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Renewable Fuels
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By Ed Burke, Dennis K. Burke Inc.
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Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
announced plans to reduce ethanol-
blending goals in the Renewable Fuels
Standard (RFS), media attention turned to
the ethanol boom, its impact and ethanol’s
questionable environmental benefits.
In one eye-opening investigative article,
the Associated Press (AP) found that ethanol
hasn’t lived up to some of the government’s
clean-energy promises, and the story began
drawing fierce response from the ethanol
industry.
The report offered its readers vivid
descriptions of the damage occurring to
gmar inal
,
farmland g y rass hillsides plowed
into crop rows, the millions of acres of
conservation land lost, while streams and
rivers are being polluted and fouled by
fertilizer runoff. There is little question that
ethanol production has had many negative
environmental impacts.
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The consequences are so severe that
environmentalists and many scientists have
now rejected corn-based ethanol as bad
environmental policy. Over the past few
months, dozens of renowned groups have
publicly withdrawn their support for the
corn-ethanol portion of the RFS.
The ethanol industry says AP is wrong
and calls the reporting a “smear campaign.”
They dispute several of AP’s findings and
conclusions. AP responded back in an
article that their investigation was based on
government data, interviews and observa-
tions. It highlights what many researchers
have published in peer-reviewed journals
and is consistent with reports to Congress
by the Environmental Protection Agency
about ethanol’s environmental toll.
The ethanol folks pointed out that soil
erosion, water pollution and other conse-
quences happen with most industrialized
corn farming, whether the harvest is used
to make ethanol, used as livestock feed, or
used in food products.
They also note that the vast majority of
the land was former farmland taken out of
production under the Conservation Reserve
Program (CRP), an initiative
they say is only partly about
protecting sensitive land but
also about boosting farm
prices.
And finally, they recog-
nized that higher corn prices
may have driven farmers to
put idled land back into pro-
duction, but so have reduc-
tions in the CRP program, the
drought last year, and shifts in
global grain demand.
A major concern the article
discusses is possible manipulation
of data to ensure that corn ethanol met
a policy test of being 20 percent “greener”
than gasoline. After an initial analysis put
the figure at 16 percent starting in 2022, the
EPA changed its calculations to raise yield
forecasts and lower price predictions, both
of which would raise corn ethanol’s benefits
relative to costs. AP says this was done
under pressure from industry lobbyists.
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In December, a bipartisan group of
Senators introduced a bill to eliminate
the ethanol mandate of the RFS. Senator
Dianne Feinstein of California, Senator
Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, and eight other
cosponsors introduced The Corn Ethanol
Mandate Elimination Act of 2013.
“Under the corn ethanol mandate in
the RFS, roughly 44 percent of U.S. corn is
diverted from food to fuel, pushing up the
cost of food and animal feed while damaging
the environment,” Senator Feinstein said.
“Oil companies are unable to blend more
corn ethanol without causing problems for
automobiles, boats and other vehicles.”
Feinstein noted that the bill would leave
mandates for non-corn ethanol advanced
biofuels untouched. “I strongly support
requiring a shift to low-carbon advanced
biofuels, including biodiesel, cellulosic
ethanol and other revolutionary fuels,”
she added. “But a corn ethanol mandate is
simply bad policy.”
“This misguided policy has cost tax-
payers billions of dollars, increased fuel
prices, and made our food more expensive,”
Senator Coburn said. “Eliminating this
mandate will let market forces, rather than
political and parochial forces, determine
how to diversify fuel supplies in an ever-
changing marketplace.”
“The proposal has strong support from
the prepared food industry,” Feinstein said,
“including dairy; beef; poultry; oil and gas;
engine manufacturers; boaters; hunger relief
organizations; and environmental groups.”
Feinstein and Coburn previously
teamed up in 2011 to cosponsor an amend-
ment that ended the ethanol industry’s
45-cents-per-gallon tax incentive and its
54-cents-per-gallon import tariff.
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While it is unlikely that ethanol will go
away, volume levels will probably be limited
to stay below the blend wall. The adminis-
tration believes supporting corn ethanol is
the best way to encourage the development
of biofuels that will someday be cleaner
and greener than today’s. Officials fear that
pulling the plug on ethanol might mean
killing any hope of these next-generation
fuels being developed.
In the end, the reality is that ethanol
mandate is a broken policy that needs reform.
What Congress does with the RFS over the
next few months will tell us about their
political resolve to fix unworkable mandates
and costly government regulations.
