Innovation Pipeline

Turns out biofuels are not only hungry, threatening to take a serious bite out of crops like corn, they are also thirsty. Ethanol refineries drink serious amounts of water. And in areas like Burley, Idaho, it’s causing concern about the draw down on the water table.

In that Midwest city, a recent story estimates that one-eighth of the city’s water supply will be consumed by an ethanol refinery that’s currently under construction.

The company, Pacific Ethanol, says it will require as much as 400,000 gallons of water per day in order to generate 137,000 gallons of ethanol. City and state water resource officials don’t appear to be worried about the rising water usage.

Earlier this month, a report released by the National Research Council said that the U.S. effort to ramp up ethanol production could threaten water supplies that are already under duress.

To reduce dependency on foreign oil, President Bush has called for production of 35 billion gallons of ethanol a year by 2017 – to replace 15 percent of U.S. petroleum fuel with biofuels. In large areas of the Midwest, the drain on water resources for ethanol production could accelerate the already water-stressed Ogallala Aquifer, which lies under portions of South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas.

One of the co-authors of the report
was Professor Dara Entekhabi of MIT’s department of civil and environmental engineering. In the report findings, the authors recommend that biofuel cultivation “should only be undertaken in tandem with regional water assessments, the adoption of environmentally sound farming practices and consideration of the full life cycle of biofuel production. Agricultural shifts to growing corn and expanding biofuel crops into regions with little agriculture, especially dry areas, could change current irrigation practices and greatly increase pressure on water resources in many parts of the United States,” the authors said in the report.

Among the other recommendations in the report were: examining how biofuel crops could be irrigated with wastewater that is biologically and chemically unsuitable for use with food crops; exploring genetically modified crops that are water-efficient; and examining how more perennial crops, such as switchgrass, which hold soil and nutrients in place better than most row crops to minimize the erosion caused by traditional biofuel crops. Lee Bruno, for more see Biofuels Unlocked .