Will California Shuck Corn Ethanol?

The California Environmental Protection Agency apparently has concluded that corn ethanol would not help the state implement Executive Order S-1-07. The order, signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Jan. 18, 2007, mandated a 10% reduction in the carbon intensity of the state's fuels by 2020. Fuels deemed to have low carbon intensity earn credits toward that goal. With 20-20 hindsight, the California EPA, by dropping ethanol for now as a cure-all for climate change, is doing the right thing for the wrong reason. "Ethanol is a good fuel, but how it is produced is problematic," Dimitri Stanich, public information officer for the California EPA, said in an interview with World Net Daily. "The corn ethanol industry has to figure out another way to process corn into ethanol that is not so corn-intensive." Ethanol is in fact not a good fuel. According to the Hoover Institution's Henry Miller and Prof. Colin Carter of the University of California at Davis, "ethanol yields about 30% less energy per gallon of gasoline, so miles per gallon in internal combustion engines drop significantly." It generates less than two units of energy for every unit of energy used to produce it. It takes about 1,700 gallons of water to produce one gallon of ethanol. Each acre of corn requires about 130 pounds of nitrogen and 55 pounds of phosphorous. Increased acreage means increased agricultural runoff, which is creating aquatic "dead zones" in our rivers, bays and coastal areas. The California EPA now opposes corn ethanol in part because of the environmental damage it says growing the corn does. "Converting land that is now a 'carbon sink' to farmland producing ethanol," says Stanich, "also defeats the purpose of the regulations, because land now absorbing carbon dioxide would be cleared to produce corn."...IBD