torquill | Down with HFCS

Even though the whole corn-based ethanol craze has people coming up with pie-in-the-sky predictions and groundless optimism, before it all comes crashing down (and it will), it has at least done a couple of good things:

It's brought the selling price of corn up from its stagnant level of four decades, where it didn't even budge for inflation -- that's good for farmers, and

The spike in price -- it's doubled in the last five years -- has made corn syrup immensely less attractive to food manufacturers. Add that to the organic movement, where cane is not only easier to grow organically but not potentially tainted with GMOs, and we're starting to shake loose the ubiquitous presence of high fructose corn syrup.

On a personal note, I've found that corn syrup has increasingly had a "thickening" effect in my throat, to the point that I end up feeling thirstier after I've drunk a soda with HFCS, and I cough more. As a result, I've started avoiding soda (not easy when you can't drink the water most places). I brew my own, but only when I have time and energy. So I've begun looking for cane-sugar soda... and found that, in addition to good old Hansen's, Whole Foods' own brand uses cane sugar, and (what do you know) so does Jones, which I had never looked twice at before. Safeway hasn't started making standard soda with cane sugar yet, but their organic line of sparkling lemonade/fruit juices is cane-sugar sweetened, and their cranberry juice cocktail is too. I hope that other companies will start joining in as the price of corn continues to rise -- most of my friends prefer cane sugar in their soda anyway, if they don't do diet, so it may sell fairly well.

If nothing else, other processed foods may start quietly getting more beet and cane sugar. One downside is the rising cost of wheat as more farmers grow corn, but that will stabilize soon enough.

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that (admittedly pleasant) effect may not last. after all, one of the strong other biofuel alternatives is sugar-cane-based ethanol.

That's only being seriously pursued in Brazil, where they have a *lot* of cane production already set up, and a beautiful climate for growing it. The U.S. can't grow cane except in the deep south and Hawaii. Meanwhile, most of the continental U.S. is perfect for growing corn.

I think we're less likely to want to import sugar for biofuel than for food (and the Caribbean isn't anywhere close to using their own sugar for ethanol, which prevents the market from tightening). So long as our climate is better suited to corn -- and the politicians in corn states keep a lock on the subsidies -- I suspect we'll stick with that and switchgrass. By the time we warm up enough that cane production might spread into the heartland, the ethanol fad will be over.

Cellulosic ethanol.

Can be made from anything organic. Anything. Food scraps. Grass clippings. Toenail clippings.

Bamboo.

Kudzu.

Algae.

Maybe ethanol can work. Can we at least look at the options?

If you can make the numbers work, more power to you. The (real) experts can't.

Corn is used as a standard because starch is a great source of ethanol, with a wonderful conversion rate. It won't work because of the sheer volume of corn needed to replace even a portion of our fuel use: converting 30% of our gasoline use to ethanol would require using the entire landmass of the continental U.S. to grow corn. Not to mention the (petroleum-based) fertilizer necessary to grow it.

Cellulose also makes ethanol... but it has a horrible conversion rate (I think I've heard 20% as an optimistic yield, but I don't feel like getting out of bed to dig out my textbook). The very optimistic numbers people have been dreaming up, which have not yet been met by technology (and may never be) suggest that replacing 30% of our gas use would only take the land area of California plus Texas planted in switchgrass.

I used to be a proponent of biomass ethanol -- use the "waste" products for it. Rice straw was a great one for California, with all our rice, and it just goes to waste... except it doesn't. That straw gets returned to the soil; if it doesn't, the soil fertility tanks after a few years, and topsoil starts getting really scarce.

If you use food scraps, grass clippings, kudzu... you still run into 1) we need far too much of it to make a dent in our oil consumption, and 2) you're stripping nutrients from the soil and not giving anything back. You have to feed these plants somehow, which means (surprise!) more natural gas and other energy consumption to make nitrogen fertilizers. We're not totally on sustainable energy sources yet.

It looks great on paper. Then the sheer scale of it makes you realize oh, crap. It would make an okay supplement, but not even close to a replacement for oil.

This class has made me pretty pessimistic about the future (climate change, ethanol, the future of farmland, etc.) At least we still have thermal depolymerization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization) to look forward to.

You'll have to excuse my ignorance; the last I'd heard, nobody had given this a serious look.

Sadly -- going by what the popular movement seems to be -- very few of even the important people have bothered to, and they're not listening to the experts who have. This is why I label it "craze" and "fad". :/

everything I have read says that corn-based ethanol can't be made to work as a net environmental or energy-win. switchgrass is far better in terms of efficiency and smaller impact on the biome. also, corn in the heartland = deadzone in the gulf of mexico, too, as the fertilizer run off causes such a severe algae bloom where the Mississippi lets out that there's no oxygen in the water for hundreds of square miles.

if you are interested in sources let me know and I will pull some up. Science News has had a bunch of articles on this recently though.

I think my ESO's high school friend is currently working for a company looking at turning farm waste into ethanol (e.g. corn stalks). I don't know how well their project is faring.

Edited 2008-03-03 06:46 (UTC)

At least we still have thermal depolymerization to look forward to.

The issue there being the power drain. But any issue can be solved with the application of enough power. Build more nuke plants, dammit!

From what I've seen I didn't think power usage was the main problem with thermal depolymerization. There's been a pilot plant Missouri for a few years now. They use like 20% of the fuel they produce to power then process. The main problems so far have been economics (they were betting on turkey guts being banned from being used in animal feed, but that hasn't happened in the US, so they still have to pay for their feedstock), and odor complaints. The odor complaints seem a bit dubious though, they were getting complaints on days that they weren't running, plus they're right next to several major agricultural plants.

I've been rather enthusiastic about thermal depolymerization since I first found out about it a few years back. I particularly like the idea of using it for sewage treatment (one of the byproducts is sterilized water). Sewage doesn't produce as much fuel as turkey guts, but it's free and you're getting energy from treating the sewage that you'd already have to treat. Two birds, one stone.

I agree about the nuke plants though. But fusion is much better. And it's about twenty years away (and always will be).

That's ok, we just need to give up on ethanol and switch to powering all our cars with hydrazine!

Yeah, that sounds like fun... :)

One problem with beet sugar is that bioengineered sugar beets have just been released to the commercial markets.

I read somewhere that ethanol from mixed wild prarie grasses had a much higher yield than any cultivated crops, but I can't remember details (and it's still pretty well a moot point, as you were saying).

Of course the corn ethanol craze will eventually collapse, as all artificially-inflated things do sooner or later. When that happens, the price of corn will plummet, probably to lower levels than it was at before all of this started up, so we may get a sugar respite for a little while, but sooner or later we'll probably be right back where we were with corn syrup in everything because it's so much cheaper...

Down with HFCS

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