One-third of the nation’s 2008-09 corn crop will be consumed by ethanol production, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That is up from 22 percent annually and will amount to four billion bushels. It will also translate to higher costs for beef, corn and many processed foods that use fructose, a corn syrup. It is one more example of the government chasing alternative energy chimeras.
As we have noted before, corn-based ethanol takes a great deal of energy to produce, does not give notably more miles per gallon than gasoline and must be transported from the Midwest to both coasts, in addition to its effect on food production.
Chasing chimeras is nothing new to our government, thanks to good intentions but poor analysis by successive Congresses. The U.S. Energy Information Administration, an independent federal agency, reports that government spending on energy production last year was $16.6 billion, double what it was in 1999 and much of it spent on “renewables,” such as wind and solar power.
Alas, the taxpayers are not getting much bang for the buck from these. The cost per unit of energy for these sources is, to put it mildly, high. It costs $24.34 per megawatt hour for solar energy and $23.37 for wind — yet, after years of shoveling money at these sources, they still account for less than one percent of total electricity production. Nuclear power, by contrast, provides 20 percent of the nation’s electricity with one-fifteenth the subsidy given to wind power.
Meanwhile, we will depend upon refined petroleum for years to come, and everyone rails against the current high price of gasoline. No one wants to depend on foreign sources, but ultra-environmentalists have so conditioned Congress that it seems impossible to tap our own sources of oil in order to cut down that dependence.
Their standard argument against opening up a tiny area of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge coastal plain to high-technology oil extraction has been “it would take 10 years before it produced the first barrel.”
If Congress had okayed ANWR production then, we would have been producing hundreds of thousands of barrels a day beginning in 1993. Perhaps some in Congress will begin to do the numbers and stop chasing chimeras. The current and growing opposition to corn ethanol may just jump-start the process.
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Making transportation fuel from a food source is a dumb idea. Making fuel from a renewable non-food source, like ethanol from cellulose. is a better idea. And, making energy from the sun, wind and other renewables with small carbon footprints is the best idea for our future energy.
Here is more up-to-date info from a 2007 article written in the WSJ and posted at YaleGlobal:
"Criticized for years as costly and unsustainable, alternative energy attracting renewed interest amidst a wave of technological developments and rising oil prices. While the US depends heavily on fossil fuels, renewable energy sources such as biomass, wind, geothermal and solar are likely to account for a larger share of the electricity supply in future years. With growing concerns over global warming and energy security, regulators force electric utilities to utilize more “green” power and require oil companies to blend more plant-based biofuels like ethanol with gasoline. In this “Wall Street Journal article,” Rebecca Smith explores the falling costs of four alternative-energy sources and the potential benefits they could bring to the world. – YaleGlobal
The New Math of Alternative Energy
Does going green finally make economic sense?
Rebecca Smith
The Wall Street Journal, 23 February 2007
The numbers are starting to look promising.
For years, the big criticism of alternative energy was cost: It was too expensive compared with energy based on traditional fuels like coal and natural gas.
Even though the fuel was often free -- such as wind or the sun's rays -- alternative-energy producers had to plow lots of money into finding the best way to capture that energy and convert it into electricity. Fossil-fuel producers, on the other hand, could draw on billions of dollars in infrastructure investments and decades of know-how.
Now the equation is showing significant signs of change. Costs are falling for some alternative-energy sources, driven by new technology and renewed development interest.
Alternative energy still can't compete with fossil fuels on price. But the margins are narrowing, particularly since oil and gas prices have been rising. The math looks even more favorable if you consider the environmental cost of fossil fuels -- which most purely economic calculations don't."
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Some interesting information about what the Canadian government thinks about ANWR: (http://www.canadianembassy.org/environment/development-en.asp:
"Canada believes opening up the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil and gas development would seriously disrupt the calving grounds of the Porcupine Caribou herd and threaten other migratory wildlife Canada shares with the United States.
The herd of more than 129,000 caribou ranges across northeastern Alaska, northern Yukon and the Mackenzie Delta in the Northwest Territories. Thousands of Aboriginal people in both countries depend on the herd for food and for the survival of their traditional way of life.
In 1987 Canada and the United States signed the Agreement on the Conservation of the Porcupine Caribou Herd, under which they agreed to protect the herd and its habitat and to consult promptly if either the herd or its habitat were damaged or its migration routes disrupted. U.S. and Canadian scientific experts have concluded that any development in the coastal plain could pose a major threat to the calving and migration patterns of the herd.
Canada believes that the best way to ensure the future of the Porcupine caribou herd is to designate the Arctic coastal plain as wilderness, thereby providing equal protection on both sides of the border for this shared wildlife resource.
In 1984, with the creation of the Northern Yukon (now Ivvavik) National Park, Canada permanently protected as wilderness a large portion of the herd's habitat, including an area of the Yukon coastal plain where the caribou occasionally calve. The creation of Vuntut National Park south of Ivvavik put additional areas of the caribou's habitat off-limits to development. Most of the rest of the herd's Canadian range is located in areas that have either been withdrawn from development or are subject to Aboriginal land claim agreements that place stringent restrictions on development.
Much of the herd's Alaskan habitat lies within the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, created in 1960 and expanded twenty years later under the Alaska National Interest Conservation Lands Act. Although development is prohibited in most of the refuge, the calving grounds lie in an area east of Prudhoe Bay that Congress set aside for possible oil and gas development under Section 1002 of the act. The act instructs the Secretary of the Interior to consult with Canada in evaluating the impact of development,"particularly with respect to the Porcupine Caribou Herd."
The 1.5-million-acre coastal area known as the 1002 lands is home to a rich variety of other wildlife--wolves, wolverines, polar bear, barren-ground grizzlies, muskox and Dall sheep. About 140 species of birds, including bald eagles, tundra swans and snow geese, use the area as a staging ground for migration. Many of these species migrate between Canada and the United States.
Canada is most concerned about the effects of development on the Porcupine caribou, whose life cycle makes it particularly susceptible to disturbance."
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Anyone who wants to read the WSJ article that this opinion is based upon can go to:
http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2008/04/25/at-the-trough-a-pee...
For a more expert look at renewable energy sources versus non-renewables, go to:
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/recolumnists/story?id=51836
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