Gas 2.0 – Iowa’s Ethanol Plants Create 15 Percent of its Emissions:
The Des Moines Register reported the other day that Iowa’s ethanol plants contribute 15 Percent — 7.6 million metric tons out of a total of 52 million metric tons — of greenhouse-gas emissions found in the state’s new inventory of major manufacturers, businesses and power plants.
Iowa’s Department of Natural Resources found that the largest portion of the state’s overall emissions came from fermenting grain at the plants and not from burning natural gas or coal. In addition, burning biomass such as switchgrass at various industrial plants added another 0.13 million metric tons.
The emissions generated by ethanol production are one reason why some environmentalists downplay the benefit of renewable fuels, while others insist they are far more beneficial than burning fossil fuels
It’s hard to say how this would compare to an equivalent amount of gasoline production, but it does point to the fact that biofuels aren’t magically free of pollutants. (Assuming, of course, that global warming is even caused by greenhouse gases.)
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You’re missing the other side of the equation there. The corn plants themselves are sucking up CO2 during their growth. The yeast are just re-releasing that into the atmosphere, much like I do when I eat corn, burn the sugars for energy, and emit CO2 myself.
Oil, on the other hand, doesn’t suck up CO2 when we pump it out of the ground. Burning it releases elements into the environment that have been trapped underground for a long, long time.
That said, I still think ethanol (from corn) is a stupid idea and there’s no way in hell that humans are responsible for the recent uptick in global temperatures. I dug up a graph showing global temps for the past 425,000 years and made some idiot marks on it for humor: http://justinbuist.org/blog/images/global_temp2.jpg
I’m probably way off when I made the mark as to where humans started to exist, and I’m sure the dinosaurs never created an SUV, but it does show a pattern of the earth warming up every 75,000 or so years like clock work.
The “Where your graph starts and ends” line is meant to point out that global warming/global climate change folks are pointing to a very small section of our global history and pretending like it’s something new. It isn’t. They’re freaking out about a natural occurrence and the only reason the graph gets jagged at the end is because we’ve got a lot more data points in recent history than we can get form core samples and such from times long gone.
You’re missing the other side of the equation there.
No, I understand the theory. That’s why I said “It’s hard to say how this would compare to an equivalent amount of gasoline production.”
There’s a controversy over whether ethanol actually produces more energy than it consumes due to fossil fuel inputs involved in planting, fertilization, harvesting, transportation, and refinement. It isn’t clear that corn-based ethanol in particular actually has any energy yield at all.
Factor in the deforestation need to increase agricultural output, and the increase in food prices, and it just seems like a bad idea.