An op-ed in an Iowa newspaper from Democratic White House front-runner Hillary Clinton has laid bare the new politics of a biofuel blending mandate that has corn growers on edge.
While the ex-secretary of state and senator offered a full-throated endorsement of the Renewable Fuel Standard, never once did she write the words “corn” or “ethanol” in the piece that ran Thursday.
In the Hawkeye State, saying you support corn ethanol is tantamount to saying you’re against getting kicked in the genitals. The state produces more corn ethanol than any other, accounting for 25 percent of the United States total. Even Republican Gov. Terry Branstad is behind a multimillion-dollar effort to get White House hopefuls to endorse the fuel standard at the Iowa caucuses, underscoring the industry’s importance to the state.
But corn ethanol has come under increasing pressure from a key part of the liberal base — environmental groups.
“I think the bloom is off the rose of corn ethanol,” said Craig Cox, senior vice president for agriculture and natural resources with the Environmental Working Group. “There’s growing awareness of really the failure of corn ethanol to live up to the promises that were made about the fuel — that it’s better for air quality, that it’s creating energy independence, improving greenhouse gas emissions. All of those have been proven to be false.”
The biofuel industry is feeling pressure as lawmakers on both sides of the aisle eye changes to the Renewable Fuel Standard. Congress passed the fuel mandate in 2005 and expanded it two years later to include “next generation” fuels made from non-edible sources. It calls for blending biofuels into conventional gasoline with targets that accelerate each year, ending with a desired 36 billion gallons in the fuel supply in 2022.
The next-generation fuels haven’t reached scale quickly enough and gasoline demand has fallen as U.S. domestic oil production has increased. As such, the Environmental Protection Agency scaled back the amount of corn ethanol and cellulosic biofuel — those made from cornstalks, for example — that’s to be blended into gasoline this year, next year, and retroactively for 2014.
Clinton said that the Renewable Fuel Standard should stick around, but that “we also can’t ignore significant changes to the energy landscape” since its expansion in 2007 and that the program must get “back on track.” Those references are vague, but a common criticism from the oil industry — that the EPA implicitly acknowledged in adjusting the blending volumes — is that there simply isn’t enough demand for gasoline to shove increasing amounts of corn ethanol into the fuel supply.
The EPA decision Friday hit the corn ethanol industry by reducing the amount of corn ethanol producers could sell to refiners next year by 1 billion gallons, down to 14 billion gallons.
But green organizations said the EPA didn’t go far enough.
Environmental groups say the corn portion of the Renewable Fuel Standard encourages changes in land use that add greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere, which most scientists say drives climate change. The Environmental Working Group, using EPA statistics, said Friday that the 14 billion gallons of biofuels used last year yielded 27 million more tons of carbon emissions than if Americans had driven on pure gasoline.
Clinton, meanwhile, is trying to win support of Iowans and also convince the progressive wing of the Democratic Party that she’s serious about addressing climate change.
Progressives don’t much care for corn ethanol, though it and environmental groups support the next-generation biofuels the Renewable Fuel Standard is designed to support. Bill McKibben, a prominent climate change activist most known for his opposition to the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline, said in November 2013 that, “Ethanol was always a way to help the corn industry, not the environment.”
Ben Schreiber, a spokesman with Friends of the Earth Action, said Clinton was “trying to have it both ways” by not mentioning corn ethanol but touting E15 and E85 — fuel blends composed of 15 percent and 85 percent ethanol, respectively, compared with the standard 10-percent blend.
“We did see this as pandering to the corn lobby,” Schreiber told the Washington Examiner. “She’s putting in buzz words like E15 and E85, which clearly means corn ethanol to those who are knowledgeable about it. But it allows her to not have smoking gun at the same time.”
Ethanol groups contend environmental groups can’t have it both ways, either. They have argued that any reduction or change to the corn element of the mandate would send a shock to investors in next-generation fuels, further stalling their development.
The corn ethanol industry also disputes claims that its product is worse for the environment, and global emissions, than conventional crude. Michael Frohlich, a spokesman with corn ethanol trade group Growth Energy, noted opponents’ claims regarding greenhouse gas emissions depend heavily on land-use change models that cannot accurately attribute deforestation and other activity to corn ethanol.
“They can continue to say what they believe, but if they want to ignore facts and data then ultimately their arguments are going to continue to fall flat,” Frohlich said.
Kalee Kreider, a former adviser to then-Vice President Al Gore — a corn ethanol opponent, for climate concerns — said the Iowa caucuses have increasingly politicized corn ethanol. But the unrealized expectations regarding next-generation biofuels and new research on land use change, which is still evolving, have added to the fire.
“Add to that stew [of the Iowa caucus] the fact that it was the first biofuel to come online, the next generation fuels have not come online as fast as was hoped, the ‘food vs. fuel’ debate, and the changing science re: corn ethanol production and its [carbon dioxide] footprint and you have all the elements for controversy,” Kreider wrote in an email.
Still, the biofuel industry didn’t see appeasement to anti-corn ethanol environmental groups or other corn ethanol opponents in the absence of the term in Clinton’s op-ed.
Along with the nods to E15 and E85, Clinton also promoted rural energy programs at the Agriculture Department. Getting the higher-blend fuels on the market is key to expanding ethanol production, but automakers and the oil industry oppose those blends because they say it could result in engine damage.
“While she didn’t use the words ‘corn ethanol,’ she did unreservedly support the RFS, higher blends and infrastructure, plus the USDA programs. Quite the opposite of any cause for concern,” Paul Winters, a spokesman with the Biotechnology Industry Organization, wrote in an email.
Most of the accusations from environmental groups rely on contested modeling regarding land use change, Frohlich said.
Frohlich instead pointed to a 2012 Argonne National Laboratory study that concluded corn ethanol produced 34 percent fewer emissions than conventional gasoline, even while accounting for land use change and energy used to convert corn into ethanol fuel.
But Emily Cassidy, a research analyst with the Environmental Working Group, noted the EPA had criticized the model used in the Argonne study because it prevented calculating potential land use change in places such as South America. Cassidy argued that the corn ethanol mandate pushes corn prices higher, thereby incentivizing corn production elsewhere in the world that could yield deforestation to make way for cropland.
Still, in a nod to how complex digesting the economics of land use change are, Cassidy noted it’s also not fair to assume that all the forest land that wasn’t considered in the model used for the Argonne study would get converted for producing corn.
“There’s a lot of different assumptions that these models make,” Cassidy said.
