(March 15, 2010)   Washington - The recent paper by Tom Hertel and others is little more than an attempt to put into print what the state of California did in creating its flawed and illegal Low Carbon Fuels Standard.

“The most recent attempt to saddle ethanol with market-mediated environmental impacts further underscores the lack of consensus in the scientific community about this issue,” said Renewable Fuels Association Director of Public Affairs Matt Hartwig. “Moreover, it once again ignores the market-mediated impacts of other fuels, choosing to make unfair comparisons between ethanol and petroleum based on a different set of standards.”

Of note in the paper:

• The indirect land use change (ILUC) result obtained by these authors is just 25% of the outlandish result calculated by Searchinger (27g/MJ to 104g/MJ). The wide disparity in ILUC results to date clearly demonstrates the lack of agreement on methodologies and assumptions.

• The authors acknowledge there is tremendous uncertainty associated with this type of analysis.

• The model used for the analysis, GTAP, is deeply flawed and is incapable of capturing the dynamism of global agricultural markets, such as yield growth and changes in how the livestock feed coproduct of ethanol production (DDGS) is used. Notably, because of its shortcomings, EPA opted not to use the GTAP model for its RFS2 modeling.

• Using the same model and scenarios, but adding more reasonable assumptions on yield growth, DDGS use and other factors, Air Improvement Resource produced a result of about 7 g/MJ--25% of what Hertel et al. calculated.

• The paper focuses only on the possible market-mediated impacts of corn ethanol expansion--it does nothing to advance the dialog on the market-mediated impacts of other energy options. We can't make fair comparisons about future energy options until all fuels have been subjected to the same type of examination of market-mediated, indirect effects.

It should be noted that BP and other traditional petroleum sources provided much of the funding for this research through Big Oil’s “investment” in various academic research programs. The 2008 study “Big Oil U.” from the Center for Science in the Public Interest found that Big Oil doled out nearly $800 million to various universities, including the University of California-Berkeley that helped sponsor this report, for research between 1991 and 2008.