Water drain vs. economic gain
MADRID — The crane boom rotates slowly over a cluster of metal cylinders on the northeast edge of town.
It’s helping build an economic boom, the likes of which Madrid residents had figured they might never see.
In a week or two, the Mid America Bio Energy plant will begin converting corn into ethanol. The plant will bring decent-paying jobs, boost the tax base and provide a local market for the area’s dominant crop.
But ethanol production needs water as much as it needs corn. And in southwest Nebraska, where irrigation has been measured to the inch for nearly 30 years, water is on everyone’s mind.
Here’s some of the math they’re thinking about.
The Madrid plant will produce 44 million gallons of ethanol a year. Plant officials have been allocated as much as 515 million gallons of water annually, although they expect to use less.
Just to the east, heavy equipment kicks up dust, doing site preparation for a second phase. The second plant will distill more than twice as much ethanol as the first, but because of improved efficiency, its annual water allocation is 517 million gallons.
The two plants have the permits to draw as much as 1 billion gallons of water annually from the ground below Madrid. By comparison, the 265 residents who live in the village use about 10 million gallons each year.
Now consider that Nebraska’s 16 operating ethanol plants make just less than 1 billion gallons of the fuel. Industry representatives say plants use about three gallons of water to produce each gallon of ethanol, which means Nebraska plants will use at least 3 billion gallons of water annually.
But not for long.
By next year, an additional nine plants now under construction will be pumping out more ethanol and pumping up more water.
So, does all this water math equal addition or subtraction in Nebraska? As with any question involving ethanol, it depends upon whom you ask.
Some environmentalists say excessive water use is another natural resource cost that fades the green out of corn ethanol. They argue some parts of Nebraska should be off limits to ethanol plants and they question why regulators would allow additional high-volume groundwater pumping where water tables have declined for decades.
“That’s insanity to me,” said Laura Krebsbach, a community organizing consultant in Lincoln who used to work for the Nebraska chapter of the Sierra Club.
Ethanol supporters counter that plants use less than half the water they did 20 years ago and that technology continues to improve efficiency. In addition, some plant developers obtain independent hydrological studies to be sure the underground water supplies can meet their demand without hurting nearby municipal, domestic and irrigation wells. Also, older plants treat and discharge some of the water into nearby streams, essentially returning it to the environment.
Finally, in places like Madrid, plant operators buy and cap irrigation wells to offset the water they use.
The industry has learned it needs to continually lessen water consumption because without water, it can’t exist, said Todd Sneller, administrator of the Nebraska Ethanol Board.
“Two years ago, water was nine on the list of 10 things considered when it came to siting a plant,” he said. “Today, water quality is number two.”
n n n
In Missouri, concerns over water supplies have prompted people living near proposed plants to sue ethanol developers.
It’s hard to imagine court battles in Nebraska because the state has plenty of groundwater. At least that’s always been the assumption, thanks to the Ogallala Aquifer.
North America’s largest aquifer stretches from Texas to South Dakota and contains enough water to overfill Lake Huron. Or, put another way, it has more than 3 billion acre feet of water — enough to cover all 50 states 6 inches deep, according to statistics from Texas State University.
And Nebraska has the biggest portion of all that water — about two-thirds — because if the Ogallala Aquifer is like a huge underground lake, it’s not a uniformly deep lake. The shallowest regions are in Texas.
Agriculture, the economic foundation of the entire region, relies heavily on the aquifer. Irrigation uses about 9½ out of every 10 gallons brought to the surface. Nebraska agricultural producers use about 1.6 trillion gallons of groundwater annually to raise corn.
So, the 3 billion gallons of water needed by Nebraska’s ethanol plants equals 0.2 percent of the state’s irrigation usage, said Ken Cassman, director of the Nebraska Center for Energy Sciences Research at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
“In the big picture of things, my point is we have plenty of water,” Cassman said. “(Ethanol’s demand) is very small when you look at the amount of water resources we have available and the amount of water we use on corn.”
But the aquifer isn’t like a big cup of water that everyone with a straw can draw out equally. Differences in underground sands, gravel and rocks cause the aquifer to vary across the state. In some places, the water is easily accessible and removable; in others, it’s more difficult to get out.
And while the aquifer is massive, in some parts of Nebraska, it’s falling.
About 92,000 high-capacity wells, defined as pumping more than 50 gallons per minute, draw water from the aquifer in Nebraska. When those wells remove water faster than rainfall and snowmelt can replace it, the water table falls.
An extensive network of monitoring wells tracks declines throughout the aquifer. Improvements in irrigation efficiency, moratoriums on new wells and reductions on pumping have reduced the declines in recent decades, but they’re still occurring, especially along the western border of the aquifer.
While the plants themselves use water, those who monitor the aquifer are more concerned by a boost in irrigated corn acres to meet demand caused by ethanol production. Mark Burbach, an assistant geoscience professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who directs the statewide groundwater monitoring program for the School of Natural Resources, shares such concerns.
“There are a lot of questions,” he said. “I wouldn’t say the sky is falling — we’re not in a crisis. But it’s a limited resource and where is the tipping point?
“It’s a very complex question to answer.”
When it comes to watching the water used by ethanol production and other industries, no single agency does it all.
The Department of Environmental Quality enforces regulations involving water pollution, which which comes into play when plants treat and discharge their wastewater into streams.
DEQ spokesman Rich Webster said he knew of only one water discharge violation involving an ethanol plant in Nebraska.
It occurred in 2001 when Chief Ethanol Fuels of Hastings discharged wastewater that was too warm into the Blue River. The Environmental Protection Agency determined that the plant falsified documents and plant officials paid $100,000 in fines, plus a $100,000 donation to the National Audubon Society for its Platte River crane sanctuary near Gibbon, Webster said.
The main players when it comes to monitoring underground water supplies in Nebraska are Natural Resources Districts. The locally governed agencies, assigned to the 23 major stream basins in the state, regulate groundwater.
Because groundwater conditions vary across the 23 districts, so do requirements for those who drill wells. One regulation applies to all but two of the districts — wells that pump more than 50 gallons per minute must have a permit.
A good place to see how water regulation works is in the Upper Republican NRD in southwestern Nebraska.
Perkins, Chase and Dundy counties are stacked on top of each other along the Colorado border. Center pivot irrigation systems, like giant metal sprinklers, spray water from the Ogallala Aquifer on the ground, keeping circles of corn, wheat and other crops growing on the semiarid landscape.
This is one place in Nebraska where the water table is declining.
In 1978, in an effort to slow groundwater declines, the Upper Republican NRD started regulating irrigation by restricting the amount irrigators could apply to crops.
Over the years, the annual allocation dropped from about 20 inches per acre to 13½ inches, said Jasper Fanning, manager of the NRD. Farmers irrigate nearly 450,000 acres within the three-county district.
The district since has imposed moratoriums on new wells.
Complicating water management in the region is the fact that the NRD falls within the Republican River Compact, which allocates the water supply of the Republican River Basin among the states of Colorado, Nebraska and Kansas.
Under threat of litigation, Nebraska must make sure it sends enough water down the Republican River into Kansas. In dry years, Nebraska must reduce its consumptive use of water to fulfill its obligations under the compact.
All of which begs the question: If water is such a hot commodity, how can the state allow construction of plants that will use millions of gallons per year?
It’s a question being asked by everyone from environmentalists to farmers.
“It helps the economy, I’m not against it,” said Lowell Cornelius, a 75-year-old farmer from Madrid with irrigation wells near the plant. “I just hope it works for everybody. I hope we all have enough water.”
A practice called offsetting is supposed to allow room for new water users like ethanol plants in water-tight areas.
Here’s how offsetting is supposed to work in Madrid:
The land Mid America Bio Energy bought for its plant was formerly irrigated by two wells that pumped between 800 and 1,250 gallons per minute. The company capped those wells and replaced them with one that pumps about 980 gallons per minute.
But unlike irrigation wells, which run during a three- or four-month growing season, the plant’s well will run year-round and around the clock.
While the plant has the capacity to pump up to 515 gallons of water per year, Fanning expects it will use significantly less. He’s expecting something along the lines of three gallons of water for each gallon of ethanol, which would put the plant’s consumption at about 132 million gallons.
The NRD also will maintain and inspect a meter on the plant’s well, just as it does will all high-capacity wells in the district.
Offsetting water use doesn’t have to be gallon-for-gallon. Under rules of the Republican River Compact, industrial water users must offset half the water they pump.
In the case of the Madrid plant, “they have essentially offset the full amount that will count against us in the compact,” Fanning said.
The company will also offset water when it adds the 100-million gallon ethanol plant. And offsetting will be required if proposed 100-million gallon plants get built at Imperial and Wauneta.
As a rule of thumb, water managers say a 100-million gallon ethanol plant will use the equivalent of nine center-pivot irrigation systems.
Still, other water users in the Upper Republican NRD aren’t concerned.
Bruce Young, who has farmed near Madrid for 25 years, said he sold land to the plant and has invested in it financially. He believes the offsetting regulations will protect his wells and those of other irrigators.
For rural residents whose livelihoods depend in agriculture, using water to make ethanol is a legitimate and wise decision, Young said.
“I honestly think all the other things that will come out of this are so much more beneficial than the water itself,” he said. “It’s just a plus all the way around.”
Some other NRDs, even those where groundwater levels aren’t falling, are requiring ethanol plant developers to carefully consider water before they break ground.
The Upper Blue NRD based in York is a good example.
The NRD doesn’t face the challenges of a declining water table, but it was the first in the state to require ethanol plant developers to conduct detailed hydrological studies before building, said Rod DeBuhr, water department manager for the NRD. The studies show whether the plant’s groundwater demand can be met without adversely affecting existing nearby wells.
Three new plants in various stages of construction — at Fairmont, Sutton and Aurora — were approved under the new regulations, DeBuhr said. In all three cases, the NRD required plant developers to answer follow-up questions about hydrology before granting pumping permits.
Plans to build a plant near Seward were abandoned after it was determined the groundwater supply in the area may be insufficient to support ethanol production, DeBuhr said.
“It’s not only for our own benefit,” he said. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense to build a 150-million gallon ethanol facility on a site where there isn’t enough water to run it.”
Other NRDs may regulate industries less, but ethanol plants aren’t flocking to those districts, said Dean Edson, director of the Nebraska Association of Resources Districts, which represents all 23 NRDs in Nebraska.
In Edson’s view, the NRDs are doing “what we think is required to safeguard the water supply.” He said he is aware of no claims made by a property owner whose well has been affected by an ethanol plant.
And he made this point: Nebraska, by law, sets a priority system for water users. Domestic users (drinking water) come first, followed by agriculture. Industrial users, which includes ethanol plants, are last in line.
“That’s the bottom of the totem pole,” he said. “That’s a safeguard, too.”
No one, not even those with misgivings about corn ethanol, say biofuel plants shouldn’t be developed in a sustainable way.
What makes some people nervous is the speed with which the industry is expanding in Nebraska.
Dennis Keeney provides an outsider’s perspective. The professor emeritus of agronomy at Iowa State University in Ames co-wrote one of the only published analyses of water and ethanol production last year for the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy in Minneapolis.
He found that Minnesota is the only state that maintains public records on the amount of water pumped by specific ethanol plants. His analysis showed plants used between 3.5 and 6 gallons of water for every gallon of ethanol produced, an amount higher than the 3-to-1 ratio claimed by the ethanol industry.
“I think Nebraska is probably going to have to be a little more water conscious than other states because you’ve got an awfully lot of plants coming in,” he said.
The Nebraska Ethanol Board lists 16 plants in production, 11 under construction and no fewer than 30 under consideration. Not even the most enthusiastic drum major for ethanol says all 30 will be built, but Nebraska seems likely to soon pass Illinois as the second-leading ethanol producer in the country.
Under the current pace of growth, ethanol is poised to become the largest single industry in Nebraska.
What’s attracting it to the state is access to rail transportation, proximity to cattle feeding operations (which fatten cattle with distiller’s grain) and, of course, ample corn supplies.
But growing even more corn to meet the industry’s demand worries those already worried about groundwater supplies.
“Are we going to have more marginal land going into row cropping and raising corn? Of course we are,” said Laura Krebsbach. “And that has a huge impact on water quality.”
Others who might be considered less skeptical of the industry still share similar concerns.
When it comes to water “you don’t want to sacrifice long-term sustainability for short-term gain,” said Don Wilhite, director of the National Drought Mitigation Center at UNL.
Long-term sustainability represents a moving target that’s even harder to hit when climate change is factored in. Most scientific modeling shows Nebraska getting drier in the future because of higher temperatures and less precipitation.
“Is drought going to become a new normal in terms of frequency in the future?” Wilhite asked. “We don’t know. … We need to do a lot more work on this, I don’t think we just ought to assume we have all this water and we ought to use it without much regard for the sustainability of the resource.”
Ken Cassman, director of the energy research center at UNL who argues the state has plenty of water for ethanol, said questions and concerns about the best way to use public resources are legitimate. And challenging.
But Cassman embraces the idea that science, technology and free markets can meet those challenges.
For example, he said, ethanol plants will become more efficient at using water because the heavily capitalized industry can attract the best engineers.
Cassman also said irrigators must become more efficient with water. He pointed to low-pressure pivot and drip irrigation systems as examples of how current technology uses a great deal less water than flood and furrow irrigation.
Researchers also are working on ways to grow higher yields of corn with less land and water. Their work has shown promise in these areas, Cassman said.
“To really expand the industry at the rate we’re expanding and address all of the environmental concerns that people have, it is a significant challenge,” he said. “But it’s not one that we should shy away from.”
Most would agree he’s right, because for all Nebraskans, there’s too much at stake.
Reach Joe Duggan at 473-7239 or jduggan@journalstar.com.
It’s helping build an economic boom, the likes of which Madrid residents had figured they might never see.
In a week or two, the Mid America Bio Energy plant will begin converting corn into ethanol. The plant will bring decent-paying jobs, boost the tax base and provide a local market for the area’s dominant crop.
But ethanol production needs water as much as it needs corn. And in southwest Nebraska, where irrigation has been measured to the inch for nearly 30 years, water is on everyone’s mind.
Here’s some of the math they’re thinking about.
The Madrid plant will produce 44 million gallons of ethanol a year. Plant officials have been allocated as much as 515 million gallons of water annually, although they expect to use less.
Just to the east, heavy equipment kicks up dust, doing site preparation for a second phase. The second plant will distill more than twice as much ethanol as the first, but because of improved efficiency, its annual water allocation is 517 million gallons.
The two plants have the permits to draw as much as 1 billion gallons of water annually from the ground below Madrid. By comparison, the 265 residents who live in the village use about 10 million gallons each year.
Now consider that Nebraska’s 16 operating ethanol plants make just less than 1 billion gallons of the fuel. Industry representatives say plants use about three gallons of water to produce each gallon of ethanol, which means Nebraska plants will use at least 3 billion gallons of water annually.
But not for long.
By next year, an additional nine plants now under construction will be pumping out more ethanol and pumping up more water.
So, does all this water math equal addition or subtraction in Nebraska? As with any question involving ethanol, it depends upon whom you ask.
Some environmentalists say excessive water use is another natural resource cost that fades the green out of corn ethanol. They argue some parts of Nebraska should be off limits to ethanol plants and they question why regulators would allow additional high-volume groundwater pumping where water tables have declined for decades.
“That’s insanity to me,” said Laura Krebsbach, a community organizing consultant in Lincoln who used to work for the Nebraska chapter of the Sierra Club.
Ethanol supporters counter that plants use less than half the water they did 20 years ago and that technology continues to improve efficiency. In addition, some plant developers obtain independent hydrological studies to be sure the underground water supplies can meet their demand without hurting nearby municipal, domestic and irrigation wells. Also, older plants treat and discharge some of the water into nearby streams, essentially returning it to the environment.
Finally, in places like Madrid, plant operators buy and cap irrigation wells to offset the water they use.
The industry has learned it needs to continually lessen water consumption because without water, it can’t exist, said Todd Sneller, administrator of the Nebraska Ethanol Board.
“Two years ago, water was nine on the list of 10 things considered when it came to siting a plant,” he said. “Today, water quality is number two.”
n n n
In Missouri, concerns over water supplies have prompted people living near proposed plants to sue ethanol developers.
It’s hard to imagine court battles in Nebraska because the state has plenty of groundwater. At least that’s always been the assumption, thanks to the Ogallala Aquifer.
North America’s largest aquifer stretches from Texas to South Dakota and contains enough water to overfill Lake Huron. Or, put another way, it has more than 3 billion acre feet of water — enough to cover all 50 states 6 inches deep, according to statistics from Texas State University.
And Nebraska has the biggest portion of all that water — about two-thirds — because if the Ogallala Aquifer is like a huge underground lake, it’s not a uniformly deep lake. The shallowest regions are in Texas.
Agriculture, the economic foundation of the entire region, relies heavily on the aquifer. Irrigation uses about 9½ out of every 10 gallons brought to the surface. Nebraska agricultural producers use about 1.6 trillion gallons of groundwater annually to raise corn.
So, the 3 billion gallons of water needed by Nebraska’s ethanol plants equals 0.2 percent of the state’s irrigation usage, said Ken Cassman, director of the Nebraska Center for Energy Sciences Research at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
“In the big picture of things, my point is we have plenty of water,” Cassman said. “(Ethanol’s demand) is very small when you look at the amount of water resources we have available and the amount of water we use on corn.”
But the aquifer isn’t like a big cup of water that everyone with a straw can draw out equally. Differences in underground sands, gravel and rocks cause the aquifer to vary across the state. In some places, the water is easily accessible and removable; in others, it’s more difficult to get out.
And while the aquifer is massive, in some parts of Nebraska, it’s falling.
About 92,000 high-capacity wells, defined as pumping more than 50 gallons per minute, draw water from the aquifer in Nebraska. When those wells remove water faster than rainfall and snowmelt can replace it, the water table falls.
An extensive network of monitoring wells tracks declines throughout the aquifer. Improvements in irrigation efficiency, moratoriums on new wells and reductions on pumping have reduced the declines in recent decades, but they’re still occurring, especially along the western border of the aquifer.
While the plants themselves use water, those who monitor the aquifer are more concerned by a boost in irrigated corn acres to meet demand caused by ethanol production. Mark Burbach, an assistant geoscience professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who directs the statewide groundwater monitoring program for the School of Natural Resources, shares such concerns.
“There are a lot of questions,” he said. “I wouldn’t say the sky is falling — we’re not in a crisis. But it’s a limited resource and where is the tipping point?
“It’s a very complex question to answer.”
When it comes to watching the water used by ethanol production and other industries, no single agency does it all.
The Department of Environmental Quality enforces regulations involving water pollution, which which comes into play when plants treat and discharge their wastewater into streams.
DEQ spokesman Rich Webster said he knew of only one water discharge violation involving an ethanol plant in Nebraska.
It occurred in 2001 when Chief Ethanol Fuels of Hastings discharged wastewater that was too warm into the Blue River. The Environmental Protection Agency determined that the plant falsified documents and plant officials paid $100,000 in fines, plus a $100,000 donation to the National Audubon Society for its Platte River crane sanctuary near Gibbon, Webster said.
The main players when it comes to monitoring underground water supplies in Nebraska are Natural Resources Districts. The locally governed agencies, assigned to the 23 major stream basins in the state, regulate groundwater.
Because groundwater conditions vary across the 23 districts, so do requirements for those who drill wells. One regulation applies to all but two of the districts — wells that pump more than 50 gallons per minute must have a permit.
A good place to see how water regulation works is in the Upper Republican NRD in southwestern Nebraska.
Perkins, Chase and Dundy counties are stacked on top of each other along the Colorado border. Center pivot irrigation systems, like giant metal sprinklers, spray water from the Ogallala Aquifer on the ground, keeping circles of corn, wheat and other crops growing on the semiarid landscape.
This is one place in Nebraska where the water table is declining.
In 1978, in an effort to slow groundwater declines, the Upper Republican NRD started regulating irrigation by restricting the amount irrigators could apply to crops.
Over the years, the annual allocation dropped from about 20 inches per acre to 13½ inches, said Jasper Fanning, manager of the NRD. Farmers irrigate nearly 450,000 acres within the three-county district.
The district since has imposed moratoriums on new wells.
Complicating water management in the region is the fact that the NRD falls within the Republican River Compact, which allocates the water supply of the Republican River Basin among the states of Colorado, Nebraska and Kansas.
Under threat of litigation, Nebraska must make sure it sends enough water down the Republican River into Kansas. In dry years, Nebraska must reduce its consumptive use of water to fulfill its obligations under the compact.
All of which begs the question: If water is such a hot commodity, how can the state allow construction of plants that will use millions of gallons per year?
It’s a question being asked by everyone from environmentalists to farmers.
“It helps the economy, I’m not against it,” said Lowell Cornelius, a 75-year-old farmer from Madrid with irrigation wells near the plant. “I just hope it works for everybody. I hope we all have enough water.”
A practice called offsetting is supposed to allow room for new water users like ethanol plants in water-tight areas.
Here’s how offsetting is supposed to work in Madrid:
The land Mid America Bio Energy bought for its plant was formerly irrigated by two wells that pumped between 800 and 1,250 gallons per minute. The company capped those wells and replaced them with one that pumps about 980 gallons per minute.
But unlike irrigation wells, which run during a three- or four-month growing season, the plant’s well will run year-round and around the clock.
While the plant has the capacity to pump up to 515 gallons of water per year, Fanning expects it will use significantly less. He’s expecting something along the lines of three gallons of water for each gallon of ethanol, which would put the plant’s consumption at about 132 million gallons.
The NRD also will maintain and inspect a meter on the plant’s well, just as it does will all high-capacity wells in the district.
Offsetting water use doesn’t have to be gallon-for-gallon. Under rules of the Republican River Compact, industrial water users must offset half the water they pump.
In the case of the Madrid plant, “they have essentially offset the full amount that will count against us in the compact,” Fanning said.
The company will also offset water when it adds the 100-million gallon ethanol plant. And offsetting will be required if proposed 100-million gallon plants get built at Imperial and Wauneta.
As a rule of thumb, water managers say a 100-million gallon ethanol plant will use the equivalent of nine center-pivot irrigation systems.
Still, other water users in the Upper Republican NRD aren’t concerned.
Bruce Young, who has farmed near Madrid for 25 years, said he sold land to the plant and has invested in it financially. He believes the offsetting regulations will protect his wells and those of other irrigators.
For rural residents whose livelihoods depend in agriculture, using water to make ethanol is a legitimate and wise decision, Young said.
“I honestly think all the other things that will come out of this are so much more beneficial than the water itself,” he said. “It’s just a plus all the way around.”
Some other NRDs, even those where groundwater levels aren’t falling, are requiring ethanol plant developers to carefully consider water before they break ground.
The Upper Blue NRD based in York is a good example.
The NRD doesn’t face the challenges of a declining water table, but it was the first in the state to require ethanol plant developers to conduct detailed hydrological studies before building, said Rod DeBuhr, water department manager for the NRD. The studies show whether the plant’s groundwater demand can be met without adversely affecting existing nearby wells.
Three new plants in various stages of construction — at Fairmont, Sutton and Aurora — were approved under the new regulations, DeBuhr said. In all three cases, the NRD required plant developers to answer follow-up questions about hydrology before granting pumping permits.
Plans to build a plant near Seward were abandoned after it was determined the groundwater supply in the area may be insufficient to support ethanol production, DeBuhr said.
“It’s not only for our own benefit,” he said. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense to build a 150-million gallon ethanol facility on a site where there isn’t enough water to run it.”
Other NRDs may regulate industries less, but ethanol plants aren’t flocking to those districts, said Dean Edson, director of the Nebraska Association of Resources Districts, which represents all 23 NRDs in Nebraska.
In Edson’s view, the NRDs are doing “what we think is required to safeguard the water supply.” He said he is aware of no claims made by a property owner whose well has been affected by an ethanol plant.
And he made this point: Nebraska, by law, sets a priority system for water users. Domestic users (drinking water) come first, followed by agriculture. Industrial users, which includes ethanol plants, are last in line.
“That’s the bottom of the totem pole,” he said. “That’s a safeguard, too.”
No one, not even those with misgivings about corn ethanol, say biofuel plants shouldn’t be developed in a sustainable way.
What makes some people nervous is the speed with which the industry is expanding in Nebraska.
Dennis Keeney provides an outsider’s perspective. The professor emeritus of agronomy at Iowa State University in Ames co-wrote one of the only published analyses of water and ethanol production last year for the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy in Minneapolis.
He found that Minnesota is the only state that maintains public records on the amount of water pumped by specific ethanol plants. His analysis showed plants used between 3.5 and 6 gallons of water for every gallon of ethanol produced, an amount higher than the 3-to-1 ratio claimed by the ethanol industry.
“I think Nebraska is probably going to have to be a little more water conscious than other states because you’ve got an awfully lot of plants coming in,” he said.
The Nebraska Ethanol Board lists 16 plants in production, 11 under construction and no fewer than 30 under consideration. Not even the most enthusiastic drum major for ethanol says all 30 will be built, but Nebraska seems likely to soon pass Illinois as the second-leading ethanol producer in the country.
Under the current pace of growth, ethanol is poised to become the largest single industry in Nebraska.
What’s attracting it to the state is access to rail transportation, proximity to cattle feeding operations (which fatten cattle with distiller’s grain) and, of course, ample corn supplies.
But growing even more corn to meet the industry’s demand worries those already worried about groundwater supplies.
“Are we going to have more marginal land going into row cropping and raising corn? Of course we are,” said Laura Krebsbach. “And that has a huge impact on water quality.”
Others who might be considered less skeptical of the industry still share similar concerns.
When it comes to water “you don’t want to sacrifice long-term sustainability for short-term gain,” said Don Wilhite, director of the National Drought Mitigation Center at UNL.
Long-term sustainability represents a moving target that’s even harder to hit when climate change is factored in. Most scientific modeling shows Nebraska getting drier in the future because of higher temperatures and less precipitation.
“Is drought going to become a new normal in terms of frequency in the future?” Wilhite asked. “We don’t know. … We need to do a lot more work on this, I don’t think we just ought to assume we have all this water and we ought to use it without much regard for the sustainability of the resource.”
Ken Cassman, director of the energy research center at UNL who argues the state has plenty of water for ethanol, said questions and concerns about the best way to use public resources are legitimate. And challenging.
But Cassman embraces the idea that science, technology and free markets can meet those challenges.
For example, he said, ethanol plants will become more efficient at using water because the heavily capitalized industry can attract the best engineers.
Cassman also said irrigators must become more efficient with water. He pointed to low-pressure pivot and drip irrigation systems as examples of how current technology uses a great deal less water than flood and furrow irrigation.
Researchers also are working on ways to grow higher yields of corn with less land and water. Their work has shown promise in these areas, Cassman said.
“To really expand the industry at the rate we’re expanding and address all of the environmental concerns that people have, it is a significant challenge,” he said. “But it’s not one that we should shy away from.”
Most would agree he’s right, because for all Nebraskans, there’s too much at stake.
Reach Joe Duggan at 473-7239 or jduggan@journalstar.com.
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