Using Food For Fuel Could Save Money. For Some.
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 10.28.06
This headline really caught our eye- "using food for fuel". We love corn, especially with a bit of butter and salt, but now people are just throwing it into furnaces to heat their houses because it is cheaper to burn it than just about any other fuel. We have touted corn-powered stoves before as being TreeHugger correct, but are they? 47 billion dollars has been spent to subsidize corn production since 1995, and corn prices are spiking everywhere because of its increasing use in making ethanol, affecting the cost of everything we eat. Michael Pollan points out that we are all made of corn, that the American diet is almost entirely corn based. Should we be heating with food? ::WPXI
People have no idea how much corn is grown. Most of it is silage -- food for cattles.
Here you go:
http://www.ncga.com/WorldOfCorn/main/consumption1.asp
Domestic cereal consumption (eg, corn on the cob, canned corn) comprises less than 2% of corn end-use, though a pretty large amount gets exported.
A member of Greenpeace told me that it's common practice in Denmark(?) to use half cooking oil, half fuel for cars. Then when some guy tried doing the same, in England(?), the government tried to put a tax on cooking oil.
I think you shouldn't forget that while we like to eat certain parts of a cornstalk (like the grain, and the syrup from the cane) everything else can be transformed into fuel.
Even a simple thing like transforming corn cob husk into ready to use charcoal in developing countries (see Amy Smith on TEDTalk)
Using a cereal crop for fuel is just not a good idea. Cereal crops take from the soil. It is going to further cement industrial agricultures' monocropping practises. If it is profitable enough, the average frmer will grow corn on the same field year after year, which means more and more toxic fertalizers and sprays added to same piece of land each year as well.
oO,
Cornstalks yield no syrup. High Fructose Corn syrup is made from processed corn kernels.
If you want to grow some serious plants for ethanol, we should be growing more cane crops. Sorghum, sugar cane, etc. These crops grown in rotations with corn, sugar beets, and soybeans actually improve the topsoil, in addition to having 3-4 times the yield per acre for sugar (which is the basis of ethanol production). Not only is it higher yielding, but sorghum and sugar cane require significantly less energy to process into sugars to ferment into ethanol.
the only thing Corn has going for it... is a strong and influential political lobby.
Au contraire, anonymous poster. Corn stalks do yield a syrup when boiled. Maybe not high-fructose, but a sugary syrup nonetheless. It's made the same way as sorghum.
Using crops for fuel may just shift the constrained resource from petroleum to water (for an overview of depleting water resources see http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz/WORMKA/). And since the fuel must still be combusted, it doesn't help with climate change. For a fairly good overview see, http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/andrewkantor/2004-02-20-kantor_x.htm then read some corrections he published http://www.kantor.com/usatoday/ethanol.shtml.
In my view, all our effort should go immediately into electrons -- do not stop at hydrogen (which either takes too much fresh water or still uses petroleum), do not stop at ethanol.
which either takes too much fresh water
False.
A while ago I was researching what kind of oil producing plants could be grown in southern California and I came across a shrub called Jatropha. It has a very high energy payback and it is a perennial, yielding oil seed for decades. It grows without irrigation in arid conditions where corn and sugar cane could never thrive.
http://ecoworld.com/Home/Articles2.cfm?TID=367
Very promising.