The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently released final regulations that will triple the amount of biofuels produced in the United States. These new regulations implement the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS2), which mandates that transportation fuels sold in the United States contain a minimum of 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels per year by 2022, a massive increase from the current 12 billion gallons.
The RFS2 also requires that biofuels produced at new facilities achieve at least a 20 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions when compared with conventional fuels. According to the recent guidelines developed by the EPA, which created a new emissions accounting model, corn-based ethanol achieves a 21 percent emissions reduction, just enough to put the fuel above minimum polluting standards – barely.
While the biofuels industry was obviously happy, environmental groups greeted the new emissions model with skepticism. Jonathan Lewis, an attorney with the Clean Air Task Force, said that the “EPA appears to have bent over backward to allow some highly problematic biofuels to meet the environmental criteria set by Congress.”
While we are now on the path to a radical 300 percent increase in biofuels production, the EPA’s own Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA) – a detailed examination developed by the agency to determine the potential impact of the RFS2 – warns of the effects of this expanded production on water resources. According to the RIA, “EPA anticipates that increased corn production for ethanol will increase the occurrence of nitrate, nitrite, and atrazine in sources of drinking water.” The RIA also states that “in addition to potential additional contamination of sources of drinking water, surface and ground water supplies may be strained by increased production of irrigated corn for ethanol and the ethanol production process itself in local and regional areas. Increased pumping from agricultural aquifers to support ethanol production may accelerate the long running depletion of aquifers which has been documented by the USGS.”
Concerns about the impact on water from biofuels production have been voiced before and are becoming louder. A little more than a year ago, then U.S. Department of Interior Secretary Dick Kempthorne, stated: “To reach our ethanol production target of 7.5 billion gallons per year by 2012 will require 30 billion gallons of water a year to process, or the amount of the annual water needs of Minneapolis, Minn. And if just 25 percent of the new corn crop requires irrigation, ethanol will demand more water than the combined annual usage of all cities in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho and Nevada. As we increase ethanol production, we must have a holistic approach that takes into account its impact on water supply.”
And late last year a report by the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan independent arm of Congress that investigates federal government spending, concluded that more research is needed regarding both the water impacts of feedstock cultivation and biofuel conversion, and more data on water resources is required as well.
With so many warnings and so many uncertainties, the rush to a massive increase in biofuels production looks nothing short of reckless.
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