Ethanol Land Use Debate Heats Up
New studies commissioned by ethanol groups hope to bring light to misrepresentation of biofuels impact on land use change
Compiled by staff
Published: Apr 13, 2009
One of the major challenges facing ethanol this year is how state and federal governments interpret the impact of land use change from the increase of biofuels production.
Upcoming rules from both the Environmental Protection Agency and the California Air Resources Board will include a lifecycle analysis of biofuels accounting for the carbons released from a change of forest or pasture land to corn.
California law requires that the global warming impact of vehicle fuels be reduced by 10% from 2010 to 2020, but draft reports indicate the upcoming rule currently includes flawed indirect land use change models.
The risk of California being wrong is that if the standards progress as is, ethanol use in the fuel mix will be reduced, and ethanol will be branded a "brown•bCrLf fuel which would have far reaching national implications.
New data
The ethanol industry now has new data to help address and better understand the land use impact of biofuels. New studies identified that the preliminary corn ethanol indirect land use change results published by CARB and EPA appear to be based on overly conservative projections for crop yield growth, significantly undervalued distillers grains credits, and other questionable assumptions.
One of the first studies on the topic released in February 2008 used a model showing that when U.S. ethanol was increased from 15 to 30 bgy, that U.S. exports would decline (corn by 62%, wheat by 31%, and soybeans by 28%), and that these export declines would have to be met through increased production overseas at lower productivity rates.
A policy paper from Growth Energy and another study from Air Improvement Resource, Inc.(AIR) debunk the notion that exports will increase. According to USDA projections, exports for corn and soybeans are likely to remain steady or grow slightly through 2015.
According to indirect land use change theory, corn used for ethanol displaces other crops, like soybeans, causing farmers in Brazil cut down rainforest to grow soybeans and fill the demand.
However, data from Brazil's National Institute of Space Research shows that even while U.S. ethanol production has dramatically increased, deforestation in the Amazon has significantly decreased, as much as 50% over the past four years when the greatest surge of corn-based ethanol production occurred.
In another study commissioned by the Illinois Corn Growers Association, Steffen Mueller from the Energy Resources Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago, found that introducing a new ethanol plant into farm country does not result in the conversion of non-agricultural land to corn or non-corn farmland to corn production.
Mueller studied a modern ethanol plant in Rochelle, Ill. (approximately 75 miles northwest of Chicago) as its test subject. His study reports that the grain demands that a plant puts on its "grain supply draw area•bCrLf are modest and within a handful of years are met and exceeded by incremental farm productivity improvements (primarily plant genetics resulting in higher yields).
Tom Darlington, president of AIR and author of the AIR report, found that productivity gains as well as a decrease in wheat and cotton acres can easily make up for the additional needed acres with increased corn ethanol production.
Darlington says the life cycle community is constantly gaining a better understanding of how products, such as distillers grains, are being used. However, that has not fully been transformed into some of the modeling used.
Distillers grains were once thought to replace corn on a pound by pound basis. A recent Argonne study states the conversion is higher since one pound of distillers grains replaces 1.28 pounds of base livestock feed, including soybean meal.
This creates a "land use credit" of about 70%, Darlington says, higher than the previously pound to pound ratio of 31-33% land use credit given to distillers grains.
In the end, "the best estimate of land use impacts of expanding corn ethanol in the U.S. between 2001 and 2015 is zero," Darlington says.
Permalink: Click here
Tagged: ethanol, soybeans, biofuels, farm, wheat
|