The White House rolled out a long-anticipated biofuels rule on Wednesday, issuing revised estimates for greenhouse gas emissions that – just barely – qualify corn ethanol as a potential source of relatively clean renewable energy (NYT, WSJ).
Agriculture and corn lobbies pushed hard for such an outcome, but there are provisos. EPA’s numbers assume advances in crop yields over the coming decade and deployment of the most efficient ethanol plants powered by natural gas. Combining those assumptions with a new calculation suggesting fewer indirect emissions due to rising crop prices and deforestation overseas, EPA found that corn ethanol would come in 20 percent cleaner than petrol.
As it happens, that’s the magic number for qualifying as a “renewable fuel” under the biofuels mandate enacted by Congress in 2007, and it is considerably more optimistic than other analyses by many scientists and even the state of California. I emailed Timothy Searchinger at Princeton University, whose 2008 paper in Science suggested that corn ethanol could double near-term emissions compared to gasoline due to conversion far-away forests. He was still poring over the documents but offered this quick assessment: “Let’s just say that their numbers are inconsistent with the numbers almost everybody else is generating.”
The news followed President Barack Obama’s meeting with a number of state governors, where he discussed goals on energy and global warming. A day earlier he acknowledged what many in the Senate have been saying for some time: comprehensive climate legislation could give way to a paired-down clean energy bill this year.
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In the short term, the EPA rule’s impact on corn ethanol could be fairly minor as current plants are grandfathered in and don’t have to meet the standards anyway, but it could mean more corn ethanol down the road. The law requires requires that refiners blend 36 billion gallons (136 billion litres) of biofuels into the fuel mix by 2022. Getting there could be difficult. More than half of the total percent would need to be “advanced biofuels” that cut emissions by 50 percent; requirements for cellulosic biofuels, both the most promising and technically difficult, were scaled back and will be addressed on an annual basis.
The ethanol industry is relatively pleased, but environmentalists less so. The Boston-based Clean Air Task Force says EPA seems to have “bent over backward to allow some highly problematic biofuels to meet the environmental criteria set by Congress.”
EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson defended the proposal, saying that staff scientists took new information into account, ran the numbers and produced a new result. “Based on what we know now, there is no basis for excluding these fuels,” she said. “I would not sign a rule if I didn’t believe we had met the requirements of the law.”
The administration also issued out a biofuels strategy and a proposed rule intended to help farmers deliver corn husks and other plant materials not used in food to biofuel facilities. On the coal front, Obama commissioned a task force with the goal of establishing 5 to 10 commercial scale power plants that capture and bury carbon dioxide emissions by 2016; the ultimate goal is to commercialize “carbon capture and storage” within a decade.