Ethanol and 'peak oil': an aside

Responding to one of my periodic tirades on ethanol, reader Roger Dennison recently wrote in to say:

Tom, the thing you don't mention in your blog, which will certainly impact agriculture in a big BIG way, is the inevitable onset of 'Peak Oil'. I must assume you know what I'm talking about. I am so certain about the future fuel supply crisis, that, when it comes, I want to be (A) living in a place that sells ethanol or E85, (or biodiesel) and (B), have a Flex-Fuel vehicle that will run on it. By that point, and it could happen sooner than later, the "glut" of ethanol will suddenly transform into a shortage.

I'm curious to know what you have to say on this matter.

Bitter Greens Journal responds
I'm familiar with "peak oil," the idea that humans have consumed crude oil so rapidly over the past 100 years that the world's deposits are severely diminished. The argument goes like this: All of the "easy" oil has been sucked out of the earth or will be soon; what's left will be expensive to extract, both becuase it's concentrated in politically unstable countries, and because it lies deeper under the earth's surface than the easy stuff. Thus oil production has peaked or will soon--and the world faces ever-tightening supplies of oil and ever higher prices at the gas pump.

The oil industry, and its champions within the White House, downplay the peak-oil scenario. Sure, they say, oil production will eventually peak, but not anytime soon; thus no need for serious conservation/alternative-energy efforts.

Yet I find the peak-oil argument generally persuasive, especially after having read Paul Roberts' bracing 2004 book The End of Oil. Anyone who thinks peak oil is a fringe theory should read that impeccably documented work. Note also that Richard Lugar and James Woolsey, respectively US senator and former CIA chief, essentially put forward a "peak oil" analysis in this 1999 essay in Foreign Affairs, that trumpet of establishment thinking.

Indeed, those two worthies were essentially arguing my critic Dennison's case: that ethanol provides a way out of an imminent energy crunch.

I disagree.

Studies about how much energy gain ethanol delivers conflict. The USDA, that long-time underwriter of ethanol production, recently came out with a study claiming that ethanol delivers a little more energy than it requires to produce.

Tad W. Patzek, a geoscientist at Berkeley, begs to differ. He claims that accounting for "the myriad energy inputs required by industrial agriculture, from the amount of fuel used to produce fertilizers and corn seeds to the transportation and wastewater disposal costs," ethanol consumes six units of energy to produce just one.

So USDA posits a marginal gain and a Berkeley scientist posits a significant loss. Either way, if petrol prices skyrocket under a peak oil model, how will we come up with the energy needed for mass-scale monocrop corn production?

Indeed, I find the idea that we can rely on industrial agriculture to fuel our 211-million-strong fleet of cars in the US fanciful, at best.

Richard Manning, in his Harper's 2004 essay The Oil We Eat, has this to say:

Ever since we ran out of arable land, food is oil. Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten. In 1940 the average farm in the United States produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil energy it used. By 1974 (the last year in which anyone looked closely at this issue), that ratio was 1:1. And this understates the problem, because at the same time that there is more oil in our food there is less oil in our oil. A couple of generations ago we spent a lot less energy drilling, pumping, and distributing than we do now. In the 1940s we got about 100 barrels of oil back for every barrel of oil we spent getting it. Today each barrel invested in the process returns only ten, a calculation that no doubt fails to include the fuel burned by the Hummers and Blackhawks we use to maintain access to the oil in Iraq.

In short, an agricultural system that depends so heavily on fossil fuel represents a dubious option for replacing fossil fuel.

If Bitter Greens Journal ruled the world, the government would stop subsidizing industrial agriculture and ethanol production and start building a real train system. Keeping 211 million vehicles on the road, nearly one for every man, woman, and child in the US, may simply not be sustainable.

Amtrak's annual budget is about $1 billion a year. Corn farmers get at least that much in subsidies in a typical year, and the highways suck up many more times that.