Ethanol Boom Saps Water
“We know we have a finite resource. We know it won’t last forever,” says Yuma city manager Sanderson. “But we certainly don’t respect the resource more than we respect the people.”
Scientists and engineers say there’s a clear lesson from the Republican River saga: water and energy are inextricably linked. “They will be the two driving forces of the future,” says Knox. “And we’re starting to see the future in this region.” Professor Schnoor calls ethanol simply “a bridge fuel” to undiscovered and truly environmentally friendly technology. Meanwhile, with warm months just around the corner and a meeting with state officials in Denver to discuss the pipeline that he opposes, Adamson is frustrated. “Trying to solve problems by using the same old techniques doesn’t solve the problem,” Adamson says. “We’re going to make the area a desert. It’s going to be uninhabitable.” And that would be a high price to pay. – Newsweek
I’ve got a few thoughts about this. First, I see this all the time, where people say things about how one shouldn’t value a resource over people. I understand the feeling there, but it’s not sane. You’re not talking about one person, or ten people, or a thousand people. You’re talking about decimating the water for an entire region, making it difficult not just to grow crops, but to keep animals, to keep the land reasonably cool, and any of the millions of things we do with water every day.
Adamson up there isn’t an ecology non-profit volunteer, he’s a farmer. The ARG “World Without Oil” was pretty cool and interesting – when’s “World Without Water” coming out?
The other thing, more of a media geek comment, is that I really hate summary lines in news articles. They remind me of the smarmy aren’t-I-funny puns in the evening news. Isn’t the sentence, “We’re going to make the area a desert. It’s going to be uninhabitable.” enough of a stinger without telling us the value? Ugh.
So like, Waterworld, but Landworld?
Or is that like Mad Maxx :P
Heh, yeah, pretty close to that, really.
Which is better than Westworld.
or Wayne’s World, maybe.
Shayne’s World?
An interesting (to me, since I live in an ethanol-friendly corn-exporting state) corrolary to this; most of the anti-ethanol rhetoric and science has been really promoted by the oil producers of the southern states, since they have a vested interest in retaining control over the old-line energy technologies such as so-called “clean” coal and fossil fuels.
However, I was watching CNBC this morning when BP CEO T. Boone Pickens, an, ahem, rather “colorful” old-Texas style character, to put it kindly, was being interviewed. Pickens, who had in the past been quite vociferous in his opposition to ethanol as a fuel additive, pulled a 180-degree turn and was singing a new, pro-corn tune this morning. His rationale? The fact that more money is being exported out of the country to Middle-Eastern oil-producing states (to the tune of about $2 trillion a year) than is remaining inside the U.S. borders. And unfortunately for ol’ Boone, oil patches in highly destabilized or state-run areas such as Nigeria and Venezuela aren’t something that he’s going to be able to profit from. So now he’s singing ethanol’s praises, largely because as an investor he figures it’ll be easier for him to snatch up huge swaths of farmland in Iowa at bargain-basement prices than it would for him to pay to have Hugo Chavez taken out in a military coup. :P
Ethanol is a net loss in energy
The basic energy economics of ethanol makes no sense from a scientific perspective. A liter of gasoline (or diesel, etc.) contains more Joules of energy in it than a liter of ethanol. We use chemical fertilizers derived from petro-chemicals to farm corn in this country, we use tractors running on gas or diesel to do the field work, and we use trucks and trains running on diesel to transport the corn, or ethanol. When one adds up all of the petroleum products used to make a liter of ethanol, one finds that something like 3 liters of petro-chemicals were used. In other words, from an energy and economic standpoint, we’d have been further ahead to just produce the gasoline and use that in our cars.
That’s not to say that ethanol can’t be used as an energy source–perhaps storage and transfer system might be a better term–but we would fundamentally have to change our energy economy. And once we did that, it’s likely that ethanol would still be on the short end of the stick in terms of energy, because it’d be competing against the likes of nuclear fission produced hydrogen fuel, and other technologies which are far more energy dense and economical.
In short, let’s keep the corn for food, livestock feed, chemical raw material and bourbon, and look for much better sources of energy.