I don't want to minimize the impacts of ratcheting up production of "ag commodities" for making fuel. It seems a terrible idea for many reasons. But can someone help me understand the extent to which the transfer of a bushel of commodity corn or soybeans to fuel production represents a debit from the "real food" column?

I have the impression that commodity corn, i.e. the vast sea of yellow field corn comprising the Great Midwestern Corn Desert, is generally not used to produce "real food", except for the proportion that goes to animal feed (of course, many of the animals this feeds are cattle which are not "designed" to eat corn, but that's another debate). Instead, most of it is used to make pseudo-foods such as high fructose corn syrup, and other pseudo-food or even non-food "products".

And I also hear that most corn that is used in "real food" is white corn, which is different from what comes out of the Great Corn Desert.

And yet I hear repeatedly the mantra that corn-based ethanol is causing price spikes of tortillas in Mexico, for instance.

Is there good information on how a bushel of corn is divied up in the "marketplace"? How much goes to "real food"? How much goes to animal feed? How much does planting an acre of "ethanol corn" really subtract from the production of real food? Can someone help me sort this out?

Because more acres are being used to grow corn for ethanol.  That puts other grains, like barley, in short supply.  Prices rise for all crop based food products when land area of corn energy production goes up because demand for ethanol goes up.

Cut back on meat, for instance, and the much more efficient foods, dairy, vegetable, and egg sources use a lot less land area for the human food produced.

Starvation from food price rise due to fuel farming is already soaring.  Couple that with water problems from drought, contamination, and war (the US attacked Iraqi water supply firtst in gulf 1 and 2, dooming 100s of thousands of, mostly children, from water bourne illness), and a massive death toll is inevitable.  

Global climate change, oil war, and fuel farming.  Brutal methods of population control.  Corporate feudal methods.  

Reproductive rights for women, that's the natural answer to overpopulation.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

But corn ethanol is almost too easy to hate

It's a crappy feedstock
It's a crappy biofuel (on performance / compatibility basis)
It's a food crop (And therefore receives a bunch of subsidies it doesn't deserve for fuel)

Practically a strawman.

_

Now the harder one to figure out are the solid arguements against stuff like switchgrass butanol.

Except that using solar to harvest hydrogen is a waste of energy.

You'd get 3-4x more energy just by using the raw energy inside a battery.

Thats why the European Fuel Cell Forum, one of the most influencial fuel cell groups in the world.

They have officially canceled all hydrogen fuel cell research.

(Focusing instead on massive power plant fuel cells that use carbon fuels and could replace coal and natural gas facilities)

The specific commodities that would be made into ethanol are not taking food off the market so much as the land and energy that went into growing those commodities. For example, nobody think that we're going to eat the feedlot corn in Iowa, but we would eat wheat grown on those fields, using those resources.

The people who read Foreign Affairs are generally not "policy elites," though some probably are. They could be, for example, employees of USAID who are trying to help farmers in developing countries develop their farming practices. Foreign-service types are usually more realistic than "policy elites," and they're probably the vast majority of people who read Foreign Affairs.

So what about the question of ethanol vs. tortillas? This direct negative correlation is being widely circulated as fact. Is it just another unproven assumption being propogated by lazy journalists? Because there are a LOT of lazy readers out there.

gmunger:

From the Foreign Affairs piece Tom referenced:

"In late 2006, the price of tortilla flour in Mexico, which gets 80 percent of its corn imports from the United States, doubled thanks partly to a rise in U.S. corn prices from $2.80 to $4.20 a bushel over the previous several months. (Prices rose even though tortillas are made mainly from Mexican-grown white corn because industrial users of the imported yellow corn, which is used for animal feed and processed foods, started buying the cheaper white variety.)"

In the short term a higher demand for corn by the ethanol producers will increase the price of corn.  More bidders for a fixed amount of production will cause the price to go higher.  

In later years corn production will increase to meet demand as in all markets.  The supply increase does not happen overnight because more land must be procured for farming, along with more equipment for planting and harvesting.  

Assuming of course that demand for ethanol remains high.

As usual, some patient searching would have lead me to the answers. Thanks for helping.

Don't get me wrong, I'm on your team here. Just trying to flesh out some details that don't always get fleshed out in the mainstream media.

Thanks for humoring me.

...the subsidy for commodity corn remains constant.

But if the demand rises substantially, what justification can we invent for maintaining the subsidy?

The enlightenment is coming rapid-fire.

The real question is why are we trying to increase the supply of liquid fuels anyways?

Electricity uses 3-4x less energy than hydrogen.
And we now have batteries that can recharge in 10 minutes and drive hundreds and hundreds of miles.

It's not like we're running out of Oil anytime soon.  We're merely at the halfway mark.

The difference is that Oil is going to continue to get more scarce.  More expensive.
Which is a good thing.

All the more reason to abandon ship, rather than furiously using a bucket in a vane attempt to keep the Titanic afloat.

In later years corn production will increase to meet demand as in all markets.

Except that that production will come at the cost of production of other grain products.  And with an enormous ecological price tag as well.  Corn is one of the worst food crops in terms of impact per acre.  The last thing we want to do is grow still more of it.

...an enormous ecological price tag as well.

Indeed. The tallgrass prairies and oak savannas of this region may be the most dramatically transformed ecotypes in North America. We've been trading our natural heritage for cheap soda pop.

Supermarket to the world....my arse.

But like said
Corn is a strawman argument anyways

If we were forced to make alcohol biofuel without subsidies in play.
We wouldn't pick Corn

Yield in gal/acre/year
Algae Starch     20000
Miscanthus     1500
Switchgrass     1150
Sweet Potatoes     1069
Poplar Wood     1000
Sweet Sorghum     900
Sugar Beet     714
Sugar Cane     662
Cassava     410
Corn          370

_

And we certainly wouldn't pick Ethanol either.
Since it's a horrible fuel based on it's

30% lower Energy Density than Gasoline
Incompatibility with existing vehicles, pumps, pipelines, and storage tanks due to it's corrosivity, high vapor pressure, and attraction of airborn water which contaminates the fuel.

If we had to choose, we'd go with Butanol

_

However like said, this is all a stupid argument to begin with since biofuels are inherently just pork barrel subsidies for oil and farm lobbies.

And at best, merely air quality and performance additives to oil.

What is the source of your estimates for gal/acre/year?

Are they scalable based on land and growing climate?  Corn is used because it grows over the large flat portion of N. America.  I am not sure about land area available for the crops you show.  I also am not sure about the current technology to convert crops to a useful biofuel for a reasonable $/GJ.

In the present biofuels depend heavily on subsidies, but looking out to 2030 can they stand on their own?  Will changing to a differnt feed-stock like Algae Starch decrease the cost per GJ of the fuel?

With a guesstimate on the algae, which can be bred to be 97% starch.

And thanks, Tom, for all the links. There has, indeed, been quite a lot of negative press about ethanol recently.

Just one correction. GreyFlcn asserts that

Brazil has been heavily subsidizing ethanol for over 2 decades.

Actually, the Brazilian federal govermment supported the production of ethanol capacity (e.g., with subsidized loans) for most of two decades, but stopped providing these subsidies in the 1990s.

Nowadays, the main support is indirect, through differential taxation, especially at the State level. But to give some indicative numbers, gasoline is taxed at a rate or around 45 percent of the final price, while the tax on ethanol is only 28 percent. The important point is that this tax differentiation does not subsidize exports.

Liquid fuels don't make sense because solid and gasified biomass utilized as electricity generates drastically more net usable energy for the same amount of biomass.

_

For instance a Direct Carbon Fuel Cell can reach as high as 72% net energy utilization from biomass.
(90% efficient torrification process.
80% efficient direct carbon fuel cell)

Which is a far cry from 7.2% conversion with ethanol.
(38% efficient Fischer Trophe process
20% efficient gasoline engine)

10x difference in energy content, from the same amount of biomass.

Jesus jabailo.  If you're going to quote out of context to intentionally distort their point, you could try a little harder next time.

Bossel's point is that hydrogen is a bad idea because it's a poor energy carrier, and switching to it as a primary mode of energy distribution would increase our total energy requirements, and this increase would have to come from fossil fuels.

Continuing the rest of the quote:

In addition, he says a substantial amount of energy is lost when the electricity is converted to hydrogen for storage in a fuel cell and subsequently converted back into electricity.

"About three quarters of the original energy is lost for electrolysis, compression or liquefaction, transportation, storage, transfer and re-conversion back to electricity with fuel cells," the Fuel Cell Forum said in a statement.

According to Bossel, this is because "a synthetic energy carrier cannot be more efficient than the energy from which it is made. Renewable electricity is better distributed by electrons than by hydrogen."
</blockqoute>