Media outlet: Ethanol's minor impact on food prices ignored by media
The Southeastern Farm Press, echoing the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), is pointing a finger at the media for not reporting on a recent finding by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). According to the CBO's report, called "The Impact of Ethanol Use on Food Prices and Greenhouse-Gas Emissions," ethanol production caused food prices to rise "only" 0.5 to 0.8 of a percentage point in 2008. We mentioned the report, but did get the math wrong a bit. According to the AFBF CEO, this report is the tool they needed to prove that ethanol was not responsible for the increase in food prices that took place last year. What's more, he stated that farmers did not benefit from the price increase.
[Source: Farm Press]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
jpm 8:27PM (5/06/2009)
I agree. Who cares about corn prices. Derivatives of corn are turning americans obese.
What's more interesting is that ethanol EROEI is less than 1.
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Pholostan 3:37AM (5/07/2009)
EROEI for corn ethanol is bad. Stop using corn! EROEI for sugar cane is greater than 1. So is EROEI for sweet sorghum. Even ethanol from wheat is better than wthanol from corn. Corn based american ethanol gives other much more efficient processes a bad name.
jpm100 11:24AM (5/07/2009)
That's a misleading (any contradicted number).
The energy in the production process does not have to come from oil. It can come from cheaper sources like coal.
The other issue is that the EROEI for the 22 gallons of gas that come from 40 gallons of oil are less than 1 as well.
All depends on how you look at it. What really matter is the cost per mile travelled. And corn is not competative with $2 gas. But it is competative with $8 gas. And a year ago we were just $3 from either number.
jpm 1:08PM (5/07/2009)
In the grand scheme of things, the most important thing is C02 per mile. Right now almost every transportation fuel is dirty to make, dirty to burn. A nice exception is electrons; clean to burn but dirty to make, but there is the most hope is making clean electricity from renewables. Image having a roof of solar panels that cost $1/watt and a EV in the drive way. That is the ultimate solution.
Dennis U. Atuanya 7:54AM (5/07/2009)
This seems at variance with the World Bank Report of 2008 by Donald Mitchell: http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/IW3P/IB/2008/07/28/000020439_20080728103002/Rendered/PDF/WP4682.pdf
Corn is a poor feedstock for bioethanol production. First, it has poor ethanol productivity and even poorer energy balance (ratio of energy yield to energy input). It is a food crop which carries with it those fuel-food conflicts. The added cost of conversion of corn starch to sugar prior to fermentation only adds to the cost of production.
Brazil has become the model of ethanol excellence using sugarcane as feedstock. Sugarcane has double the ethanol productivity of corn and up to eight times the energy balance. More importantly, etimated reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from their ethanol program is between 86% and 90%.
From production to utilization, ethanol has 81% greater energy efficiency than gasoline.
I discussed these in detail in my recent post at: http://7xreferences.blogspot.com/2009/05/notes-on-bioethanol-programs-in-united.html.
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Mike Dimmick 3:31AM (5/10/2009)
It should now be well-known that high food prices were the result of three things: high fuel prices (most work to grow food is mechanized), high artificial fertilizer prices (most food is produced with artificial fertilizers, themselves largely made from ammonia made by natural gas through the Haber Process) and futures market price speculation by institutional investors. In turn, oil and natural gas prices were *also* high due to futures market price speculation.
The House Agriculture Committee wrote a bill, H.R. 977, to set position limits for speculators, to prevent them from becoming the dominant force in the futures markets and return those markets to their correct function of price discovery, for physical hedgers (i.e. people actually making/growing/extracting the commodity, and those buying the commodity as an input to a process or for sale to end-consumers). Unfortunately it is now stalled in the House Financial Services committee.
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Herm 11:52AM (5/07/2009)
the simple solution is not to use oil to make ethanol.. simple no?
It would be neat to see interstate trucks powered by steam engines burning coal.
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Nixon 2:32PM (5/07/2009)
Steam engines? Try Biodiesel.
Nixon 3:20PM (5/07/2009)
All of the EROEI numbers that I've seen that bash corn all have the same error.
They all fail to account for the output of corn mash for cattle feed, and calculate ALL of the energy input as if Ethanol were the ONLY output. In reality, most of the corn that goes into Ethanol production is "recycled" and put right back into the food cycle by feeding it to cattle.
What these EROEI studies do that come up with rather dismal numbers, is to assign ALL of the energy input to the Ethanol, as if the corn mash magically appeared without consuming any energy at all! Or as if the corn mash magically disappeared at the end of distillation, and the only output was the Ethanol.
There are two ways to CORRECTLY calculate the true EROEI of ethanol to account for the 2nd major output of the process.
1) Calculate the amount of energy it would have taken to produce the equivalent amount of cattle feed to replace the corn mash, and deduct that amount of energy from the EROEI calculation for Ethanol. (This is because if the corn mash weren't available to be used as feed, farmers would have to grow something to replace the corn mash).
2) Apportion the total amount of energy required to create both the ethanol and corn mash so that a percentage is assigned to BOTH Ethanol AND the corn mash. Don't just assign ALL of the energy inputs to just the ethanol output. You could do this by weight, by percentage of calories output. (The calorie thing makes for some interesting math, because distilling changes the total number of calories going in vs. the number of calories going out.)
If you do one of those, all the sudden the EROEI of ethanol gets roughly somewhere around 10 times better (give or take).
But since the folks putting out the studies with poor EROEI numbers are doing so in order to attack ethanol, it is no wonder they don't do either of these things. And all the folks parroting their numbers won't stop parroting them either.
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