If the American Midwest is known for anything, it is known for corn. This is not a bad thing because corn is, for the most part, awesome. Among the many products corn can be made into is Ethanol. Ethanol sucks. I will get to Ethanol in a later post, but rest assured that Ethanol is a shitty chemical that makes a shitty crutch for people to lean on while they halfheartedly search for a viable substitute for oil. Meanwhile, oil tankers crash and BP drilling rigs leak, releasing untold gallons of oil into the gulf and releasing the dark and ancient god Cthulu.
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The proposed oil sands pipeline that will run from Alberta, Canada, down through the Midwest and into Texas, will cut through miles of prime corn-growing country and will bring an estimated 1.29 million barrels, or 54 million gallons, of oil per day[1]. This week the US Department of Transportation shut the project down until TransCanada can address leakage problems. This shutdown will provide groups opposed to the pipeline with ammunition to lobby the US State Department to shut the pipeline down when it makes its final decision later on this year.
I am not the economics writer here, so I’m not going to make my “The thin strip of cropland that the pipeline will displace will be more than made up for by the petroleum energy we receive from the pipeline” argument. To be honest I’m not even sure that’s true. My argument is this: Most oil disasters seem to come from the sea. There is no fail-safe, risk-free way to get the amount of energy we need. What we need to do is find the safest, cheapest way to get that kind of energy. If we find a way to exploit a North American source of oil and get it to a refinery without releasing a dark and ancient god from another dimension we have to do it.
[1]US: Canadian oil pipeline hazardous to the environment, The Christian Science Monitor, June 4, 2011
I think the economic argument is solid. My contention is that, if the pipeline has to cross private lands, farmers will be able to negotiate a rental price for the land being occupied. At the very least, the government could use eminent domain, in which case the farmer would at least still receive some annuity payment for their land that reflects the opportunity cost of the foregone agricultural production.
ReplyDeleteOne of the major issues with corn-based ethanol at this juncture is that we're close to bumping up against the so-called “blend-wall”; U.S. demand for ethanol is limited to < 15% of total gasoline use, since any mixture of gasoline that is more than 15% ethanol will damage automobile engines that aren’t specifically designed as flex-fuel vehicles.
Not to beat up too much on ethanol, but I agree with the general position that ethanol is nothing more than a crutch that will keep us from making serious efforts at generating alternative fuel sources. And that is totally aside from the social and environmental impacts inherent in the production of biofuels, whether that takes the form of greater competition for land for grain production, increased use of nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers (which themselves result in hypoxia and greenhouse gas emissions), or pulling marginal lands out of retirement and putting them into agricultural production. Given all of these problems, it’s hard to make the argument that our pursuit of ethanol is really all that good.