Then to allocate burdens between ethanol and corn oil, energy allocation is used.
Fig. 8 illustrates this with statistics for annual US corn grain production and allocations.
And, fourthly, the massive allocation of corn in the U.S. for ethanol production, and its effect on the planting of soy and other U.S. food crops, will create a greater global demand for Brazilian soy and corn, which in turn will cause more agricultural expansion into the Amazon.
Large increases in crop productivity in the US since the 1800s (see Fig. 8c) have resulted in increasing corn production without extra land allocation.
But in the hybrid and process-level energy allocation approaches when corn oil shares upstream burdens with corn ethanol and DGS, these steps become the third largest contributor to life-cycle GHG emissions after chemical inputs to corn farming and ethanol production.
The hybrid allocation approach produces a similar corn ethanol CI to the displacement and marginal approaches despite the application of completely different co-product allocation methods.
The process-level energy allocation approach, however, produces a corn ethanol CI that is significantly lower than the other approaches produce.
These four approaches are (1) assign the credit to ethanol industry; (2) assign the credit to the biodiesel industry; (3) share the credit between corn ethanol and biodiesel industry using energy allocation; and (4) assign the credit to corn oil biodiesel, which has no associated LUC GHG emissions.
The Americanized Mexican resto offers a finite number of corn chips expertly and ornately arranged with precise allocation of nacho toppings.
The second approach, marginal allocation, reflects the perspective that the corn ethanol plant exists to produce corn ethanol; corn oil recovery is a marginal operation.
