Ethanol, oil and what it means to be green
WASHINGTON — QUESTION: What is the ethanol mandate?
ANSWER: In 2007, Congress passed a law requiring oil companies to blend corn ethanol into the gasoline supply. That requirement started at 9 billion gallons and has risen each year since. This year, it’s about 13 billion gallons. Barack Obama, who was running for president against a crowded field of Democrats in the Iowa caucuses, was a champion for this law. And with oil prices high and imports climbing, President George W. Bush signed it. Politicians in both parties predicted homegrown corn would help reduce greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming and help wean the country off foreign sources of oil.
QUESTION: Sounds straightforward. Green energy, right?
ANSWER: Not really. From the beginning, environmentalists were skeptical of this program. Even people on Obama’s environmental team had doubts. Ethanol comes with all kinds of environmental baggage, like the fertilizer used to grow corn and the coal and natural gas that fuel ethanol plants. The ethanol policy also helped send corn prices rising, which encouraged farmers to plant more corn, in some cases on native prairies and land set aside for conserving habitat.
In Des Moines, Iowa, the water utility was strained to the brink this summer as it tried to remove the nitrogen fertilizer residue from drinking water to keep it within safe standards. Some of that fertilizer runs into the nation’s rivers, worsening a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico that can no longer support marine life. Farmers also planted on hilly, erodible soil, which encouraged erosion and the loss of topsoil.
QUESTION: But ethanol helps reduce global warming?
ANSWER: That was the intent. But sometimes farmers create cropland by plowing over grassland. Grassland keeps carbon dioxide locked up in the soil. Plow over it, and that gas is released. It can take decades to make up for that loss.
Under Obama, more than 5 million acres that had been set aside as conservation land was transformed from grass field back into farmland. That’s the size of Yosemite, Yellowstone and Everglades National Parks combined. At least another 1.2 million acres of prairieland in the Great Plains have been plowed over for corn. Many environmentalists and scientists now question whether the ethanol mandate will ever accomplish its primary environmental goal: reducing greenhouse gases.
QUESTION: The ethanol industry disputes those numbers and says no virgin land has been lost. What gives?
ANSWER: The government only started tracking this in 2012. The USDA concluded 38,000 acres were lost that year. And farmers in the Dakotas told AP reporters that they were plowing into pristine prairieland. So it’s not a question of whether it’s happening. The question is on what scale. The government has made it impossible to determine that number precisely. So the AP used the only method available to estimate it: Government crop data collected by satellite. The AP identified tracts of land that were cornfields in 2012 and had been grassland in 2006. The AP then excluded land lost from the Conservation Reserve Program to prevent double counting. The AP vetted this methodology with an independent scientist at South Dakota State University who has published peer-review research on land conversion using the same satellite data.
