MATT REYNOLDS SCIENCE APR 13, 2022 7:00 AM

Biofuels Are Getting a Second Look—and

Some Tough Questions
Bioethanol has been touted as a green way to cut reliance on Russian oil.
But new modeling suggests it isn’t the climate solution we’d hoped for.

PHOTOGRAPH: DANIEL ACKER/BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES

SAVE
THE BORDERS OF the Corn Belt have always been fuzzy. The sprawling
patchwork of cornfields that spreads across the Midwestern United States is one
of the most productive agricultural regions on Earth. Over 36 percent of the
world’s corn comes from the US, and almost all of that is grown in the handful of
states nestled between the Great Plains to the west and the Appalachian
Mountains to the east.

But the Corn Belt is on the move. Over the past couple of decades, farmland
devoted to corn production has been creeping northwards and westwards. In
North and South Dakota, grasslands that were formerly used for cattle grazing or
set aside for conservation have been converted to cornfields. Between 2005 and
2021, the area of land harvested for corn in the US increased by around 14
percent.

One of the big drivers of this shift has been bioethanol—transportation fuel
usually made from fermented corn. Since 2005 the US government’s Renewable
Fuel Standard (RFS) has mandated that gasoline producers blend corn ethanol
into their fuel. The amount the RFS requires to be mixed in has ratcheted up each
year from the policy’s start, and since 2016 gasoline producers have been
instructed to blend 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol annually into transportation
fuel. The RFS was supposed to reduce reliance on fuel imports and lessen the
environmental impact of the transportation sector, but when it was introduced
some scientists warned that it might end up increasing overall emissions. Now it
looks like those predictions have come to pass.

In February 2022, Tyler Lark, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison,

published a study analyzing the impact of the RFS. Lark and his colleagues
researched the impact that the policy had on crop prices and farm expansion
between 2008 and 2016, comparing the real-world situation to a counterfactual
one where biofuel production was kept at levels mandated in an earlier version of
the RFS.

Lark’s study found that the RFS significantly pushed up the price of corn. This
incentivized the expansion of total US cropland by 2.1 million hectares between
2008 and 2016—an increase of 2.4 percent. Often the areas newly converted to
cropland were grasslands on the western edge of the Corn Belt. “Over millennia
these grasslands have created really carbon-rich soils. And what happens is when
you plow that up you expose a lot of it and make it vulnerable to being released
into the atmosphere,” says Lark.

The supposed benefit of biofuel is that, although it still releases carbon dioxide
when it burns, that carbon was drawn down from the atmosphere by the plants
that make up the fuel rather than being released from oil that was once
underground. But growing fuel creates emissions too. The biggest problem is
when land that used to be a carbon sink is plowed up to plant crops, but
manufacturing fertilizer is also a major source of emissions, and applying that
fertilizer to land also releases greenhouse gasses in the form of nitrous oxide
emissions.
In 2010 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which sets the amount of
corn ethanol required by the RFS, estimated that by 2022 corn ethanol would
have total life-cycle emissions 20 percent lower than gasoline. But these
projections didn’t account for the dramatic effect the RFS would have on land use
in the US. “I don’t think people expected as much land to come back into
production,” says Lark. His study found that the RFS increased corn prices by 30
percent and the price of other crops by 20 percent. In response, farmers who
previously used their land for cattle grazing or who were involved in conservation
schemes started growing crops instead. All this land-use change has essentially
outweighed the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that come from growing
fuel instead of pumping it out of oil wells.

Lark’s study comes at a decisive time for the future of corn ethanol. Later this year
the EPA will decide how much biofuel should be blended into US transportation
fuel from 2023 onwards. And on April 12 the White House temporarily waived the
summertime ban on E15—fuel made from gasoline blended with between 10.5
and 15 percent ethanol. In the US, E15 is banned over the summer months
because of the way it reacts with sunlight to create smog, but lobbyists and some
lawmakers have argued that removing the ban will ease the country’s reliance on
Russian oil and keep down gasoline prices. Earlier this month, Congress voted to
ban imports of oil, gas, and coal from Russia.

Increasing corn ethanol production would be a big mistake, says Jason Hill, a
biofuels expert at the University of Minnesota. “The science has long pointed out
that this is not where we want to go,” he says. “In the long run corn, ethanol has
done almost nothing for our energy independence, and it has a large,
disproportionately negative impact on the environment and food security.”
The projected impact of corn ethanol differs depending on how you estimate
those emissions. In early April a group of US senators representing Corn Belt
states wrote a letter to the EPA urging it to adopt a model that shows biofuels
have a considerably better environmental impact than Lark’s study suggests. But
in March, Hill published an op-ed in the scientific journal PNAS calling for greater
scrutiny of the models used by regulators like the EPA to assess biofuels. Lark’s
study “supports other recent concerns that these commonly used models
underestimate the emissions consequences of land-use change, which in turn
leads to their overestimating the climate change benefits of corn ethanol,” Hill
wrote.

“Models are always incomplete. They are usually lacking important data that
ideally they would have, but which doesn’t exist or doesn’t exist as broadly across
the world as you’d like,” says Richard Plevin, a former academic who specializes
in biofuel modeling and now works as a consultant. In 2006 he was part of a
team at UC Berkeley that published a study concluding that corn-based ethanol
could have lower environmental impacts than gasoline.
Since then Plevin’s position has changed completely. “My conclusion at the end of
all this is it’s misguided,” he says. The problem, Plevin argues, is that it’s
impossible to accurately estimate the overall emissions that result from using
biofuels. The effects of biofuel mandates can ripple out in unpredictable ways. If
biofuel displaces gasoline in one country, then this could suppress the price of
gasoline elsewhere in the world and lead to people increasing their fuel use. Add
in a war, or trade embargoes, and the whole dynamic can flip again. “You can
assume 10 different scenarios about the way things are going to unfold and you’ll
get 10 different answers, and they might all be equivalently realistic. How do you
build a policy around that?”

For Plevin this leaves us with an obvious choice: reducing our dependence on
liquid fuels altogether. “If I were king for a day, I would be putting all my effort
into electrification right now,” he says. Hill agrees. “It’s no longer corn ethanol
versus gasoline. They have the same interest, and they’re both feeling pressure
from electrification, which is their common enemy,” he says.

There are other impacts of bioethanol too. Global food prices jumped by a record
13 percent last month. Diverting some US corn away from bioethanol and toward
food would help keep prices lower and replace lost exports from Ukraine and
Russia. “There is all this competition for the land,” says Annie Levasseur, a
professor at L’École de Technologie Supérieure, an engineering faculty based in
Montreal. “If we want to look at the impact of increasing biofuel, then we will
need cropland, and there will be this displacement.”

Levasseur and Hill are both part of a committee put together by the National
Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) to assess current
methods for analyzing the impact of low-carbon transportation fuels. The
committee’s report, which will be published in the third quarter of 2022,
“contains information that the EPA may wish to take into consideration if it
decides to develop a new RFS or a low-carbon fuel standard,” says Camilla
Yandoc Ables, a senior program officer at NASEM.

In Lavasseur’s opinion, bioethanol production is already high and shouldn’t be

increased. Instead, the US government should be looking at other ways to reduce
transportation emissions. “We cannot keep increasing demand for energy and
then transform everything to biofuel,” she says. “We really need to decrease the
demand.”

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Matt Reynolds is a senior writer at WIRED, where he covers climate, food, and biodiversity.
Before that he was a technology journalist at New Scientist magazine. His first book, The Future
of Food: How to Feed the Planet Without Destroying It, was published in 2021. Reynolds is a
graduate of... Read more

SENIOR WRITER

TOPICS BIOFUELS CLIMATE CHANGE ENVIRONMENT ENERGY RUSSIA CLIMATE

CARBON EMISSIONS CARBON CARBON DIOXIDE

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