I did acknowledge that it was a pedantic point, but if you post on a board with the strapline “Fighting ignorance since 19-whatever” then pedantry comes with the territory. No offence was intended.
So why is Congress subsiding an idea (corn-produced ethanol) which amounts to a net increase in oil imports? When the bad economics of these ethanol plants becomes apparent, they will be shut down, and the capital investment become worthless.
We’d be better off paying people to drive less.
Until a genuinely rapid recharge option is available, period, maybe the logical places for recharging stations aren’t gas stations, but places where people tend to park awhile anyway: offices, shopping malls, motels, and the like.
I could see, sometime in the future, pulling my electric car into a parking space in the parking garage at the office, plugging up my car to the metered outlet, putting my ID in the slot, and having the cost of the electricity deducted from my paycheck.
Like kunilou says, there’s a 100 year old infrastructure already in place to support easily storable liquids that are easily convertible into energy. But there’s also a similarly venerable infrastructure sending electricity (generated from such liquids, or coal, or wind, or whatever) over wires to practically everywhere. Seems like that could be easily adapted to put electric car recharging facilities wherever they’d be handy and cost-effective.
Good points except that most of those locations will be on days of short enough communting that recharges won’t be needed … charge once a day overnight at home at off-peak hours and you are good for more than one day of typical commuting. Okay, the motel option makes a lot of sense. It’s the cross country trip that does most of us in. The rest stops need recharge options or its a no-go.
Congress isn’t subsidizing an idea which amounts to a net increase in oil imports. Congress is subsidizing an idea which a dude at a University, contrary to most other research done on the matter, says will amount to a net increase in oil imports.
The distinction is pretty important. If the majority of experts are right, ethanol will produce more energy than what is required to create it, and the net oil usage for the whole system will be zero.
Buckminster Fuller came to the same conclusion about paying people not to drive (or at least, not to consume petroleum). He used the perspective of what it would cost to replace the petroleum, starting from biological feedstocks.
On the issue of the negative energy output of corn-based ethanol, here is a quote from the World Watch website:
(my emphasis)
Corn-based ethanol is at the bottom of the list, but it’s still a net benefit relative to CO2 emissions. I’ve seen a nice plot of the relative GHG reduction potential of various transportation energy sources, but can’t seem to find it. That also shows corn-based ethanol with a net positive impact.
My usual points:
- Using food to make fuel is an obscenity.
- I will consider the electric car viable when I can can drive the 30 miles (48km) between my house and my job in -10F (-23C) temperatures without stopping twice to recharge the batteries.
- What about the Stirling engine? Use a spent nuclear fuel rod or Plutonium from a Russkie nuke as your heat source and you’ve killed two birds with one stone. Possibly more, in the event of an accident.
They aren’t using food to make fuel.
The market for corn for all human food and animal feed purposes has stayed pretty level at about 7.5 billion bushels for the last 10 years.
Farmers were growing 7.5 billion bushels 20 years ago. If there’s decent weather this summer, the corn harvest could come in at somewhere around 12 billion bushels.
The corn that’s going to ethanol is surplus.
Some fact checking reveals that you are a bit off. The numbers. Years 2002 to 2006 corn production ranged up and down from 8.967 billion(2002) to 11.807 billion tops (2004). In 2007 estimates are for production of 12.460 billion, up yes, but with stocks down from a peak of over 2.1 billion in 2005 to under 1 billion. Ethanol production has gone from taking under 1 billion bushels of corn to over 3.4 billion bushels estimated for 2007.
Is further increased corn production to support more ethanol production sustainable? Some worry that it may not be.
Your facts are just wrong. Under conservative predictions food supplies would be diverted, US food prices dramatically increased, and less US agricultural product available for export to the rest of the world. Interestingly, this analysis is less than sanguine about cellulosic production: growing corn, if possible, will still be more profitable and getting corn stover to the processing plant would b a transportation nightmare (they say).
I think the OP meant to say “wherefore”.
Wherefore thou does not read a thread before thou posts a statement that verily adds nothing to the discussion?
Oops. Sorry. :smack:
Already, ethanol production has contributed to sharply higher prices for tortillas in Mexico.
Therefore, I refuse to back down from my position that, in a world in which many people are hungy, it is obscene to use a highly portable and, if prepared correctly, highly nutritious foodstuff to make a gasoline substitute.
In fact, there’s no divergence between the numbers I’ve cited and the numbers you’ve cited. Demand for food and feed has remained relatively stable, and production has exceeded demand. Yes, ending stocks have declined, but ending stocks are what’s leftover after accounting for **all ** use, including exports. If production comes anywhere near projections this year, even with the expansion in ethanol production, we’ll end up with more corn than we started with.
I don’t know which “major new study” you’re citing, but this one outlines a variety of different scenarios. The one which shows food supplies would be diverted, etc. is not “conservative” – it is, in fact, a worst-case scenario based on both a crop failure AND a federal mandate that ethanol production must increase. It’s a good academic scenario, but it’s no more real-world than a best-case, blue sky study.
dropzone with regard to the price of Mexican tortillas, you might want to read this exchange. It ain’t that simple.
And I’ll repeat this. Ethanol is made from #2 grade yellow corn, which is primarily used as livestock feed. Food grade corn sells at a higher price than #2 corn. No farmer is going to divert his food-grade corn production into #2 corn, since he can get more for food corn anyway.
And just to give some perspective on prices here, at $4 a bushel, a pound of corn costs 7 cents.
Hmm kunilou, you claimed that production has been stable around 7.5 billion bushels and it has really flippped around but consistently above that for the last six years at least. That’s saying the same thing?
The basic of what you don’t seem to get is that feed costing more raises food prices. Corn is bought as food demand for that is relatively inelastic, but it costs more. The increased demand increased prices which drives more production by devoting more acrage to corn, but a the expense of acrage to other crops, raising those prices as those supplies diminish.
Most relevant to the premise of the op, there isn’t enough acrage to produce enough ethanol to meet any major portion of the car fuel demand of this country and attempting to do so will have significant ripple effects. Using biomass, even cellulosic biomass, to produce ethanol which is then used to produce energy to power inherently inefficient ICE vehicles is not going to be a big part of the fix. Too many inefficient multpliers. Biomass conversion directly into electrical energy and distribution into the inherently more efficient electrical engines can get much more energy out of the same biomass with much less carbon production. And it allows for any variety of renewable and non-renewable sources to be used.
Powering cars off of grid derived power for most of their milage is the way to go. And it is close to the day.
DSeid please go back and read my earlier post.
The demand for corn for food and feed has remained pretty stable. The *supply * has varied from year to year, but has been comfortably above the requirements for food and feed. Even when the crop was hit by a drought back in the mid 90’s, the year-end supply (the “surplus”) never dropped below 883 million bushels. Last year, it did drop lower. So this year, there’s more corn being planted.
As for your next point, that more corn will lead to less production of other crops, and also raise prices, you and I are in luck. Just today, the U.S. Department of Agriculture released its World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (warning pdf). The report is 40 pages long, so I’ll summarize some of its key projections for this year:
Wheat - more than expected, but higher prices.
Corn - more than expected, lower prices. More corn to be exported than orginally predicted. (That’s right, despite all the demand for corn for ethanol, not only are prices expected to go down, but there should be more available for export this year.)
Sorghum - more than expected.
Soybeans - here’s where you’re right; production down, prices up. However, it’s projected the U.S. will end up with higher soybean stocks than it started with.
Cotton - production also down, but cotton isn’t used for food or feed.
And of the stuff that’s fed with corn?
Poultry - more chickens, turkey projection is unchanged
Pork - higher production and producers expanding
Beef - estimates will be out July 20
I’m not arguing that biofuels will (or even should) replace oil. After 30 years of making ethanol a national priority, Brazil has only replaced about 20% of its oil use with ethanol.
And I agree with you that the internal combustion engine is not the best way to go in the long-term.
But if the U.S. can augment its petroleum supply by 20% with biofuels, I don’t think that’s anything to dismiss out of hand. Biofuels may only be a transitional step, but the technology is available right now (not “close to the day”), it’s viable and it’s working.
When will you people learn that, given a choice between making a strong statement or one with enough weasel words to provide me an out, I will usually take the latter? 
I’m not a big Ethanol pusher, but I was surprised to learn this week (in a new report just released) that Ethanol has the potential to create more U.S. jobs (by far) than any other sector of renewable energy.
Source: American Solar Energy Society
PDF WARNING
http://www.ases.org/jobs_report.pdf
see p. 18
In the spirit of enlightenment, here’s the latest take on the ethanol question from Salon.com.
What isn’t explained is how Brazilian sugar cane is more environmentally friendly than U.S. corn. Is it cultivation methods? Are Brazilian forests being torched to raise sugarcane?
Sugarcane is a better source of ethanol simply because it produces far more sugar per hectare than grain crops. That means less land is required and far less transportation is required. Even with these advantages it is still not clear whether cane ethanol is a net energy source or an energy sink. It seems impossible that grain ethanol could ever be other than a sink as things stand.