Listening to the radio this morning, I heard yet another report about the economist who claims that ethanol isn’t a viable fuel because it takes more energy to produce than it can provide.
No kidding! That’s true of ALL fuels, as anyone with even the faintest knowledge of thermodynamics knows.
Before you complain that I’m taking his words of out context, that what he meant to say isn’t necessarily what he said, I cannot think of any possible interpretation of this claim that is valid. It takes far more energy to grow, harvest, process, ship, and consume food for human beings than the food itself contains. It takes far more energy to produce a car battery than the car battery can store. It took far more energy to create fossil fuels than they contain, and even more energy to find, extract, process, and deliver them.
Why do people fall for such ludicrous and scientifically uneducated claims? Help me understand, please.
He’s saying that with current best practise, it takes more HUMAN energy to produce ethanol. ie, mainly oil. Thus, for every gallon of ethanol you put in your car, we burned up 1.2 gallons of oil to farm it, process it, ship it etc. So why not just put oil in your car.
Of course, I am neither adovcating or disagreeing with his position, but it isn’t lucridious.
People want to feel safe. Part of feeling safe is believing, since we don’t and can’t know everything, we rely on those who know more than us. Faith (denial) is one of our best/most functional defense mechanisms, it allows us to do things like drive to work each day, fully knowing that there’s a good chance of death on the freeway.
Also, it’s a lot of friggin work with little reward to do the necessary research for fully understanding what a guy said on the radio. Not being directly involved in the production of ethanol or gas, most people need only concern themselves with the price at the pump and not much beyond, keeping their minds clear of clutter so that they can do things like play with their children.
Even if it actually takes more than a gallon of oil to produce the energy-equivalent amount of ethanol, it doesn’t follow that ethanol shouldn’t be used to drive cars, just as the necessity of expending more energy constructing and charging a car battery than the battery can supply over its lifetime isn’t wrong.
Huh? The saving of fossil fuels is the only reason ethanol is advocated, right? So if it’s shown that every gallon of ethanol you use actually took more than a gallon of fossil fuel to produce, that would seem to be a pretty effective argument.
IIRC, the big selling point of ethanol is that it reduces our dependence on fossil fuels and thus the attendant problems they cause – pollution, dependence on other countries, etc, etc. If ethanol production doesn’t actually reduce the amount of fossil fuels in use, then those benefits are illusory – their use just shifts from consumers (e.g., cars etc) to ethanol production facilities.
Because the oil doesn’t magicaly leap out of the ground and into my gas tank. I need to know how many gallons of oil it takes to pump, process, ship etc the oil as well. In fact, it’s recursive, too, because I can use ethanol to power the vehicle that ships the ethanol, and to power the generator that processes the ethanol.
I don’t know enough to make the claim that ethanol is or is not viable, but the info you provided alone is not enough to make a decision.
Basically the ethanol producer and the gas station both get their fuel from a distributor, so up to that point they’ve both consumed the same amount of energy/oil. The question is will the ethanol plant produce a surplus of energy from a fixed volume of oil/gas. I’m betting no.
Now if you can get ethanol production out of the oil loop it is currently in (fueling combines, processing plant matter, fertilizing the crops) then it’s possible that it could be more efficient than using oil straight out. As far as I know that situation is not what’s currently out there.
Bingo. Obviously, in some sense the energy we expend on producing fossil fuels is less than the total energy we derive from it – otherwise our civilization would simply grind to a halt.
Somehow I find it hard to believe that, with our extremely efficient methods of farming, we can’t actually turn corn into alcohol sufficiently effectively to use it as fuel. Not impossible, but difficult.
That’s what I got out of it as well. If the point is to reduce consumption of fossil fuels, and the manufacture of ethanol uses more fossil fuel vs. end product, why would you want to keep making ethanol. You can use less fossil fuel by just burning it firsthand in your engine.
I did a little caclulation recently based on the amount of ethanol needed to replace our consumption of fossil fuels. Then I checked it with production of crops. Ethanol came up very short and shy, that did not account for distribution problems.
Essentially, we’d drive ourselves to starvation. Even if we doubled or tripled our crop output, prices of grain would skyrocket.
What I don’t understand is why so many people think they know better than the experts do, that their “common sense” and intuition is somehow superior to the findings of people whose job is to find out these things. Of course you need to know how to use those experts; when they don’t seem to agree on a single conclusion, as is the case for the ethanol question, we should understand that to be an open case and we should not believe either side.
We’ve become a very specialized society where typically a person is not encouraged to be capable in various areas. This breeding of specialization and the emerging experts, or technocrats, perpetuates this by using language shorthands that those outside of their respective fields likely do not understand.
The complexity of various issues is such that when it is explained it likely isn’t done well and the person receiving the explanation may not grasp the subtleties the speaker assumes to be common knowledge.
Now since both have about the same density, the gasoline provides for a smaller tank, which leads to a lighter vehicle which means less energy to move it.
When he said “viable”, I think he meant economically viable, which it is not without subsidies. Depending on the current prices of corn and gasoline, it can cost more to produce ethanol than the cost of gasoline at the pump. Gas stations will buy the less expensive pure gasoline. They buy ethanol because the subsidies make it competitive with gasoline.
The high cost of ethanol is due to the difficulty of the water/alcohol separation, which requires a large amount of energy (sometimes as much as is produced in the alcohol, as I address in the OP’s related thread in GQ), plus the high cost of capital (this distillation requires a BIG distillation column, plus a means of breaking the azeotrope).
