May 17, 2010
Corn Ethanol Benefits from Study Revisions
Published in All Voices
Revisions to a Purdue University economic analysis on land use changes and resulting CO2 emissions due to US corn ethanol production are friendlier than the 2009 report. Wally Tyner from Purdue is the lead author and said they have prepared a pretty heavy revamp of the original report.
Tyner says that’s “because the original work was sort of first cut, and we needed to take a more thorough, careful look with new data, new modeling approaches and model parameters.”
The research objective was to estimate land use changes associated with US corn ethanol production and to then use those estimations to calculate Greenhouse Gas Emissions from corn ethanol production. The new analysis predicts emissions related to land-use change at a third lower than previously reported. The GHG emissions number from ethanol in proportion to gasoline was cut by about 10 percent, according to Tyner.
Tyner explained the adjustments in the model and data used in doing the analysis included putting in distillers dried grains, “so that was going into the livestock sector. We improved the way the livestock sector was modeled so it better reflects the way the sector actually functions. We brought in cropland pasture and CRP land into the model so that if it chose, it could go after those. We didn’t use any CRP land but the model has the capability to use it now. We have a corn yield response due to when corn prices go up there is a yield increase because people farm a bit more intensively.”
They also looked ...
