January 05, 2009

Water: Ethanol's Achilles Heel
AlterNet
by Robert Glennon

"If I could offer our soon-to-be Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack one piece of advice, it would be this: 'We're already running low on water. Don't make matters worse.' I would offer my advice with hope, but out of fear. My fear is that in Des Monies and in his short-lived presidential campaign, Mr. Vilsack was an ardent supporter of ethanol, so has been President-elect Obama. Once he becomes agriculture's advocate in the new administration, it will mean more and more ethanol plants for America. Mr. Vilsack is in for an unpleasant surprise. That's because while many of ethanol's problems (energy inputs, land use, food prices and more) have been thoroughly discussed, we have oddly (or maybe purposely) overlooked its true Achilles heel: water." (12/23/08)

I don't know Robert Glennon, but he obviously has either bought into the propaganda from the environists about water, or is himself using its propaganda value. Knowing just a wee bit about AlterNet and Huffington Post, I suspect it is intentional propaganda.

Yes, it takes tremendous quantities of water to produce ethanol, and to grow corn. But very little of that water is "converted" into ethanol. Assuming we are producing denatured ethanol, C2H6O, and that water, H2O, is the ONLY source of the hydrogen and oxygen (not true, but I am trying to explain for ordinary people here), each molecule of ethanol would "consume" 3 molecules of water and release an oxygen molecule. If I remember my chemistry calculations, 46 grams of ethanol uses 54 grams of water. So a gallon of ethanol (6.5 pounds) requires about one gallon of water (8 pounds). BUT when that ethanol is burned (C2H6O) with oxygen (O2), we have C2H5OH(g) + 3 O2(g) ? 2 CO2(g) + 3 H2O(l); (?Hr = -1409 kJ/mol[19]) or, duh, all three molecules of water have been recreated! Net ZERO consumption of water.

A lot of the water is USED but not consumed. Assuming he is truthful about the 4 gallons, most of the other three gallons will come out either as evaporation (steam) from the processing, or waste water (dirty water) from the processing and incidentals. Some will come out in the mash left over from the fermentation.

Evaporation will eventually (days or weeks) return as rain or snow, just not necessarily at the same place it was evaporated. Waste water will be purified, either naturally or by a manmade plant and returned to streams or even to ground water - again, not necessarily at the same place. Mash water will get eaten by cows, probably nearby, and thus reduce (somewhat) the amount of water those cows would drink. Cows similarly use and consume water, and generally it is returned to the hydrologic cycle in the same way. Of course, many of these people are religious fanatics (vegans or such) and the idea that COWS are being fed and then eaten by humans is as evil as using the ethanol to fuel an SUV.

IF you are pumping the water from a limited, confined acquifer (like the Ogallala, say, or some of those in the west) or you are pumping the water from an overappropriated surface water system (like the upper Platte or some of the Colorado River), then you are LOCALLY depleting the water supply, since some of that is NOT going back into local systems. IF you are pumping from local aquifers or local creeks/rivers FASTER than these are being recharged by natural mechanisms, and you are not enhancing those natural mechanism, then you are again, depleting the LOCAL water supply. If you are NOT treating your waste water, then you are potentially contaminating a great deal of water downstream from where you discharge, and either preventing its immediate, convenient reuse OR making it much more expensive to reuse. But you are NOT consuming nor running out of water.

As for the water "consumed" in ethanol, the shelf life of ethanol is relatively short, probably averages a year or less, and the market is fairly restricted too. Not a lot of ethanol is shipped outside the US, except maybe to Canada. So the gallon "consumed" is pretty quickly turned back into water right here in North America, just where ever the fuel is burned and the winds carry the exhaust gasses. In winter time I suspect that a LOT of those emissions condense right in the tailpipe and get added to that ice on the roads (gee, has anyone done a study to see if high fuel ethanol consumption contributes to black ice hazards on highways? Another reason to banish the evil stuff!) or what has to be chipped off the driveway.

My older son has joked about a recirculation system (a la Dune) for vehicles burning pure ethanol or hydrogen, in which the water would be recycled and (using solar panels or wind) converted back into fuel for the vehicle - provided a few leaps in technology can be made.

Of course, there isn't a whole lot of corn grown in the land above the Ogallala Aquifer OR in the Colorado River Basin. Most of it is grown in places that usually have TOO MUCH water a good deal of the time, like all those states along the Mississippi, which we taxpayers have to bail out (literally, with buckets, sometimes) after the Big Flood (which seems to happen every other year). Sure, there are droughts in places, but those same droughts do a number on corn production too, and the ethanol plants have to take that into consideration. Most field corn is NOT grown on irrigated cropland. In areas subject to such cycles, people might have to do something radical and out-of-the-box like storing water during wet years to have available conveniently during dry years. This is usually done through a little-known technology called "dams and reservoirs" (which is, of course, as evil as eating cows and driving SUVs); it is also possible to intentionally flood vast areas of land during some periods to allow water to infiltrate back into underground aquifers - or even inject water back into aquifers after it has been treated, or while it is being diverted from naturally-flooded areas.

There are many ways in which water use can be improved to address site-specific problems, and if the ethanol producer has to pay a reasonable, free-market price for their water, they will take economical and sustainable measures to conserve, reuse, and replace water. This will be necessary as the relatively undeveloped technology of getting ethanol from other biomass sources is exploited in the future, which will often mean that the biomass sources come from drier parts of the nation.

Although even THAT problem is mostly a political one and not an engineering one, the logical places to build plants that can use some biomass other than corn to produce ethanol are big cities in areas with high rainfall: like Richmond and DC and NYC and Cleveland and Boston - where the waste streams are huge and the consumers are right there, to boot. But we know that the environists and the politicians and the elite will NEVER let that happen. An ethanol or biodiesel plant on top of Fresh Kylls landfill on Staten Island or the same sort of plant at the south end of, say, the Washington Navy Yard would be as little welcome as using either of those places to construct a new Naval shipyard. It would even, perhaps, make sense, to haul all the corn down river to someplace like St. Louis or Cairo, where the water and the shipping is available, and make it into ethanol there together with the wastes from the big cities; but that has its own political drawbacks. They would rather, as usual, treat the West and the Midwest (and even the South) as colonial possessions to be exploited.

All of this, of course, requires further manipulation of the natural order of things - something which is understood universally by the AlterNet and Huffington Post babies of the world to be far more evil than killing babies in the womb, condemning children in third-world countries to die of starvation, malnutrition or disease (because it is evil to use pesticides, build dams, genie crops, and similar other manipulations). So ANYTHING which allows our civilization to survive, let along grow and thrive, is by definition evil and must be outlawed. Ethanol was promoted originally by these very same people who thought that it was going to be "natural" but not really too viable, and get away from the more-evil petroleum (or at least allow them to further demonize petroleum, nukes, and such), but as usual, human ingenuity (especially American ingenuity) has made it viable. So now it must be demonized as well - and they are doing a great job of it, as always.

Ethanol is NOT the answer to energy shortages (which are caused by a growing demand for energy), and NOT the answer for environmental and political impacts from the petroleum economy. But it certainly is PART of the solution.

Nathan Barton is writing this from a wonderful place in the West, which might be in the Black Hills of South Dakota or Wyoming, or might be in one of the Four Corners States. Exactly where it is, the breezes blow with the scent of liberty, and the sound of the pines or the pinions is the sound of freedom. For thousands of years, people have fought and died for the liberty that Americans in the great spaces of the West enjoy, and he writes these commentaries in the hopes that continued generations will be able to do so, until the end of Time. Visit the blog: The Gospel Sower

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