Ethanol

[Kiroy]

What do you guys think of Ethanol, and the corn craze?

I'm not super happy that my milk and steak is rising in price. Is this something that's we should deal with to get oil independence, cause even when we start pumping ethanol into our cars, it's going to cost more a gallon than gas costs now...

I'd rather see us going to way of the electric car, and more nuclear power.

[Eomer]

I like my ethanol in beer, as well as jager, jack, and vodka.

Everything I've read about ethanol leads me to believe that it's a total joke, in terms of a replacement for the fossil fuels we currently use for transportation. It's more expensive to make, releases that same amount of greenhouse gas and pollutants for the most part, and fucks around with food pricing. It's simply not a solution.

[Itzena]

Ethanol from corn is a waste of time.
Ethanol from sugar cane less so.

Ethanol from algae (when they get that final bit of genetic engineering working) will be great.

[brekk]

i think the stat i heard was:
"If the entire US corn supply for 1 year was converted to ethanol it would handle our gasoline needs for 1 week."

[Ninajrr]

Ethanol from algae (when they get that final bit of genetic engineering working) will be great.

Ty. More gene splicing kthxbai.

[Fammaden]

Originally Posted by Itzena

Ethanol from corn is a waste of time.
Ethanol from sugar cane less so.

Ethanol from algae (when they get that final bit of genetic engineering working) will be great.

Yes.

And biodiesel for the win! Which could also potentially be harvested from algae. I'm sick of expounding on the virtues of it though everytime fucking ethanol, fuel prices or hydrogen comes up. BioDieselNow - Renewable diesel biofuel if you feel like reading about it. VW planning to increase the amount of diesel passenger cars to the US after selling out of '07 diesel Jettas while hardly being able to move the gassers even with incentives and deals. Also, Honda Accord diesel to replace Accord hybrid for '09 on American shores. Even using petro diesel instead of bio, just driving a diesel auto would be a major step toward conservation and reduction of foreign oil dependence for American drivers. Diesel automakers are also about to introduce new emissions tech to comply with the strict CARB standards and other strict standards for California and other states as well.

Ethanol is not the solution for North America.

[Tea on tuesday]

Originally Posted by Fammaden

Yes.

And biodiesel for the win! Which could also potentially be harvested from algae. I'm sick of expounding on the virtues of it though everytime fucking ethanol, fuel prices or hydrogen comes up. BioDieselNow - Renewable diesel biofuel if you feel like reading about it. VW planning to increase the amount of diesel passenger cars to the US after selling out of '07 diesel Jettas while hardly being able to move the gassers even with incentives and deals. Also, Honda Accord diesel to replace Accord hybrid for '09 on American shores. Even using petro diesel instead of bio, just driving a diesel auto would be a major step toward conservation and reduction of foreign oil dependence for American drivers. Diesel automakers are also about to introduce new emissions tech to comply with the strict CARB standards and other strict standards for California and other states as well.

Ethanol is not the solution for North America.

Biodiesel runs into the exact same problems as ethanol, namely, we just can't make enough of it. Yeah, biodiesel from algae would solve a lot of that, but the same holds true for cellulosic ethanol---and we're still years off from practical uses from either of these. A lot of people have expressed concerns about the carbon content of biodiesel as well. If you just look at the emissions just from biodiesel it looks like a big step forward. If, however you consider the carbon usage that comes from processing and growing the base material for biodiesel then you're looking at anywhere from a minor reduction in C02 to what, I believe, George Monbiot called "the most carbon intensive fuel ever developed". Monbiot may be insane, but it hard to ignore all of his arguments.

Either way, it's a bit silly to say "psssshhhh, ethanol....biodiesel is the way to go," when they're facing essentially the same problems.

[Menoz]

It's all hype. The first step should be to reduce the number of cars on the road that get less than 30 miles per gallon. Then we work on tractor-trailers then we find a viable fuel alternative. In my opinion.

[Fammaden]

Originally Posted by Tea on tuesday

Biodiesel runs into the exact same problems as ethanol, namely, we just can't make enough of it. Yeah, biodiesel from algae would solve a lot of that, but the same holds true for cellulosic ethanol---and we're still years off from practical uses from either of these. A lot of people have expressed concerns about the carbon content of biodiesel as well. If you just look at the emissions just from biodiesel it looks like a big step forward. If, however you consider the carbon usage that comes from processing and growing the base material for biodiesel then you're looking at anywhere from a minor reduction in C02 to what, I believe, George Monbiot called "the most carbon intensive fuel ever developed". Monbiot may be insane, but it hard to ignore all of his arguments.

Either way, it's a bit silly to say "psssshhhh, ethanol....biodiesel is the way to go," when they're facing essentially the same problems.

The major difference is that ethanol from corn is much less of an efficient source of fuel than biodiesel from soy, at least for North America where we don't have loads of disposable sugarcane. We use tons of soy in this country just for chicken feed and the waste product oil can be used to make biodiesel. Plus diesel engine passenger cars exist in significant nunbers right now as well as a massive diesel pumping infrastructure and refining capability that just does not exist for ethanol. Additionally, the torque power and fun to drive factor of a diesel engine in a passenger car is highly understated.

I'm not saying biodiesel is a magic bullet, but that if you are conservation and greenhouse gas minded, then biodiesel is a viable option right now. The growing process is already in place in many cases and many government agencies are already pushing biodiesel for many applications in many diverse areas. Diesel autos get insane MPG as well which decreases the sheer amount of fuel needed to run them in addition to being relatively carbon friendly compared to unleaded.

[Fammaden]

Originally Posted by Menoz

It's all hype. The first step should be to reduce the number of cars on the road that get less than 30 miles per gallon. Then we work on tractor-trailers then we find a viable fuel alternative. In my opinion.

And like I keep saying, diesel passenger autos knock 30 MPG into the dust in most cases. They just aren't as readily available in the states. I am more personally into conservation than green concerns myself, and though particulate and CO2 emissions are of concern with diesel autos, I find the dramatically increased fuel consumption efficiency to offset such concerns enough for diesel and biodiesel to be a viable short term and very probably long term solution. Much more so than ethanol is the point.

[Hachima]

Well the farmers will support the politicians that will give them subsidiaries. So crap will be imposed to make it 'economically' beneficial to use. It's a load of crap though. The same thing happened with cane sugar VS High Fructose Corn Syrup.(HFCS)


US regulates imported cane sugar prices so we have to pay more than double the world market price. A while ago it was 10 cents on the world market per pound but companies in the US are forced to pay 21 cents per pound. This made HFCS a better choice, even though cane sugar is cheaper. The US is one of the only countries that use it. It is also not as healthy as cane sugar. It doesn't trigger metabolism the same way cane sugar does and it results in more obesity than an equal amount per calorie of cane sugar. It's not healthy, it costs more to produce, but our nice government gives corn farmers subsidiaries if they produce it. So we are stuck with unhealthy, expensive crap. There was an article released a week ago that goes over this issue Why Congress Should Repeal Sugar Subsidy Candy companies have even moved to countries like Canada to produce candy because they can buy sugar cheaply. There are no regulations there on the amount of cane sugar that can be imported per year.

# Chicago, once the nation's candy manufacturing capital, has lost thousands of jobs. In 2004, candy maker Fannie May closed its Chicago factory and Brach's moved its Chicago candy production to Mexico.
# Michigan took a hit in 2002, when Kraft moved its 600–worker LifeSavers factory to Canada in search of low–cost sugar.
# Hershey Foods closed plants in Pennsylvania, Colorado and California and relocated them to Canada as well.

I could go on and on about problems of HFCS vs cane sugar but I'll stop for now. The thing is this is the same type of crap that will go on with ethanol vs gasoline. They will force us to use it even though it's less efficient and costs more to produce because of good ol' boy politics with the farmers.

I can care less if gas prices go up also. I've made enough money in just the last few months off investments in oil companies to pay for gas for the next twenty years... keep rising those prices =)

You know what they should do, grow all that millions of tons of food and feed some poor countries that have starving people. No... Let's grow enough food to feed the world who knows how many times over but smash it down and burn it!

[Tea on tuesday]

Originally Posted by Fammaden

The major difference is that ethanol from corn is much less of an efficient source of fuel than biodiesel from soy, at least for North America where we don't have loads of disposable sugarcane. We use tons of soy in this country just for chicken feed and the waste product oil can be used to make biodiesel. Plus diesel engine passenger cars exist in significant nunbers right now as well as a massive diesel pumping infrastructure and refining capability that just does not exist for ethanol. Additionally, the torque power and fun to drive factor of a diesel engine in a passenger car is highly understated.

While it's true that soy is more efficient it also produces a lower yield per acre than corn. We can run over the numbers if you want. 1 acre of corn yields roughly 300 gallons of ethanol. Unfortunately it takes about 140 gallons of petrochemicals either through fertilizer or miscellaneous energy consumption during processing to grow that one acre of corn. We can roughly convert the petrochemical usage into ethanol usage by multiplying by 1.5. So, we get a net gain of ~90 gallons of ethanol (a 1.42 EROEI, which is a bit on the high end for corn ethanol, but definitely within reason---although this number can go higher or lower depending on how crazy you want to get). An acre of soybeans on the other hand will produce about 50 gallons of pure soybean oil. It's been a bit since I've had to search for the numbers, but as I recall, we need about 16 gallons of gasoline equivalent to grow that soy. So we wind up with a net gain of 1.5*(50-16)=51 ethanol gallons equivalent (and that's a reasonably high EROEI there, but not out of line.) So, it's certainly more efficient, but it produces even less energy per acre than corn ethanol---which is my whole point. We just can't realistically replace the absolutely staggering amount of gasoline we consume (something like 150 billion gallons a year) much less the tremendous amount of crude and semi being used in other applications.

I'm not disagreeing that biodiesel is a better energy source than corn ethanol, but this isn't a problem of efficiencies---it's a problem of scales.

[Divinefactor]

There are alot more facts about biodeisel and ethanol that most people gloss over or dont realize.

The grain used to produce both ethanol and biodeisel can be used after fermentation to produce bread. Not great tasting bread... but bread none the less for around 10 cents a loaf (this could be stockpiled in case of disaster or given to needy countries).

The massive carbon release that some people spout off about isnt as straightforward as they would like to make you think. But going into that is just a huge can of worms.

As for the infrastructure for using ethanol for fuel... California already uses close to a 12% ethanol mix in its gasoline, places in the midwest (north dakota etc) have E85 pumping stations.

I currently work in a lab thats doing research on this topic (mainly biodeisel) and we a pilot scale fermentor pumping out yeast and algae thats 50% oil by mass. So its getting pretty close to where it needs to be to replace corn for ethanol/biodeisel use AND the algae we are using grows off the CO2 and in initial tests seems to remove more carbon from the atmosphere than it emits from burning.

As for the prices of ethanol. Last I checked in california, ethanol was 3.17 a gallon. Last I checked for regular unleaded... 3.43. Although I am in hawaii and summer may have increased gas prices in LA even more.

In my opinion, they should just charge 5+dollars a gallon. If people dont want to be fuel conscious they can pay for it.

edit: forgot some prices

[Torrid]

I could go on and on about problems of HFCS vs cane sugar but I'll stop for now.

I heard some guy who runs a soda pop store in California (this store sells all kinds of exotic soft drinks and the like) saying that HFCS made drinks taste worse than sugar too. Since they replaced sugar in the 80s and I was too young to remember, I've been wondering what they tasted like in the old days.

Also read an article in Wired (I think it was) that you use as much oil farming corn for ethanol as you would putting it into your car. Small wonder oil companies are jumping on the corn bandwagon. This same article said that some sort of grass yielded better returns.

Considering that all of this shit is easily measured, I don't see how there is so much debate and confusion on which alternatives are the best. I suppose we have greed to thank for this mess once again.

[Fammaden]

Originally Posted by Tea on tuesday

We just can't realistically replace the absolutely staggering amount of gasoline we consume (something like 150 billion gallons a year) much less the tremendous amount of crude and semi being used in other applications.

I'm not disagreeing that biodiesel is a better energy source than corn ethanol, but this isn't a problem of efficiencies---it's a problem of scales.

I don't expect to replace the entire fuel sources with anything anyway. As the other guy above me said, I am a significant stock holder in Exxon-Mobil, so I shouldn't really care. I do support conservation though, and all things considered, diesel is a more efficient option considering fuel usage per engine and potential use of supplemental boutique green fuel than ethanol.