While ethanol supporters smile about government mandates for alternatives to oil, the world has begun to see the impact of using food — corn specifically — as fuel. This piece published by Atlantic magazine includes very revealing numbers (emphasis is mine):
The creation of politically popular biofuel mandates by many of the world’s biggest farming nations has been particularly disruptive. U.S. law, for instance, requires that ethanol make up at least 5 percent of vehicle fuel (rising to 22 percent by 2022), and 30 percent of U.S. corn went toward ethanol production last year. The U.S. government has claimed that biofuel demand is responsible for only 3 percent of the increase in global food prices over the past year. But a recent World Bank report estimated that figure to be 75 percent once the resulting economic changes, such as shifts in land use, are considered.
High prices hurt poor, import-dependent nations the most. The price hikes of the past three years threaten to push 100 million people back into poverty, according to the World Bank, erasing seven years of progress.
If that’s not bad enough, an Economist piece from earlier this year detailed ethanol’s impact on water resources. I can’t find the online link so I will excerpt a paragraph from the print edition story. It comes from a March 1 story about Tampa, Florida, where officials of the state’s first ethanol factory told the city the factory would require 400,000 gallons of water a day.
A typical ethanol factory producing 50m gallons of biofuels a year needs about 500 gallons of water a minute. Most of that goes into the boiling and cooling process, which is similar to making beer. Some water is lost through evaporation in the cooling tower and in waste discharge. All this is putting a heavy burden on aquifers in some corn-growing areas.
