Corn-based ethanol doesn't do much to sever the U.S. reliance on fossil fuels or diminish the need for oil imports, but the biofuel does soak up billions of dollars worth of taxpayer dollars in the form of subsidies, according to study released June 15 by the Environmental Working Group.
Overall oil consumption in the United States was reduced in 2009 by very little — the equivalent of just 1.1 miles per gallon in fuel economy — despite the fact that the 139.5 billion gallons of gasoline consumed in the United States last year contained 10.6 billion gallons of ethanol. That, EWG said, is primarily because producing a gallon of corn-based ethanol does not replace the need for a gallon of gasoline in the U.S. fuel supply.
The report notes that ethanol is a less efficient energy source than gasoline, and replacing 10 percent of a gallon that comes out of the pump essentially means drivers will have to refuel more often than with pure gasoline. The maximum amount of ethanol allowed to be blended into a gallon of gasoline now in the United States is 10 percent for normal fuel not specifically produced for ethanol-powered vehicles.
"The problem is that the current blend of 10 percent ethanol ... cuts gas mileage by almost 4 percent, according to U.S. Department of Energy figures," EWG said in the analysis. "That is because one gallon of ethanol yields only two-thirds as much energy as a gallon of gasoline. At the national level, this means that the 10.6 billion gallons of ethanol burned in 2009 displaced just 7.2 billion gallons of gasoline."
And corn-based ethanol becomes even less attractive of a gasoline substitute when taking into consideration the amount of petroleum-based products it takes to both raise corn and produce ethanol, EWG said.
Groups representing the U.S. ethanol industry disagreed sharply with the EWG report. "Ethanol is the only commercially available alternative to gasoline today, and removing it from our nation's fuel supply would mean more oil use — and we ought to learn from the painful and ongoing lesson in the Gulf of Mexico that more oil is simply not a sustainable path," said Brian Jennings, executive vice president of the American Coalition for Ethanol.
USDA forecasts that the ethanol industry will consume about 4.6 billion bushels of corn in the current 2009-10 marketing year and 4.7 billion next year.
