Fuel politics and the fate of the Ogallala Aquifer

The Ogallala Aquifer is one of nature’s wonders, a vast [174,00 square miles] underground reservoir stretching from South Dakota on the north down to the farmlands of the West Texas panhandle on the south.

Without the wells that tap its ancient depths, much of the Great Plains’ agriculture bounty would cease to exist, and cities dependent on its water would turn into ghost towns.

Small wonder, then, that the announcement of plans to extend the Keystone XL oil pipeline over the aquifer to transport tar sands oil south from Canada generated considerable anxiety and galvanized political opposition that forced to Obama administration to call for a new Environmental Impact Report assessing the project’s potential harm to America’s grain belt.

While the pipeline’s fate remains an open question, there’s another fuel source that poses equal if not greater threats to the aquifer, and that’s ethanol, derived in this country from corn.

Two recent articles look at ethanol’s impacts on the aquifer.

Ethanol, a water-thirsty fuel

First up, this excerpt from an excellent overview by Julene Bair of Grist:

Corn is one of the most water-intensive crops grown in the region, demanding over a foot of irrigation water in the western Kansas climate, and closer to 20 inches in hotter parts of Texas. Yet the federal government mandates ethanol production. Responding to the resulting increase in corn prices, farmers have expanded their corn acreage by 16 percent.

Corn is also a “heavy feeder,” meaning it demands more fertilizers than most other crops. Genetically modified “Roundup Ready” corn predominates. As weeds have developed resistance to the herbicide glyphosate, or Roundup, use of other chemicals has intensified. Those nitrogen fertilizers and pesticides leach downward in the soil, eventually poisoning wells. They also run off into rivers, corrupting city water supplies and ultimately adding to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Tax credits and tariff protection for ethanol will expire in early 2012, and there is increasing support for ending, or at least trimming, the mandate.

But the federal government also encourages corn planting through subsidies to farmers. Growers receive direct payments, help with crop insurance, and price guarantees on their crops. A new, less obvious approach has been proposed for the 2012 Farm Bill that would guarantee farmers’ income by expanding federally underwritten crop insurance. While direct payments have come under fire from both the left and the right, this new approach ultimately changes very little.

The Environmental Working Group and many other sustainable farming organizations are insisting that aid for farmers should be tied to conservation measures. I support this, but it’s not enough. The 2012 Farm Bill must also take North America’s largest aquifer into consideration. The bill can help end the current unsustainable mining of the Ogallala by excluding those who raise water-intensive crops like irrigated corn, cotton, and sugar beets from receiving direct payments or help with crop insurance, whether in its old or enhanced form.

Read the rest.

Challenging ethanol’s supposed efficient

Now consider this from Kay McDonald of big picture agriculture:

Thanks to the Ogallala aquifer, Nebraska is now the number two ethanol producing state, second only to Iowa. Were it not for the aquifer (and irrigation from the North and South Platte Rivers), only the eastern part of the state would be able to grow naturally rainfall fed corn.

Aquifer water is next-to-free for farmers wishing to irrigate. Once they pay for their pivot systems, they need to pay for electricity to pump the water, the deeper the more expensive their pumping costs, which does affect their profit margin. Lucky for these Nebraska farmers, electricity is relatively cheap in Nebraska due to large coal burning power plants and two nuclear facilities (remember – the ones that flooded last spring), making Nebraska an electricity exporter, and attracting power-thirsty businesses such as Google to the banks of the Missouri River.

Logic? Not so much.

Engineers speak of the EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) of corn ethanol. It is already low enough (.8-1.3) that it doesn’t make up for the environmental damage which it causes, but once you throw irrigated corn into the calculation, there is virtually NO energy returned and quite likely there is net energy lost. This means that the electricity made from coal, natural gas, or diesel which is used to irrigate the corn would best be used directly to power vehicles and we’d save the aquifer and the land degradation involved, too.

Finally, when you consider that we are exporting approximately 7% of the ethanol we’ve made here in the U.S. this year, it becomes even more absurd to use aquifer fed corn to make ethanol.

Read the rest.

And back to the tar sands

At 54,000 square miles, the Athabascan tar sands of Alberta, Canada, represent one of the world’s largest oil reserves.

Because the oil is in the form of bitumen and trapped in sand, extraction is a messy, environmentally destructive process, also resulting in extensive waste and consuming vast amounts of water to produce.

BP is a major tar sands player, and one focus of the Energy Biosciences Institute at UC Berkeley, bankrolled by half a billion BP bucks, is the creation of genetically modified microbes designed to transform bitumen into more easily processed fuel stock.

So BP would be a major beneficiary of the pipeline, and the administration is under pressure from congressional Republicans to speed up approval of the project.

And then there’s the major focus of BP’s Berkeley project, developing microbes to turn plants in fuel, another project that will no doubt be making its own demands on the ancient aquifer.

As a journalist, we always looked for local angles on major national stories. Here in Berkeley, it seems, everything has a local angle.