What looks to many like a good idea on paper is really a bogus venture in economic and energy diversification, said speakers at the National Farmers Union 34th annual convention Nov. 22 in Saskatoon.
Tadeusz Patzek, an engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told NFU delegates that ethanol production would be one big boondoggle of fossil fuel dependency.
“There’s not a shadow of a doubt: ethanol production … is a fossil energy losing proposition. It was devised as a terrible solution to air quality problems,” said Patzek.
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He warned that at every level, ethanol production is a poor allocation of time, money and resources. Ethanol produces a negative energy balance, meaning that it takes more energy to produce a litre of ethanol than a litre of ethanol will return, he said.
Ethanol supporters have said in the past that such calculations are wrong.
Ken Sigurdson, NFU regional co-ordinator for Manitoba, said that besides the volume of fossil fuel resources that would go into making ethanol in Western Canada, the main ingredient, feedgrain, isn’t exactly in abundant supply.
“We just don’t have cheap feedgrains for ethanol production in Western Canada. That’s the bottom line.
“And we don’t have people jumping up and saying, ‘I want to grow some low value wheat for ethanol production’ either.”
Manitoba does not have excess corn or cereal feed, Sigurdson added.
He said Manitoba hog barns are importing corn from the United States and Manitoba ethanol plants will have to do the same.
NFU executive secretary Darrin Qualman said the organization is against putting public money into grain-based ethanol plants for several reasons.
“We think there’s good research showing the energy balance is negative. We question the ethical implications of turning food into fuel. The economics don’t seem very good and we’re very pessimistic that it’s going to increase grain prices,” he said.
“Ethanol is where we give public money to Archer Daniels Midland to turn American corn into environmentally questionable energy,” is how Qualman described one Manitoba delegate’s view of the ethanol industry. There are fears of an eventual centralization of ethanol plant ownership.
Ian Cushon of Oxbow, Sask., said that province hasn’t done enough to develop the energy it has. He said oil wells around his property are still flaring off natural gas rather than capturing it. He thinks ethanol is a superficial answer to a big problem.
“It’s not sustainable, it’s the flavour of the month,” Cushon said. “It doesn’t make much sense in the long term.”
Patzek said that at present, fuel efficiency and conservation is the only way to reduce dependency on fossil fuel and control climate change.
“If you were to increase by a factor of two (the) efficiency of the cars in the U.S., you would save 33 percent of the fossil fuel used in the U.S. Ethanol solves less than one percent of the fuel use,” he said.
