The new edition of The Forbidden Fuel is now in print, published by the University of Nebraska Press. The book is also available through Amazon and other booksellers.
The Forbidden Fuel is the definitive history of alcohol fuel, describing in colorful detail the emergence of alcohol fuel in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the political and economic forces behind its popularity, opposition, and eventual growth.
In 1982, when The Forbidden Fuel was first published, approximately 350 million gallons of ethanol were produced in the United States for transport fuel. In 2008 that number had grown to 9 billion gallons—an approximate average annual growth rate of 98.9 percent.
Similar dramatic growth has occurred all over the world, especially in Brazil.
Remember all the cute news items two years ago about how the price of movie popcorn just went up $2 thanks to ethanol, or how your grocery cart (or your wallet) just got lighter, thanks to ethanol?
(Parts of this essay were published in Yale 360 on March 15, 2010. Reprints encouraged on request). By Bill Kovarik and Scott Sklar
At a time when the need for public understanding of environmental science and energy technology issues has never been greater, the debate over biofuels illustrates a serious problem.
Because the issues are extraordinarily complex, participants in the debate often resort to misleading oversimplifications even when their concerns are quite legitimate.
For instance, Prof. Runge argues that biofuels require massive federal subsidies. A less polemical and more helpful approach would include a comparison of all subsidies received by energy industries. The Environmental Law Institute reported in Sept. 2009 that ethanol received some $16.8 billion in subsidies over the 2002-2008 period, while the oil industry received $72 billion over the same period. Not surprisingly, the gap between federal subsidies for traditional energy industries (coal, oil and nuclear) and federal subsidies for renewable energy industries (biofuel, wind and solar) increases with historic perspective. (1)
The point is also made that biofuels drive up food costs, contributing to Keep reading →
The grain ethanol industry has always been controversial.
These days, critics point out that the corn ethanol industry is not going to help avert climate disaster since, at best, it has a slightly positive net energy balance (or carbon footprint).
Fair enough. But the corn ethanol industry was not originially created as a way to shift to low-carbon fuels.
The net energy balance issue was almost as controversial in the 1980s as it is today and not terribly meaningful when we try to understand why we have a large modern grain ethanol industry. And the argument fails when we consider second generation cellulosic ethanol or the possibilities for third generation biofuels.
Why ethanol?
The ethanol industry was, first, an outgrowth of the lamp fuel industry that produced kerosene. It was taxed out of existence in the US during the 1860s, but returned with the backing of Henry Ford and Teddy Roosevelt in 1906.
When geologists said oil was running out just after World War I, ethanol was seen as one important answer. When engines needed better fuels in the 1920s, ethanol was seen as superior to tetra-ethyl-lead (“leaded gasoline”) octante boosters. When farmers needed new markets in the 1930s, ethanol was billed as a way to avoid farm relief. And when the Arabs cut off oil supplies to the US in the 1970s, an ethanol industry was built to provide emergency fuel supplies.
Its easy to be smug about opposing ethanol. Critics say:
• If ethanol was so great, it wouldn’t need a subsidy.
• It robs food from the poor to give fuel to the rich
• It takes more energy to make ethanol than it produces
• Ethanol causes more air pollution than gasoline.
• Even if all America’s corn were turned into ethanol, it would only come to 12 percent of the country’s fuel.
There are grains of truth in each of these statements, but this is a complex argument, and each of these statements contains omissions, distortions and inaccuracies. So lets take them in turn …
BOARDMAN, Ore. — The poplar trees here grow 10 feet a year, transforming an irrigated stretch of desert near the Columbia River into a neatly pruned forest. For now, the trees provide lumber for cabinets and pulp for paper.
But in the years ahead, energy entrepreneurs hope the pulp from poplar can be turned into ethanol, helping resuscitate the Northwest’s floundering biofuels industry.
This illustration– from the Congress des Applications de L’Alcool Denature, Dec. 16 – 23, 1902 (published by the Automobile Club de France) — popped off the cover of a book I happened to pick up at the National Agricultural Library archives in Beltsville, MD while I was a grad student in the 1980s. At the time I was reading Leo Marx’s “Machine in the Garden,” and I was instantly struck by the beauty of the visual correspondence to that metaphor.
Recently, students at the University of Nebraska who are interested in the history of biofuels asked me about this image, as they are apparently using it in a publication.
It seems to that this “muse of biofuels” is probably an adaptation of the image of Polyhymnia, the muse of agriculture and lyric poetry, one of the nine muses of Greek mythology.
Of course, the hair style and the cog-wheel brooch are modern for the year 1902, but the flowing robe and the diadem in her hair would be typical of depictions of a Greek muse through the ages. Keep reading →
By Bill Kovarik For SEJournal, Society of Environmental Journalists, Summer 2009
The US and Canadian biofuels industry is struggling to pull through an historic shift to second generation production feedstocks and production technologies.
There is pressure coming, in part, from low carbon fuel standards passed by the California Air Resources Board in April 2009, and also from the need for some return on federal development funding injected into the industry since 2007.
At least eight major cellulosic biofuels plants are in production or under construction in the US and Canada.
So, it’s now or never for cellulosic biofuels — the “fuel of the future” for almost a century, and long seen as the only source of renewable fuel that could replace petroleum.
“We think, ultimately, cellulosic materials are the only materials where you can produce enough under environmentally sustainable conditions,” said Chris Somerville, director of the Energy Biosciences Institute at the University of California at Berkeley at the 2008 Society of Environmental Journalists conference.
Somerville is restating an opinion expressed by Henry Ford, Isaac Asimov, and even, 90 years ago, by the scientist who founded the Cellulose Chemistry division of the American Chemical Society – Harold Hibbert, who said: Keep reading →
The new edition of The Forbidden Fuel is now in print, published by the University of Nebraska Press. The book is also available through Amazon and other booksellers.
