Brookings Institution-U of Iowa Look Beyond Corn-Based Ethanol

Commentary By Michael O'Hanlon

The Brookings Institution in conjunction with the University of Iowa held an event Oct. 17 in Iowa City on energy, ethanol, and national security. Despite what one might have expected, however, this was not a rally for any and all forms of ethanol as a substitute for petroleum-based fuels.

As most realize, Congress and the Bush administration are pushing ethanol very hard right now as a way to find domestic, environmentally friendly alternatives to oil. The president's goal is to produce 35 billion gallons of biofuel annually by 2017 (with ethanol actually only one of the possible choices, biodiesel being another). That would be a sixfold increase from today and equal, in energy content, more than 10 percent of America's petroleum imports expected at that time.

The concept of corn-based ethanol is sound — that is, up to a point. As several of the panelists, including Jerry Schnoor, Mani Subramanian, and Tonya Peeples of the University of Iowa's engineering schools, one of us, Steve Fales of Iowa State's agronomy department, and John Miranowski of Iowa State's economics department underscored, however, there are lots of downsides to pushing the corn-based ethanol concept too far. The gist of the panelists' remarks was that it should be viewed as a transitional biofuel and not the final objective in and of itself. It can help us create markets for biofuel, refineries to make it, infrastructure (like dedicated pipelines) to move it around the country, and demand for cars utilizing it. But the real breakthrough will have to be of a different type.

As Jerry Schnoor emphasizes, when you put a gallon of Iowa ethanol in your flex-fuel vehicle, you're also effectively putting several pounds of Iowa topsoil into the Mississippi River and ultimately the Gulf of Mexico. That is because plowing fields for annual crops inevitably creates substantial erosion — not to mention the usual pesticides and fertilizer runoff characteristic of intensive agriculture.

Most of Iowa's potential farmland, about 23 million acres, is already devoted to corn and beans. The popularity of ethanol may, however, lead farmers to cultivate an additional 1 million acres now in the conservation reserve program, with associated environmental consequences.

Washington Times, Oct. 26, 2007