Corn Commentary

Ethanol Critic Changes Numbers

Every day I look for something other than ethanol to write about on this blog, but when it continues to come under attack – and corn growers with it – you just can’t ignore it.

One of the most recent came last week in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, hometown newspaper of the National Corn Growers Association, which printed a commentary by noted ethanol-basher David Pimentel. The Cornell University professor of entomology rehashed most of his common arguments about ethanol – not really anything new there. (I didn’t know he was an entomology professor – wonder how a bug guy got to be an ethanol expert?)

What was apparently new, and picked up on by NRDC policy analyst and blogger Nathanael Greene, was that Pimentel says corn ethanol actually does have a positive return of fossil fuel investment. Quoting from the article:

Cornell University’s up-to-date analysis of the 14 energy inputs that go into corn production, plus the nine energy inputs invested in ethanol fermentation and distillation, confirms that more than 40 percent of the energy contained in one gallon of corn ethanol is expended to produce it.

Greene notes that means the return on fossil fuel investment is about 2.5 (100%/40%).

Thanks to the Iowa Corn Growers for sending out a press release alerting media to this.

“The naysayers’ wall of misinformation is beginning to crumble,” says Tim Burrack, a corn grower leader from Arlington, Iowa. “Corn growers have been touting the benefits of ethanol for more than 30 years and we pride ourselves on using sound scientific data to support our product.”

Note that there does not seem to be a way to comment on Pimentel’s article in the Post-Dispatch, short of sending a letter to the editor (which I would strongly encourage), but you can comment on Greene’s blog post and I would highly recommend that. He nicely refutes Pimentel’s article and another anti-ethanol piece by Tom Philpott in Grist. He deserves congrats for that.