On Sep 13, 6:56 am, Dave Hinz wrote:
On Thu, 13 Sep 2007 05:00:23 -0000, wrote:
On Sep 12, 6:17 am, Maxwell Lol wrote:
I don't have the reference, but someone told me that if we switched to
biofuel, we would starve because we would need all of the land
available to make the fuel - and there would be nothing left for food.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics..._ethanol_scam_...
According to this: Ethonal accounts for 3.5 percent of our gas
consumption currently, And uses 20 percent of the Corn Crop.

Of which year's? The nice thing about crops, is they can change
proportions of one to the other year to year. And, if the price gets
attractive enough to grow, lots of folks who have land in CRP programs
will decide to take 'em out - which is what CRP is for in the first
place.

Ok, I did some digging. USDA states that we harvested 70.6 Million
acres of corn (Planting 78.3) in 2006 and averaged 149.1 Bushels Per
Acre.
That comes out to 10.5 Billion Bushels.

Ethonal industry claimes that it can output 5.6 Billion Gallons per
year as of the close of 2006. (It only output 4.9 in 2006, but I'll
use the 5.6 as the current number)

Inustry average of 2.7 Gallons per bushel. This is the highest number
I could find. Others where between 2.5 and 2.6.
Divide and you get 2,074,074,0742,074,074,074
Or 2.1 Billion Bushels used == 20% of the crop.


They don't cite where they got their numbers though.

Of course they don't. But pretending that the corn supply is inelastic,
or that corn is the only/best way to make methanol, are two problems
with that particular point of view.

2007 numbers from the USDA state:
92.8 Billion acres planted, 85.4 Harvested, averaging 155.8 Bushels/
Acre
That gives us 13.3 Billion Bushels.

Ethanol is estimated to output 9 billion gallons this year with the
addition of 53 new or expanded plants.

Giving some points to the gallon/bushel conversion for improvements,
lets say 3 gallons/bushel (just over a 10% improvement which is
nothing to scoff at). Easy to divide this time so we get 3 billion
bushels. Or 22% of the crop.

We averaged 140 Billion Gallons of gas in 2004. With an outlook of
146 Billion Gallons for 2006. (DOE Website sucks, so I stop the
digging there). So lets call 2007 148 Billion gallons just to have a
safe number (less increase than the average 3 billion/year between
2004 and 2006, thank god for the Smart car!).

I'm all for alternative energy, and I don't claim that Corn is the
only Ethenol source. However thats the current main source for US
Ethanol. Hopefully it changes for the better with good research.