Agronomist fights for truths about ethanol industry
Gregg Carlson doesn’t like to hear the negative comments about ethanol.
The SDSU Extension farm precision agronomist has been telling farmers at crop expos this winter and others he talks with that producers wouldn’t have the prices they do today on their crops without the liquid fuel.
“The success of ethanol is incredibly, incredibly important for Midwest agriculture and the economies of the Midwest area. It’s because of ethanol that we have the prices we do. Could you imagine one-third more corn in the market now?” Carlson said.
After all, it’s his employer, SDSU, where the first ethanol dry mill production plant in the United States was developed by Paul Middaugh in the 1970s. The microbiology professor took his still to the mall in Washington, D.C., and started the ethanol revolution.
Carlson can talk for hours about the benefits of ethanol. Historically, he goes back to 1908 when Henry Ford said that alcohol was a cleaner, better fuel for automobiles than gasoline.
“He was an excellent engineer and he had a switch on his Model T dashboard with a switch that would go back and forth between ethanol and gasoline,” Carlson said.
Fast forward to today, and Carlson said that most of the negative talk about ethanol comes from the oil companies, who lose a lot of income because of the fuel. He points to an Iowa State University study that ethanol has helped reduce gasoline prices by 30 cents a gallon and that’s causing oil companies to lose about $100 million per day. And with 33 million gallons of ethanol going into gasoline on a daily basis, that’s another $100 million a day, he said.
“So you start to wonder where the information is coming from,” he said.
Carlson hopes to help establish different viewpoints or “truths” on the ethanol discussions that he feels are “incredibly important.”
His major points in his presentations and talks with farmers include:
• Use of water for ethanol production: “People don’t understand what incredible amounts of water that come down the Missouri River – 20 million acre feet of water flow down the Missouri annually,” he said.
In putting that in perspective, Carlson said they could irrigate every acre of cropland and hay land in South Dakota with a foot and a quarter of water and that would about equal the amount of water flowing down each year.
He likes to say that if every ethanol plant in the United States was on the banks of the Missouri, the amount of water being used by the plants would be “so little.”
“It’s bizarre to think that ethanol wastes all of this water,” he said.
• Life cycle analysis: He said the analysis is important because such agencies as the California Resources Board uses this process to determine whether a fuel source is acceptable to them.
He said all ethanol is grouped together by some organizations, but in the Upper Midwest it’s different because this area has less rainfall and uses less nitrogen per bushel than other areas in Ohio and Illinois. And livestock producers in this area are using appreciably more distillers grains and cornstalks in the their feed diets.
For example, Carlson said he traveled down a 60-mile stretch of road in South Dakota last fall and there were baled cornstalks in about half of the fields. With those, mixed with distillers grain, there really ends up to be no feed loss at all because of the corn used for ethanol.
“It’s important that South Dakota has created just as much feed as we had before, but the difference is we have lots of ethanol and a huge amount of liquid fuel. In the life cycle analysis, critics say the corn is gone, feed is gone … everything is gone. They pay no attention to the fact that we have just as much feed as we had before. This is a fight, a battle that we will eventually win I believe,” he said.
Additionally, all of the nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium in corn that is taken off the field and goes to the ethanol plant, by using the distillers grain, all of that comes back to the farm and becomes part of the livestock feed and a “large percentage is excreted by the livestock and put right back on the land,” Carlson said.
• High cost of food: Checking at Walmart, he said it’s about $2.30 for a pound of corn flakes. With corn at $6 per bushel, that’s about 11 cents of corn in corn flakes. The real cost for increased food costs at the stores is the cost of transportation, he said.
• Fuel efficiency: Carlson believes the United States needs to look more at Sweden’s ethanol diesel engine, something that they have been using for 15 years.
Scania, part of Volkswagen, builds modified, heavy-duty diesel engines designed to run on almost pure ethanol (E95, or 95 percent ethanol, with a 5 percent ignition improver). U.S. auto manufacturers make a big deal out of converting cars and trucks to run on 85 percent ethanol. Scania has done better than that for 15 years, and their engines can run on 100 percent biodiesel without any modifications, too, said the company.
Sweden is now using it in more than 600 buses in the country and is expanding it to use in trucks, too. Carlson believe that technology needs to become more a part of the U.S. transportation industry.
To add a few more arguments to the ethanol discussion, Carlson said there have been no major ethanol spills, no wars have been fought over ethanol, no solider has lost his life in a fight over ethanol, zero dollars have gone to Middle East country governments because of ethanol, and no ethanol dollars have funded terrorists.
