Slashdot Mirror
Ethanol More Trouble Than It's Worth?
call -151 writes "Yahoo reports this story by researchers from Cornell and Berkeley who show what a number of people had suspected- it takes significantly more energy (at least 29%) more energy to produce ethanol than it yields. Since ethanol production plants don't use ethanol themselves for their own energy needs (with presumably negible delivery costs) this has been widely suspected but not so bluntly stated: "Ethanol production in the United States does not benefit the nation's energy security, its agriculture, the economy, or the environment." Ethanol producers dispute the study, predictably, which deducts the multi-billion US dollar subsidy. It's not clear how this compares with this earlier Union of Concerned Scientists article that claims that the yield from corn kernels is net 50% positive- and the UCS is usually quite unbiased on these things."
riposte!
s hdot.org
http://www.google.com/search?q=ethanol+site%3Asla
rooooar
Wholesale or retail?
;)
I don't know about you, but I don't buy fuel for my car by the tanker truck.
$1.80/gal
Gasoline is somewhere around 65$/barrel right now, correct? A barrel is 42 gallons, so wholesale gasoline is $1.55/gal.
the lowering of the dollar value
Oil is traded in US dollars. The weak dollar raises oil prices and cheapens ethanol by comparison.
Mind you, I *want* to see us move more to ethanol. The prices just aren't there yet. They keep getting closer, though, so expect to see more ethanol at the pumps in the future. Equatorial countries can be expected to push even more for ethanol production, as they can make it with sugarcane (more efficient than corn).
Point of interest. Offering to shoot us might not work so well as an incentive as you might imagine.
So? Fuel ethanol is not using the average bushel of corn, it's using the marginal bushel
So? Farmland in the US has remained relatively fixed in the past several decades, and as a consequence, so has the percentage of land that needs to be irrigated, while production of corn has gone up. Corn production increases have far outrun what we use to produce ethanol.
Unfortunately, that's accurate now. Several US nitrate plants have shut down due to the N. American natural gas shortage, and the US is now a net importer of nitrate fertilizer (ammonium nitrate travels better than LNG).
Nitrates are the heaviest energy-user, and we import about half of our nitrates, so about a 50/50 balance would seem to be in order at a first glance. However, that is unfair. We import the most fertilizers from Canada, another first-world nation. Several prosperous middle eastern nations, such as Qatar and Kuwait, produce large amounts for us, as does the Netherlands. The only major non-first-world exporters are Trinidad and Tobago, and Russia, and they're hardly the "world average". The more inefficient areas in the world are in south and east asia, and Africa.
Without the demand due to fuel ethanol, the least efficient of those overseas plants might well shut down; the marginal impact is much worse than the average impact
As far as nitrate production goes, they're going to do *something* with their natural gas. If they have a nitrate plant, they're going to operate until local supplies of gas run low, unless there's a dramatic reversal in prices. You don't build a fertilizer plant and then decide that you'd rather cart your gas away in LNG tankers.
The folks at CalCars [calcars.org] are doing just that. Have you looked at the Prius+? [calcars.org]
I said *your* car. Does *your* car burn ag waste? 99.9% of cars out there don't. BBL.
Point of interest. Offering to shoot us might not work so well as an incentive as you might imagine.