Yes, I’ve heard the reasons not to use E85. It’s expensive and subsidized. It has less “bang for the buck”. You need to buy a car that uses it. Using it may cause more carbon to be emitted into the atmosphere.
However, my thinking is that the world is better off by stretching the dwindling supply of non-renewable fossil fuels by mixing it with renewable Ethanol. Would widespread adoption of E85 make any meaningful difference here?
As E-85 is used more, it will become more available, and thus used even more. As it is used more and more ethanol is sold, more and better methods of creating ethanol will be developed. Eventually we stand a very good chance that the process will have increasing amounts of net benefits for the US.
As it stands now, the only benefit for ethanol is that it substitutes coal/natural gas consumption for oil consumption. This may or may not be attractive to you. But with advances in cellulose derived ethanol already occurring, I am hopeful that if we build the infrastructure to drive the demand we will eventually have a far more politically stable fuel source. So as I see it the benefit to using E-85 is just to get us ready for the future.
This is also the only benefit of hydrogen powered cars, isn’t it?
Powering cars on hydrogen is a great idea, but you have to get the hydrogen from somewhere; either cracking it out of fossil fuels, or by cracking water (process powered by fossil fuels, OK, maybe solar or some renewable source).
In the latter case (the non-fossil-fuel one), the available chemical energy from burning the hydrogen is going to be less than the amount of energy used to produce it, so hydrogen would just be a method of transferring energy; if it can be produced cleanly, or if it can be produced in bulk in a dirty way that is still more efficient than individual petroleum engines in cars, then it’s an improvement, otherwise not.
Ethanol doesn’t have to be the same; if it’s produced from sugar cane, wood pulp or corn stalks, then it’s carbon-neutral to burn, because the carbon it releases has been absorbed from the environment within recent history, and growing more crops to convert to fuel absorbs more carbon (albeit only to be released again). There’s also no particular reason (at least in terms of the laws of thermodynamics) why it would take more energy input (in terms of fossil fuels, etc) to harvest the crops and to produce ethanol than would be available from burning it; the energy isn’t coming from the process of harvesting or production, it’s coming from the sun, via photosynthesis.
For the most part, yes. Mangeout covered that pretty well. The other advantage of hydrogen would be that the mobile emissions sources (the cars) would be less polluting in that the fuel cells would give off only water vapor rather than CO2, NOx, etc. Currently, the initial burning or cracking of fossil fuels to create the H would release these pollutants, but would be in large central plants which are easier to regulate. (Easier, not necesarily easy.)
Hmmm. Kind of dissapointing as a debate. Anyone want to throw out some crackpot ideas we can counter?
Ummmmm, the solution to our oil dependence comes up every morning?
Maybe I’m missing something, but my point is that if you’ve got a limited supply, stretching it with unlimited Ethanol is a good thing. Because my understanding is you can’t run 100% Ethanol, you need the 15% fossil fuel to go with it.
So, imagine YOU, personally, have 1500 gallons of gasoline. That’s it… you burn it, it’s gone and no more. Wouldn’t you rather cut it with 8500 gallons of Ethanol?
I never seem to see this point bandied about, but I wonder if it’s still a valid argument.
I think it is valid, but we need to get the energy to produce the ethanol from a renewable resource to really make the system work.
Are we prepared to build some new nuclear power plants and expand incentives for developing solar panels at the same time? I hope so.
I’m going to shamelessly shill my thread as a tie-in to yours.
Should we take hope that President Bush is at least addressing renewable energy?
Jim
You’re right about NOX, etc. But for CO2, the amount released is exactly the same as the amount used during its manufacturing (i.e. removed from the atmosphere as the plant grew). So it shouldn’t contribute to global warming any more than hydrogen.