Land Use Meeting: More Questions Than Answers
Best modeling is little more than guess work.
Mike Wilson
Published: Aug 26, 2009
The opening day of NCGA's Land Use and Carbon Impacts of corn-based ethanol conference only seemed to confirm what most people already believe: measuring projected indirect land impacts from biofuels will be either difficult or impossible.
"We're trying to measure the immeasurable," says Iowa State Ag economist Bruce Babcock, one of several opening day speakers. The meeting is being held at the Renaissance Hotel in St. Louis.
"This effort to measure indirect land use is greatly open to criticism and you've already heard much of it," he says.
The meeting is being held in response to potential regulations from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which has proposed rules to limit emissions of climate-changing gases from the manufacture of ethanol, a step that would probably curtail the expansion of corn ethanol production. EPA has said it would factor in changes in land use, so that if more American-grown corn were used for ethanol, and as a result a farmer anywhere cut down trees to raise crops, the loss of that forestland, and the resulting increase in carbon dioxide, would count against ethanol's carbon footprint.
Babcock laid out one scenario where corn ethanol production increases from 12.4 to 15 billion gallons by year 2022. The most logical impact would be a change in land use as a response to higher market prices from diverting corn or corn oil away from food use and into biofuels.
Babcock estimated that adding 3.6 billion gallons of corn ethanol would mean adding almost four million more domestic acres of corn; conversely his modeling forecast nearly 2 million fewer acres of soy and about .5 million acres less of wheat with little change in other crops.
Based on world prices in dollars per metric ton, that 3.6 billion gallon domestic increase would translate to about $10 more per metric ton in corn prices. "As a result our study projects an increase of 4.8 million corn acres internationally, based on the 3.6 billion gallon domestic increase," he says.
Even with such projections, most scientists agree the best modeling is little more than guess work.
"Estimates can never be verified by ground truth," he says. "Annual agricultural land use flux is large and variable. There's a multitude of factors that affect whether a plot of land is in crops, pasture or forest."
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Tagged: ethanol, biofuels, wheat, EPA, Environmental Protection Agency
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