04/23/07 Checking Up On Air Pollution

Checking up on air pollution. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. Last week a study was released that has the ethanol industry a bit up in arms regarding the pollution output of ethanol. While ethanol industry officials are adamant that the tail pipe emission are safe, Mark Jacobson disagrees. Jacobson is an atmospheric scientist with Stanford University. JACOBSON: This was just a natural extension of what I've been doing previously, in fact the model had been set up to do this type of calculation but the constraints are pretty different with ethanol so it took some work to get that going. Jacobson has been studying the differences between the pollution of gasoline and ethanol, projecting out 20 years into the future. JACOBSON: I focused on looking at E85 which is a high blend of ethanol comparing it to gasoline in terms of air pollution in the United States and looked at the effect on ozone and carcinogens and also in particles throughout the United States and then applied health affects data to look at well kind of what's the net effect on human health. What Jacobson found was that ethanol while not being dramatically different from gasoline, it's not any better. JACOBSON: In the past people have been arguing that ethanol is going to improve air quality, it's going to cause fewer fatalities and cause less respiratory illness but this is all based on studies that all they looked at was emission changes and emission changes don't translate into atmospheric changes. Because ozone is not emitted, how can you tell what it's going to be like in the atmosphere  the changes of ozone in the atmosphere unless you actually account for the evolution of species that are emitted that produce the ozone? So what do we need to do to improve air standards? JACOBSON: I approached this from how can we address climate and air pollution issues simultaneously. Now the most recent study looking at the carbon balance from ethanol from UC Davis suggests that there's only a 2% difference in the net lifecycle greenhouse gas emission from corn ethanol versus gasoline and that's hardly anything considering we need about an 80% reduction in carbon to address climate. So if ethanol is not going to  is not addressing climate significantly and if it's not addressing air pollution, what else can we do? Well, there are other technologies that exist but need to be expanded further that can address both these problems I think a lot more efficiently. He recommends expanding battery cell technology backed up by wind power electrical generation. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.