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AlterNet / By Stan Cox

-

The Folly of Turning Water into Fuel

Agribusiness and politicians are sucking our country dry with
mandates for biofuels.

March 22, 2008  |

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With corn selling at record-high prices,
Steve Albracht expects to have no trouble paying his electric bills this year.
Albracht irrigates 1,000 acres of corn near the town of Hart in the Texas
Panhandle and expects to shell out $180 to $240 per acre to run his pumps
through the spring and summer. "In this area," says Albracht, "the water table
has dropped, but nobody's cutting back on watering yet. There's still plenty
down there."

Albracht won the 2005 National Corn Yield
Contest in the "irrigated" category, producing a whopping 352 bushels per acre.
In a region that gets an average of less than 18 inches of rain annually,
Albracht and his neighbors apply anywhere from 28 inches to more than 3 feet of
water to their corn each year. With the prospect of a highly profitable harvest,
Albracht says he can afford to water generously this year. And he'll need to, he
says, "because it's been a dry winter."

For once, times are good in the High Plains.
Corn and other grains are selling like precious metals, and there is every
reason to believe that prices will stay high. At the heart of the boom is the
U.S. government's decision to rely on corn-based ethanol to meet a big part of
the nation's demand for "renewable" fuels.

Most recent controversy over ethanol has
focused on the its poor energy return; in growing corn and turning it into
ethanol, you have to burn three calories to get four. With prices of fuel and
other inputs rising fast, corn farmers won't be getting rich (except for those
who happen to have oil wells on their property.) But selling their corn for such
high prices, they can afford to sow more acres and burn more propane, diesel or
electricity to pump more water than ever. A torrent of cash will be flowing
through the nation's corn-growing regions, but the biggest price will be paid in
water.

Thirst for corn

To hear agribusiness boosters and politicians
tell it, corn-based ethanol is a miraculous solution to the nation's hunger for
liquid fuels. But as miracles go, it's not all that impressive. When Jesus,
according to Biblical reports, converted approximately 150 gallons of water into
an equivalent quantity of wine, his conversion rate was about a cup of ethanol
per gallon of water invested (given the typical alcohol content of wine).
Compare that to current processes that use irrigated corn as their carbon source
and get less than a teaspoon of ethanol for each gallon of water consumed.

In dry areas of the High Plains where
irrigation is the most crucial to corn production and the ethanol-to-water ratio
even lower, agriculture is dependent on a one-time drawing of groundwater that
hasn't seen daylight for 11,000 years or more. The vast Ogallala aquifer,
stretching from not far south of Steve Albracht's Texas farm all the way up into
South Dakota, is being mined at a rate that, in some areas, will drain it
sometime in the relatively near future -- at least before the oil wells of the
Persian Gulf run dry.

The Ogallala was trapped underneath the High
Plains around the time of the last ice age. The formation holds enough ancient
water to fill Lake Huron, the second-greatest of the Great Lakes -- or at least
it did before being exploited for agriculture. In the High Plains, raising a
single bushel of irrigated corn slurps up 2,000 to 3,000 gallons of water, and
more corn than ever is being raised there.

With national corn acreage having shot up 15
percent just from 2006 to 2007, pressure on water resources is increasing. The
U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that the
land area sown to corn will remain at historically high levels of 90 million
acres or more through at least 2017. The incentive: the price, which has
rocketed up from around $2.00 to more than $5.00 per bushel. And USDA
forecasters now see high corn prices as near-permanent.

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