People of the Corn

[IXjamesXI]

Making corn-based ethanol badly hurting environment: AP - CBS News

[J P Stein]

Another federal program at odds with itself.......is this a new thing?...or just its being the reportage of CBS being news worthy.

[red-beard]

I think the fact that CBS is reporting it, is noteworthy

[RANDY P]

GOOD!

Maybe they'll back off on the RFS (Renewable Fuel Standard) now. Oxygenated gas sucks.

[IXjamesXI]

I think the knee-jerk car enthusiast opinion on ethanol, which I hear here and elsewhere, is that it has been forced upon us by environmentalists, where the reality is more subtle.

It has been marketed using the language of environmentalism and energy independence, in order to "sell" it to both parties and the public and make it the law of the land. I think part of the argument for it is that it will lead to better, more efficient renewable fuel technologies.. but is that really happening? It doesn't seem that way.

I just thought it was an interesting article.

[RWebb]

Campaign by ethanol lobby against AP includes press calls, form letters, personal attacks

Published: 6:33 a.m., Nov. 12

WASHINGTON — A new Associated Press investigation, which found that ethanol hasn't lived up to some of the government's clean-energy promises, is drawing a fierce response from the ethanol industry.

In an unusual campaign, ethanol producers, corn growers and its lobbying and public relations firms have criticized and sought to alter the story, which was released to some outlets earlier and is being published online and in newspapers Tuesday. The Agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, told the Des Moines Register that the AP project included "a number of inaccuracies and errors." Vilsack said farmers were engaged in other conservation practices, including wetland reserve programs, wildlife habitat incentive programs and EQIP, a program that helps farmers adopt conservation practices.

The industry's efforts, which began one week before the AP project was being published and broadcast, included distributing fill-in-the-blank letters to newspapers editors that call the AP's report "rife with errors." Industry officials emailed newspapers and other media, referring to AP's report as a "smear," ''hatchet job" and "more dumpster fire than journalism."

"We find it to be just flabbergasting. There is probably more truth in this week's National Enquirer than AP's story," said Geoff Cooper, vice president of research and analysis for the Renewable Fuels Association in a press call with reporters Monday criticizing the investigation.

The economic stakes for the industry are significant. Congress is working on legislation to do away with the corn-based portion of the mandate, which required oil companies to blend billions of gallons of ethanol into their gasoline. Big Oil is pumping big money into the effort. The Obama administration, a strong defender of biofuels, is soon expected to slightly ease the law's requirements. Overnight, such changes would eliminate a huge source of the demand for ethanol, reduce profits for farmers and ethanol producers and likely lower the price of corn.

The AP's investigation is based on government data, interviews and observations. It highlights what many researchers have published in peer-reviewed journals and is consistent with reports to Congress by the Environmental Protection Agency about ethanol's environment toll.

"The AP's reporting on this important topic is a result of months of work and review of documents, and interviews of experts and people on all sides of the public policy debate about this energy resource," said Mike Oreskes, AP's vice president and senior managing editor. "We stand behind our reporting and welcome further insights and discussion."

Specifically, the ethanol industry disputed AP's findings that as farmers rushed to find new places to plant corn, they wiped out millions of acres of conservation land and destroyed habitat. The industry said the primary driver for such losses was Congress lowering the number acres allowed in conservation, not ethanol. It also cited a Dutch study, which was not peer-reviewed and found that urban sprawl internationally was responsible for greater loss of grassland than biofuels.

In addition to citing the Agriculture Department's figures of more than 5 million acres of conservation land transformed under the Obama administration from grass field back into farmland, the AP analyzed U.S. government crop data collected by satellite. The AP identified tracts of land that were cornfields in 2012 and had been grassland in 2006. The AP then excluded land lost from the Conservation Reserve Program to prevent double counting. The AP vetted this methodology with an independent scientist at South Dakota State University, who has published peer-reviewed research on land conversion using the same satellite data.

The Dutch study that the industry cited, which AP did not mention, noted that in the United States "biofuel expansion is the dominant cause of agricultural land use loss."

The ethanol industry said farmers were not converting native grasslands into cropland. The AP cited USDA's own data for 2012, the first year it collected data on so-called new breakings, showing that 38,000 acres of never-before-planted grassland was farmed.

The ethanol industry also complained that AP was misleading when it said since 2010 more corn went to fuel than livestock feed. It noted that the distillation process leaves behind a residual byproduct that can be used for feed. The AP used the government's official, long-established benchmark for domestic corn use: data from USDA's Economic Research Service, which do not factor distiller's grain into its official data. The figures show that, in 2010 for the first time on record, fuel was the top use of domestic corn — a trend that continued in 2011 and 2012.

Monday's press call criticizing the AP also included Leroy Perkins, an Iowa farmer interviewed for the AP project. Perkins said he was surprised by the article's focus. He said he thought the AP was writing about the increase in farm ownership from people outside the area and about water quality impacts.

An AP spokesman, Paul Colford, said Perkins was clearly aware of the questions that AP had about the expansion of cornfields into conservation land and went out of his way to be helpful, even helping AP arrange a flight over Iowa farmland. Colford said that, like many other farmers contacted by AP, Perkins said he would prefer to keep land in the conservation program but was reconsidering, given the favorable price being offered for corn.

Growth Energy and the Renewable Fuels Association in the days leading up to the publication of the AP's ethanol report emailed newspapers and other media offering "balance" in emails with subject lines such as "Associated Press story plows under the facts about ethanol."

Those two organizations, along with the National Corn Growers Association, together spent more than $834,000 on lobbying the U.S. government from July through September, according to federal lobbying records. Those funds paid for lobbying in both Congress and the Executive Branch — including the EPA — over issues like ethanol fuel standards and tax policy.

Fuels America, a coalition of pro-biofuel groups and companies, spent $120,000 during that third-quarter period lobbying for renewable energy rules, records show. The group, which includes Monsanto, RFA and Growth Energy, also organized a tour for journalists in Iowa in August through the Glover Park Group, a leading Washington crisis-management and public relations firm. The AP traveled to Iowa independently in July.

[GH85Carrera]

I guess AP got their attention. It would be nice to see common sense used but the lobbyist don't want that.

[lane912]

Harvard Study Of Quinones Flow Battery - Business Insider


Science More: Renewable Energy Harvard Solar Wind
A Chemical Compound Found In Rhubarb Has Just Solved Renewable Energy's Biggest Problem
Rob Wile

Jan. 10, 2014, 1:41 PM 29,764 27

inShare76

rhubarb pie

purpleslog/flickr

We recently explained why insufficient energy storage is renewable energy's biggest problem: When the sun is not shining or the wind isn't blowing, it creates all kinds of disruptions to the electric grid.

Existing solutions to the problem are extremely expensive, and aren't even that efficient.

Now, Harvard researchers say they've found a cheap solution that addresses both those problems.

In a new paper published Jan. 9 in the journal Nature, they say an overlooked group of organic compounds, called quinones, can be used to create an inexpensive battery capable of charging and discharging renewable electricity much more rapidly than existing metal batteries can.

"That's really our innovation — quinones turn out to be naturally abundant and very inexpensive and very stable," co-author Michael Aziz told Business Insider by phone Friday.

The trick is that they are water soluble, which means you can set up large, inexpensive tanks to hold electricity, instead of having to engineer solid-state batteries like ones found in cars. These "flow batteries" would be capable of storing one kilowatt hour of energy using chemicals that cost $27, a third of the price of existing systems, according to a write-up of the study in Nature. The quinone molecule the team used in its mock-up is almost identical to the one found in rhubarb. Quinones can also be found in crude oil.

Here's what the setup looks like on a lab-model scale:

harvard flow battery

Harvard SEAS

"The whole world of electricity storage has been using metal ions in various charge states but there is a limited number that you can put into a solution and use to store energy, and none of them can economically store massive amounts of renewable energy," co-author Roy Gordonsaid said in a statement. "With organic molecules, we introduce a vast new set of possibilities. Some of them will be terrible and some will be really good. With these quinones we have the first ones that look really good."

Read more: Harvard Study Of Quinones Flow Battery - Business Insider