gasoline use in the next decade should come from using more biofuels such as ethanol. Is this a good strategy?

DV: In my view, this is a dangerous goal because the other technologies [such as cellulosic ethanol] are not available, [and] it really demands that we dramatically scale up our corn-based ethanol program. And I think that has serious ecological problems because of the large amount of land that they're going to have to put under cultivation. [There are] big economic problems because [making ethanol from corn] certainly isn't competitive with other ways of making biofuels, such as from sugar.

Note when he says that biofuels made from sugar more competitive he's almost certainyl referring to cane sugar, not beet sugar. Currently the United States has restrictions in cane sugar imports in order to protect the domestic farmers who produce cane or beets for sugar. The Brazilians can grow cane sugar at lower cost and can therefore make ethanol for a lower cost.

The US government also effectively blocks Brazilian ethanol import. So neither Brazilian cane sugar or ethanol made from sugar cane can be imported at a competitive price. But there's an ecological advantage in blocking US import of Brazilian ethanol: This reduces agricultural demand for Brazilian rain forests.

I'd like to repeat what is surely a familiar refrain for long time FuturePundit readers: We'd be better off accelerating battery, nuclear, and photovoltaics technologies. They'll eventually provide cheaper energy than ethanol. Plus, they'll use a much smaller land footprint and produce less pollution than ethanol produced from agriculture.

My fear about cellulosic technology: It will make biomass ethanol so cheap that humanity will put large swathes of the world under cultivation to make ethanol. Continued world economic growth is going to increase demand for transportation fuel by double,. triple, and even more eventually. If we make biomass energy cheap then say good bye to the natural state of ever larger chunks of land.

By Randall Parker 2007 January 25 11:16 PM Policy Energy
Entry Permalink | Comments ( 2 )