Biden Administration & The Energy Industry
The United States is a powerhouse in the cultivation of corn. When driving across the upper mid-west you will be met by vast cornfields stretching to the horizon in either direction. This industry was the bedrock of the American diet corn flour, corn bread, cornmeal all staples of traditional American food but in the last decade this industry has been slowly pivoting to an entirely different industry i.e. The Energy Industry. Today nearly half of all corn production goes to the production of ethanol a bio-fuel that is being mixed with gasoline with the goal of reducing the carbon footprint of your daily commute, for the average American 10% of their gasoline is now composed of ethanol and corn farmers across the USA are making more than ever. Thanks to the government mandated ingredient of gasoline, pushing the value of their crop higher with electronic vehicles on the rise and the pandemic's effects on fuel consumption hitting the hydrocarbon fuel industry hired ethanol lobby groups are now pushing the Biden administration to make an even larger percentage of our fuel to be made with this ethanol but this begs an important question why?
The Truth About Bio-Fuels
There is nothing inherently wrong with burning fuel as long as we have a method of absorbing its products, but we've become like the yeast trapped in a brewer's fat, eating the fuel it was provided and releasing toxic byproducts until at some point the alcohol it produces reaches a concentration. It can no longer survive. A closed system with no corrections to keep the balance is unsustainable. Bio-fuels seek to address this imbalance, fuels that we create using organic material from plants and animals which unlike fossil fuels can be restored over a short period of time and then when we restart the cycle re-growing the organic material the carbon we release into the atmosphere when burning them, is theoretically absorbed once again restoring our balance with nature, theoretically is the key word.
In 2019 the United States received about five percent of its total energy from biomass, 45% of that was generated from synthesized bio-fuels, primarily ethanol, the primary method of producing ethanol is with our little doomed friends from earlier, yeast when deprived of oxygen yeast and bacteria use an anaerobic form of respiration where instead of converting sugars to energy and carbon dioxide they convert it to energy and ethanol. The United States is the largest producer of bio-ethanol. Thanks to its abundant supply of corn and the quantity is rising, the production process isn't terribly complicated the corn is simply ground into a flour and used as a feedstock for our microbial friends to turn into ethanol, what we need to worry about is all the extra steps needed before and after this. First let's do a simple calculation of how much farmland we would need to grow enough corn? This decides the map of croplands in the United States - the bread basket or corn basket of The United States is the upper mid-west, which is why the brunt of the infrastructure for ethanol production is located there. It is to avoid transportation costs of shipping corn which has a lot of unusable non-sugar waste.
This area is super interesting the green area totals about 166 million hectares 22 percent of that land area about 37 million hectares goes to corn and 40% of that corn goes to make bio-ethanol. So 8.8 percent of this area is going to make ethanol to provide just 10 percent of the fuel that fills American fuel tanks. The ethanol industry wants that figure to rise to 15% and ultimately is targeting 20%, extrapolating that 8.8% farmland figure we will find that it would take around 17.6% of the current total farmland in the United States to achieve 20% at the current gasoline usage. Nearly one-fifth of all of the United States farmland devoted to making something we can't eat seems extreme and we can already see the effects a fraction of that number is having at the turn of the millennium, over 90 percent of the United States substantial corn production went to feeding people and animals. Only five percent was used to produce ethanol then the average price of a bushel of corn was two dollars.
Today the price of corn has raised with the extra demand from the bio-fuel industry the price of a bushel. One bushel is about 35 liters. Today price of one bushel fluctuates between about four and seven dollars. That's great for farmers but the end result is that it encourages more natural habitats to be converted to farmland. Over the past decade croplands in the United States have expanded at a rate of over 1 million acres per year much of it over important natural habitats. Corn was the main crop planted on these freshly destroyed natural habitats, despite this expansion in corn growth food prices have risen not only for corn based products but for products that rely on corn as feedstock for animals, eggs, milk and meat have all increased in price costing Americans millions without them even realizing. But the price to the average USA citizen is much higher than higher grocery bills.
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