Great Green Idea: Green Technology: The Fallacy of Ethanol

The Fallacy of Ethanols

Energy independence is a very important step to ensuring that we no longer cause the detriment on the environment which we have been for a long time now. We all know that oil consumption in the world is running unchecked and that the fossil fuels are drying up. The environment needs our help and energy independence is one major step to ensuring that this happens. One of the ways in which the US government seems to be trying to accomplish this comes through ethanol production. We must be careful about believing the ethanol fallacy, however, for in the end, the numbers for ethanol substitution are just not green.

On the surface, the ethanol fallacy seems like the perfect green solution. Vehicles are able to run on fuel produced by corn, which is called ethanol. One of the major tenets of energy independence comes in the form of finding green alternatives to fuel. This is why we need to start looking for methods of energy production which come from renewable resources. Considering that corn is a crop which is grown regularly throughout the United States, it seems at first like the perfect solution. This is where the ethanol fallacy pulls people in.

The trouble starts to surface once you look into the details of the ethanol fallacy. The truth is that it takes a great deal of energy to produce ethanol, which stops this from being a green alternative. It is roughly estimated that for every 1 BTU of fossil energy (namely oil) which is used to produce ethanol, only 1.3 BTUs of ethanol will be produced. This is only a very small gain and some researchers claim that this may be a very generous estimation. As you can see, this is not a very green alternative at all. It is not granting very much energy independence.

On top of this, a great amount of corn is needed to produce the right effects for ethanol to work. A standard SUV would need 450 pounds of corn in order to produce enough ethanol to fill the gas tank. When you take these numbers and calculate how much ethanol would be needed to replace America's foreign dependence on oil, you suddenly need about 95% of the farmland found in the country to do this. Once you replace that much of the total farmland for ethanol production, you must stop to ask the question of where the rest of the food is going to be produced from?

The government is buying into the ethanol fallacy too quickly and as a result, we are replacing one method with another which is not so green in the end. It's important to form an energy independence, although the ethanol fallacy is not going to be the way to achieve this. We need to find green methods of energy production which are not going to cause more harm than good. While it sounds like an attractive plan, the ethanol fallacy is going to be one which, in the end, will cause just as much harm to the environment as our current dependency on oil.