Is ethanol a renewable fuel?
While corn itself is a renewable resource, growing by photosynthesis which uses sunlight and carbon dioxide as fuel, the infrastructure needed to produce and process corn for ethanol manufacture is still dependent on fossil fuels. Farm machinery used to plant, cultivate, and harvest corn currently burn conventional gas and diesel; factories that make the pesticides and fertilizers for optimal crop yields also use fossil fuels in their production processes. The plants distilling ethanol are also dependent on fossil fuels, coal and natural gas primarily, to provide the heat and power needed to stimulate the chemical changes required. And E85, the fuel blend ethanol supporters wish to see in America’s gas tanks, is 15 percent gasoline. All along the way, from farm to factory to fuel tank, ethanol continues to be least partly dependent on fossil fuel, that dwindling resource. To call ethanol a renewable fuel, then, is partly true. Cellulosic ethanol may prove able to mitigate many of these
