Nebraska Corn Board chair says gasoline requires 30 times as much water to produce as ethanol

In Nebraska, Jon Holzfaster, chairman of the Nebraska Corn Board, lashed out at critics of the ethanol industry’s water consumption.

He said that it takes three gallons of water to produce one gallon of ethanol, compared to 94 gallons of water to produce a gallon of crude oil, or 150 gallons to produce a Sunday newspaper, or 1800 gallons to irrigate a golf course for a day. He also noted that only 14 percent of corn depends on irrigation to supplement the existing rainfall.

The Wall Street Journal first raised the connection between the Nebraska water shortage and biofuels.

A response written by Jacques Beaudry-Losique, Director of the Department of Energy’s Biomass Program, repeated the DOE position that the nation should apply a sustainable approach towards clean, domestic, renewable energy resources such as ethanol. Beaudry-Losique pointed out that 87% of corn grown for ethanol is not irrigated, and that the region can and should support both food and fuel.

The connection between water usage and corn ethanol  production was Myth #8 in a Biofuels Digest editorial on the jihad against biofuels.

Myth #8: According to the Crown Prince of Holland, the amount of biofuel in an SUV tank uses as much water as it takes to produce enough grain to support one person for a year.

Fact: It always depends on how much grain a person eats in a day, but using: the USDA US adult average consumption of grains; an allowance of 449 gallons of water per pound of corn based on irrigation tables; and a usage of 2.19 gallons of water per gallon of ethanol based on a North Dakota plant breaking ground today: we conclude that it takes 37 incremental gallons of water to make enough E85 ethanol to fill an SUV. That’s enough water to sustain the average US adult grain diet for 216 minutes. Just a tad short of the …. wait for it …. 525,600 minutes …. claimed by the Crown Prince.

The point which apparently eludes the Crown Prince’s fact-checkers is that the water used to make corn is renewable, in that it comes from the sky rather than the ground.

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