Indirect Land Use Concerns for Ethanol

DomesticFuel.com
Posted by Cindy Zimmerman – August 27th, 2009

A conference on land use and carbon impacts of corn ethanol held this week in St. Louis offered a broad view of a significant topic as Washington braces to continue debates on climate change legislation and the future of ethanol.

Geoff Cooper with the Renewable Fuels Association moderated the first panel at the conference sponsored by the National Corn Growers Association. That panel focused on the modeling used to determine land use change and Cooper says the panel participants pointed out how difficult this can be. “It’s a new area of study and certainly new to a regulatory framework,” Cooper said. “Using these models for these purposes involves lots of subjective decisions and judgement calls and when you put that in the context of a regulation, that’s problematic.”

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