Molly Murray, The News Journal
9:44 a.m. EDT August 3, 2014
Ethanol was supposed to be good
for the environment, lower gas prices and increase energy
security but the costs of the unintended consequences may
outweigh the benefits. Expanded corn production is reducing
wildlife habitat nationwide. Monarch butterfly populations
dropped from 231 million in 2007 to 33 million in 2013. (Photo:
Getty Images/iStockphoto)
Across the farmlands of America, there are acres upon
acres of corn. Corn planted over roads that used to
subdivide cropland. Corn planted on ground once considered
too wet for cultivation. Corn planted on ground typically
too dry to produce dependable yields but are profitable
today because of innovations in drought-tolerant seeds
developed by companies such as DuPont Pioneer.
There's now corn planted on 1.3 million acres that until
recently was reserved for conservation – an area larger than
all of Delaware. Last year, American farmers planted 95
million acres of corn, 10 million acres more than in 2008.
Fourteen percent of Delaware's total land base, 180,000
acres, was last year planted in corn.
This phenomenon is being driven by increased demand for
corn-based ethanol, which now consumes more than 40-percent
of corn grown nationwide. Researchers at South Dakota State
University say it has spawned the most important change in
land use in decades.
As envisioned by the 2007 Energy Independence and
Security Act – championed and signed into law by President
George W. Bush and embraced by candidate and now President
Barack Obama – ethanol was supposed to lower gas prices for
consumers, reduce America's dependence on foreign oil and
improve the environment by helping reduce levels of carbon
dioxide – a greenhouse gas – in the atmosphere.
The ethanol industry, and its strong lobbying arm in
Washington, say most of those goals have been achieved.
But the growth of ethanol, an alcohol-based additive that
makes up 10-percent of each gallon of gas, has had
unintended consequences:
• We pay more for foods like bread, snacks and chicken.
Between 2007 and 2008, ethanol drove a 10 to 15 percent
increase in food prices, according to a Congressional Budget
Office report – partly because corn once used for livestock
feed is now used to make fuel.
• Our vehicles get fewer miles per gallon of gasoline now
that ethanol is included, and we're paying more for that
fuel – about 13 cents per gallon because of the lost
efficiency.
• Boat engines and lawn care equipment go kaput from
engines that weren't designed for fuels that include
alcohol, a natural byproduct of the sugars and starches in
corn.
• Fiberglass marine fuel tanks in older vessels can't
stand up to the alcohol-based fuel additive, causing
dangerous leaks.
• Iconic species like monarch butterflies, native bees,
pheasants and other grassland birds are declining from lost
habitat as more land is converted to corn production.
• Corn planted in marginal habitats threatens one of the
most altered ecosystems in the world – the temperate
grasslands of the Great Plains, which naturally absorb
carbon from the atmosphere.
While corn stalks do absorb carbon when they're green,
they do not sop up the greenhouse gases when stalks turn
brown in fall, or when they're plowed under during winter
and early spring.
In Delaware, the poultry and petroleum industries have
been hammered by the ethanol mandate.
Because corn and soybeans are more expensive thanks to
the biofuels industry, the cost of livestock feed has gone
up.
It creates "a very uneven playing field for chicken
companies to compete for necessary feedstuffs," said Tom
Super, a spokesman for the National Chicken Council, the
poultry industry trade group based in Washington, D.C.
The bottom line: over $44 billion nationally in higher
actual chicken feed costs, Super said.
"Adding together the higher cumulative feed costs for
chicken, turkey, table eggs and hogs, the total is almost
$100 billion in additional feed costs," he said. "Also
higher feed costs for other agricultural animal producers,
such as dairy and beef cattle, would add measurably to the
$100 billion cost."
At least a dozen chicken companies closed, filed for
bankruptcy or were sold to another company between 2007 and
2013 because of the higher costs of feed, Super said.
"The chicken industry is only one drought away from
another economic crisis, while the mandate continues," he
said.
Delaware City's refinery also has felt the pain. It and
other refiners are required by federal rules to blend a
percentage of their products with renewables like corn-based
ethanol. If they don't meet the benchmark, they have to buy
renewable credits. In the first quarter of 2014 PBF Energy
Inc., which owns the refinery, spent $30 million to buy the
credits.
PBF is seeking a partial waiver from the proposed 2014
Renewable Fuels Standards being developed by the federal
Environmental Protection Agency.
The real cost
The National Corn Growers Association and a consortium of
groups called GrowthEnergy, which describes itself as
"America's Ethanol Supporters," argue that ethanol has been
a stunning success.
The corn growers say corn-based ethanol has led to more
economic independence and energy security and has had a
$42.4 billion economic impact. And much of the economic
benefit, according to a 2011 report by the Renewable Fuel
Association, was in rural communities. Corn-based ethanol
offset the need to import 485 million barrels of petroleum,
the report says.
GrowthEnergy contends that a series of myths about
ethanol have been perpetuated, including loss of acreage and
higher food prices. The organization counters the loss of
land argument by explaining that once U.S. ramped up
domestic ethanol production, there was less deforestation in
the Amazon.
As for higher food costs, it maintains that increased
transportation costs, speculation on Wall Street and higher
costs of manufacturing and packaging had more impact than
ethanol production.
For the decade prior to the ethanol mandate in 2006, corn
prices stayed around $2 a bushel – going up or down
depending on droughts, rainfall and yields by bushel
harvested per acre. Corn sold for $2.28 per bushel in 2006.
Last year, the average price nationwide was $6.15.
Ed Kee, Delaware's secretary of agriculture, said farmers
need the higher prices to make a profit. Even at $4 a
bushel, corn is not profitable for farmers, he said.
On non-irrigated land it costs the farmer about $600 to
grow an acre of corn. Last year, a farmer in Delaware with
an average yield of corn made a profit.
As long as the corn crop is strong in the Midwest, there
is enough corn to meet the needs of both ethanol and feed,
he said. But in years like 2011 and 2012, when the harvest
was off in the Heartland, it had a huge impact on feed
prices that hurt poultry producers, he said.
"The story is a series of what-if scenarios," Kee said.
"A lot of people say just let the market figure it out."
Jim Newcomb Jr., a Farm Credit loan officer based in
Denton, Md., believes "farmers can feed and power the
country."
But whether corn-based ethanol is the best answer,
Newcomb isn't sure. In Europe, he said, they use canola oil
– and get better efficiency.
"Politics is involved" in America, he noted.
When experts and interest groups parse out the costs and
benefits of ethanol versus conventional gasoline, Newcomb
wishes they would make reasonable comparisons.
No one factors in the military costs of securing
petroleum around the globe when they look at the cost of
conventional gasoline.
"The real cost of oil isn't in our cost of fuel at the
pump," he said.
Nor is the real cost of growing corn for ethanol.
Taxpayers for Common Sense, a watch dog organization that
tracks Congressional Spending, concluded that ethanol is
also supported by an array of tax credit, grant and loan
programs – benefits that total in the billions of dollars
over the past 30 years.
And that doesn't include routine, federal subsidies for
crop insurance or help with losses when there are
farming-related disasters.
Other possibilities
There are promising biofuel possibilities beyond ears of
corn.
In a field at Michigan State University's W.K. Kellogg
Biological Station at Hickory Corners, researchers study
sample plots in search of corn-based ethanol alternatives.
The end game is a cellulosic biofuel that increases wildlife
habitat and sequesters carbon on the soils while producing
ethanol from a product that isn't used for food.
In 2022, the Energy Independence Security Act requires
that 16 billion of the 36 billion gallons of biofuels
created come from cellulosic fibers. Among the most
promising new test plots are grasses like the Asian plant
Miscanthus and natives such as switchgrass and prairie
grasses.
In Delaware, scientists are looking at seashore mallow, a
plant that tolerates salty soils, as a possible cellulosic
biofuel feedstock.
And DuPont Co. researchers also are looking at cellulosic
biofuels from corn stover, the leaves, stalks and husks left
after ears of corn are harvested.
"As a vehicle fuel, cellulosic ethanol reduces greenhouse
gas emissions by as much as 86 percent relative to
gasoline," said Wendy Rosen, a DuPont spokeswoman. "The
refining of corn stover into ethanol also creates a
byproduct, lignin, a renewable solid fuel that can displace
coal in power plants, thus further reducing carbon dioxide
emissions."
Rosen said the current policy "has spurred hundreds of
millions of dollars in private investment of advanced
biofuels and is expediting the transition from a
petroleum-based to a bio-based global economy. The
development of this new industry has happened quite fast,
but that remarkable innovation is under threat if the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency changes its critical
policy."
Ethanol industry lobbyists are pushing for ears of corn
to make up the majority of feed stock for future biofuels –
eliminating the promise of different grasses and even corn
stalks and corn leaves. One proposal would cut by 20 percent
the amount of biofuel made from grasses and corn stover in
standards now in development.
Still, it appears ethanol will to play a role in
America's energy future.
The EPA is scheduled to update its Renewable Fuel
Standards in September, and one of the key options under
consideration is increasing the content of ethanol blended
with gasoline to 15 percent from the current 10 percent. The
standards update has been delayed twice.
In Texas, James Griffin, director of the Mosbacher
Institute at Texas A&M University, questions the
effectiveness of corn-based ethanol, noting that the big
picture environmental gain is small when examining costs and
benefits.
In 2011, use of ethanol saved about 25.2 metric tons of
CO2 emissions from going into the atmosphere. That equals
about 0.42 percent of total CO2 emissions in the United
States and 0.08 percent globally.
"The realized benefits of our ethanol policy has been
disappointingly small," he said.
Griffin is urging a repeal of the ethanol mandates in the
Energy Independence and Security Act.
Raising concerns
Rep. John Carney, D-Del., was among a group of
Congressmen who wrote to EPA in 2012 after a drought in the
Midwest caused shortages and higher corn prices. Among
Carney's concerns: the impact on the poultry industry, on
food supplies and on jobs.
This year, he wrote another letter to EPA raising
concerns about the impact of the renewable fuel standards
set on small refineries with no or limited abilities to
blend gasoline with ethanol.
Carney said the standard sets "an important goal, which
is to encourage businesses to develop cleaner-burning fuels
and to make America less dependent on oil produced by
countries that aren't our friends. But there are certainly
challenges associated with it."
He said delays in the updates to the standards are a
problem because the economy, weather and other events can
have an impact on the market for renewable fuels.
"The problem is, EPA hasn't been doing its job," Carney
said.
While the debate on America's energy future moves on,
owners of older boats curse the ethanol in fuel used to
guide their watercraft up and down Delaware's rivers, bays
and ocean shores.
"It destroys everything," said marine mechanic Chris
Prince, who works out of Phillips Marine in Lewes.
Adds Chris McCormick, who works with Prince: "It makes
your engine run hotter. It makes your engine run leaner. And
now they are talking about E-15."
That would be an ethanol fuel blend of up to 15 percent
rather than the current 10 percent.
Older marine engines built before federal mandates stall
out because ethanol causes water to build up in the fuel.
And fiberglass fuel tanks in older boats disintegrate with
the addition of ethanol, McCormick said.
The butterfly effect
Then there are monarch butterflies and other species
struggling because milkweed, which often lined the edges of
fields before the ethanol phenomenon, is disappearing.
The
planting of corn for ethanol has lead to the
loss of milkweed, a host plant for the monarch
butterfly.
Earlier this summer, the U.S. Department of Agriculture
Natural Resources Conservation Service sent out an advisory
asking people to consider planting milkweed in their
backyards – a move that would create habitat for monarch
butterflies. The butterflies – orange and black – spend the
winter in Mexico but their population has been in a sharp
decline.
"The decline is happening up here," said Doug Tallamy, a
professor of entomology and wildlife ecology at the
University of Delaware. "We're losing the Monarch up here"
because of "mono cropping of corn and soybeans and
conversion of former federal Conservation Reserve lands to
ethanol corn."
Last summer, Tallamy said he saw just two monarchs on his
trips to the middle part of the county – the place that was
the heartland for monarch habitat. Loss of milkweed and a
drought in Texas were part of the equation. The estimate,
Tallamy said, is 3.6 percent of the monarch population is
left. There are still monarchs and milkweed in Delaware and
the East Coast. But, said Tallamy, "the East Coast is not
going to be able to rebuild that population."
It's got to happen in the Midwest, he said.
"You have to see it to believe it," said Orley "Chip"
Taylor, a professor at the University of Kansas and director
of Monarch Watch. From Minnesota to Iowa you can drive for
miles without seeing any milkweed – the host plant for the
iconic monarch butterfly. "The small towns are going to be
the refuges for wildlife."
Taylor, the director of Monarch Watch, hasn't lost hope
for the monarch but he said it will take a big response to
help the population recover.
It isn't just monarchs at risk.
About 4,000 species of native bees – the insects that
pollinate many of the plants across the Midwest – are also
at risk as habitat disappears. Milkweed is important to many
of these bees, too. Bees don't pollinate milkweed. Instead,
they feast on the nectar.
Milkweed was once common in the prairies of the central
United States. But farming and use of crops resistant to
herbicides have led to a decline. Of the 30 species of
milkweed in the region, five are listed as federal or state
threatened or endangered species, according to the Xerces
Society for Invertebrate Conservation.
Sam Drodge, head of the Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab
at Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Maryland, said that
milkweed "is like a smorgasbord" for many species of bees,
wasps and butterflies.
If a landowner clears a field to the edges, those wild,
grassy strips of habitat are gone and "then the diversity is
gone," he said.
"If you have high quality habitat, you have bees," he
said. "That habitat is disappearing."
Contact Molly Murray at 463-3334
or mmurray@delawareonline.com