Fuel Alternatives

When seeking an alternative to petroleum-based combustibles for use in passenger vehicles, corn-based alcohol originally showed some distinct advantages over gasoline. Burning more cleanly than the heavy hydrocarbons drilled in the oil fields, ethanol as an additive or replacement reduces emissions of greenhouse gases to a considerable extent.

It’s renewable, too-unlike fossil fuels, which experts say may be entirely diminished before the century’s end. The supply of ethanol can be replenished each year, bringing fallow farmlands back into production and returning farmers to the field.

Crop-based fuel can be produced domestically, removing the element of international strife from each visit to the pump. Ethanol is not without political problems, however, as implementing alcohol-blended gasoline on a widespread basis stirs controversy among the very environmental groups who demanded change in the first place.

In large part, the challenges to ethanol are exaggerated. The fuel is primarily manufactured using feedlot corn, which just a few years ago was in surplus. The corn used to manufacture ethanol is not generally intended for human consumption, but rather to fatten cattle and chickens housed in confinement lots.

Corn is certainly not without problems, however. Those golden stalks turn out to be a poor source of energy for vehicles, yielding just 18-20 gallons of fuel per acre, a mere fraction of the possible yield from other crops such as algae. The demands of water and particularly petroleum-based synthetic fertilizers also bring the ecological equation of corn ethanol into question. In the end, it is clear that corn is not a good candidate to fuel a greener future.

In large part, the transition to biofuel is being hampered by outmoded ideas about agriculture. Certainly there is nothing “green” about overworking the land to grow fuel. And crops which we are familiar with cultivating for their food value, while being obvious choices for farmers, clearly do not make the optimum sources of energy when applied to machinery.

Fortunately, ethanol does not need to be manufactured from corn-cellulose alcohol can be made from a variety of sources, including many plants which are traditionally thought of as weeds, such as switchgrass. These can be grown with minimal effort and water on land that is relatively poor for the cultivation of food crops. Because most non-food plants use different nutrients than food plants, these grasses can even restore fallow lands which have been battered by the high demands of growing food.

Thanks to advances in the development of cellulose alcohol sources for fuel, we don’t need to choose between sources of food and fuel.