On Sun, 16 Sep 2007 12:46:26 -0500, Louis Ohland wrote:
Search google for "bio fuel" and "boondoggle", 47,800 hits.
Right, because anything using such emotionally charged language is
_sure_ to be an accurate, unbiased reference, is that it?
Ethanol, of course, is nothing new. American refiners will produce
nearly 6 billion gallons of corn ethanol this year, mostly for use as a
gasoline additive to make engines burn cleaner. But in June, the Senate
all but announced that America's future is going to be powered by
biofuels, mandating the production of 36 billion gallons of ethanol by
2022. According to ethanol boosters, this is the beginning of a much
larger revolution that could entirely replace our
21-million-barrel-a-day oil addiction.
So, cleaner burning and less foreign oil. If it was a net-negative as
some claim, obviously that wouldn't work. So someone is wrong - either
biased people with a grudge writing emonionally charged rhetoric, or
it's the people investing millions or billions in the projects. I'm
guessing they've done their research.
Midwest farmers will get rich,
the air will be cleaner, the planet will be cooler, and, best of all,
we can tell those greedy sheiks to **** off. As the king of ethanol
hype, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, put it recently, "Everything about
ethanol is good, good, good."
I'm not going to go be a chearleader for it but, what specific problem
do you have with it?
This is not just hype -- it's dangerous, delusional bull****. Ethanol
doesn't burn cleaner than gasoline,
Really? Can you show me how a complex hydrocarbon will burn more
cleanly than an alcohol? Because I'm not seeing the chemistry as being
what you describe.
nor is it cheaper.
It's a lot closer than it was 2 years ago. And, once production volumes
go up, economies of scale and process improvements will change the
equation drastically.
Our current
ethanol production represents only 3.5 percent of our gasoline
consumption -- yet it consumes twenty percent of the entire U.S. corn
crop,
Which is an elastic supply, quantity being driven by market forces. As
of course you know.
causing the price of corn to double in the last two years and
raising the threat of hunger in the Third World.
That's amazing. Sorry, "incredible" rather. According to
the Chicago Board of Trade, corn futures are currently trading at 350.
Two years ago, they were trading at 225. Not sure where you get
"double" out of that. As far as the third world goes - per the USDA at
this URL:
http://www.ers.usda.gov/AmberWaves/M...es/Ethanol.htm
It says we're using 14% of our corn for ethanol as of 2005/06. So
that's 86% that isn't.
And the increasing
acreage devoted to corn for ethanol means less land for other staple
crops,
Wrong again. As I've mentioned at least twice, CRP programs exist and
have for decades. Land is held out of production to allow it to
rejuvinate, and to give us a strategic reserve of cropland when the
situation shows it's needed. There's a reserve of more than 36 million
acres in CRP programs at this time. Source: USDA, he
http://www.fsa.usda.gov/FSA/webapp?a...r&topic=crp-st
If the price goes up enough to get people more than the average they're
getting at $43.00/acre/year, then they just might decide to put that
land into corn. Market forces will work it out. The sooner we push to
get this and other biofuels into production quantities that will allow
better economies of scale, the sooner it'll be less expensive than
petro-based fuels.
giving farmers in South America an incentive to carve fields out
of tropical forests that help to cool the planet and stave off global
warming.
They're doing that now already without our help.
So why bother? Because the whole point of corn ethanol is not to solve
America's energy crisis, but to generate one of the great political
boondoggles of our time. Corn is already the most subsidized crop in
America, raking in a total of $51 billion in federal handouts between
1995 and 2005 -- twice as much as wheat subsidies and four times as
much as soybeans. Ethanol itself is propped up by hefty subsidies,
including a fifty-one-cent-per-gallon tax allowance for refiners.
How much has gasoline gone up during the Iraq war?
And a
study by the International Institute for Sustainable Development found
that ethanol subsidies amount to as much as $1.38 per gallon -- about
half of ethanol's wholesale market price.
Good. Let's keep the money here. You do know that it then gets _spent_
here, right?
But as a gasoline substitute, ethanol has big problems: Its energy
density is one-third less than gasoline, which means you have to burn
more of it to get the same amount of power. It also has a nasty
tendency to absorb water, so it can't be transported in existing
pipelines and must be distributed by truck or rail, which is
tremendously inefficient.
There's water in our pipelines? Can you please provide a cite for this?
And certainly, ethanol is a drying agent - HEET and similar additives
use it. You notice that it still burns. So I'm not seeing the problem.
Nor is all ethanol created equal. In Brazil, ethanol made from sugar
cane has an energy balance of 8-to-1 -- that is, when you add up the
fossil fuels used to irrigate, fertilize, grow, transport and refine
sugar cane into ethanol, the energy output is eight times higher than
the energy inputs. That's a better deal than gasoline, which has an
energy balance of 5-to-1. In contrast, the energy balance of corn
ethanol is only 1.3-to-1 - making it practically worthless as an energy
source.
Cite for these figures, please?
"Corn ethanol is essentially a way of recycling natural gas,"
says Robert Rapier, an oil-industry engineer who runs the R-Squared
Energy Blog.
Yeah, about cites. I've been using USDA and CBOT, you're using biased
blogs. Just thought I'd point that out.
But the biggest problem with ethanol is that it steals vast swaths of
land that might be better used for growing food.
That's an outright lie. See previous CRP land reserves.
Thanks in large part to the ethanol craze, the price of beef, poultry
and pork in the United States rose more than three percent during the
first five months of this year.
Couldn't have had _anything_ to do with the rise in fuel costs which
made everything more expensive across the board, I suppose?
In Mexico, tortilla prices have jumped sixty percent, leading to food
riots. In Europe, butter prices have spiked forty percent, and pork
prices in China are up twenty percent.
Wow. So by using a whole 14% of our corn crop for ethanol, we are
responsible for all this mayhem? Oh, the humanity! Or perhaps, somoene
is ascribing more effects than just the ethanol can account for.
By 2025, according to Runge and
Senauer, rising food prices caused by the demand for ethanol and other
biofuels could cause as many as 600 million more people to go hungry
worldwide.
Corn, and other crops, are not an inelastic supply.
Dave, the world is your oyster, just crack the shell...
Got any good cites? You know, with facts? Or just pointers to more
blogs.