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The ‘Green’ Aviation Fuel That Would Increase Carbon Emissions
(e360.yale.edu)
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this post was submitted on 27 May 2025
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Ethanol is the biggest environmental disaster in the United States. It takes two gallons of fossil fuels (counting fertilizer, transportation, and all other inputs) to make one gallon of ethanol - plus all the herbicides, pesticides, toxic fertilizer runoff, and all the other negative externalities of monocrop industrial agriculture - so a handful of Big Ag megacorps can get fat off subsidies at taxpayer expense.
51 million acres of farmland - an area the size of Nebraska - wasted turning fuel into less efficient fuel.
Of fucking course Trump and Biden found some way to make it worse.
So you mean it's not ethanol that's the problem, it's the way it's produced usually via monocrops like corn with massive subsidies. If you produced it more sustainably with a more natural permaculture like prairie grasses, wouldn't it be better than the co2 emitting gasoline status quo?
Not clear. Even if no fertilizer use. Harvesting, transportation, fermentation are high co2 emmitters. Where fertilizer boosts yields, it may be a minimal contributor to net emissions.
Land owners making ethanol precursors would want high yield crops.
They don't have to be. They are currently because equipment and vehicles mostly run on gasoline. If the farm equipment and fuel transporters were modified to run on the ethanol it would be co2 neutral or somewhat co2 negative as the co2 harvested by the plants would be stored for later release when burning the fuel or fermenting before burning.
Heating for fermentation and distilling could also be powered by co2 neutral biomass such as crop byproducts or well managed wood forests. Usually fertilizer is less necessary with organic and permaculture growing practices since the natural diversity of plants' keeps the soil healthy and well nourished.
Corn is actually one of the lower yield corps per acre when grown for ethanol. It averages around 350 gallons per acre. Crops such as sugar cane, sugar beets, sorghum, cassava, cattails and even natural prairie grasses all produce more than that per acre.
Corn is used so widely for ethanol in the US because of all the government subsidies keeping its price artificially low.
Well managed plant fuel is definitely better for the environment than fossil fuels. Brazil has been running most of its cars on ethanol grown from the byproducts of sugar cane production since they forced the carmakers there to adopt their engines to run it in response to the 1970s oil price shock.
Ethanol is bad mostly because energy prom pv solar is over 15 times higher.
A circular corn ethanol economy Is not a solution to make it better. Just produces less surplus per acre.