The Truth About the Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone

There have been numerous new – and erroneous – attacks on domestic ethanol for contributing to the “Dead Zone” in the Gulf of Mexico. Big Oil, notably BP, would love nothing more than to change the subject away from the catastrophic results of policies that rely on drilling for oil. Growth Energy wants you to know the truth behind these attacks, so here are some facts about domestic ethanol, and the facts about the Dead Zone, and some perspective.

• As of today, the Deepwater Horizon spill could be 12 times the size of the Exxon-Valdez spill in Alaska’s Prince William Sound. The Deepwater spill will be much larger before BP is able to cap the well. (see map here)
• The people in Washington, DC, should know that the spill is so big, that if it were layered over the nation’s capital city, it would stretch from deep inside of Virginia, encompass all of the District of Columbia, and stretch to Delaware. (see map here)
• Last year the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico was estimated to be about 3,000 square miles. Last year, the U.S. produced 10.8 billion gallons of ethanol. In 2001, the dead zone was 8,006 square miles, and ethanol production in the U.S. was 1.8 billion gallons. How do critics of ethanol explain how the dead zone shrunk while ethanol production increased by more than 6 times in the U.S.? (Read more here)
• Everyone focuses on the Gulf of Mexico’s dead zone, but in fact there are dead zones in other bays and lakes that are nowhere near corn ethanol production, including Vermont’s Lake Champlain, and rivers in Oregon and Washington State. So there must be other contributors to the dead zone besides corn ethanol…
• And in fact, the Sierra Club pinpoints many major contributors, including runoff from golf courses and urban centers, livestock manure, dumping from boaters, sewer overflows, lawn fertilizer, atmospheric deposits from power plants and vehicles, and industrial runoff. (read more here)
• Nitrogen and phosphorous come from many sources other than crop fertilizer. And today’s farmers are growing more corn than ever in ways that do not contribute to the dead zone – through the use of precision farming and smart farming techniques, such as buffer strips that collect inputs instead of letting them run into streams that feed the Gulf waters.
• The size of the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico has varied every year, depending more on weather patterns than anything else. The Gulf’s dead zone was discovered in the 1970s, but it may have existed for a century.
• A 2007 study by Argonne National Laboratory looking at crop years between 1970 and 2005 found corn yields increased by 90 percent. But nitrogen loads to the Gulf of Mexico, tracked from 2001 to 2005, showed a 21 percent decline.
• Farmers in the Mississippi River Basin, which feeds the Gulf of Mexico, are using conservation and residue management plans on 20.8 million acres. Nutrient management plans were applied to 18.3 million acres. Farmers restored, enhanced or created an additional 1.4 million acres of wetlands, according to the USDA, and installed as much as 2.3 million acres of conservation buffers.
• Biofuels like ethanol can actually help prevent runoff, according to a recent study of the Chesapeake Bay watershed by the Chesapeake Bay Commission and the Pennsyl¬vania Department of Agriculture. The study found that production of biomass can reduce erosion, absorb excess fertilizer from idle farm fields and capture carbon dioxide as they grow. (read report here)