Killing the Seas to Fuel our Cars

Information taken from http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1721693,00.html

Congress wants to produce 15 billion gallons of ethanol from corn by 2022. On the surface, this sounds like an environmentally-friendly idea to reduce our dependency on oil and other depleting natural resources. However, upon further inspection, such an increase in ethanol production actually has the potential to destroy our seas.

Increasing our ethanol production to 15 billion gallons means drastically increasing the amount of corn harvested in the US. That’s where the harm to the seas begins. Corn requires heavy fertilization, and a byproduct of that fertilization is nitrogen. The nitrogen from the fertilizer runs off the farms and into rivers and streams which eventually feed into the Gulf of Mexico. Streams have a natural ability to filter the nitrogen to an extent, but the amount of corn currently planted and which needs to be planted to meet the government’s goal exceeds the capability of the streams. The excess nitrogen runs into the Gulf of Mexico and becomes nourishment for algae. The more nitrogen run-off, the greater the amount of algae. Algae decomposition requires oxygen and therefore takes a large percentage of the oxygen in the Gulf, creating what scientists call a dead zone. Currently that zone is the size of New Jersey, but with the increase in corn and nitrogen-runoff (10-19%) the zone will increase to a level impossible to shrink.

I found this article interesting because it reveals a problem with a plan that seems like the solution to our energy problems. Corn, a natural product, contains the potential to fuel our nation. But, as it turns out, corn also has the potential to destroy our seas. So what do we do? We need to find some way to reduce our dependency on oil, coal, and natural gas, but even with new forms of “green” energy come problems. Although we will hopefully reduce our impact on the environment in many ways, we have no way to measure and even predict our potential effects.