DES MOINES, Iowa (AP)--An agricultural economist and founder of a Washington-based environmental think tank said Thursday that the focus on ethanol to reduce reliance on petroleum-based fuels is ill advised.
Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute, said the major auto manufacturers' focus on flex-fuel vehicles that use corn-based ethanol instead of electric cars is the wrong strategy.
"I think it's based on the idea that we're going to be able to produce huge amounts of crop-based motor fuel," he said. "I'm not sure we are."
Even with a major push to produce more ethanol from corn in the United States, ethanol production is still only 3% of the auto fuel use in the nation, Brown said. It obviously hasn't reduce demand for gas enough to lower prices, he said.
"I doubt it ever will have much effect," he said.
In a telephone conference call with reporters, Brown said a study published by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that if all the corn and soybeans produced in the United States was used for ethanol and biodiesel, it would only cover 12% of the gasoline demand and 6% of biodiesel demand.
As a result, he said, it's clear that using grain-based alcohol products to replace petroleum-based automotive fuel is not going to make much difference.
In addition, he said converting massive amounts of grain to run cars will eventually reduce the resources to be used for food and feed grains for animals. The result could be higher prices for food, something he said could be a critical issue for the poorest people in the world's developing countries who already struggle to eat.
The issue is creating competition in the world between the 800 million people who want to fuel their automobiles to maintain mobility and the 2 billion of the world's lowest income people, he said.
Brown said the amount of grain required to fill a 25-gallon gas tank on a sport utility vehicle with ethanol would feed one person for a year. The grain to fill the tank every two weeks over a year will feed 26 people, he said.
Another alternative to grain-based ethanol is the use of switchgrass, which can be grown on poorer quality erodible land and wood chips from rapidly growing poplar trees to make the fuel additive, Brown said.
Ethanol proponents argue that the corn grown for ethanol production is different from the grain people eat.
"Humans don't eat field corn," said Monte Shaw, a spokesman for the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association.
He said the ethanol distilling process uses only the starch in a corn kernel and the remaining parts are sold back to livestock producers to feed animals. Corn used for ethanol is not completely lost from the food chain, he said.
"The latest research shows that about 15 billion gallons of ethanol can be produced from corn before you impact feed costs more than about 1 to 2 percent," Shaw said. "Last year the U.S. produced a record amount of ethanol and there was still a record carry-over of corn stocks."
He said some environmentalists use certain statistics to highlight their "sky is falling" point of view.
World production of ethanol in 2005 was estimated at 12.2 billion gallons, said the Renewable Fuels Association, a national trade group. The U.S. was the world leader producing 4.26 billion gallons, followed by Brazil with 4.23 billion gallons, the group said.
Brown, who is promoting a newly published book, "Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble," said the key to cleaning up the environment and halting the drain on food grain resources is promotion of electric cars.
"It has a lot of potential and a lot more people are seeing this as a likely solution for our future," he said.
The quickest way to clean up the environment and fuel cars in a cheap, efficient way is to develop more wind turbine-generated electricity and use that to power electric cars that can be plugged in and recharged, he said.
"Wind energy is so cheap. It doesn't make sense to push the agriculture envelope too far with overplowing, erosion and pollutants from the heavy use of fertilizers," Brown said.
Brown has served as an international agriculture analyst for the Department of Agriculture and was administrator of the International Agricultural Development Service. He is the author or co-author of 50 books. He holds an agriculture science degree from RutgersUniversity, a master's degree in agricultural economics from the University of Maryland and a master's of public administration degree from Harvard.
Source: Dow Jones Newswire