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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."
The real question is, how much energy production do you get back out of pork?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Just use ethanol to fuel the production of the ethanol! I guess those researchers didn't go to community college.
No matter what independant researchers say, Ethonal is not going away any time soon. Why? I can explain in three letters:
A.
D.
M.
When the corporation who puts out the vast majority of ethanol-producing corn has members of both parties in their pocket, legislators are going to continue to preach the advantages of "clean, renewable" corn-based fuel.
(Also, they would prefer that you pay no attention to the fact that Ethanol produces less CO2, but more of other gasses, such as O3. We've got an environment to save, dammit! How dare you question the advantages of A.D.M.'s Ethanol!!!)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Convenience is. You can use clean energy to produce the ethanol, such has hydro-electrics or nuclear power but it's much harder to use it directly in a car. You can use ethanol in your car though. So throwing money in developping ethanol is not pointless because a) research will make the efficiency ratio increase b) ethanol is a convinient way to store energy for vehicles
\u262D = \u5350
It depends how and from what you make your ethanol. And how you farm your feedstock of course...
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Brazil does just fine with it's sugarcane:
http://www.eroei.com/articles/16_jun_05_brazil_fu
Surely you jest, man. Ethanol is most certainly a worthwhile endeavor. How else would ulgy people...
Oh. You mean Ethanol energy production. Yes. Of course.
Plastic Rabbit, New Gizmo?
Gasoline takes more energy to produce than you can get from it. That energy just came from the sun a million (?) years ago. Gasoline is a means by which we can transfer solar energy to our cars without sail-ssized solar panels.
Consider ethanol as a means to store energy from nuclear, solar, wind, tidal, hydro or other clean energy sources and transport it to your auto's engine.
I'd like to see ethanol compared to chemical batteries, fuel cells or others on an basis of efficency & cost.
Yeah, producing ethanol from corn does produce more energy...
However, growing other plant materials (from waste or whatever) is much more efficent.
Ethanol will work... just not from corn.
Did anybody think the transition would be easy?
Ok, perhaps "hydrogen energy" has some meaning like "solar/wind energy used to produce hydrogen", but certainly not in the context above ("solar, wind and hydrogen energy").
To turn my finger nails into ethanol.... warm weather perennial grass found in the Great Plains and eastern North America United States, it takes 45 percent more energy and for wood, 57 percent. It takes 27 percent more energy to turn soybeans into biodiesel fuel and more than double the energy produced is needed to do the same to sunflower plants, the study found. But what about sugar beat, sugar came, sweet corn and grapes (given corn and grapes will start to ferment naturally)
The issue over how efficiently we can produce ethanol is not important, it's that we start using it thats important. Even petrolium wasn't efficient to produce when we started with cars, and now look at the plants that make it.
The sooner we start using a fuel we can grow, even if it's not efficient, the sooner our dependance on fossil fuels will end.
Most people usually don't figure the cost of keeping an extra aircraft carrier-centered battle group around to guard Mideast shipping lanes and a couple of ill-planned invasions here and there into "oil subsidies", but if they did, I'd bet you find that the cash devoted to ethanol isn't that much at all.
As long as a third of our budget is military and a chief focus of the military is to keep the oil flowing, it makes sense to pursue other energy options.
Umm... beer?
To be blunt, when I drink beer on a Friday evening, the amount of energy that comes out is waay more than goes in. As for fusion reactors and hydrogen/sodium tomfoolery? They have no place in my nights out thanks very much!
Wow! I sure am glad my great province of Ontario decided to get rid of all the coal plants in favor of ethanol plants! Otherwise we might not be able to pay more taxes and have less energy! Good ol' Ontario politicians.
TFA doesn't tell us who paid for the research.
Now, with this in mind, tell me why ethanol is needed?
Because it's a huge, politically correct opportunity to subsidize voters in agro states, and to buy off the eco-crazies with something that sounds emotionally warm and fuzzy. It's not about fuel, it's about throwing a bone, no matter how pointless, to the sustainablites while real research into actual solutions is conducted on other fronts (say, in France, believe it or not).
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The whole point of ethanol is that there are far better ways of producing fuel-use ethanol than corn fermentation, which has been debated for years in terms of its energy efficiency.
The enthusiasm for ethanol by real scientists is from the very promising means for producing ethanol from cellulose-based feedstocks, in other words from cheap plentiful surplus materials. While this wasn't cost-effective as an energy alternative when gas cost 80 cents a gallon, at 2.25-2.50 a gallon, cellulosic ethanol is quite competitive on a dollar-per-mile basis, and it can extract energy from cheap, easy to grow feedstocks or waste-cellulose material that would otherwise end up in municipal garbage dumps.
Oh wait...is this one of those 1 in 3 studies that's later shown to be false?
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
hell, i could have told you that this morning.
"no officer, i can't be hungover. i'm still drunk."
How do you pronounce negible?
43 - For those who require slightly more than the answer to life, the universe and everything.
These guys say they have a production facilities with uses no outside energy. http://www.iogen.ca/
Ethanol as motor fuel has issues other than negative energy production. Its cold-start properties leave a bit to be desires and for people like me who live in colder climates it's a real problem.
;-)
You've got problems with hydrogen as well. Right now 95% of the hydrogen extracted in the US is done from natural gas. Extracting hydrogen from water requires a heck of a lot of electricity, a lot of which is generated from fossil fuels.
I hear people touting hybrid cars and have tried many times to explain that the energy in a gallon of gasoline is more efficiently used to drive the wheels than charge batteries and that it's impossible for regenerative braking to reclaim all the energy required to get the vehicle up to the speed you deccelerated from. You'd think I was talking to a wall sometimes
I think more research needs to be done, but in the US I believe the most significant positive impact to our environment in the short term would be to increase subsidies to public transportation and to focus on that infrastructure while we get technology to catch up with energy demand.
The solutions are out there, but IM frequently less than HO we haven't found them yet.
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
...but we are pretty obviously headed straight towards a new nuclear age. That doesn't mean I like nuclear, or that this is a good thing...
Ethanol and other biofuels don't seem to really hold up to cost-benefit analysis, as this article (and many others) suggests- Even if this article is exaggerated, the truth is still on the wall that it can't compare to nuclear.
Oil will run low pretty soon, coal, air and wind power can't take up the slack... BAMM! New nuclear age.
Does anyone really have reasonable prediction that doesn't include at least 80% of all power being nuclear in 50 years? I can't find one...
Ethonal only has the 60% of the energy by volume as does gasoline. I definately notice the lower mileage in winter - about 10% on a 15% mix. And I still have to pay full price for this inferior product.
I only see ethanol being used and developed as long as gasoline powered cars are dominant. If we see a major switch to alternative energy sources like electric or hydrogen then I think ethanol will go the way of the dodo bird. It seems like more of a patch solution than an alternative solution.
Voice your opinion!
So, we're 29% away from making Ethanol a paying proposition, from the sounds of it. Great, so let's push it, get some economies of scale, and then for say a 25% or even 20% premium, we can get away from dependance on foreign oil. Let's start giving our money to the USA's farmers, instead of to people in parts of the world where they want to kill us.
I'd rather see the US government subsidise ethanol production, than to have that money spent to temporarily have certain countries pretend they're our friends.
Ethanol is a portable source of stored energy. The advantage is that you can take a non-portable source - hydroelectric, coal, nuclear, solar, etc. and convert it to a form that you can run a vehicle from. Furthermore, you can use existing distribution channels (gas trucks, pipelines, gas stations) to deliver it. And best of all, it can reduce dependence on mid-east oil. Given that, the fact that production is somewhat inefficient is not relevant.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Weve got sound based fusion reactors nearing break-even
Link? Last I heard, sonofusion was nowhere near being energy positive. For that matter, there is still some question about whether it's actually fusion or not.
we have what could be an easy way to generate hydrogen from water using sodium.
Which in no way detracts from the idea of using Ethanol.
Hydrogen is really great stuff. It's simple to make, relatively inexpensive, and reasonably safe. The problem is that it's also difficult to store, it's far more volatile than gasoline, it requires entirely new cars, and there needs to be an infrastructure to support it.
With ethanol we can leverage our existing ethanol infrastructure (part of which is already used for gasoline blends), convert our existing vehicles, and use our existing fill stations. All that's required is for farmers to farm *more*. Not necessarily a bad thing for our economy.
The only reason why a switch to ethanol hasn't happened yet is that there is a constant argument over the issue of ethanol taking more energy to farm than it ever produces. Some studies say that it's a losing game (in which case it's useless) others say that we passed the energy positive stage a long time ago. Until we can get a general consensus on this, the technology isn't going anywhere.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
AND we have what could be an easy way to generate hydrogen from water using sodium. Now, with this in mind, tell me why ethanol is needed?
Because hydrogen isn't a practical energy carrier. Even at tremendous pressures (like 500 atmospheres) it doesn't even come close to the gravimetric or volumetric energy density of gasoline.
Ethanol has about 2/3rds the volumetric energy density of gasoline. This is worth while over hydrogen, even if the stuff takes more energy to make than it yields. Just think of the energy required to compress hydrogen to 10kpsi. One might joke about running an automobile on this pressure alone.
The bottom line is that energy input versus output will be moot once everyone realizes that we'll need nuclear to be sustainable. We just need a good, dense energy carrier.
FWIW, hydrides have become the hydrogen carrier of choice in nickel metal hydride batteries because you don't need tremendously high pressures to get good volumetric density. But to put it in perspective, they're still only carrying about 2 percent hydrogen by weight. Some day, a nanotech breakthrough may make it possible to increase that by an order of magnatude. When this happens, we'll have electric cars that you'll take in after a few thousand miles to get the battery changed.
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This article brought to you by your friendly Oilcompany-sponsored government.
You can only grow so much fuel before the ground has all its minerals sucked out, unless you fertilize it. Guess where most fertiliaer comes from? Natural gas. And of course all those plants are protected by petroleum based pesticides. Ethanol doesn't bring it.
The only thing that sounds remotely plausible to me is Hydrogen as a way to transport and store energy, and fusion to create it. Of course, that doesn't solve the need for pesticides and fertilizer to grow food.
Using sodium? Well I'm glad that you were able to watch at least one demonstration in chemistry. Sodium is an extraordinarily reactive metal that is *never* found in its natural state and, furthermore, is difficult to process by virtue of its high electropositivity (as with all akali/alkaline earth metals). The way to extract hydrogen from water is through electrolysis
and furthermore the extraction takes energy to perform. Hydrogen is a potential energy carrying medium, not a net source of energy. And high hydrogen density requires storing it in some sort of organic compound (like methanol) because metals tend to become brittle when large amounts of hydrogen pass through them (hence limiting its compressibility). Please don't allege the possibility of easy through sodium or some other equally absurd magic bullet lest we be unable to persuade people of the actual merits of its use.
Ethanol strikes me as a reasonable way to store energy generated by other means for use in internal combustion engines. If it costs 50% more to make than the power it gives, then it appears to be around 60-70% efficient as a storage medium. It may be hydrogen is better, I don't know, there are storage issues with hydrogen, in theory.
There are probably better solutions. But there's also no reason to keep all one's eggs in one basket, especially when the people who are most vocal in hyping a particular solution to all mankind's energy needs, the pro-nukers, seem to be a bunch of kooks for the most part, usually promoting technologies that have never been implemented, and assuming that very real issues that affect us today will be solved in twenty years if we just ramp up our use of Nuclear "solutions".
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I'm from an Aggro state, and he's entirely correct...
The whole point of Ethanol is that by using Ethanol, we can use more of the corn produced in the US, therby having to export less. Also, by using Ethanol, we can import less oil. Even if it takes 29% more energy to produce Ethanol than it returns, What it doesn't say is that a LOT of Ethanol produced in the Aggro states run on power grids that get most of their power from dams/windmills.
We support the Agriculture by buying up all of the left-over crop of corn/soy from last year, we make it into a fuel to dilute the gas we import from the Middle East... Ethanol is much more valuable than left over corn/soy... and without it, small farmers in the midwest would go bankrupt...
It's like saying that if your computer doesn't boot up all the way, you throw it out instead of fixing it. It takes time to get things working properly.
It's like Solar, efficiency keeps getting better and better, prices keep getting lower and lower. Is it worth it? Not yet. In the future? Possibly. Solar won't produce a whole lot of energy, but with the lowered energy needs from those energy saving lights and other sustainable housing features(tubular skylights for example), it may very well be a possibility.
So it doesn't do good right away is no reason to dismiss it outright.
Slashdot has covered this before and I will repost my comment from back then:
While production of ethanol can be inefficient rarely does it result in a net energy loss. Several different studies show anywhere from a 38% net gain in energy to over 100% depending on methods use. The generally cited claim of a net energy loss from producing ethanol all seem to come from only one paper written by David Pimental [the author of the paper quoted in this article]. To support his claims he seems to have taken a worst pratices view for every step in the production process, a realworld combination found in less than 5% of current ethanol production. The more comphrensive studies I've been able to find show a slight, albeit not stellar, net gain in energy. The most recent (2002) by Michigan State shows a net gain of 0.56 MJ/MJ of input for corn based ethanol production. If one looks at Cellulose based ethonal production, studies show almost a 2.5 net energy gain and it is easier on the environment since it requires less maintenance and fewer fertilizers.
For reference this site has some good links, including a rebuttal of the Pimental paper (as well as showing the Pimental article).
www.econet.sk.ca/pages/issues/ethanolinfone tenergybalance.htm
I don't think the article could say less with more works if it tried. It is supposed to be about Ethanol but it slips in this one line about biodiesel "It takes 27 percent more energy to turn soybeans into biodiesel fuel". huh? Lets try to be a little consistent here.
For actual useful information on bio-diesel take a look at the wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel
For information on why oil replacement fuels are going to become very important to mainstream America and not just tree huggin' greenies you should parous the forums over at http://www.peakoil.com/
Why ethanol? (basically the same alcohol from the drinks). I thought that it is methanol that should be cheaper and more vehicle-efficiency-friendly. After all ChampCars (and soon IRL) sportcars, for example, are run on methanol. I don't know a lot about this but maybe someone can post something insightful?
Corn syrup is an inferior product but it can be had cheaply in the USA because of the massive subsidies paid to ADM.
Have a Coke anywhere else in the world and it will taste good. Coke in the USA is undrinkable unless you can buy Passover Coke (once a year in certain markets) or Mexican Coke (in a glass bottle, yum) both of which have real sugar.
Also note that you can get REAL Dr Pepper from www.dublindrpepper.com
Lasers Controlled Games!
First, did anybody ever said that building chemical batteries consumed less energy than it produced? I don't think so! But they are still the second most used portable energy source (if you consider petroleum fuel the first)
Whats interesting about ethanol, is that you can bring it with you, use it in your car, lawn mower, or wathever. Can you use corn in your car directly? Nope.
Its sure that wind and sun are more efficent. I mean, we don't have to spend energy to use them. But is it reallly cost-effective? I don't think we could use cars with Biiig Wind Turbine on top of them to work. Or 20 feets wide solar-sails either.
Why couldn't you use a nuclear power plant (or solar/sun!!) to transform corn into ethanol? Isn't it the whole point?
I wouldn't mind you in my head, if you weren't so clearly mad -Lews Therin Telamon
Seriously? That production of a fuel requires more energy than it requires? Surely eveyone must by now have at least heard of the second law of thermodynamics?
If it were possible to produce a substance using less energy than it produces in an exothermic reaction (e.g. combustion), then well done, you've just built a perpetual motion machine.
So what the hell does the claim "Ethanol production in the United States does not benefit the nation's energy security, its agriculture, the economy, or the environment" mean? That we must stop all research into alternative fuels and continue to all our money to Dubya's Texan oilfields?
I think not. I'd rather have a solar or nuclear power station producing portable electricity. Oh well, only ten more years until Mr Fusion
Here's an idea - if the company that manufactures it really believes it's a viable product, let them pay for the research. Why should my tax dollars be wasted on this useless product?
But, hey, don't take my word for it. Look here : http://www.taxpayer.net/energy/ethanol.htm
Why would on earth would we care about clean coal.
We just upped the sulphur limit not too long ago. It doesn't work out that we will now see "extra" crap coal, but rather coal production mixes those that don't meet the requirements with those that do to produce something just marginally good enough to use. (At least good enough for most, but there are many industries that ask for premium grade coal)
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
According to the very active Biodiesel forum at TDIClub.com, this study isn't worth the electrons you're viewing it with. One poster notes, "This Cornell fellow brings this up about once a year. Do a search on this site and see the FUD."
I run Biodiesel in my New Beetle TDI engine when I can, so I'm biased, but I agree with my fellow TDI'ers. When the study says "It takes 27 percent more energy to turn soybeans into biodiesel fuel," there's no comparison being made against the alternative. How much energy does it take to pump crude oil out of the ground? How much energy is burned loading it onto a tanker, and then refining it into useful products?
How much energy will be used to clean up the hazardous chemicals required to turn prehistoric ferns into internal combustion fuel? How many gallons of gasoline were burned in the funeral procession for the 15 workers killed near Houston when a tank of benzene exploded this year? By comparison, you can make Biodiesel in a converted water heater, with lye and methanol (hazardous chemicals, but available at any hardware store).
And I won't even touch the issue of how many soldiers must die to ensure the continued flow of addictive foreign petroleum...
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
As someone who lives in Pensylvania, but goes to school in Iowa, all I can say is that if the tax payers of Iowa want to help me pay to fill up my minivan, I'm not going to stop them.
Also, by using Ethanol, we can import less oil. Even if it takes 29% more energy to produce Ethanol than it returns
Actually, since the vast majority of our energy comes from oil (especially the industrial machinery used in farming), the point is that more oil gets used for Ethanol production than the oil which Ethanol is supposed to be displacing.
It's a net additional oil cost to use.
This Cornell guy releases the same 'report' every other summer:
P imentel-ethanol.html
P imentel-ethanol.html
l .toocostly.ssl.html
http://www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicle/01/8.23.01/
http://www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicle/03/8.14.03/
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/July05/ethano
If I didn't know better, I'd say "-1, Troll"
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Additives in gasoline are incredibly harmful to us and the environment plus burning gasoline dumps carbon taken out of the atmosphere millions of years ago back into the atmosphere rapidly. With plant based fuels, it puts carbon back into the atmosphere that was taken out of it last year.
He's been saying the same thing for years now, and his data are, to say the very least, suspect. He ignores new technologies such as cellulosic ethanol, assumes the very least efficient methods of farming and of ethanol distillation, ignores the existence of crops that are more than an order of magnitude more productive per acre than corn, compares apples to oranges by neglecting to consider that fossil fuels also have an extraction cost, fails to take into account the energy saved from the free byproducts of ethanol production such as industrial-grade carbon dioxide... I could go on for a long time.
I don't know who funds Pimentel's research, but whoever it is it certainly seems to have a sizable PR budget, because his findings are always very well publicized, and the numerous studies that show the exact opposite, that ethanol has a significant postiive energy-return-on-investment, never seem to get nearly as much coverage.
The existence of massive government ethanol subsidies means that there's an incentive on the part of some interests--including some very well-funded ones--to distort the picture. I'm not a fan of the subsidies, but however stupid they may be politically and financially, and however much they may distort the marketplace and slow innovation... that says nothing at all about the energy balance of ethanol production. Science takes precedence over politics.
Disclosure: My nickname is Ethanol, and I'm a big fan of the stuff. But I chose the name, back when I was a chemistry student in college 20 years ago, because of its entertaining qualities when imbibed--not because I have any connection whatsoever to the ethanol industry. I don't.
However, I do also think ethanol is an excellent fuel, and after considerable review of the available data, I'm convinced Pimentel is wrong about it.
This is where biodiesel comes in. It can be produced from waste oil and here the energy balance is much more favourable than for ethanol. What's more, it can be poured straight into the tanks of most diesel-powered cars without requiring any modifications. I think this is where the motor industry is moving medium term (next 5 - 20 years).
Of course commercial growing of oilseed rape and other oil crops is not without other problems, such as lack of biodiversity. But at least there are many different sources of oil available and production is not confined to a small handful of politically unstable countries.
43 - For those who require slightly more than the answer to life, the universe and everything.
1) No fusion method has actually broken even on this planet, and even if it did, it's tabletop. Not a car. It would probably be 30+ years away from actual use.
2) That sodium crap is *definitely* an energy loser, as sodium metal isn't just sitting around and takes a lot of energy to reduce to its metallic form from the ionic form in which it's actually found. It's also just basically reversing the reaction that generates sodium in the first place. Talking about getting energy from that is like talking about the relative merits of a perpetual motion machine.
3) Ethanol burns in cars. Now. With actual internal-combustion engines that exist.
The relative ethanol break-even is important to a degree, but it (or something like it) is needed now to get more oxygen in fuels which helps prevent incomplete combustion (read: air pollution). MTBE (methyl t-butyl ether) was used previously, but is worse than ethanol in groundwater. Ethanol is worse for aerosol formation in the atmosphere I've heard (ie, more smog), and is a bit more expensive. We use ethanol these days instead of MTBE thanks to ex-Sen Daschle, protecting his state's corn lobby.
Bottom line? We have to use ethanol, or something like ethanol, to clean up gasoline if not for a fuel. We also need something realistic to bridge the gap between fosil fuels and the further-out alternative fuels.
It's not an order of magnitude, but it appears that among their many other interesting properties, carbon nanotubes can be made to hold up to 8% hydrogen by weight.
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If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
This once again shows that currently we have no viable large scale renewable energy sources! Over 95% of our energy production is nonrenewable! First we have the hydrocarbons, all of which are finite: Petroleum (nearly halfway depleted) Natural Gas Coal Then our other major source is nuclear, which requires uranium. Uranium is an element, which means it is mined and finite! We can't just build a million nuclear plants, there wouldn't be enough uranium. When are people going to realize that all this talk about ethanol and hydrogen is a smoke screen. Neither of them is an energy SOURCE. We're facing an impending energy disaster as our primary energy sources (petroleum and natural gas) begin peaking and becoming scarcer and scarcer. We're holding onto this idea that fusion will come along and save us.
As a group that describes themselves as "Scientists for Environmental Solutions" I have to consider that they have an agenda. Because they are a group seeking to prove things to steer policy, they have an axe to grind and I therefore have a hard time believing they would be unbiased. Besides that, "scientist" and "usually unbiased" don't belong in the same discussion. A scientist should *always* be unbiased--else he is not being objective. If he is sometimes biased (that's what "usually unbiased really means") then how do you know when he/she is biased and when they are not? We biased people wind up as engineers. :)
For example, I'm biased toward believing in conservation of matter & energy. This would make me cry foul on something that seemed to contradict my bias. If I were truly objective, I would look at everything on its own merits and draw my own conclusion. So, judging from the response of the scientific community every time a new idea is put forth, I have to say that there is very little objectivism and a lot of bias; therefore very few (if any) true scientists exist. Everyone has a pet theory.
Besides all that & to bring this on topic. Who cares about ethanol for fuel? Everyone knows ethanol is best used to kill the slower brain cells...
"Biomass" fuels represent energy from the "fast" carbon cycle -- that carbon was going to be back in circulation in a century or less. Granted, the efficiency of distributing and releasing that energy seems moderately lower, but the rate at which that energy is produced can be made to meet or exceed our energy demands.
Bottom line: any energy source which is consumed faster than it can be produced is doomed to ultimate failure due to exhaustion of available resources. Energy sources which can be replenished at a greater rate than they are used will ultimately prove to be the only viable long-term solution regardless of the perceived lower efficiency (fossil fuels are in fact horribly inefficient; only the fact that they represent literally millenia of energy production available for relatively easy use preserves the illusion that they are more efficient somehow than the renewable energy resources available in the fast carbon cycle).
One might joke about running an automobile on this pressure alone.
One might, but it's not a joke...
"Weve got sound based fusion reactors nearing break-even,"b ristol_eaimkhong/Sonofusion.htm
No we don't they do not know if sonofusion even exists. http://www.chemsoc.org/exemplarchem/entries/2004/
"we have what could be an easy way to generate hydrogen from water using sodium."
This uses MUCH more power then it generates. To get the sodium you must separate it from molten salt. This is NOT a source of energy but potentially and energy storage system.
" Now, with this in mind, tell me why ethanol is needed?" Because it may or may not be better than break even. It probably does not make sense to grow corn just to make ethanol however if you use the waste products you may have a net gain. BioDiesel is in much the same category. Ethanol may be bad science and a waste but not for any reason you posted.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
That's silly. Energy exists in many forms and is so deeply intertwined with human life that you might as well say "even if humans stopped using energy altogether they would still cause bad things to happen like - er - stepping on pretty flowers or something"
Life is complex and inherently wasteful. Improvements come in little steps and sometime via round-about routes. Problems with the clean-ness of hydrogen will get less bad as technology improves. Any increase in the efficiency of any process or machine takes it closer to being a perpetual motion machine. We won't ever make one, but the struggle to get ever closer is more useful than sitting there saying "Energy itself is bad due to chainsaws".
Brazil has been doing this for years. They slowed down when oil was cheaper in the 90's after liberalising their economy, but now they're ramping up production again.
And, for the love of god, ethanol is a renewable resource that lessens any producing nation's dependence on crisis stricken countries full of religious fanatics and other nutcases. And the best thing about it is that literally any nation that isn't pure desert can jump on board, and very poor afican nations like Cameroon, Ghana, Liberia etc that lie in the tropics and sub tropics can get in on the act and produce ethanol as well from plants with high sugar content (sugar cane, fruit, etc) and get themselves out of the bind they are now in.
In fact, this is an idea to make some fantastic cash if you get in on the market now!
These facts have been out for years. Ethanol is a political tool pushed by money makers like ADM. It's government subsidized, and most people don't realize it.
Another few fun ethanol facts:
Fuel economy drops with ethanol due to lower energy content. It may look cheaper, but you burn more of it.
Ethanol varnishes fuel systems and is hard on small engines. In MN (the only state to require 10% ethanol.) there are tons of small engine shops that will tell you they get tons of business from cleaning out carbs and fuel systems.
A study that I read a few years back stated that there was not enough fertile land in the US to supply our gasoline needs with ethanol. Granted this report is now several years old, but our needs have gone up since then.
Sadly, the words of "Chernobyl" are so well rehearsed by this community that they fail to realize the fact that Chernobyl was running at 130% capacity at the time -- a situtation which does not happen in current reactors due partially to the government regulations, partially to the IAEA, and partially to political pressures. That, and it's fucking common sense for crying out loud! Nuclear scientists and engineers know what they are working with now more than ever.
Modern day physicists if asked honestly, know that the answer lies in atomic energies for our future. It is cheap, clean, produces no greenhouse gases, and leave a microbe of waste as compared to a petroleum based economy. If the US and its politics weren't so oil hungry and to boot -- money hungry, they would be investing in the fusion experiement that is now going to be located in France. Granted it probably won't produce much power to boot... but it would be 100% clean and without any radioactive waste. The implications for potential power are huge, unfortunately most US lobbyists have convinced our government to turn their back on the future and concern themselves with just strengthening a limited fuel.
Sorry for the tirade, but I hate to see talks about biodiesel and ethanol (which is actually really cool, it produces higher octane numbers than gasoline!), and the arguement the author makes without bringing up our energy situtation that makes this point oh, so relevant.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/1 3/2322254&tid=99&tid=14
Get some of that and some water and there you have it. it would be far more dense than gaseous H2, even after you offset it with the sodium
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
There isn't enough arable land in the universe to satisfy the corn production needs of a pure-ethanol automotive energy economy.
Read here, here and here.
t ml
Read about Pimentel here: http://www.pacificviews.org/archives/000653.html
Read about both here: http://www.ilcorn.org/Ethanol/Tribune_/tribune_.h
Ethanol production in the next 1-2 years will vastly change. There are new companies currently in the process of building facilities that manufacturer Ethanol cleaner, quicker, and more efficiently. These figures will change drastically. This is an argument for the present and does not reflect the sweeping change that is occurring in the ethanol energy market. So everyone chill.
Require them to use only Ethanol in the production of Ethanol. Either they'll prove a net positive, or come to a grinding halt.
By "Troll away!" do you mean respond to your troll?
I have not read the study itself
You've also apparently not read the article that talks about the study. In there it states:
They conclude the country would be better off investing in solar, wind and hydrogen energy.
Yet you accuse the study's authors of being a shill for Fox News (what that has to do with is anyone's guess) and that they spun the story to support burning of fossil fuels.
I really wish vocal liberals such as yourself weren't so offensive every time you talked. With enemies like you, right-wingers are assured a comfortable place in office and that serves nobody well.
Take this as constructive criticism from a swing voter who voted for Al Gore but couldn't imagine voting for a Democrat today. Despite the fact I'm socially liberal and agree with Democrats on many issues, I find you guys far more intellectually dishonest than the other side. Please fix that, because I don't want the other side to take over either.
I'm a big tall mofo.
I think I am confused. What exactly is the difference between ethanol (made from corn waste..?) and biodiesel (made from slaughterhouse waste..?)? Are they the same thing? Do they work differently in practice, can the same engines use them? There seems to be a lot of vagueness in the way the media has been reporting these things.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
In other news: Life sucks. This shocking revelation brought to you buy Death-o-Matic suicide machines, for when you want to end it all in style.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
Until such times as we welcome our robot overlords, you'll have to live with this. That's why there is peer review and statistical analysis of results, and a requirement for scientific experiments to be reproducible. These are all safeguards against bias and they're there because scientists know that unbiased objective observation is an impossible ideal which everyone should aim at but never assume they have achieved.
If I were truly objective, I would look at everything on its own merits and draw my own conclusion.
That sounds good but in practise there isn't time and so we all generally fall back on "astounding results need astounding evidence", otherwise every scientist would be bogged down in double-blind tests of whether communion wafers taste like human flesh or if Mr Higgenblack's anus shows signs of extra-terrestrial haemorrhoid cream.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Make sure you read the second article listed before you go witch hunting ethanol production. It looks like it all depends on which study you listen to.
To quote the study from the "Union of Concerned Scientists" http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/renewable_energ y/page.cfm?pageID=78
"One persistent myth about biomass is that it takes more energy to produce fuels from biomass than the fuels themselves contain. In other words, that it is a net energy loser. In fact, current ethanol production uses corn, one of the most energy-intensive crops, and then uses just the kernels from the corn plant, and not even the entire kernel. Even so, this process yields 50 percent more energy than it takes to make the ethanol, so it is a net gainer.
Nonetheless, we could do much better. By making ethanol from energy crops, we could obtain between four and five times the energy that we put in, and by making electricity we could get perhaps 10 times or more."
Seriously, that company has harmed the US in so many ways. The time will come when we lump them in the same group as Big Tobacco.
Lasers Controlled Games!
GELLERMAN: And in the '70s when they had the oil shock prices then in the long gas lines. Ethanol was in the news and people were using it. So, what's new here is that, instead of making it from corn, now we can make it from other things.
COLEMAN: Correct. There's a term called cellulosic ethanol and the end product is the same. However, cellulosic ethanol comes from the leaves, stems and stalks of the plants instead of just the fruits and the seeds. So if today's ethanol producers grow corn to harvest a corn kernel, tomorrow's producers may be choosing from rice, wheat, oat, barley, straw, switch grass. Some companies even want to make it out of urbanized waste streams and municipal waste and even stale beer.
San Francisco Photographers
If you really want to support farmers why not just have the gov buy farms. I mean we already export a tun of food and we/the gov is pumping a lot of money into making cheep food that just gets exported so why not just buy excess farmland. Thus decreasing the supply of food and thus increasing it's value while setting aside this farm land so that it's topsoil will remain for future generations seems like a net win for everyone. If we start with say 100million a year on the most subsidized farms then we can stop subsidizing those farms thus saving money letting us buy more farms the next year... Until we reach a balance point where we don't need to subsidies the remaining farms.
Now some might say producing an over abundance of food each year is a good idea for safety reasons, but rather than turn the existing abundance into fuel we can store some of that food for a few years and build up a reserve. With 2 years of reserved food we should be able to adapt to any sudden changes in the food supply.
hat about biodiesel? That is what Willie uses.
Insert Generic Sig Here:
It still costs more to recycle, but people are still doing it.
(yes yes.. aluminum is the only recyclable that is cost effective)
- what is the definition of simultanagnosia?! I've been meaning to look it up!
Assume 2gw power plants, worldwide oil consumption of 30Billionbarrels /year
If I calculated corectly, the world would need about 3300 nuclear powerplants to replace oil energy with nuclear energy. I'm not claiming this is impossible, but it would be by far the largest building effort humanity has ever attempted. Nuke plants take from 5-15 to build and cost .5 -3 billion USD. Please recall that the world economy is only produces 45 trillion/year. Additionally, we don't have unlimited supplies of uranium either. I'm not saying that we cant switch to nuclear. Just that it is not an easy fix or a magic bullet. It's not very feasible.
Im all for ethanol but if they want to make it work *without subsidies* they need to start in the south west where maybe they can eek out enough clean power to make it worth trying..
It's just a sweet fizzy drink. Nothing special.
I don't understand the logic. It doesn't really matter if there's a 30% energy loss.
If we were bereft of petroleum, we'd still need a portable liquid fuel to put in vehicles. It's not a substitute for cheap oil (nothing is), but it'd be fuel for critical uses like farm equipment, military, and police/fire.
Following the same logic in the article, you'd have to say making wine is a waste since you're wasting all those grapes.
While ethanol isn't as cheap as drilling out of ground it does have several factors that are being ignored.
The oil industry is mature and well run, they buy in massive massive bulk and save save save.
Oil rich lands are controlled by raving loonies, just look at Alaska. Getting to the oil has dangers attached. Cold, Raving loonies, Raving loonies w/ guns. etc.
In 150 years, we can still make ethanol, in the quanties we need and likely for a lot cheaper per unit then now. It literially grows out of the ground. In Fact thats just what is does. We are using food crop corn to make ethanol, GM grains may make for better yeilds in ethanol. The Raving Loonies in Iowa and Texas are a lot easier to contain then the ones in other parts of the world.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Because I thought it was a post like ask slashdot from random nerd about drinking alcohol beverages.
:/
And then it was some stupid energy article
Taking into account the free energy from the sun in order to grow the crops IS misleading the public. check out the explanation of the study here: http://petroleum.berkeley.edu/papers/Biofuels/uc_s cientist_says_ethanol_uses_m.htm
Then their methods of harnessing the ethanol are'nt the most efficient either.
Unfortunately the public will be mislead time and again over the use of non-fossil fuel alternatives. Wish politics would stay out of science.
ok...I'm going to stray into another fuel for a second, but bear with me, I do have a real point...
I did some research with biodiesel for a fuel company a while back. Biodiesel comes up against very similar arguments as ethanol does as an alternative fuel - it's not really saving energy because it takes so much energy to generate it in the first place. While scientists might not like to hear this type of thing, it's a valid and important argument, and something that really needs to be looked at before we move on to new fuels. There's a catch though - while the studies didn't necessarily agree, they all looked at the current methods of producing biodiesel. Meanwhile, in the past few years, another researcher had devised a new way of producing the stuff. Normal production methods (in a nutshell), use temperature and pressure to split a triglyceride into biodiesel and glycerine. The newer method used chemicals, which were then recycled. Also, you could produce the stuff from yellow grease, which normally has to be cleaned and disposed of anyway. This was a HUGE breakthrough in both cost and energy useage, which is why our company was now looking at providing premium biodiesel farm blends (mostly because of the cost thing though =). As an added bonus, a lot of farmers loved the idea of running their equipment on an agricultural based fuel.
Meanwhile, back to the ethanol thing.... We tend to think of ethanol as one of those fuels that has sort of established itself. It's already produced on a large scale, it's as good as it's going to get. I'm not sure I buy that. I think there's plenty of research to be done on improving the production techniques for ethanol. We're still a fair way off from having viable hydrogen based cars - we don't have the infrastructure or cars to support it, and we don't have viable and affordable technology to produce and store enoug of it to be useful. But research continues and we assume that we will eventually overcome these problems. Why then, can research not continue on ethanol and different, better, ways to produce it? As it stands right now, I can see a large number of reasons why it would be prudent to continue to develop ethanol as a fuel:
1. We have the infrastructure to handle the delivery of the fuel
2. High ethanol blends can be put into current car designs with some fairly minor adjustments - mostly seals and filters.
3. With higher fuel costs, the relative price is going down
4. it's a high octane fuel
5. In lower blends, people are able to use it right in their current cars.
While hydrogen might be the goal, ethanol could be the transition. Hydrogen still seems to be a fair way off IMHO, and ethanol is something we can work with today, with our current cars and our current infrastructure. We do need to keep looking at hydrogren, but in the mean while, we can't really keep using petroleum, so we need something, be it electric cars, or better ethanol, or both together. It just seems like a more realistic, attainable goal for the near future.
...no two people are not on fire.
$0.51 per gallon of Ethanol. That's not how much Ethanol makers charge us for their fuel. It is how much the Federal government subsidizes every gallon of Ethanol made.
If Ethanol is such a viable replacement for gasoline made from oil, then why does it need a 51 cent subsidy? The fact is that no ethanol maker can make a profit without that subsidy.
There is nothing inherently safe about liberty. That's why so many people died protecting it.
The reason people keep referring to using sodium to create hydrogen is from a recent article:
2 54.shtml
:-)
http://science.slashdot.org/science/05/07/13/2322
Not quite tested and perfected, however not an absurd magic bullet either...
(You must not be an hourly slashdot reader huh
Ethanol is a renewable energy resource, but that does not make it environmentally friendly. Moreso than petroleum, perhaps, but combustion of ethanol still produces carbon dioxide, and carbon dioxide is still one of the major alleged culprits of global warming.
A truly eco-friendly economy is going to require massive investments in solar, tidal, geothermal, and nuclear sources of power production, and hydrogen - not carbon - should become the storage medium for our energy needs. We also need to focus tightly on energy efficiency, with new semiconductor technologies, more efficient appliances, and properly insulated homes and buildings.
Now, regardless of your politics, the only serious proposal above board is the proposals made by the Bush administration towards those very same ends. Its congress - Republicans and Democrats - that are holding up the show. Bitch at your congressman today.
The important thing about energy production and use is what the stuff costs not how efficient it is. Thats why hydro pumping stations work to move energy production from low to high demand cycle. This is also the key point to pursue in terms of strategies to move toward energy security. The cheapest forms of energy known are fission and coal. The drawback of these is poor portability and scalability. It would be impracticle to put fission reactors in cars for example. The popularity of oil comes from its flexibility of use and has been pointed out with better battery technology we could use cheaper energy sources for general fuel use. While I agree that research into alternatives to oil are in the long term interest of the non-middle eastern nations the far more important pursuit is the radical reduction of the cost of energy. This is obviously not achievable by merely paying part of the bill out of general revenue. Currently well as of a few moths ago http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/mer/pdf/pages/sec1_13. pdf the energy cost for your car was cheaper then what we had coming out of the outlets in out homes. That is the important number to pursue.
Somebody has said, referring to the second law of thermodinamics, that ethanol is an energy sink. It is not so, if we consider the energy provided by our sun as a free source of energy (as it is for us humans). Ethanol is produced using mainly two energy sources: petrol (to move the machinery and to produce the related fertilizers/pesticides), and solar energy (the crops are energy collectors). The ultimate question is: "How much energy can we extract from ethanol for each unit of energy of petrol invested?" It is not clear that we get less that we put in. And even if it was, there is still an argument in favour of ethanol: it is a perfect substitue for gas, and we could become energy independent if we started producing ethanol using a trully renovable energy source (solar, or whatever).
While it is correct that ethanol is 2/3rds the energy density of gas, that isn't the whole story either. Ethanol burns better in engines, so you get more of that energy out the crankshaft. In an engine designed for only ethanol (that is it cannot use gas in an emergency) will get nearly as good a milage as a similar engine running on gas. The emissions are better too.
The bottom line is you use more fuel. However it is not as much more as you would expect based on 2/3rds the energy.
Good point! If you treat ethanol as a storage medium like batteries and hydrogen, the efficiency seems more reasonable.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
...from the article summary:
"Since ethanol production plants don't use ethanol themselves for their own energy needs...
I think I see a possible way forward here.
I should probably just RTFA to see what it's all about, but I produce and use Ethanol on a micro level (at home, for myself) and don't see what the fuss is about. I use leftover or intentionally grown crops (barley and corn), ferment them, and then distill them. The distillation process uses ethanol that it produces. (I use a rather simple moonshine still to distill the ethanol.) Even after these runs, I have enough ethanol left to use in my gas tank. Admittedly I mix it with gasoline because I haven't modified the injectors etc. to accept pure ethanol, but hey, that's not that bad.
;-)
I also use bio-diesel in my tractor and truck, but the ingredients are leftover, used frying oil that I get from a few local restaurants.
I'm not entirely grid-independant yet, but a large portion (I suspect 50 to 60%) of my electrical needs are from wind turbines, but none of this power is used for the ethanol distillation process. (It only uses ethanol.)
So... I don't see how ethanol could require MORE energy than it produces, although I can understand that possibly, using electrical energy in a large plant, may still require more energy than produced simply because of the way the plant is setup. That is an issue with the specific plant, however, and not that ethanol in and of itself require more energy to produce than it consumes. To say otherwise is utter BS, as I can testify otherwise.
And, BTW, my energy bills are VERY cheap, and I'm quite happy having an abundance of energy without an ill feeling about the environment. I don't give a crap about energy conservation, as in my eyes energy usage is what propels our civilization, but at the same time I can laugh in the faces of anyone that says alternative energy sources are not gonna happen. A visit to my farm will prove otherwise. (My servers run off clean energy, so I suppose that buys me extra geek points too.
Mostly out of pork you get votes and money. And hot air, but it's hard to convert that to fuel.
First they said eggs were bad for you, now they say they're good for you.
Then they said alcohol was bad for you, now they say a little is actually healthy.
Then they said that you shouldn't put sugar in your gas tank. And now...
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
generate hydrogen from water using sodium
Yeah, leaving a big, nasty pile of highly corrosive sodium hydroxide behind. They still need to figure out what to do with the waste products. We only need just so much drain cleaner.
TFA is based on the assumption that a fixed power source is equivilant to a mobile one. If the fixed source is sufficently cheap, it's still viable to use an expensive process (power-wise) to produce mobile fuel.
The problem I see is scale. How much of our demand can this really meet? I would say not much. Agro-chem is useful, but can't compete with petro for meeting actual supply. We need another alternative.
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Canadian Coke is also corn-syrup free. A friend of mine moved near the border because he loves soda and has a corn-syrup allergy.
If I calculated corectly, the world would need about 3300 nuclear powerplants to replace oil energy with nuclear energy. I'm not claiming this is impossible, but it would be by far the largest building effort humanity has ever attempted. Nuke plants take from 5-15 to build and cost .5 -3 billion USD. Please recall that the world economy is only produces 45 trillion/year. Additionally, we don't have unlimited supplies of uranium either. I'm not saying that we cant switch to nuclear. Just that it is not an easy fix or a magic bullet. It's not very feasible.
What you say rings true, but you're missing a few key details that make nuclear power plants workable:
1. Different parts of the world already rely heavily on nuclear power. France, for example, runs 75% off of nuclear power. These stations do not need to be replaced, so you can knock about 17% off your figures.
2. Dams and wind powered plants do not need to be replaced, so you can knock a few more percent off your figures.
3. Old power plants need to be rebuilt or replaced after their useful lifetimes, anyway. If the decision was made to make all new power plants nuclear fired, then new nuclear plants could be created with little to no negative effects on the world economy.
4. Modern nuclear techniques can provide us with nuclear fuels for much longer than the original 100 year estimate. In a breeder reactor, the reactor actually produces MORE energy dense material (via plutonium creation) than it uses up.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I can think of much a better use of Ethanol than powering cars.
It even saves me gas, cuz I'm not driving, and sometimes I'm not driving the next morning either.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
and raise you to 15% (by weight):
Ammonia
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I hope we go nuclear. Otherwise we're gonna run out of helium. No other way to produce it except through nuclear decay to alpha particles. And what's a birthday party without helium baloons. Reason enough for me.
It's pretty ironic, since now we get most of our helium from oil wells.
Anyone know if the gov makes ANY effort to recover helium from nuclear waste?
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
If ethanol is a net negative, it is only sustainable given:
1. Another renewable energy source that's net positive is used for refining and other processes that don't depend on mobile fuel (e.g. solar, wind, nuclear power).
2. Ethanol use is limited to areas that require mobile fuel (mainly vehicles).
If ethanol is net negative but is used for the entire supply chain, then there won't be enough fuel produced to power the supply chain, and it simply won't work. I do agree that oil will not be sustainable. It is net positive, but the supply is limited. Personally, I'm looking to nuclear power as the solution. I think people's fear of nuclear power is largely unjustified. It's quite safe, and when you consider the incredibly tiny amount of nuclear waste produced in comparison to the waste products of coal or oil, it's crazy. You can just seal it in block of concrete or glass or whatever and stick it in some designated waste area. Thousands of times less waste.
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
NT
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Yeah that diagram blantantly points out the solar power from the sun to grow the damn crops. Its latent and always there and shouldnt be factored in. Maybe Im misreading the diagram, but that certainly looks like what they're doing.
is that growing plant, and deistrubting them uses too many fossil fuels, then just make windmills that produce hydrogen fuel, and build hydrogen fuel cell tractors etc..
;) some people wouldn't mind having a little more of that stuff around.
But the real problem is that both sides are trying to prove a case. so, of course side A. uses the 'best case scenario' where the corn is grwon and refined into ethanol locally, and then added to the fuel supply locally, using all modern, energy efficient farm equipment... and side B. uses the worst case scenrio, where you have to ship the corn 2,000 miles across highways, then another 2,000 miles, and the farms growing the corn are using the worst gas guzzler tractors on the market...
And what's wrong with producing ozone*
*= I know, ozone clouds can trigger strong alergic reactions in people with resperiatory alergies.. I've lived close enough to detroit to know they have ozone alerts on the local weather from all the steel smelting etc that goes on there..
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Ethanol comes from Corn. Ethanol works asa fuel because it is rich in nitrogen. Corn does not produce it's own nitrogen. Corn for Ethanol requires nitrogen rich fertalizer.
;)
Deisle can be made from Soy. Soy produces it's own nitrogen. Soy grows damn near anywheres. Brazil can grown enough Soy in one year to feed the world for 6 years. Soy is your savior. Turbo Deisle is the way to go. Either that or a hydrogen combustion generator for an electric car
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Are you suggesting that farmers use nuclear combines or that distilleries use nuclear fission as a heat source.
Actually, yes, that's what he's suggesting. Except that he's talking about it indirectly: ethanol fueled tractors and trucks for shipping.
Trucks and tractors need small, mobile power plants, and liquids are a good way to fuel mobile power plants. It's hard to store pure electricity or heat. It's quick and easy to load a new batch of liquid. So the grandparent is proposing converting them into ethanol. He could as easily have proposed compressed hydrogen (a fluid if not a liquid), and we could debate that as well. But the gist is that even if ethanol is not in and of itself an energy win, improving technologies for ethanol production may still be worthwhile.
Even if the whole thing would be highly inefficient, remember, we are using solar energy and converting it into chemical form (ethanol).
:-/
We don't use corn in Brazil, we use sugar cane, which itself is used to move ethanol refineries (burning the waste of already pressed cane).
Potential problems aside (like the soil getting worn out), have in mind solar energy is totally free and is there for us to reap, most of the time (at least in Brazil).
Compare this with oil, which is also free, but is running out.
We can learn to get solar energy more efficiently and more cheaply (sorry if this is gramatically wrong), but once the oil is gone, well, it really is gone.
Now, with all that said, we really should change our attitude towards energy. SUVs are out for good; we really should have individual or two-people cars. Streets should be better shared on a time-based scheduling. Electronic communication and home-based work should be encouraged. Cities should be limited in size and people in big ones should be given tax exemptions if moving to smaller ones.
There's no secret: organisms grow up until size becomes a problem.
Ethanol is much more valuable than left over corn/soy...
The missing point is it is also worth more as a portable liquid fuel than Natural Gas. Why burn Ethanol in a stationary plant to produce Ethanol when you can burn cheaper Natural Gas (or other non-liquid fuel such as mill sawdust) and then sell the expensive Ethanol for vehicle use. Even using waste heat (heat recovery) from a generator plant makes more sense than just burning the fuel for the heat.
The truth shall set you free!
Last time I puchased a 1/2 pint bottle of Everclear it cost me $8. Don't see how I could afford to run my car on it efficiently but to tell you the truth, after drinking it I could care less.
-- Each tock of the Planck clock is a new world and here we are still life. --
WHO FUNDED THE RESEARCH?
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
2. The costs of oil are far greater than the money spent processing it. What about the economic costs of having to over build car engine technology to mitigate exhaust pollution? Catylitic converters use some fairly expensive materials. What about the economic costs of dealing with polluted air? What about the economic costs of keeping our military topped off with oil so we can go "fight terra" and "keep the homeland safe" aka, keep the homeland filled with plastics and oil? The military takes up over 30% of tax payer money, and it's sole purpose these days appears to be securing oil for western countries.
3. What about the tactical cost of keeping all your eggs in one basket? There would be distinct tactical advantage for America's military and cival sector to have another source of energy in case the rug were pulled out from underneath oil. Major wars have been decided by cutting off oil supplies, and if there was ever another world wide conflict, you better believe that oil control will be the tactical ace up the sleeve. Without oil, our fancy war machines do nothing. Having a secondary source of energy is very important in this regard.
So yea, the article says that ethanol costs more and requires more energy to produce. Well, that may be true in the short term. That is, unless we feel like digging a huge hole, putting a bunch of carbon based corpses and plants, and covering it up for a few millennia. If you want to speed up that process, it's going to take more energy.
Ethanol is a good thing.
Hi, thanks for taking the time to read my post and respond.
My calculation was just based upon the fact that we use 30 billion barrels of oil per year. I was speaking of just replacing OIL usage with nuclear. Existing nuclear plants, hydroelectric, etc.. are outside the scope of my OP.
to summerize, 30 BIllion barrels of oil/year = 3300 nuclear plants.
of a recent study that shows recycling waste is more economically viable than just dumping it- because the study takes into account the environmental effects and the economical resources used to solve long-term problems caused by just dumping garbage.
Yes!
wikipedia
Biodiesel is the wave of the future... we can even use our existing infrastructure.
Fertilizer is likely to be used in the production of these crops.
From: http://utfb.fb.org/Index/nitrogen.htm/
Natural gas is a primary feed stock in the production of anhydrous ammonia (82% nitrogen). Anhydrous ammonia (NH3) in turn can be applied directly to the soil or utilized as a feed stock for other nitrogen fertilizers such as urea (45% nitrogen) and ammonium nitrate (34% nitrogen). It takes an average of 33.5 MMBtus of natural gas to produce one ton of NH3. Consequently, the cost of producing NH3 has jumped from approximately $70 a ton a year ago to $295 a ton in December, 2000.
So, isn't the price of ethanol highly related to the price of oil and gas? It's not clear to me that the cited study took this into account. (I didn't read it...)
There is a much simpler and more convincing argument for why ethanol fuel production is wasteful than the type presented in TFA:
If the value of ethanol produced is greater than the value of resources consumed in its production then government subsidies would be unnecessary. If ethanol production yielded more value than it consumed, then ethanol would be produced voluntarily without subsidies. The fact that ethanol production only exists where subsidized tells you that it must be wasteful.
If there were a magic box named "ethanol production" which could turn $1.00 worth of corn and fossil fuel inputs into $2.00 worth of ethanol, government would not have to pay corporations to use it. It is because that, in reality, ethanol production turns $1.00 worth of fossil fuels into less than $1.00 worth of ethanol that corporations only will produce ethanol on the condition that governments repay them for the value of resources wasted in its production.
If you approach the problem from physics, by calculating energy yields at each stage, the embodied energy of the equipment, it's lifetime, and inventory all the inputs that is a very hard problem. So any result is open to much disputation. If you approach the problem from economics, it is very simple: Ethanol costs more to produce than the value of resources produced, therefore it is wasteful.
You might say, "you are leaving out the externalities". Including them works against ethanol; topsoil erosion from farming, deforestation, pollution from refineries, pollution from the fossil fuels consumed it its production. Directly consuming energy used to produce ethanol must have fewer externalities than consuming more than that amount of energy in the production of ethanol and then consuming the ethanol. In both cases you produce and consume energy, but in the latter you produce and consume more energy, and additionally there are the externalities of ethanol production ittself.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Cool, so all these US-corn eating Russian, Chinese, whatever are about to starve ?
No, they're about to have their own farms become economically viable again.
They have their own farms. The problem is that our farms are heavily subsidized, so imports from the U.S. are cheaper than locally grown crops ever could be. Which means the local farmers can't make a living, and end up unable to buy the cheap food that put them out of business, and they starve. This is a summary of one of the complaints African countries have with our "aid".
Actually, when simplified like that, it sounds kinda like our relationship with China, doesn't it? Communist country with little environmental/labor protection produces products well below the cost of any U.S. manufacturer, putting local manufacturers out of business. Fortunately the retailers have an interest in making sure the locals can at least afford the imported goods, if not much else.
Anyway, got off on a tangent there.
The enemies of Democracy are
The half life of U-235 is 704 million years. Tf it had a short enough half life to be gone in 150 years it would be gone already. The planet hasn't received any new supplies of uranium since it coalesced from interstellar dust four billion years ago. Hell, even if you believe the earth is flat and was created by the Almighty 6000 years ago like it says in the Bible, it would be gone already with a half life that short.
We may use it up in 150 years, but there are ways around that too, like fast breeder reactors, which can produce more fuel than they consume.
But this whole article being discussed is bogus, they take into account the Sun's energy put into the plants, but then don't take into account gluton, which is the by product of corn based ethanol and can be fed or mixed into cattle feed.
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
I heard that a great deal of helium is captured - in the concrete walls of reactor buildings, where its presence weakens the structural integrity of the concrete.
Don't blame me, I voted for Durga.
The Union of Concerned Scientists is a special interest group with a convincing name. I've read their study on a "cleaner" Ford Explorer. Supposedly they "designed" one which could get dramatically improved fuel economy for a negliglbe price increase. However, close inspection revealed assumptions like: Aluminum parts are the same price as steel parts 6 speed transmissions cost the same as 5 speed transmissions And then they assumed modifications like these resulted in a several MPG benefit! I've built my own vehicle simulations in MATLAB and shown that their studies are total BS. Not even in the right ballpark. Their "studies" are more marketing ploys to push their interests.
It's not just throwing a bone.
It's better to have our tax dollars spent to pay farmers to grow corn in Idaho, than paid to rich sultans in the Middle East!
The US receives X amount of sunlight per year. With Ethanol, we are spending our money to convert that sunlight into fuel, using corn as solar collectors.
the "Underrated" modifier add to your karma without changing the tag on the comment score? I thought that was in the FAQ, but maybe it only modifies the comment score, and not your karma.
--- What
So ugly chicks can get laid too?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Ummm, he's not talking about replacing all energy sources with nuclear, just the ones that currently use oil. His figure of 3300 plants is in addition to the existing nuclear, hydro, and other sources.
...who gets the feeling that the "is ethanol worth it?" question is just going to end up like issues such as global warming, evolution v. creation, F/OSS TCO, etc'? I have the feeling there will be so much personal and financial investment in either side of the argument, no credible science will ever make it to the table. At that point, what real science does make it into the discussion just gets lost in the noise.
I mean, with the kinds of people involved in these sorts of things, there isn't much chance we'll ever know if ethanol is, in fact, "worth it" without an overwhelming acceptance of it in the marketplace.
Eh, mod me down for it, but I'm just thinking out loud.
This sig rocks the casbah.
While you can produce ethanol from many sources, current US corn-based ethanol production could not survive without heavy subsidies. With the current subsidies in place there is no incentive to improve efficiencies.
Modern field corn production requires large amounts of fertilizer, in particular anhydrous ammonia, to produce the 150+ bushels per acre that we currently enjoy.
Ammonia prices have steadily climbed over the past decade as the price of natural gas climbs. Ammonia is made using the Haber process to combine nitrogen from the air with hydrogen obtained from natural gas.
I come from a long line of farmers:
In my great-grandfather's day, corn production rates were pitiful.
In my grandfather's day, the Haber process and corn hybridization produced bumper crops.
In my father's day, he stopped growing corn. Combined with the US embargo of Canadian beef it just wasn't worth the effort.
Here in the Golden State we have to buy special California formula gas that claimed to run cleaner then the rest of the nations. (It may even work if you ignore the 3-5 MPG loss in fuel efficiency) The relevance here is that Ethanol is one of the big ingredients in this gas.
A few years ago, One of the major gas producers found that it could make a much cleaner burning fuel using only petroleum based chemicals. It would cost less and save the air. Unfortunately the Feds stepped in an demanded that ethanol continued to be used instead.
Just follow the pork folks.
JFMILLER
Strive to make your client happy, not necessarly give them what they ask for
Come on man, these guys are a politically oriented action group. Most member of the group are non-scientists.
Look at the sensational fearmongering and hatemongering titles, like:
"Is our food safe to eat?"
- This is an article about geneticly modified food. While Big Macs and Twinkies might not be safe because they are full of fat and sugar, there hasn't been a single documented case of anyone being harmed by eating GM food, ever. This kind of headline is pure un-scientific fearmongering. They could have headlined it "Genetically Modified Crops: What are the issues?". Or "Will GM crops disrupt the ecosystem". Instead they are using the "Frankenfood" hysteria to promote a view (that all GM crops are evil!), that clearly all scientists don't have a single point of view on.
"U.S. Sets Back Progress on Global Warming at G8 Summit"
- Yeah, write an article with lots of inflammitory statements like "President Bush resembled an isolated soul", but don't mention anywhere in the article WHAT ACTUAL ACTIONS OR POLICY DECISIONS HE TOOK TO "SET BACK PROGRESS ON GLOBAL WARMING". There was not one mention of any G8 policy, plan, study, or anything else in the article. The entire article basicly says "Bush is a baddie". I am not a fan a Bush, but this is not the behavior of responsible scientists. This is the behavior of a left-wing political organization... which is fine, people have the right to express thier views, but don't pretend the organization is a non-political "Scientific" one.
A small nuclear reactor, or even wind-turbines in the corn-feilds could produce enough energy to power reactors and whatnot.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
If you're fortunate enough to live in north central Texas, you can buy Dublin Dr. Pepper which is a superior soda pop to any cola, period. In fact this stuff is so good tasting, that the AbTex Beverage Corp's (huge soda pop bottling company in Texas) plant in Plano, TX has also started making limited production runs of specialty Dr. Pepper using Imperial Cane Sugar too. Their formula doesn't taste exactly as good as the Dublin, TX plant's stuff, but it's much better than the plain corn-syrup-sweetened mass-produced Dr. Pepper sold everywhere else.
If you want to make it work, tell universities not to sponsor flawed studies that say it's not worthwhile. Any guesses as to who funded this ?
Using it as an addative in gasoline is a bit stupid, seeing as you have to get rid of all the water in it before you can mix it. Someone should take them on a tour 'round Brazil.
> What happens when a tanker full of ethanol spills? I kind of picture an ad hoc hazmat team made up of guys from Skid Row. The fire department drives a Greyhound bus up to a street corner on "that" side of town, loads up, drives out to the accident site & hands everyone drinking straws.
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
Nature does all the work putting energy into oil, and someday it will go away, none of this changes the fact that using oil and natural gas to produce Ethanol is a joke on the environment and the American tax payer..
Ohhhh... if it's supposed to be possessive, it's just 'its', but if it's supposed to be a contraction, it's 'it-apostrophe-s'. scalawag.
It's better to have our tax dollars spent to pay farmers to grow corn in Idaho, than paid to rich sultans in the Middle East!
You're missing the central point of the article. In order to produce the ethanol, we're having to use even more imported fuel oil. The process of producing the ethanol (harvesting the crop, running the plants that produce the ethanol, distributing the output) all consume even more oil than the fuel that the ethanol represents. In other words, in order to have the ethanol, we have to buy even more oil from Saudi Arabia, or Venezuela, or other distasteful places. If it's a net loss and requires more fuel, we should simply take that money and use it to produce oil elsewhere or leverage the more friendly sources while we develop positive-balance sources (nuclear, what have you).
With Ethanol, we are spending our money to convert that sunlight into fuel, using corn as solar collectors.
And then we buy a bunch of oil so we can actually make the process work. Not useful!
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I present the conservation/renewables scenario:
a) 50 mpg cars
b) energy-efficient-everything
c) 100 million acres devoted to ethanol/biodiesel
d) lots of large wind farms
e) cost-effective solar power
f) coal
Obviously c) is the problem with this scenario. The farther we get from oil, the more things we find that can only be made cheaply from agricultural products. All of these things will begin to compete with food production, beginning with a shortage of fertilizers. (This is the real reason studies like these should be taken seriously; corn ethanol is seriously dependent on fertilizers made from oil.) Farmers are good at "using everything", but at some point it may come down to a choice between eating steaks, driving cars, or going nuclear.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Im all for ethanol but if they want to make it work *without subsidies* they need to start in the south west where maybe they can eek out enough clean power to make it worth trying..
If you want to make it work, tell universities not to sponsor flawed studies that say it's not worthwhile.
Whats flawed in the study? you not agreeing with it, or thinking that the extra energy now is worth the time does not cahnge the facts.
Specifically, ethanol boils at 78.3C
What you might be refering to is the industrial production of ethanol rather than fermentation. As from the above website, industrial production uses Ethene and steam, which requires higher temperatures than simple distillation. Also note that distillation of ethanol only gets 95% pure, as that mixture of water+ethanol has a lower boiling point than either component seperately.
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
You'll note the article states that it takes 29% more *FOSSIL* energy than is produced in the ethanol. Also, I just moved away from the Dakotas where I spent five years dealing the environmental ramifications of energy producing dams on the Missouri River, so we would have to consider those costs. Its definitely not free energy, from a financial or environmental perspective.
Depends who you believe. Apparently this estimate is based on a gloom and doom scenario by someone with an axe to grind
...we end up with a shit-load of Everclear. w00t!
TWZSKFM
-- Game Developers: Stop porting badly-textured games from crappy console systems!
Wow, what horrible timing. The planet's 4 billion years old and all the uranium is going to decay in the next 150 years.
Half life for U-235 is 700 million years.
Half life for U-238 is 4.5 billion years.
Using it as an addative in gasoline is a bit stupid, seeing as you have to get rid of all the water in it before you can mix it.
The Leopard II can use pretty much anything flammable added into its diesel fuel, I've heard claims that 60% ethanol will suffice. Of course, leaving a bunch of bored soldiers and a barrel of 60% ethanol in one room is asking for trouble...
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Indeed, IIRC Ethanol is equivalent to 115 Octane or so. That means higher compression ratios than you can do with premium unleaded (before detonation), which means higher thermal efficency.
I've heard of people designing their engines to run ethanol most of the time. They can get about 85-90% of the mileage that they get with gas in the same engine, and that's not bad at all. With turbos/superchargers you can get a bit of leverage, so you don't have to design an engine with a static compression ratio of the 11-12:1 that ethanol works best at--in other words that engine wouldn't run on gasoline.
I don't think it would be too hard to design an engine that had a static compression ratio of 8-9:1 for regular gas, and a few pounds of boost when it runs on ethanol. Best of both worlds, as they say.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
http://petroleum.berkeley.edu/papers/patzek/CRPS41 6-Patzek-Web.pdf
Could some learned person translate this mix of scientific data and social/political commentary into something solid?
The fact that the parent is modded up "funny" just cracks me up! The post makes the point that people don't want to use the funny mod-point, and he gets the funny points himself! Talk about gaming the system!
Actually I read a lot of studies, and they seem in agreement - when the whole picture is taken into account, corn ethanol is a large net loser. Ethanol from Biomass isn't, depending on the transport methods. Here is another study for example that shows Corn ethanol as a net loser (nothing to do with Pimental) http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/03/05032 9132436.htm
Just be aware that Pimentel releases this "finding" every other summer, Looking at the dates below, he's a month ahead of schedule this year.
P imentel-ethanol.html
P imentel-ethanol.html
l .toocostly.ssl.html
o nneNatlLabEthanolStudy.pdf
d =UBB14&Number=946804&Searchpage=1&Main=941398&Word s=%2Bethanol+%2Bmoney+DrStink&topic=&Search=true#P ost946804
http://www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicle/01/8.23.01/
http://www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicle/03/8.14.03/
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/July05/ethano
I can't speak to this newest report, but Pimental's work has been repeatedly critiqued, and one of the main compliants it that he uses out of date numbers for yield and conversion efficiency:
http://www.mda.state.mn.us/ethanol/balance.html
http://www.usda.gov/oce/oepnu/aer-814.pdf
http://journeytoforever.org/ethanol_rooster.html
http://www.ncga.com/public_policy/PDF/03_28_05Arg
http://www.ethanol-gec.org/corn_eth.htm
All that having been said, Pimental is right that soy and corn alone cannot replace our petroleum addiction. You can read more about this in the archives at TDIclub.com.
http://forums.tdiclub.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Boar
There are significant differences between simple sugar based ethanol production and cellulosic ethanol production (based on genetically engineered cellulase enzymes). Iogen has opened up a pilot plant for such cellulosic ethanol a year ago.
In terms of total carbon burden, converting cellulosic biomass to fuel is a benefit, because otherwise this agricultural waste material would be burned off by farmers in the fields, with the energy released going to no work and most of the carbon going into the atmosphere. By capturing the energy for doing work, it reduces total carbon emmissions. Moreover, the waste material is also a fuel used in the production of cellulosic ethanol, reducing the amount of fossil fuels required for its production.
It is silly to grow an energy-intensive food crop to make ethanol, but it makes sense to use existing agricultural waste streams to do so.
Henry Ford's original designs were intended to run on home-brew alcohol. Ethanol may be less of an energy gain to produce than gasoline, but it's only a loser if you're using petrochemicals to produce it. As others have noted, using wind and solar to accelerate the process greatly reduces the worries about wasting energy. Think of how much energy is wasted every day, as solar energy heats up parking lots.
You can design an ethanol plant adjacent to a hog farm. The waste material from producing ethanol feeds the hogs. The excess heat from the hog barn can be scavenged and used to further fuel fermentation. The liquid sewage produced by the hogs will produce methane. Then, after you've scavenged the methane, the liquid sewage is spread on the field as fertilizer.
Another distinct advantage of ethanol is that it _can_ be produced on a very small scale. A farmer can power his tractors using a portion of his corn crop. He can actually produce his fuel on-site, if he so wishes.
Eco-crazies? subsidize voters in agro states? I live in an agro state, and I can tell you that corn and soybean subsidies are nowhere near as large as the tobacco subsidies -- yet, we can't produce anything approaching a power gain out of tobacco.
The eco-crazies I know oppose ethanol just as much as gasoline, because it's still a combustion process, and it still pollutes (just not very much).
Your post strikes me as a bit of a troll.
Ethanol is a real solution in that it gets us a highly portable form of energy. Is it as dense an energy transport as gasoline? No.
But it can be used to keep existing infrastructure running. I have heard that converting a fuel-injected engine to ethanol is as simple as altering the programming, but I do not know for sure.
There are some other advantages to ethanol, in that large scale fuel spills aren't nearly as toxic as petrochemical spills.
Also, trying drinking a glass of gasoline to get a buzz sometime. It does make me wonder if a fuel can full of ethanol counts as an 'open container'.
If you say make a factual observation that disagrees with the preconcieved notions of some Slashdotters, then you get modded down. Too bad some people are so closed-minded.
I get 36 MPG in the summer and 32 MPG in the winter months when 15% ethonal is mandated in my state. That is almost entirely accounted for by energy density calculations. Maybe winter driving or engine tuning accounts for a small amount of it.
For all the crowing on and on about the hydrogen economy, it's a complete waste.
It takes more energy to produce, store, and deliver this stuff than any pollution savings can make up. Unless you build more nuclear power plants to do the work, we're just going to be dumping more and more pollution into the air to power our pollution free cars.
Madness.
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
I agree that energy in is in excess of energy out. That is true in many processes.
The answer to this is nuclear power to power the ethanol (or hydrogen) production facilities. Nuclear is the closest thing we have to free energy. We would no longer rely on coal or gas powered energy plants. We could reduce our dependence on foreign energy.
We have not built 1 nuclear power plant since the 70s. China is building 5 as read this. Iran is building 3 (I think). why are we so backwards? Current Nuclear Designs are orders of magnitude safer than prior generation plants.
The anti-nuclear movement is responsible for this mess, not the government.
Dave
Nobody, even the article, isn't saying where the bulk of this energy is consumed? Is it the tractor, combine, or insecticide spraying airplane that eats so much gas? Transporting the corn/potato/whatever you wanna digest to the nearby plant? I bet you a lot that isn't it.
I'm guessing the massive portion of the energy (over 90%) is used by the distillation process. It takes tremendous amount of heat to vaporize water and alcohols, for what, to simply precipitate them back down. As a sidenote, in the chemical industry 50% of all energy use is for separation processes, most important being the super energy-hungry distillation. Most fermentation ways to produce alcohol stop at something like 10% concentration, because the bacteria die in too much alcohol - in a sense they pollute themselves to death. Membrane separations, like your body's cells use, could be more energy efficient, if they had membrane technology selective for concentrating up alcohol. The pure water that you buy in stores as artesian mountain-spring water, it's about 1% mountain water blended with locally produced "distilled water." (The 1% is there so they can still claim it's mountain spring water.) The locally produced "distilled water" isn't produced by distillation, that would be humongously expensive, but instead it's produced by reverse osmosis membrane separation, giving you about the same purity at the fraction of the cost. Trouble with alcohol is, that, while it's very easy to find efficient membranes that separate out pure water, it's quite hard to come up with something that keeps the water + rotten/fermented corn gunk on one side, and exudes only pure alcohol on the other, by osmotic pressure.
Most of the power cost in growing the corn comes from the oil used in the fertilizer. What this study (and it is actually quite old) says is that there is more OIL used in the creation of the ethanol than the volume of oil it is replacing as a fuel. That may be fine if ethanol was just being used as an oxygenation additive (which in itself is of questionable worth as the emissions systems of cars are much, much better these days), but it is being touted as a way to reduce our usage of foreign oil as a replacement of a fairly high percentage (25% or more) of the oil in gasoline. Not only that, but auto manufactures get a credit for engines that can burn ethanol in the CAFE standards, eg a car that can burn ethanol is credited for something to the degree of 25% or higher MPG rating when it comes to CAFE quotas.
Who knew what a bunch of nuts for hydrogen slashdot was! I had no idea I'd be pegged as flamebait for stating basic thermodynamic reality.
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
What it doesn't say is that a LOT of Ethanol produced in the Aggro states run on power grids that get most of their power from dams/windmills.
I have to call bs on this one. A vast majority of our power comes from oil/gas and coal. The rest is made up mostly of nuclear. According to this diagram, only ~6% of our energy comes from renewable sources (which includes wood, hydro, wind, solar, ethanolized gasoline (hah!), and geo).
Brazil went whole-hog promoting ethonal and finds the latest oil price shock not impacting its economy that much. 25% mixture is regulated, though its about 40% in practice. Brazil has huge agricultural resources suitable for producing large amounts of ethonal. So even if its takes a fair amount of energy overhead to produce ethonal, they are doing it with aboundant, cheap ethonal energy.
You need to invest in hydrogen energy technologies in order to make any use of hydrogen as a medium to store energy.
You are the one reading into the statement your own bias, they never said anything about producing energy from hydrogen, its entirely your assumption. "Hydrogen energy" makes perfect sense, you use hydrogen as an energy source. You just have to use some other energy source to make the hydrogen in the first place, kinda like with everything else we use.
Its not like oil produces more energy than it took to make either, we just didn't expend that energy ourselves.
Maybe you can believe some of the studies that come from some of the more esoteric parts of science, like cosmology and string theory, where political ideology has a hard time getting it Hellraiser hooks in, but even those could be muddied by grant money requirements and blinkered philosophies.
An Ethanol promoting friend pointed out that this article/study is apparantly based on outdated techniques and the research didn't take into account newer, more efficient methods of ethanol fuel production.
Any truth to that?
Also, people ignore that stuff that's already been fermented and dried (mash, or whatever it's called) can indeed be fed to cows, pigs and chickens, etc. also, you don't have to use the best part of the plant to get what the little microbes really want--the sugar and a bit of the other nutrients. Most of the protiens and other good stuff that the farm animals need is left intact.
So you can turn around and mix this stuff into their regular feed... Sounds good to me.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
See here. Brazil has had their "Proalcool" program for the last thirty years, and it's just coming to fruition now. They use a less energy-intensive process, with sugarcane instead of corn, and doing so, they've managed massive cuts in their oil imports. That's not really something you can fake.
Corn may be a bad source of ethanol, and Archer Daniels Midland may be liquid evil poured into a suit, but that doesn't mean other folks can't do it right.
See a rather good writeup of the issue.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
> Ethanol burns cleaner than current gasoline and will run
> all automobiles without any vehicle modification
Not so - it is necessary to replace most gaskets and rubber hoses with silicone made ones, as ethanol will eventually degrade and destroy rubber. Nevertheless the cost of conversion is minmal.
Furthermore, and entire country ran off ethanol, Brazil, with all cars capable of burning ethanol, and Brazil being 100% independent of foreign fuel.
David P. should have stayed with his bugs.
./ but given the crap factor that has been rearing its head in here... well - you all get the message.
This incorrect study has been making the rounds for a long time now. It has been thoroughly discredited many times over. I am suprised that it shows up in
----------
Ethanol is a decent source of energy - however the amount needed is such that it cannot be a solution. It can however help. Over the period of the next 10 years there probably isn't any solution other than to get the SUV's off the road.
Unfortunately the population of N.A. is not likely to do this willingly. In all liklihood the first few fords (found on road dead) will be towed off and this process will continue as long as tow truck operators can find fuel.
When the tow trucks run out of fuel then I suspect the solution will be to push them into the ditches - at least this will work until the ditches are filled. After that who knows.
There is a crisis comming - the issue is when. Some say by 2010 and some say before 2007. Wildly optimistic estimates say 2037. Frankly those estimates make me laugh - but I do hope they are correct.
Best estimates are that petroleum supplies will start to contract worldwide at 2% or more per year starting as soon as maybe 2007-2008 (and possibly before then - but there is hope into the 2008++ range).
I'm sure North Americans for instance think they can buy their way out of this. I kinda doubt it. Already we hear rumblings from certain exporting nations that they have no intention of increasing exports to North America.
At the present moment (2005) we can expect that Indoneasia is becomming a net oil importer along with the UK. This means that Australia needs to look for another source of supply for its imports since Indoneasia use to supply much of Australia's imports.
So we have the beginnings of the shortages happening right now. I expect the U.K. will be the bellweather and lead the world onto the petroleum diet that is waiting for us all.
During 2006 we can expect the 2nd largest feild (Canterral - measured from a production standpoint - not reserves) to go into terminal decline and the rate has been announced to be about 14% per year. This is about the decline rate the North Sea experianced.
Canterral produces about 2.1 million BOPD so we're going to lose about 300,000 BOPD starting within a year or so from this source.
It is an open question at this point if the largest field in the world (Ghawar) is in decline. The Saudis say no. Many experts are not so optimistic. Many experts say we will be in a crunch by Q4 this year.
At this point the North Sea has been in decline since about 1999 and production has dropped about 3 million BOPD. This decline will continue unless some new discoveries are found. So far there is drilling - but little success.
--------------
This leaves alternate fuels such as ethanol. It is not an energy loss as has been reported and in fact it is obvious this is the case. Any farmer who has sat on his tractor in the hot sun while tilling a field of barley wishing he had a cold beer in his hand (and who knows how to brew it) can do the arithmetic required.
However on the flip side.
The reality of the situation is that the best source of liquid fuel in North America (and in fact world wide) is from the Fischer-Tropche reaction. This is involved in Tar Sands production for instance as well is many stranded natural gas projects.
The investments in Alberta for instance are in the range of about $10 billion per year and these will continue into the foreseeable future.
Even with investments like this the projects will not be able to supply much more than 2-3 million BOPD by 2015. At a 2% world decline we can expect worldwide oil production to drop by a minimum of about 20% in the decade following Peak Oil.
Since we currently produce about 84 million BOPD thi
Depends who you believe. Apparently this estimate is based on a gloom and doom scenario by someone with an axe to grind
"Scenario" has nothing to do with it. This is a calculation of net energy costs for processes happening today.
They are saying it costs 1.29 gal of oil to create the ethanol equivalent of less than 1 gal of oil ("less" because of ethanol's lower energy density per gallon). This constitutes more than a mere prediction about the future that may or may not pan out. It's easily verifiable or falsifiable.
The ethanol powered cars in Brazil work fine, but the ethanol fuel is about 15% less mileage per gallon. Also, in cooler climates, in temperatures less than 55F/15C, the cars have to be equipped with a supplementary gasoline fuel tank for starting purposes. In addition, the ethanol cars have to be designed with special coatings for the fuel line and carburation, as the ethanol is slightly corrosive.
Nowadays, there is little difference in driving ethanol or petroleum powered cars, although in the past they were prone to misfiring and hesitancy.
As for pollution, the ethanol cars give off a distinct, lingering, sweet sugary smell. I am not sure what's in it, but it's kind of nice in a tropical morning. Whenever I smell something like it I am always reminded of my time in Brazil.
A very practical solution for somwhere like Brazil with vast space for sugar cane plantations, but not having much natural oil resource.
this *fact* is brought to you by the letter P, as in physics
No, this "fact" is brought to you by the letter "P", as in "Pimental". Pimental is an an anti-ethanol crusader. Every last study since the 1970s that has said that ethanol is net-negative has either been authored or coauthored by him. I can't locate a single "net negative" conducted without his involvement, amid the many "net positive"s.
All of his previous papers have been widely criticized on relying on grossly outdate information. Using modern information, about a dozen studies have been conducted by widely varied researchers; each come up with between 30-70% net positive, with the higher numbers relying on more modern technology, and the lower on "average" technology. I can only assume that Pimental's latest is more of the same as his previous. His second paper simply reused the data in his first, despite it being outdated the first time.
This is, by the way, a discussion of ethanol from corn, as opposed to ethanol from sugarcane which is more efficient (see Brazil).
Now, even if ethanol *was* energy negative, that's still irrelevant. Everything in the universe is energy negative; we only change forms of energy to produce the work that we want. For example, during WWII, the Nazis made large amounts of oil from coal. It took a lot of energy from coal to produce the oil at the time; by the sort of calculations discussed here, it was a "net negative". Yet, it powered the Nazi war machine.
What matters is if you're making something that allows you to get work done. If you power ethanol production from burning ag waste (common to do so at least partly, for heating), coal power, nuclear power, etc, you're making something that you can burn in your car from something that you couldn't - you're producing something that can get work done. Nobody is advocating burning oil or ethanol to produce ethanol here, just like the Nazis didn't burn oil to power coal liquifaction.
But, this is all a tangent: only in Pimental's little world of outdated farming energy consumption data and ethanol production efficiencies is ethanol "net negative".
Point of interest. Offering to shoot us might not work so well as an incentive as you might imagine.
So could we then stop subsidizing it to the tune of $3 Billion a year?
The only reason you can get it for $2 a gallon is because all the rest of us are paying for it through our tax dollars.
Beyond that Pepsi colluded with the Soviet Union During the Cold War. By selling it's syrup to the communist government in exchange for vodka, they attempted to get themselves intigrated into the Eastern block countries since Coke had swept through Western Europe with the Allied advance.
Pepsi has since been bitten in the rear by thier own scheme since after the fall of the Iron Curtian pepsi was seen as a holdover from the Communist Era while Coke was seen as coming with the overwelming swoosh of products from the West.
Now, the big question, did Pepsi in Russia use cane sugar? Discuss.
--"Sorry for the inconvience." Gods Last Words to his Creation
DNA, So Long and Thanks for all the Fish
While I may not fall in line with either you or my sibling posts as far as thoughts on ethanol being good or bad, but I think that many are missing some of the far reaching ramifications. I think that the main thing that is good about ethanol is that it is renewable. Petroleum is not renewable. Even if it isn't a permanent solution it may be a very necessary step toward the real solution. Growing crops for ethanol production will have a positive effect on air pollution and we aren't going to have to worry about oil wells going dry. Sure it may not be perfect, but it isn't worth dismissing like my sibling posts seem to favor.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
Nuclear (fission) is a fossil fuel too. As far as I know, there's only a few hundred year's worth of Uranium to mine, and then we're in exactly the same position again.
-BB
If the ethanol is being made from organic waste after harvesting the edible portions of a food crop, the net energy yield of ethanol production may be higher once one subtracts out the cost of the energy that would have been spent on the production of those food crops regardless of whether one was seeking to produce ethanol.
Its like the countries that extract oil from old tires. Superficially, this is a net energy loss as it takes more petroleum to extract oil from tires than the process provides. But, the process as a whole is a net gain once one factors in the cost of disposal of those same tires.
So one possible solution to the problem is to look for ways to make ethanol as by-products of processes that are going to take place regardless of whether or not ethanol is produced. As long as the value of the by-products exceed the marginal increase in inputs to create the by-product, ethanol becomes viable.
We could go back to making soap out of soap and not detergent.
That short sentence provides hope that the USA will (at last) be a player in the treaty that comes after Kyoto.
In this terrorism-enriched world, the fear of losing "energy security" may provide economic impetus for the US Government to promote efficient alternatives to dependency on oil from the Middle East.
boakes.org
Ah, I misread your post. Still, points 3 and 4 apply. We can replace the plants piecemeal without any major impact, and the nuclear fuel supply is far more extensive than the previous estimates given. :-)
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Nature does all of the work putting energy into corn too; it's called the Sun. Corn oil is an energy-rich compound, and all of that energy was solar. The 'P' for Physics argument is absolutely retarded.
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
I was kinda pointing at that
we only change forms of energy to produce the work that we want.
And in the process you will lose energy to another underired form (such as heat), my point was that with oil nature has done most of the work, with Ethanol thats not as true. Now if the study is flawed do you ahve anything other than the authors name to show it is so?
What matters is if you're making something that allows you to get work done.
But we are using oil and natural gas to produce something that does the work of oil and natural gas! and doing it at a net negative.
But, this is all a tangent: only in Pimental's little world of outdated farming energy consumption data and ethanol production efficiencies is ethanol "net negative".
that may be, I dont know the man and I do want ethanol to work (especially when generated from 'green' energy. But my point was stop atacking the messenger and go right after the message it gives more credability..
... On the one hand, you have the most blatant forms of corporate welfare, on the other you have a process that has recently become (or been found to be) net energy positive even with grain-based sourcing.
Biodiesel is still a far better choice, as its energy balance is undeniably and strongly net positive. Also, TDP should be included in any energy subsidy planning, since it combines effective waste management with fuel and energy creation with displaced CO2 (the process generates CO2, but that CO2 would have been created anyway or, worse, methane would have been created).
I'm still a fan of hydrogen, though, even if you have to build out local natural gas reformers piggybacked on the gas infrastructure as a stopgap to get you to a hydrogen pipeline system with nuclear-electrolyzed hydrogen (with anti-NIMBY legislation, the transition would take no more than 20 years). And yes, I'd have a reformer in my garage if I could, and frankly you wouldn't even need fuel cells to start: go with LNG-style conversions first.
Looking at the results are nice but I'd love to see the work and calculations used to come up with their results. Does anyone have links to something with a little more substance?
I'm from an Aggro state, and he's entirely incorrect...
Specifically, I'm from one of the ones that has mercury pollution problems from our use of industrial power plants.
Ethanol produced from corn takes more energy than it returns. Ironically, he state this, then tries to make an argument in favor of it. The only argument one could really make is that there is something cool about turning coal-burning energy into ethanol. The argument that burning ethanol is "cleaner" is useless if you're burning coal to get the power to make it to begin with.
We need less subsidies and less bureacracy to actually be a "producing" nation that doesn't consume all the rest of the world's resources. The parent talks about buying up leftover corn and soy, but apparently they aren't from my state, where we have farmers who get paid to *not* grow crops on their farms.
Now don't get me wrong, there might eventually be something to this, but I know Ethanol from corn ain't it. The parent is right, without the subsidies to grow useless crap corn, family farmers would go bankrupt. And I gotta admit, I don't really see that as a BAD thing. They aren't using the land efficiently right now, and rely on kickbacks from the government in order to survive.
That doesn't mean I like nuclear, or that this is a good thing...
But I do, and I think it's a _great_ thing.
I mean, until we discover fusion, or zero point energy, or we can leech off dark energy, or whatever.
Nook-you-ler is the way to go if you use modern PBR technology (the reactor type, not the beer). I mean, if France can go as long as they have without major catastrophes, just copy their operations manual fer chrissakes...
But how much of that oil usage comes from using it in cars and what not? Putting a little nuclear reactor in a vehicle isn't really a viable idea yet, even though a pebble reactor would work. You simply don't want a car wreck throwing readioactive particles everywhere.
I didn't know that there were any small farmers left in the midwest.
I don't think very many small farmers would go bankrupt, but maybe a few large coorporations would see profits take a hit.
- 85% of the farms in the US are owned by large coorporations.
- Domestic farming subsidies like the Farm Bill ($180 billion) pour money into these large corporations.
- The huge surpluses created by domestic subsidies get sold cheap, lowering global market value for many crops.
- We buy up all the left over corn and soy because it is super cheap. Our tax dollars already payed for most of it.
The process keeps real family owned farms in other countries in constant poverty. The low prices on the global market force other nations to subsidize before there people starve to death.
We lend the other nations cash, and give away food to there people. Wow, we are so nice!
The ethanol thing is basically government/big business throwing the dumbass public a bone. They say, "Hey, look at this! We are saving the environment, and we are helping local American families in the heartland." Blah blah blah
It's all about the money,
DOMESTIC FARMING SUBSIDIES = CORPORATE WELFARE
I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. -Confucius
You know, it isn't that hard to find the real numbers behind these studies. Here are the production and cost figures for a real live plant:
For a small 40 million gallon ethanol/year plant, the BTU inputs are 2 trillion BTUs per year for natural gas, electricity, and corn. The output in BTUs is 3 trillion BTUs. In order to push the numbers into negative territory, the ethanol critics have to generate more than 1 trillion BTUs of additional energy costs. I have not read the Berkeley study, but I bet it includes the food that the employees eat, the cost of generating the paper in the books they read, and all sorts of other absurd numbers.
Here is the actual data for a brand-new (2005) 40 million gallon ethanol plant that uses 15 million bushels of corn per year:
Inputs:
Natural Gas:
4,000 Mcf per day of gas at a cost of $3.95 per Mcf
Natural gas: 1,028,000 BTU/MCF = 1,496,768,000,000 BTU inputs for natural gas
Electricity:
30,000,000 kilowatt hours per year for an estimated price of $.040 per kilowatt- hour
High estimate: 8,962 Btu per KWH
Low estimate: 3,416 BTU per KWH
Taking the low estimate, 102,480,000,000 BTU
Corn:
339,196,122,625 BTU for fertilizer (122 bushels per acre, 15 million bushels, 124 pounds of nitrogen per acre, 22,159 BTU/lb for fertilizer)
Total inputs:
Input BTU: 1,998,444,122,625 Input total
Outputs:
40 million gallons of ethanol, 128,000 tons of distillers grains and 115,500 tons of raw carbon dioxide gas.
LHV: Low heat value--76,000 Btu per gallon of ethanol.
HHV: High heat value--83,961 Btu per gallon of ethanol.
Low: 76,000 x 40,000,000 = 3,040,000,000,000 BTU
Surplus:
1,041,555,877,375 BTU
You're talking about Iowa? I have never heard about a water shortage in Iowa. If you visited in the summer you would find it to be unbearably hot and muggy. Erosion tends to be a bigger problem, but with no-till farming that's not so much an issue anymore.
With great power comes great fan noise.
Just being the right thing to do won't make a thing happpen. If we wait too long we'll find ourselves on the downhill side of the oil production curve with oil & gas prices skyrocketing.
If that happens will the utility company be able to afford all the materials like concrete mix, rebar and the various nuclear-grade alloys? Will the construction workers be able to afford driving to work or will the contractors have to build on-site workers' barracks and mess halls just so the crews can even show up every day? It is easy to imagine scenarios where the upfront cost of a plant would be as much or more than the possioble revenue generated by it.
"In a hierarchy every employee will rise to his level of incompetence". The Peter Principle
ADM (Archer-Daniels-Midland) is one of the larger producers of corn in the United States. More so than is necessary for livestock feed and human feed.
So they were faced with what to do with all that excess corn. Ship it to starving nations? Nah. Lets make alcohol from it and sell it as the best thing since sliced bread. While they were at it they created MTBE and we know what a cluster that was.
They'd be better off putting the corn through TDP. At least they'd get oil out the other side.
The study I read (from Berkeley) about 9 months ago admitted it's rather narrow scope (corn, soybean crop, current mass production process) It made a couple of semi-sweeping claims -- but generally limited itself to criticism of throwing money at the people who were generating ethanol in stupid ways. (Note this reading was prompted by the West Wing ethanol as pork-barrel politics) The numbers used were ridiculously rough -- the margin of error would be much greater than their results. They ESTIMATED the energy production costs of producing fertilizer. Now to me, a real world check on whether a gallon of pesticide took 5 gallons of gasoline to produce is to check and see how much they're selling for . . . simple eh? (I know of and could find no significant tax incentives / government bribes for producing pesticide) So -- given that pesticide companies pay workers, make profits etc -- you cannot (honestly) conclude a gallon of pesticide took five gallons to produce if 5 gallons of gas costs anything close to the price the company is charging for a gallon of gas. Is pesticide well over $10 / gallon -- nope. At least some of their numbers are garbage -- remember GIGO -- Garbage In Garbage Out. I really would like to see an HONEST study of ethanol -- based on this (highly biased and speculative) study -- there are some significant inefficiencies in our current subsidized production. One problem I suspect is the need to avoid making human consumable alcohol. There are a couple of sites describing how you can brew your own E85 (small scale) for under $2.00 / gal. The author notes that you are limited by law to certain volumes of production despite it not being safe to drink. Are our blue laws ruining the efficiency of ethanol production? Did you know that denatured alcohol (sold as a cooking fuel) has been intentionally poisoned to prevent ingestion?
$2.50/gal of gasoline had been stated to be a critical price for US citizens. I heard this from a Saudi Oilman and I've seen it happen around me since CA has crossed that line a few times. It seems to be the price point where people start to change their purchasing habits and driving habits. It could also be the price that makes the alternatives more competitive.
With that inhand, seeing this story pop up at this time is not surprising. It runs with how the US auto industry started fighting against hybrid cars when Bush too office and started feeding them with billions for a handful of million dollar hydrogen fuelcell vehicles...
BTW, if you consider the US military complex as a subsidization for the US Oil industry, that along pulls the rug out from under their feet on this one. Would we be in Iraq and Saudi Arabia if we were not dependent on foreign oil? For that matter, would 9/11 have happened? Sure they'd hate the US for the Israeli/Palestinian issues but without a US backed Saudi government, would they be pissed enough still to come here?
Anyways, expect more of these kinds of articles as the price of US gasoline approaches an average of $2.50 nationwide. IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Did you even read that article?
Just one of the many passages that directly contradicts your link text:
"Fowler is quick to note that a study of this kind does not prove that diet soda causes obesity. More likely, she says, it shows that something linked to diet soda drinking is also linked to obesity"
Because that would be communism, duh! How the hell are companies like Monsanto and ADM supposed to make billions of dollars if the gov't owns the farms? Sheesh.
Did you read the article you linked to? It sounds to me like there is no causal relationship. Instead, it may be that people who are gaining weight switch to diet sodas in an attempt to stop the gain. In which case saying that diet soda causes weight gain is like saying that applying the brakes causes car accidents.
The mining, milling, and enrichment of uranium all produce significant greenhouse gases. In fact every stage of the nuclear fuel cycle produces green house gases. Let's not even consider CO2 produced in the building and decomissioning of the plant and facilities. Well we can't. No significant nuclear power plant has ever been attempted to be decomissioned.
Further problems with nuclear include the unsolved problem of waste disposal, the high cost of producing nuclear power (it's actually much more expensive than many renewables), nuclear weapons proliferation, and of course apart from the Three Mile Island meltdown (26 years ago) and the criticality accident at the uranium reprocessing facility in Tokai-mura (just 6 years ago), there have been plenty of other nuclear accidents.
Did I see say nuclear wasn't renewable? that's right. High grade uranium will run out in 20 to 50 years (pick your estimate). Leaving us with low grade stuff, which is even more CO2 intensive to mine, mill and enrich, and will also eventually run out (150 years perhaps).
The Strange Energy Budget of Ethanol Production, where the discussion is less about cola, and more about comparing it with other forms of energy.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Correlation is not causation. This study doesn't conclude that "Diet soda causes people to gain weight," like you say, rather that people who drink diet soda gain weight. Big surprise! Who drinks diet pop? Fatties! If you're already overweight, the chances that you're in the middle of gaining more weight is higher than someone who is fit and not gaining weight. Saying that diet soda causes people to gain weight is like saying that going to enrolling in Weight Watchers causes you to gain weight, because there is a correlation between people who enroll in WW and at some point gain some more weight.
People who want to cut the 150-200 calories for a can of pop out of their diets. Because of all the whacky psychological stuff going on too, a lot of overweight folks tend to think they since they drank a diet soda (instead of a regular) that they can make up for it in some other area- have an extra scoop of ice cream, or something along those lines. You see a lot of that with diet food- they think they're eating "healthy" buy buying the "diet" or "lo-carb" cookies, but then eat 8 cookies instead of 3 regular ones, netting a total of more calories.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
I'd say Nuclear fission is a pretty good one. As has been pointed out above, there are a number of reasons the dwindling supply of natural U235 is not much of a concern with proper management. While it is true that only a few years worth of readibly fissile material that can be naturally mined are left in the earth, breeder reactors give us an extremely expanded time frame. Especially when alternative reactors, such as Pebble Bed reactors, which can use Thorium as a fuel instead of Uranium or plutonium come into play.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf62.htm
So my concern with this is, do we stop all of our nuclear activity now and lock (or at least greatly increase the difficulty) ourselves out of fission derived power when the natural supplies decay away?
do you have anything other than the author's name
Yes. Every study not conducted by him that I have ever located. Need links? I can also link you to critiques of his previous work if you would like, and to how he ignored the critiques and used the exact same numbers again.
Want examples? Pimental assumes that all corn is irrigated (only 16% is, and that corn is rarely used for ethanol production - and Pimental even notes this, but assumes all corn is irrigated anyways!). He ignored life-cycle analysis standards. He includes one-time energy charges such as farming equipment and ethanol plant production, ignoring that oil companies have similar scale one-time energy charges for oil rigs and refineries. Pimental used energy calculations for fertilizer production from the UN's data for worldwide average costs, while the USDA and others use the energy cost of US fertilizer production (these are widely different numbers - a 2.5-fold difference). He uses 1979 ethanol plant efficiency, ignoring the huge process improvements made since (which halve the energy cost per gallon). Etc. He makes no attempt, whatsoever, to be balanced, and repeats the same inaccurate representation over and over.
my point was that with oil nature has done most of the work
You're ignoring the issue: You can't burn ag waste in your car. You can't burn coal in your car. You can't burn nuclear in your car. You *can* burn ethanol in your car. Even if it were energy-negative, which it's not close to being, you'd still be converting a non-car-usable source to a car-usable source.
But we are using oil and natural gas to do something that does the work of oil and natural gas!
False. Over half of our country's electricity comes from coal, and another 20% from nuclear, plus about 10% from renewables. Electricty generation from oil (you can't burn natural gas in most cars) was a mere 3.2% of our national electricity in 1999 (natural gas was just over 15%).
*Furthermore*, almost all ethanol production plants utilize on-site heat production, using electricity only for things like the mashers. Heat is the big energy cost for ethanol production. Typically either coal, ag-waste, or both are burned (occasionally, natural gas is used). When was the last time you shoved coal or agricultural waste into your car?
stop attacking the messenger
When the guy repeatedly uses 1979 ethanol plant efficiencies (we're twice as efficient nowadays), pretends that all of our corn is irrigated (only 16% is), uses worldwide energy costs for fertilizer production instead of US costs (a 2.5fold difference), and other gross distortions, then repeats them after being corrected, there's good reason to call him "dishonest".
Point of interest. Offering to shoot us might not work so well as an incentive as you might imagine.
It hasn't been that long since we had articles about farming algae for vegetable oil, which can be made into biodiesel fuel. That sounded really promising to me.
The whole reason for going with algae was that it has the potential to be more efficient, as compared with bio-fuels from more conventional sources. (It was stated that some species of algae are up to 50% oil, by mass. How does that compare with peanut plants? Or corn? Yeah.)
And yet. . . algae isn't part of the wider discussion. People are still arguing about corn. Now, I realize the algae thing is all hypothetical -- looks good on paper, not yet proven practical. And yes, it takes time for new ideas to gain mindshare. But IMO we need to be pushing research into more ingenious, cutting-edge ideas like this. Many of them won't pan out, but some could, and it could make a huge difference.
Nope. The only reason why the switch hasn't occurred is because ethanol costs too much. We live in a market-based economy. If we had to spend 5 times as much energy to make the ethanol as it contained, but we got that energy from on-site ag-waste burning and managed to produce $1.50-per-gallon ethanol, people would flock to it.
Wholesale or retail? According to this data, Ethanol prices will reach about $1.80/gal by December. Unfortunately, Ethanol has not been widely tracked or promoted, so there's a LOT of inefficiency that's keeping the price up. If the market started demanding ethanol, the price equation would probably change considerably.
Truth be told, we *need* to get on it. The only thing holding down the price of gasoline (~$60/barrel and ~$2.30/gal retail!) is the constant the lowering of the dollar value. That's not something the US Economy can expect to maintain indefinitely without worldwide reprocussions.
By the way, all of the papers against ethanol were authored or coauthored by the same person: Pimental. He just keeps hashing his old, widely criticized as inaccurate data, and repeating the same calculations with it.
Nice. So the question is, why does anyone believe this guy? While it's tempting to point at big oil, it's not like they're not feeling the economic squeeze as well. Any thoughts?
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I don't know how those researchers came up with their numbers but something doesn't jive. I have done enough research into Ethanol Vs. Biodiesel as feul sources to see right away there are some issues with their numbers.
The article states it takes 29% more energy to make ethanol then you get out. Then it states it takes 27% more energy to create biodiesel then you get out. These numbers are impossibly backward when looking at real-world production facilities. Making biodiesel from soybeans is a complex process that first requires alot of energy to press the oil out of the soybeans. Then adding chemicals that have to be produced somewhere (read more energy). Enormous amounts of energy to cook the ingrediants. Ethanol only reqires one cooking without any chemicals. The only real trick to ethanol is that you have to cook it a while and keep the pressure tightly regulated to get the purity you need. Roughly translated from the cost figures I last looked at, ethanol takes somewhere between 2/3 and 1/2 as much energy to produce then soy based biodiesel does. So any claims that soy based biodiesel is MORE efficient to produce then ethanol is obviously based on some incorrect math or missing some facts.
My guess? The researchers got all their data from the National Biodiesel Board... Or better yet, Exxon-Mobil;)
This is completely wrong. Transportation energy comes from oil. Electricity in the USA comes from coal, nuclear, hydro or (local) natural gas. Oil is only relevant for the transportation. By publicly claiming that the vast majority of our (presumably USA?) energy comes from oil, I'm led to believe you will tell any lie to push your agenda. However, you could merely be uninformed, caught up in the traps laid by the liars before you.
What if: The plants to produce ethanol were farmed using less-energy-intensive methods? Do we HAVE to use corn? Pretty much ANY grain can be fermented to produce Ethanol. Do we HAVE to use synthetic nitrogen-based fertilizers? The only point of that is to increase yeilds per-acre, but with the amount of farmland in this country lain fallow due to the current market conditions, there's no damn reason to hold Ethanol farming to the same production-efficiency standard. Synthetic fertilizers production is highly energy intensive. But plants will grow just fine without it. What if the distillation process were done using solar energy? ie. a solar still. (granted, this example is for water purification, but distillation of ethanol can also be readily accomplished using similar methods. I think that innovative processes could definately improve the energy yeild for ethanol production, if we're willing to think outside of the box that 20th Century industrial farming techniques have put us into. Pushing a study that finds otherwise is willfully painting a "worst-case scenario" - and perhaps political leanings were behind it? Ethanol is a very highly-charged political topic. Personally, I don't know where to stand on it, because in this case, BOTH sides are evil. (OPEC/7-sisters, or ADM/Monsanto).
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
It also says that since it tastes sweet, you body is expecting calories when it is getting none, which may lead to increased craving of real, calorie rich foods.
I didn't even want to head in that direction as it's even worse what people can convince themselves of.
Think about who drinks diet pop. People that understand that large amounts of sugar is bad. So what do they look for? Something that is the same, but not as bad for you. (In that one particular area)
Stop...the point was almost missed there.
What is Pop?
It's essentially liquid sugar.
What does it take to come to this realization, and then decide that drinking pop itself isn't the problem, it's the sugar. (Remember, there really is no difference)
What brings people to even _want_ to drink pop when they've realized the sugar is bad for them? What's left? Just don't drink the shit.
Nothing good can come from trying to find a replacement for sugar so that you can consume disgustingly huge amounts of guilt free.
Just quit drinking pop. Switch to carbonated water if it's the fizz you like. Switch to natural fruit juices if sweetness is your thing. Switch to coffee or tea if caffeine is your thing. Just drop the refined sugars instead of looking for a replacement. And if that seems unreasonable, I strongly suggest you think about _why_ you need that sugar, OR the replacement, in the first place.
No Comment.
A simple Google search of the Cornell and Berkley professors involved yields some interesting things. First, that Tad Patzek seems to be a member of the "U.C. OIL CONSORTIUM". You can read the charter here: http://patzek.berkeley.edu/UCOil/charter.html The other guy seems to be more geared toward environmental impact than the efficiency of ethanol production. http://www.entomology.cornell.edu/Faculty_Staff/Pi mentel/pimentel.html
Not to suggest that the research is all FUD, but I get itchy when academia thinks that they understand something better just because their not making a direct profit from it. That somehow their outside vantage gives them a better understanding of how things work.
Nature put more enery into a volume of oil than it did into the same corn, and it put it into a form which is easier to process.
I used to think that, too (energy used to separate hydrogen = energy gained from oxidizing it), but hydrogen can be generated by cracking hydrocarbons, not electrolyzing water. Carbon waste is generated, but at least it's isolated to the cracking plant.
There are other problems w/hydrogen: the energy required to liquify hydrogen is 40% of what's available from the liquified product. Oops. Well, maybe if we're working w/fission/fusion, we can accept higher energy losses, since we're starting with the POWAH of the SUN.
John.
Indycar is using Ethanol in their cars this year..
3 -05.htm
http://www.mocorn.org/news/2005/News%20Release3-0
I saw them in Richmond...seemed to run pretty fast but the smell was interesting.
It is the same reason we use electric washing machine engines instead of using an internal combustion engine powered washing machine (which could reuse the excess heat to heat the water).
Convenience. People want convenience and 24h availability. That costs extra.
Read the article people eat more after drinking a diet soda far or otherwise. The 'empty calories' cause psychological hunger to kick in somehow (that they do not know) and you try to replace the calories with real food.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Yes I would really appreciate the links, thanks.. Thank you also for making points (which had I RTFA I might have already knows) which I can agree really blow holes in his work without turing to flame.
Over half of our country's electricity comes from coal
Not exactly a clean source of energy.
When the guy repeatedly uses 1979 ethanol plant efficiencies (we're twice as efficient nowadays), pretends that all of our corn is irrigated (only 16% is), uses worldwide energy costs for fertilizer production instead of US costs (a 2.5fold difference), and other gross distortions, then repeats them after being corrected, there's good reason to call him "dishonest".
That may be but you got me with the first paragraph attacking his methodology not the previous comment with flippent attacks on someone I have never heard of..
That may be just what happens when we offer our bodies the sweet taste of diet drinks, but give them no calories. Fowler points to a recent study in which feeding artificial sweeteners to rat pups made them crave more calories than animals fed real sugar. "If you offer your body something that tastes like a lot of calories, but it isn't there, your body is alerted to the possibility that there is something there and it will search for the calories promised but not delivered," Fowler says.
Don't read to the second page of a 3 page article and than conclude. Lol.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Currently, the cost of producing ethanol from cellulose is estimated to be between $1.15 and $1.43 per gallon in 1998 dollars. According to this paper, that cost could drop by another $.60/gallon by 2015.
Enthusiasts for biofuels seem to use a wierd analysis approach. The term "system expansion approach" appears in papers justifying ethanol production, and most of those papers are by Bruce Dale. That form of analysis doesn't seem to be used for anything but biofuels, so that's suspicious.
Read the 3rd page of the second page article where it describes a controlled rat study. Do not just read to where an article 'proves your point'. Lol.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
(I couldn't see anyone else commenting on this.)
What did they expect? All energy transformations cost energy which is lost in the process. 29% actually sounds quite good, compared to other methods.
Adventure, Romance, MAD SCIENCE!
Go into defense contracting? Look I am not saying we should have government owned farms I am saying the gov buys the land and does nothing with it and thus saves money. I understand it's welfare for votes and I get it that low population states have way more power than cash but it would be cheaper to buy the land and just give those people the cash than go though the nascence of actually creating food that nobody wants.
The reason why I ask is that Ethanol at a retail cost of ~$2.00/gal would already beat the heck out of oil prices.
Gasoline is somewhere around 65$/barrel right now, correct? A barrel is 42 gallons, so wholesale gasoline is $1.55/gal.
The figures I've seen have crude fluctuating around $60.00/gal, with refined gasoline at about $1.60/gal wholesale. The latest report is here. (FYI, that link will stop working on July 25th.) It quotes:
Oil is traded in US dollars. The weak dollar raises oil prices and cheapens ethanol by comparison.
*smacks forehead* Of course. I knew that. I need to stop skimming articles so fast. Yes, the lowering of the dollar is making the Ethanol prices more attractive, but it does seem to be backfiring on the economy. Traditionally, lowering the dollar has had a positive economic impact, but the US has never been as quite as dependent on oil as it is today. And now that the price of oil is up there, it's doubtful we'll be seeing it drop unless actual competition enters the market.
They keep getting closer, though, so expect to see more ethanol at the pumps in the future.
Indeed. I'd be happy if oil companies started focusing on Ethanol blends. We're currently at about a 10% blend in many areas. If that blend could be increased to say 20-50% while simultaneously dropping the price of Ethanol, we'd have a real winner on our hands.
The problem is that the government needs to pour a few temporary incentives into making it happen. It would also help if exceptions were made to the undercutting laws at the pump for Ethanol fuels. Passing lower prices on to the consumer could only be good for the demand. Also, lowering taxes on ethanol gasoline (like the Illinois gas tax suspension of 2000) would help tremendously.
Equatorial countries can be expected to push even more for ethanol production, as they can make it with sugarcane (more efficient than corn).
Indeed. This would be especially helpful once the dollar goes back up, and the price of gasoline doesn't.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
So you use biodiesel orf ethanol to run the farm machinery needed to harvest the corn and transport it to the procrdding plant.
Then you can just as easily argue that drinking weight causes people to gain weight. Same effect. I don't doubt that when you try to substitute something non-caloric for real food when you are hungry gets you to eat more than you would have originally, but that argument could be used for a ton of foods any drinks.
Diet pop doesn't contain "empty calories." Or rather, it doesn't contain empty calories like you seem to mean. Diet soda tends not to contain calories in general, or rather, there are only a few in the whole can/bottle. As the dictionary says:
That is, food/drink that contains calories- be it from sugars/carbs or fats that don't contain any "redeeming" nutritional value- protein, vitamans, etc. A lot of candy and regular, sugar'd soda can be categorized as "empty calories." One could argue that the 1 calorie in a can of Diet Coke counts as an "empty calorie," but that would be pendantic beyond reason. Diet sodas are non-caloric, which is why they are "diet."
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Biodiesel from vegetable oil is IIRC more efficient to produce than ethanol because there is no distillation step. Some guys recently also have managed to come up with a process with turns corn sugars into biodiesel at low temperatures. Some other guys are working on a process to produce ethanol from cellulosic matter like corn stalks using a different yeast strain to do the fermentation step.
That's where ethanol kicks in, again, as a carrier :-)
and without it, small farmers in the midwest would go bankrupt...
The reason why small farmers are in such a bind is due to the large scale industrial farming processes, and exposure to a global market. The energy inputs are so cheap (because of cheap oil) - both for production of nitrogen fertilizers, and global transport to level-out the global market, that small farmers simply can not compete.
After the Hubbert oil peak, in about 10-15 years, I think you'll see a strong resurgence of small farmers. Farmland will be like gold. Sure, production yeilds will be much lower, and crop failures will become much more common, and it will be much more difficult to transport food long distances to markets where demand is high, but because of all these things, demand will be high EVERYWHERE. Food costs are going to go through the roof, to feed a planet of 6+ billion. And farmers will be the 2nd most profitable industry. After weapons manufacturers, of course.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
What's the boiling point of ethanol? Roughly 160 F? Pretty low in other words? Seems like combining solar thermal into the equation you can get a decent net gain. It's using fossil fuel to evaporate out the alky from the mash that takes the most energy and gives those skewed numbers, that and made from natgas fertilizers. Use a total plant based driven fertilizer scheme with it and you can get methane, alcohol, biodiesel, and whatever is left over as fertilizer, all from the same stuff.
Now if they could stop with the corn and look at doing it with industrial hemp....
This study shows important facts that are being ignored in U.S. energy policy. But I see some problems, and important facts that are not included.
For example, exactly how efficient is gasoline -- if you include exploring for the crude oil, drilling, pumping, transporting crude, refining into gas, and then transporting the gas? Likely much better than the alternative technologies, but how much?
More importantly, the study concludes that investing in other technologies such as hydrogen would be better -- But why? Hydrogen has EXACTLY the same efficiency problem (likely worse!) Hydrogen is also difficult and expensive to store, transport, and use.
The study does a good job of debunking the hype for several current alternative fuel technologies, but then jumps on the bandwagon for the most wildly over-hyped and impractical of all -- hydrogen. This leads me to believe the study is not entirely objective.
Switch to natural fruit juices if sweetness is your thing.
That is just about the worst possible advice you could possibly give to a diabetic and/or somebody trying to lose weight. Fruit juice is incredibly high in sugar (and it's mainly fructose, which is one of the "bad" sugars). If you drank it in the quantities which most people drink pop, you would never lose weight and your glucose levels would be through the roof.
Sucralose (usually sold as "Splenda") is a perfectly healthy alternative for most people. (Not for me... it upsets my digestive system something awful), and the "risks" involved with aspertame and saccharine are way overblown.
(Ever notice that the bashing of these sweetners always seems to start up right about when their patents run out, and the companies behind them are trying to sell whatever their hot new sugar replacement is? Not to go all Oliver Stone on you, but I smell a rat.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
You in your fantasy world may, but the real world doesn't.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Over half of our country's electricity comes from coal
Not exactly a clean source of energy.
When I read this, I thought of one thing too... I understand that the US doesn't refine most of it's own oil as it is, but isn't the energy being generated by coal anyway? What I'm thinking is:
Coal burned to make energy to refine oil that is then burned = 2 polluters.
Coal burned to make energy to distill ethanol that is burned = 1 polluter.
I wonder what the net output of pollution vs. the net output of energy is. Anyone know of a study on that?
-Alyred
> Ethanol = 8.65GJ/km^2/year = 274J/s/km^2 = 274 Watts/km^2.
> Solar power into hydrogen at 20% efficiency = solar flux of 1358W/m^2 * 20% solar conversion * 40% fuel cell conversion efficiency in a vehicle * 1e6m^2/km^2 = 10.8MW/km^2!!!
Well there's a bit more to it, but basically your correct. Solar flux at sea level is closer to 800W/m^2 and the sun doesn't shine like that for 24 hours every day. 20% efficiency is really high for the solar cell. I'd use a number closer to 15%. So divide by 10 and your getting closer to real yields of power. The next difference is in the energy required to produce a new generation of vehicle engines that can use the fuel cells (think Platinum catalysts). Currently fuel cells are on the order of $1000/KW. A 100HP(75KW) fuel cell would cost about $75,000 - the comparable internal cumbustion engine (new) is about $1000.
Granted even with all the hurdles to be overcome, electic fuel cell vehicles are probably the way of the future (and probably won't weight 6000lbs either).
The easiest way to save ourselves and the planet is simply to use less of course. This is not so much a technological problem as it is a social one. Ford's latest hybrid SUV gets 20/25mpg. The technology is great, but the problem is social.
I would like to see this simulation you built in mathlab. Would you mind either throwing it up on a server or emailing it to me reports(at)nospamdotnospamcom
I'm trusting that im not going to get flooded with spam. If you could email it to me I could then turn around and post it online.
The article claims that it's energy-negative no matter what your inputs are: nuclear, wind, etc. Fossil fuels just happen to be cheap and available (comparatively and temporarily, and missing a bunch of externalities). Between harvesting, fertilizing, fermenting, distilling, etc. you use a lot of energy, no matter what that source of energy is.
It doesn't have anything to do with money, a kilowatt-hour is a btu is a joule, no matter the energy source. If you burn 10 joules of solar electricity to make 9 joules of ethanol, you've wasted energy.
Now, you may have converted it into a more useful form (it's easier to power a car with ethanol than electricity; it refuels faster and goes farther). So we may need to do it anyway.
Also, there's serious question as to whether the article is right. The corn is obviously absorbing solar energy to make sugar and carbohydrates, and it feels weird to assert that it takes so much energy to convert those chemicals into a usable form. Even if there's only a slight gain (10 kwh of solar/nuke/wind/oil to make 11 kwh) it's still a win for us, since there's a loop:
1. Burn 10 kwh of oil
2. Make 11 kwh of ethanol
3. Use 1 kwh to power a computer to look at porn
4. Take the other 10 and repeat step 1, except substituting oil for ethanol.
But we're still arguing about whether the result is 9 or 11, and it's a huge difference.
We farm, and get no subsidies. What we do get is almost monthly new regulations that *cost* us money, or outright theft when some 'stakeholders" decide the flying three eyed newt is more important so the land just gets seized or put out of production, with no compensation. The vast majority of those subsidies you mention go to humongous good ole boy corporate farms, or international agro biz run through daisy chained paper corporations. They should be classed in with defense department cost overruns on no bid contracts and the like. Leave real merkun farmers out of it, we work harder for less money than about any common occupation and your food is still cheap, despite the packers and "move it around and retail it" industry taking a bigger bite than we do. Believe me, if you saw how much we get compared to what you pay for it you'd understand.
And the Africans don't want ag aid because it's GM, they don't want their farmers to get tied in with GM patented seeds,which would put them into serfdom, and I don't blame them one bit, I think it sucks too. Besides that, Africans got their own problems with tribalism and other forms of ridiculous backwards thinking and their version of the tin pot dictator du juor, THOSE are their biggest economic problems, which they are going to have to solve themselves. The best thing we could do there (IMO) is "tough love", just ignore it, neither exploit them like we have been doing for generations nor try to "help". Example, zimbabwe. Let those folks over there get desparate enough they'll hang mugabwe and his drinkin buds eventually, but if we keep shipping that doofus aid, including food aid when they used to have fantastic farms, it will just prolong things.
Ethanol More Trouble Than It's Worth?
I will only schell you schiss... *hic* Schefinitly not!!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
In addition to the costs of obtaining fissible nuclear fuel (which others have mentioned), you must consider the costs of managing the reators and the spent fuel if you are looking at the entire system of a particular fuel (as the original story does with ethanol).
While nuclear fuel is far and away the champion of energy density, by mass or by volume, it is also far and away the champion of associated costs. It's expensive to get nuclear fuel, expensive to manage reactors, and very expensive to deal with nuclear waste. In fact because spent fuel remains so toxic for so long, one can consider the cost of managing it to approach infinity from the perspective of human cultures.
Also consider the costs of an accident. Accidents WILL happen--these are human systems after all, and we've never yet created a mechanical system that is completely failure-proof (and never will). If an ethanol plant or gasoline plant experiences a leak or a catastrophic failure, it is a tragedy, but nowhere near the long-term health costs of a nuclear accident.
You also have to consider operating costs-- managing a nuclear system to the level of reliability required is much more expensive than managing a biofuel or even an oil system (since the required reliability is lower). Nuclear installations must operate perfectly all the time...you're basically talking about providing almost "infinite 9's" reliability...anyone who's sourced high-nines electric power knows how quickly cost escalates with reliability.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Why not diesel ? We have lots of lawn clippings and plastics that get dumped in land fills.
So why not recycle ?
Not to mention that ethanol still produces CO and CO2, contributing to global warming.
No, it merely releases the CO2 that was recently removed from the atmosphere when the corn grew. There is no net increase of CO2.
Its not the same as burning fossil fuels, which releases CO2 that was taken from the atmosphere millions of years ago.
What is Pop?
It's essentially liquid sugar.
So is fruit juice.
was on the comparison of fuel cells, and it showed that coal was not a good source of fuel cell storage, whereas nuclear electricity (hydrolysis) and fossil fuel (both natural gas and gasoline to create it directly) were pretty good, but that hydroelectric and wind used to split H2O by electricity were the highest energy storing mechanisms.
The problem with Science is that it depends on what your question is. They used corn, not cane sugar, to create ethanol, and they didn't use waste corn, but used virgin corn (which is really dense) - not a very smart use of biofuels - a better use would be hemp or soybean waste (only part of the plant is used).
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
If the US was a nuclear based country. It's amazing to me to see how many 'environmentalists' are up in arms about this when in fact, the nuclear reactors are more safe than ever.
...
Is that why France is switching to wind turbines and fusion power (their lastest project)?
They're more than 80 percent nuclear fission for energy, as I recall, and they're moving away from it, so that doesn't say great things about it
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The problem is, you're quoting an untested hypothesis. They have no evidence to point out that this hypothesis may be true. Instead, the idea is left as something for further testing.
To claim that because a scientist thinks there's a possibility something 'might' be true, without real, statistical or biochemical tests is absurd.
And yes, I am a scientist (population geneticist), and I research obesity for a living.
If people went around quoting alternate hypothesis that I was busy thinking up as fact before I had data, you'd believe a lot of crap in front of you. Part of our jobs is to think up plausable stories, then test those stories with data. Only when we have a sufficent body of data do we start to suspect the story is true.
We burn more energy in the form of oil to produce a barrel of ethanol than we get from burning a barrel of ethanol - net loss. We burn less energy in producing a barrel of oil than we get from burning that barrel of oil - net gain.
Sure, burning ethanol has a *lot* to reccommend it over burning oil, but *not* if we burn *more oil* to make the ethanol than if we just used oil in the first place!
This is not an argument about ecology, or the wisdom of burning oil.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Are you really going to try to compare a glass of OJ to a can of pop?
Do I really have to get in to the details here?
Come on now, that's just absurd.
No Comment.
I don't understand that part .
Why would it ? Oil from plants don't need extra energy . You don't need to crack it.
Don't forget energy required to plant, fertilize, irrigate, harvest and process the corn. (This includes preparing the fields and cleaning up between crops.) Then tack on energy required to handle, store, distribute and dispense the resultant fuel.
See, everyone seems to forget those parts.
With petroleum oil, you are working from an existing reserve. Part of the energy goes back into extracting the energy, but because there are much fewer steps and the density of the source energy is so high ("high quality" source) you come out ahead.
Sunlight will get you no more than about 150 watts per square foot, which is almost nothing. (And that's before you did anything to capture it!) So unless you can harvest that energy in a method that takes less than that to produce a usable fuel, you will have to put energy into the system from somewhere else... like petroleum.
I still say making biodiesel from algae is the best prospect...
=Smidge=
If you are diabetic, you need to understand the sugar issue much more in depth than any of this.
Also, I was not suggesting replacing your pop intake with Tang or some shit. Fruit juice is good for you, certainly better than pop. Especially if it's just juice, no preservatives or added sugar or concentrated.
Even still, Everything In Moderation!
No Comment.
They have a rat study on the 3rd page that they refer to. I am not in school atm so I do not have access to scientific journals. Lol, I love stirring up a hornet's nest of scientists.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
So, in your interpretation:
May = Will
Is that so?
WTF? Over?
Critics of ethanol are always bringing up government subsidies and process efficiency. What they never do is weigh those against the ongoing cost of defending and protecting our access to overseas oil, which amounts to hundreds of billions per year. No matter HOW inefficient producing ethanol is, we won't have the cost of invading Iowa to keep our corn supply flowing.
...and yes, it's more trouble than it's worth.
By publicly claiming that the vast majority of our (presumably USA?) energy comes from oil, I'm led to believe you will tell any lie to push your agenda.
Your facts are simply incorrect.
80% of power consumed in the US comes from oil, used mostly for transportation and heating. 20% of the power consumed in the US is in the form of electricity, and comes primarily from coal, but nuclear, natural gas, and hydo are also significant.
Average power consumption in the US is 2.5 TW: 2 TW from oil and 0.5 TW electrical (electric power consumption peaks at 1TW during the day, but is much less at night).
I've yet to see an electric combine (though, given the ingenuity of American farmers, I'm sure there's one out there) and just as the GPP said, the majority of the power needed to produce corn-based ethanol comes from oil-based fuels burned in farm equipment.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
If the gov't bought the farms, it would have no future influence over those voters. This way, legislators get to buy votes with taxpayer dollars every election.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
and the UCS is usually quite unbiased on these things.
Hahaha, you have got to be kidding me! The Union of Concerned Scientists is an activist left leaning environmental group. They are hardly unbiased.
I don't think ethanol will be going away anytime soon, assuming we can find better ways to use it (or if the auto manufacturers embrace it more readily).
Last year, a newsblurb came out from the U of MN (got corn?) regarding:
The first reactor capable of producing hydrogen from a renewable fuel source - ethanol - efficiently enough to hold economic potential...
Full Text Here
and now back to the fallout shelter...
I see that you aren't a fan of the tooth brush, enjoy cancer, and have issues with moderation*.
/.)
To each their own!
(* That would be as in 'consuming in moderation' as opposed to the act of moderating posts on
No Comment.
You oil peak guys never cease to amuse me. I remember hearing the same "we'll be out of oil in 20 years" BS 30 years ago. Never mind that proven oil reserves are larger now than when I first heard this nonsense, every year for the past 30 years I've heard "we'll be out of oil in 20 years" and I'm sure I'll hear it every year for the next 30 years.
I especially like this new idea that we'll run out of oil all of a sudden, because prices won't rise as reserves dwindle. Yeah, it's not like oil companies are greedy or anything - they're deliberately selling oil cheaper than they can, just to fool us into thinking it will last forever! By this theory, the last thing an oil company would do with a scarce resource is charge more - yeah, that's credible.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Pure hydrogen fuel cells are efficient. Other types of fuel cell are not particularly efficient because the process of turning the fuel (LPG/ethanol/methanol/whatever) into hydrogen is not particularly efficient and generates large amounts of heat.
Non hydrogen fuel cell systems are barely any better than internal combustion engines and are actually poorer than gas turbine based generators.
The best bet is still to send the fuel to an efficient power station like a small localised combined cycle gas turbine (~ 55%->60% efficient) power plant, then take the "waste" heat from that system and use it to produce a distributed heating and distributed cooling system. The overall efficiency of the generation system then reaches around 85%. Use the electricity to charge a battery electric vehicle which have very high efficiencies (90%+).
Oh, and you aren't limited to just corn or sugarcane. There are other species which can provide good feedstocks for ethanol production:
http://www.hawaii.gov/dbedt/ert/ethanol/
I would be inclined to send the biomass directly to a power plant which can use it to generate electricity and basically not bother to try to produce ethanol at all.
Deleted
Did I ever suggest drinking _any_ kind of juice in large quantities?
;)
You've just suggested taking supplements with pop intake, as well as drinking pop with artificial sweeteners.
All I suggested was not drinking crap, and drinking better things _in moderation_.
All of this is a sad attempt at trying to paint pop in a better light. What is the point? Why would you do that? Pop is crap, period. Argue that if you like, but _please_ quit insinuating that pop is not crap by comparing it to other things in less than equal comparisons.
Now, if you would like to offer up an argument countering the statement that pop is crap, I'd love to hear it. Best of luck in that
No Comment.
If the idea is to displace oil/natural gas, then the efficiency of the process is very important.
This is because modern agriculture is a process where land is used to turn petrochemicals into food.
For every 1 calorie of food 10 calories of fossil fuels were expended.
If it takes 100 barrels of oil to produce 90 barrels of oil equivalent ethanol fuel, then expanding ethanol production will make us more, not less dependent on fossil fuels!
Fossil fuels are required in every step of the process, from operating the machinery, to running pumps, to shipping the final product, to create the chemical fertilizers, as well as a vast array of pesticides, herbicides and insecticides.
I don't know where you get your total energy data from but it is WRONG. Got a link? Did'nt think so.
From http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/archives/theameri cas/chapter2a.html
"Oil, for instance, makes up about 40% of energy consumption in North America" (1997 data).
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Not that it will educate anyone by posting this on /. but...
The researchers included such factors as the energy used in producing the crop, costs that were not used in other studies that supported ethanol production, said Pimentel.
By that methodology we should be measuring how much energy it takes to obtain hydrogen. Or the energy it takes to transport oil from the Mideast by tanker.
The truth is that raw material (corn etc.) was going to be grown regardless of what it is used for. And in the case of bio-diesel, the raw material many times exists as a wasted byproduct of another process (vegetable oil etc.)
Why have 1 person driving a backhoe when you could employ 20 with shovels?
Ethanol can produce more power than gas in a given car engine under optimal circumstances (which is one reason "funny cars" are fast), but you need a very clean engine to avoid knocking. For an engine that's rebuilt every few hundred miles, you can do wonders with ethanol fuel. However, when engine deposits accumulate and produce hotspots predetonation gets worse than with gasoline. You also have problems with fuel lines and intake manifold seals, as ethanol eats through rubber and plastic much faster than gasoline does.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Scenario = unnecessary inefficiencies in the production process by selecting the worst possible processing methods.
".. Ethanol is much more valuable than left over corn/soy... " And history repeats itself, at least as far back as the whiskey rebellion... Ethanol was the best way to move corn to an urban market back around 1800 too..
"Fuel cels are a good idea for any kind of fuel."
Eh?
How do you convert ethanol (any non hydrogen fuel) into hydrogen in order to power the fuel cell?
I'll tell you. You use a stage called the reformer stage which produces hydrogen for the fuel cell itself, plus CO2. This reformation stage however destroys the overall efficiency of the cell, generally bringing it screaming back down to similar levels to an internal combustion engine, marginally better, about 25%.
http://science.howstuffworks.com/fuel-cell4.htm
Meanwhile... The restrictive Carnot cycle allows CCGTs to reach 60% efficiency.
Deleted
I've always had a problem with the notion that using FOOD to power a vehicle is a good thing.
In Brazil ethanol is made from the sugar, and the dry cane is burnt to produce
electricity and heat.
The dry cane provides more than enoughenergy for distillation and power generation.
So much that ethanol producers SELL the surplus electricity/energy they generate.
I cannot imagine corn going all that distance. Never.
Jose T Oliveira Jr.
In regards to weight gain, they are about equal. The OJ has great nutritional value, but it's something like 150-170 calories for 12 oz.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
More or less. If they rely on a soda that "is the same, but with no caloreis" rather than change of diet and exersize, we are dealing with an essentially self admitted will power problem. so yes, May = Will in this case.
Does $200 billion+ spent by the U.S. to invade and occupy Iraq count as a subsidy of the oil industry?
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Bah--sugar in the gas tank won't hurt your engine.
~Idarubicin
The obvious answer of course is to combine iron manufacturing and ethanol distillation.
Seriously though, its a shame that some industries have vast amounts of waste heat, while others spend lots of money to buy heat, and there isn't a good way to get 'em together.
That depends entirely on what you mean by "fruit juice". The kinds that are cheapest in the store, and are labeled something like "apple drink" (ie, they don't actually say juice on the label) aren't any better for you than pop. Those kind of things mostly contain a few percent juice, a lot of High Fructose Corn Syrup, and some acids (I've seen maltic or citric or ascorbic, or more than one of the above) so that they taste kind of like juice. These things are, indeed, not very healthy for you.
Real fruit juice, on the other hand, doesn't contain nearly as much fructose, so it's not as bad (by volume, at least) and it also has vitamins, since it comes from fruit. Having too much of anything, however, tends to be pretty unhealthy.
Oddly enough, it appears from the above link that fructose's glycemic index being lower than that of ordinary table sugar, sucrose, would make it healthier for you. A lot of the diet books make a big thing about low glycemic indices being important. I guess the glycemic index is irrelevant if you're drinking 2-3000 calories worth of soda pop a day.
Have you ever wondered How to Take Over
Sorry if this is not clear it would be cheaper to pay people to do nothing than pay for people and the resources they are using to farm. Every* farm in the US is a waste of US resources and a drain on the economy.
*Ok the Amish are doing fine, but for the most part it would be cheaper to import food and pay farmers the same wage than it is to grow food here.
Several people.
The bulk of energy is going to be produced by whatever means is the cheapest at the moment.
Right now, that means oil and coal.
There are no reasonable predictions that nuclear power will be cheaper in the future.
It might pass oil, but only because oil is getting more expensive.
But photovoltaics have a reasonable chance of being significantly cheaper in the future.
If the current price per watt downward trend continues, in 20 years they'll be the cheapest way to produce energy, even factoring in the cost of batteries to store the energy when the suns not shining.
-- Should you trust authority without question?
(no text)
I'll go real slow;
method 1
1. drive tractor, grow corn,
2. feed corn to cow, grow beef
3. sell beef
4. profit
method 2
1. drive tractor, grow corn,
2. feed corn to ethanol plant
3. feed waste from ethanol plant to cow to grow beef
4. sell beef
5. profit
the bottom line is we going to use the oil anyways, one way gets a little ethanol to add to the gasoline, the present way doesn't.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
That's what the study by Pimentel claims (not that he hasn't claimed that before - and has been disputed). But not what others show with actual numbers. Energy Balance/Life Cycle Inventory for Ethanol, Biodiesel and Petroleum Fuels. But even if the study is true, it is only talking about ethanol production in the USA (esp. using subsidized corn), not in general.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Also, don't forget about the oil that gets used in the manufacture of fertilizer and pesticides.
Yes, but again, lets not take one tiny piece of the argument out of proportion. This isn't a 1:1 causation thing.
A) Pop vs OJ: One actually has some nutritional value, while the other doesn't. Both have lots of calories. (Fresh squeeze OJ still has less sugar than your average pop, but whatever)
B) Moderation moderation moderation.
The problem where it is abused the worst is when the choice is between 6 cans of pop a day, OR 1 glass of OJ, 1 glass of milk and 4 glasses of water.
I know way too many people in the former category.
I also know not one single person that drinks any kind of juice on the scale that the pop drinkers do.
So while all of you are correct that OJ has lots of sugar, even when compared to pop, please PLEASE note that that is not the point.
'Drinking a shiteload of pop = bad' is the point.
No Comment.
Some of the algae varieties look very interesting (and harvesting them would be a 'flow' process since they would naturally form a slurry). Another prospect is industrial hemp. It is an oil-rich plant (like corn), but it is a 'weed' that grows very fast and doesn't need ferilizer or pesticides. It still has to be harvested, but remember that petroleum oil has to be pumped out of the ground, and shipped across oceans (most of it). Domestically grown bio-diesel may well require less energy input per harnessable erg than foreign petro-oil (IANACE).
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
The peak oil theory is not a claim that "we'll be out of oil by XXX", it's that oil production will peak in a certain number of years. "Never mind that proven oil reserves are larger now than when I first heard this nonsense", in this context, is entirely fitting, indeed, the theory wouldn't make any sense if oil production wasn't higher today than at any time in the past.
(a) How is this a "new idea"?(b) How is it relevent to the peak oil theory, which claims the exact opposite?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
There is more energy in the uranium and thorium spewed out from the black belched smoke in a coal power plant than in the coal which it burned. We are literally pissing gold away.
Nuclear power is the safest way of generating electricity per GWhr we have.
Nuclear fission power alone could fullfill all our present energy requirements. Of course, this is not what would happen in the real world. For example, France uses hydro power for most of the other 24% of the electricity they require. Wind power is also economical in the right places. I have little doubt we will eventually turn to biodiesel for transportation, even if for no other reason, it is energy dense and works on current internal combustion engines. But trying to devise an economy without fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, petroleum) using existing technology without putting nuclear power into the mix is *not* going to work.
Ammonia is a component of urine. I wonder how much ammonia you could get from, say, New York City's sewage system?
-l
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I never made that or any analogous argument. Don't attribute comments to me that I didn't make.
Biodiesel is also more efficient for another reason.
;-)
With ethanol, you have an agricultural stage, a fermentation stage, and a destilation stage, each of which consumes energy. The first and third use external energy while the second uses microbes to digest the sugars, *use some of the energy in their own reproduction/growth,* and spit out the ethanol. The second stage, therefore, uses the energy inherent in the agricultural medium to work, thereby reducing your energy output.
Now, as you state, the destilation stage is unnecessary for biodiesel production, but the fermentation stage is too, which means that you don't have bacteria using up some of your energy in order to create your desired product.
Of course, you may have more ag waste from Biodiesel production too, and maybe you can turn this into ethanol
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Looks like the 80%/20% factor is correct again. That's 80% of what "we" hear - when it comes to the environment - is "Green Washing". The entire corn/ethanol save the planet was/is just another one of those "Green Washing" efforts by "The Sky Is Falling The Gang" - yet again trying to justify another tax dollar grant/grab. At some point an analysis was done to show that the if the entire current corn production in the USA was used to produce ethanol - the outcome would be would enough ethanol in the USA for one week's replacement of gasoline! The "Green Washing Gang" - almost burst a jugular every time the phrase " Embodied Energy" is brought up. What's embodied energy? - the grand sum total of all the energy used: to "grow and harvest" the raw material, to ship to plant, to process material, to ship material to retailer, to store material, to market/sell material, to ship material to buyer (naturally the cost of infrastructure has to be inputed as well). A plasticized aluminum little bag for potato chips - has an embodied energy worth of 75 cents. For the same reason, strawbale construction is one of the least "Green" ways of building a house - aside from the fact that the house costs more than a standard built house with the same R values in the walls and roof!
Duh exactly, as in you must not understand what "half life" means. It means that 50% of a given mass decays.... not the whole things..... so there is 50% less u-238 on the planet after 4.5 billion years. It all doesn't just turn into cold leftovers.
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It is true that ethanol production in the US is woefully inefficient; so much so that you cannot use ethanol-powered equipment to produce the stuff. This should not be considered an indictment of ethanol, just our production method - corn. Brazil's ethanol production facilities generate enough energy to be self-sufficient by burning thier waste products, allowing them to consider the ethanol a net gain. They use sugar cane - a far better ethanol crop than corn.
modded as insightful?
Half life means that 50% of the mass of the radioactive element decays in the time span. So after 4.5 billion years there is 50% less u-238 by mass than there was 4.5 billion years ago.
It isn't all gone, nor can it ever be......... as the mass always reduce by 50%. That is why it is called "half life."
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Anyway, ignoring your flagrant violation of the word "literally", again this is quoting statistics without making much of an argument one way or another. Let's address this after your next point:
Quite simply, that's false. The reason Nuclear Power has an excellent safety record is the same as the reason why the airline industry has an excellent safety record: they're both so remarkably dangerous that they're under far, far, stricter regulations and scrutiny than their rivals. If we built cars with the same degree of care as we do planes, trained drivers the same way, had road traffic control systems designed to prevent two vehicles from being within a few hundred feet of one another, etc, you can bet road safety would be better than air safety. The tailgate falling off my motor vehicle is a minor problem, it falling off an airliner can be catastrophic.It's much the same thing with Nuclear. When these "safety statistics" are quoted, it's rarely acknowledging that the issues aren't comparable. We don't put as much effort into containment of coal waste as we do radiation from Nuclear reactors, for example.
To be honest though, I think the major problem we have at the moment is nobody has come up with a real solution to the Nuclear waste issue, and it's one that tends to get the most outrageous solutions proposed by the Nuclear advocates, who usually claim one of (a) it doesn't matter, because we'll find a solution in 20 years if we just start using Nuclear for everything now, (b) There's perfectly simple ways of dealing with the problem, it's just there's a giant conspiracy between the US government and Greenpeace to keep the Nuclear man down!, or (c) who cares? It's not my mountain it's buried under; or they just launch into generic attacks on Nuclear opponents, normally by misrepresenting opinions as well as lumping everyone together.
Is it kooky to whine that environmentalists are hypocritical by opposing both greenhouse gas emissions and Nuclear energy, when actually the environmentalists who do oppose both are usually into conservation, as the kook normally knows full well? Is it kooky to whine about this as if the only alternatives to greenhouse emissions are Nuclear ones, and as if people supporting other forms of energy are opposed to them too? You bet.
And that's why I used the term. I read Slashdot enough to know that the majority (I don't know you, if the above doesn't apply to you then obviously You Are Not A Kook, not for that reason anyway) of pro-Nuclear advocates here speak that way. And so, as I said in the beginning, it's hard to take the pro-Nuclear argument very seriously, as by and large, the argument is coming from people who, well, are kooky.
As I said, I'm not in favour of putting all of our eggs in one basket. I think we agree on that.You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
The problem is that while the corn absorbs energy from sunlight,
a) Only a small fraction of the biomass generated is converted (the kernels, though they store more concentrated energy than the leaves & stalks)
b) Considerable fertilizer and pesticides are required. Producing them requires lots of energy, plus some for transport and applications.
c) harvesting and transport requires energy
d) Conversion requires energy.
e) distribution requires energy - note that fossil fuels require that too.
The numbers I saw were that burning N BTUs of ethanol required N*1.7+ or more BTUs of fossil fuels to be extracted; i.e. you'd use less fossil fuels just to use them directly. So it's more like use 17 kwh of fuel, make 10 kwh of ethanol. Rinse, repeat.
That's why subsidies are required (it's an indirect subsidy to the corn industry for votes and political donations).
Now, if you want to make a go of it, don't use a heavy-fertilizer-based crop like corn. Use micro-algae in very large vats. There was a good article about it in, I think, MIT's tech review. Basically, an area in the southwest roughly the size of a small New England state could supply enough biodiesel for all road transport in the US, at least in theory. Practice may be another thing, but fundamentally it should work much better - algae requires less processing than corn; and the residue makes good fertilizer for the next batch, so energy inputs are low. Transporting it is probably the biggest hit. The water would be recycled largely. No expensive (capital or energywise) harvesting required (just run some pumps). No soil erosion - though you will end up covering a lot of desert or other such areas, which would be an issue, though small compared to the costs of fossil fuels long-term.
radioactive decay means that you never completely run out of an element from natural decay, merely that at the end of an half life you have 50% less of the substance....
So at the end of the first half life you have 50%, at the 2nd 25%, 3rd 12.5%, 4th 6.25% etc etc. You will always have some remainder of the element.
So even if an element has a 1 year half life it does not just disappear... you merely have 50% less than the previous year.
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We measure things in joules, ergs, and electron-volts. Not BTUs.
Most of the energy used in making ethanol is in the refining process, not in the harvesting process, so you're using significantly more energy than you would otherwise. Also, the waste from the ethanol plant doesn't have as many calories as the corn did, as most of the sugar has been used, so you don't get as much beef per unit of corn. You don't get the ethanol for free! (Not to mention that we're currently using surplus corn for this in the first place, so your argument would only be relevant if we made dramatically more ethanol.)
In any case, the interesting argument here is whether TFA is correct - taking all the details into account, do you really use more energy (net of the process you describe) to make a barrel of ethanol than you get from it? If so, then it's all just a pointless ag subsidy, as it's doing nothing for the environment or to preserve fossil fuels.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I see what you're saying. That's not really true. For any single farm, you're correct, because we have a significant surplus, but the giant agri-businesses grow food at a very low cost compared to the world market, even before transportation costs are taken into account.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Solar might produce enough to live off of, but it certainly won't produce enough to fuel our consumption based economy.
Corn made ethanol is one the biggest lies foisted on the American population.
... its too bad but nothing we can do about it.
The lie goes a little like this -- we have to have expensive corn based ethanol additives in our gasoline because those damn environmentalists forced us to do it
Fact is honest environmentalists have always been skeptical (if not outright against) corn based ethanol additivies. Even the conserned scientist article linked by the present slashdot story was actually AGAINST corn made ethanol (it says that the present way of making ethanol from corn is way too energy intensive and not sustainable). Of course the Slashdot story incorrectly made it sound as if it supports corn based ethanol and the editors did not catch the discrepancy (the very idea that the slashdot editors would catch that discrepency makes me laugh).
So of course then we get the usual gangs of halfwits that post endless messages about how the union of concerned scientists is politicaly motivated and they dont know anything about science and they want to force us to use corn based ethanol as part of a large conspiracy blah blah blah.
But the question remains -- if even the environmentalists aren't crazy about corn based ethanol, then why is it in our gas? And the answer is polititians from corn producing states. These guys essentially force the ethanol additives on the rest of the country so their farmers will have a nice captive consumer for their product.
The peak oil doomsday theory that is often repeated on slashdot claims that demand will so overshoot production that we'll use up all of the readily available oil before we can stop ourselves, leaving only oil that takes too much energy to acquire to be useful as an energy supply - effectively runing out of oil - leading to the collapse of society as we know it.
The theory in the 70s was that the supply of oil (which is obviously fixed) was so small that we'd use it all up in 20 years. After that idea was proven to be false for enough years, it was modified to be more subtle: we won't actually use up all the oil, but we can still have a nice disaster as soon as oil production starts to decline. To quote one site "worldwide demand for oil will outpace worldwide production of oil by a significant margin. As a result, the price will skyrocket, oil-dependant economies will crumble, and resource wars will explode."
I agree that this is a more sophisticated way to say "we're about to run out of oil", but it's still a load of BS. We use oil as our primary fuel precisely because it's cheap. If the price gradually increased, we gradually shift to something else - no disaster. In order to get a disaster you have to believe that the oil companies wouldn't raise the price of oil and thereby decrease demand, which dosen't make any sort of sense. The price of oil is precisely where supply equals demand.
You also have to believe that the problem is *now* (or *soon*), which flies in the face of the evidence. The graphs of oil production on peak oil sites remind me of the earnings charts of a dot-com - "Never mind the entire historical trend, a few years from now, the curve will change direction entirely! You must believe me, it's a power-point slide!" Sure. Meanwhile, in reality, the total pool of oil available with current technology (the proven reserve) is larger than ever, and just keeps growing.
There's no data to support the idea that the production of oil has reached any sort of peak. Even if it has, it's nonsense to assume that the demand for oil will increase regardless of its price. Anywhere oil is used for energy there is another choice, and oil is used just because it's cheaper. Where's the crisis again?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
There is a HUGE difference between "Our" and "Aggro" energy sources...
Drive through Iowa/Nebraska/South Dakota/Minnesota... You'll see why there's a difference... much much lower population, and LOTS of wind farms. A Majority of energy in the US is used by people in cities, not agriculture... South Dakota gets a LOT of their energy from the Dams on the Missouri River.
Even if you don't believe me on that (it really is true), the whole point is that the plants change an energy source such that isn't mobile (regardless of how they get their energy... even coal or natural gas), into a mobile energy source... i.e. gas.
The article claimed the factor was more like 1.3 than 1.7, but others claim it's more like .75, so... well, it's certainly not settled.
But you're very right that if it weren't for the corn industry we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
Oh there are plenty of solutions. One is to simply keep the stuff in casks, as we do right now. That is the easiest solution in technical and political terms. Recycling would reduce the waste by 90% and give more energy. Recycling primarily is not used in the USA at the moment because uranium is so cheap, it is easier to mine more than recycling the fuel. But the French manage to do it IIRC and their nuclear electricity is cheap.
Then there are several possible ways to bury the rest using current technology, if for whatever reason you got tired from the casks. Dump it into a subduction zone, inject it into solid rock, inject it into a borehole, etc. The reason this is not done is because the casks work and there seems to be some sort of paranoia about nuclear waste.
Beyond that there is promising research into transmutation of nuclear waste. But since the technology is not in use right at the moment, it can be ignored for now.
Is it kooky to whine that environmentalists are hypocritical by opposing both greenhouse gas emissions and Nuclear energy, when actually the environmentalists who do oppose both are usually into conservation
Conservation is no solution by itself. See what negawatts did to California. No new power plants were built, so electricity had to come off state. So there were brownouts and the price of electricity rocketed. Did people save energy more? Not really. This was wonderfully played around by off state energy companies, like Enron. I cannot heat myself, or run this computer with conservation. I need energy from somewhere. Even if it is food. Energy consumption per capita will increase, it is an historical trend. As China and India beef up their economies it will only make this more painfully obvious. We need power, it must come from someplace. For the safety and prosperity of the human race it must be cheap. Renewables will not be enough to satisfy the demand.
To me, green "kooks" lose the argument the moment they start talking about population control. That may work on a totalitarian state like China, but not in a democracy. To me, anyone who thinks willfully killing their own people provides a solution to any problem is simply out of their mind.
Forget corn, hemp cellulose can be converted to ethanol. The amount of cellulose that hemp provides per square foot is way more than corn could produce and hemp can grow and regrow much faster and require a lot less other energy resources for growth than say corn or trees. However I can't tell you anything about the actual conversion process and how much energy is used for the conversion, but off set the other costs and over all using hemp would be cheaper. Note to all the anti drug peeps, I'm talking about hemp, not mary jane, there are strains that contain little to no THC or cannabinoids so go lurk elsewhere.
Yeah, maybe once every 10 years we have a drought... and that means that we can only water our lawns 5 days a week rather than 7 days...
If energy issues interst you, check out the discussion forums at The Watt
We have some Amish around here, and if you're claiming they don't affect the economy, you are wrong. They don't pay taxes, but still take advantage of public services. They live on roads that get plowed in the winter. They use the publicly maintained roads. I used to take a bus to school; that bus picked up a few Amish children and took them to their school, and back home at the end of the day. There's probably more stuff that they use but don't pay for, but those are all I can think of right now.
china will displace the US in 5-8 years?
i'd mod you up if i had some mod points.
*Whew*! I'm glad I don't drink pop.
Soda, on the other hand, I down by the bucketful. But at least it's not that evil "pop" stuff...
(Sorry. Couldn't resist. Guess where I live...)
i wouldn't be a lot, but i might bet some money that taxes collected by state and fed governments over the years add up to more than what the war in iraq costs.
Yes, fruit juice is good for you but only as an occasional thing - a lot of juice is packed with sugar and even unsweetened juice can have a fair bit of fructose.
to see so many people grasping at straws. No easy technological fixes can stop our current lifestyles from screwing up the world:
The snows of Kilamanjaro are almost gone
The dreamy Maldives drowned and overrun
The polar bears will have no place to roam
They'll lounge their listless lives on solid ground
Casting storms across the Gulf of Mexico
Will God's true aim hit Mickey Mouse and Co
Or will countless sad old dreamers rue the day
When the brothels of New Orleans are blown away
Im new so I apologize for not spanning all these indvidual posts, but I have things to do. Lets get the blatant falsehoods out of the way. Kilodelta - ADM produces little to no corn. ADM buys corn from farmers and processes it. RickRussellTX-I doubt you'll find a single combine(harvester) and few if any tractors running gasoline. The numbers for Big River Resources in Burlington, IA agree with those Snaffler provided. It too is a modern Ethanol facility. To those boasting the brilliance of Brazilian ethanol, Bom Dia! ADM is a powerful trader and processor of agriculture products there as well. And finally, ADM went through a huge restructuring recently, say 2000ish. If you want proof of the culture change, look at the OSHA safety numbers. They aren't perfect, but it's not fair to use a past that's been left behind to make judgements on. Also, subsidies in this country benefit the American farmer, the person that put the food on your plate, not just corporations.
I'd be interested in knowing your theory for how you decide which roads are for 'private' and 'public' benefit. Clearly, the road outside your apartment or house benefits your private self. Is this government support of your private life an unfair subsidy? Remember, your house was also in the middle of nowhere once.
An under-unity power source? HOW DARE THEY?
Me (Blog)
So what? Who cares if it takes more energy to produce than it gives out. Just like Hydrogen, Its the portability aspect that makes it useful. The net energy balance thing is IRELLEVANT.
Its not like there's an energy shortage per se. The earth is continually bombarded with more energy than it knows what to do with from the sun alone.
The whole net energy positive argument was cooked up by Bush as a way to justify extacting hydrogen from petrochemicals rahter than any other process, so his major investment in the oil biz and his oil-baron friends won't go out of business overnight.
Doesn't liquid hydrogen also take more energy to produce than it yields? So f'ing what?
The goal of ethanol isn't to invent energy out of nothing. What a stupid study. The whole benefit of ethanol is that it is PORTABLE, as a TRANSPORTATION FUEL.
In other words, the authors of the study Miss The Point Entirely, but also Deliberately, all to spread FUD.
Besides, ethanol from switchgrass is WAY more efficient than ethanol from corn.
skkkoooonnnggggkkk ptui
If the energy used to create a nuclear plant makes the plant hugely expensive, it will likely end up in a world where energy is hugely valuable.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
All I'm saying is that the Hubbert Peak occurs (ie. when demand outpaces production capacity) - Oil will become a much more expensive commodity. This isn't a wingnut theory. Respected oil industry analysts are saying the same thing.
So, when oil prices rise, it will no longer be cheap to ship products from some third world shithole where labor is nearly free, to another country, to undercut domestic producers. Nor will it be as cheap to synthesize nitrogen fertilizers. Therefore, the supply of FOOD will be tightly constrained, and the VALUE of food, as a commodity will go up, and the corresponding markup (ie. profit) will also rise, giving small farmers a much needed leg-up. Small farmers have had a hard time for the past century, particularly in the past 30 years or so, due to the abundance of cheap oil. Cheap oil is going away. At $60/bbl, some might argue that it's already gone. I won't agree with that yet - but cheap/expensive is relative. I don't think we're going to see the $20/bbl mark we had in the 1990's ever again. That is, unless US dollars start disappearing en masse (as they have in Iraq!).
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
That article gets cited a lot, but I'd like to see a small plant in operation using saltwater to demonstrate that it is actually economically feasible.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
No one should build cities in places that are below sea level.
+++
My last.fm page
I think you are interested in exergy, not entropy. Back to thermo for you!
Don't write coal off just yet. I am sure you have been told since kindergarten that it is "dirty". However, scrubbers, carbon sequestration, and the water-gas shift reaction make it an attractive solution. Plus there is about a 500 yr supply as I recall.
For reference, "much" means 1/3. Ethanol is 21MJ/L, vs. 32MJ/L for gas.
On a flex-fuel vehicle, such as those dominating the market in Brazil, one would expect to travel 2/3 as far on a tankfull of ethanol as on a tankfull of gas. To get equivalent mileage, one would need to store 50% more ethanol than gas. Considering all of the current infrastructure can be used as-is, that's really not such a big deal.
It's certainly less of a big deal than with hydrogen, which not only needs an entirely different infrastructure, but has only one quarter the energy content per litre that gas does, and that doesn't even count the volume, weight, and energy requirements of the cryogenic storage system needed to liquify it.
Biodiesel is a good option; however, the key advantage that ethanol has is that it can be used to replace gasoline in situ---the economy can go from 100% gasoline to 100% ethanol in tiny increments, and---provided new vehicles are flex-fuel (which are no more expensive than the 10%-max engines we use now)---there will be no shock or disruption of any kind. Changing all the vehicles and fuel stations over to diesel, on the other hand, would be a massive and disruptive undertaking.
We should not be paying subsidies for such grossly inefficient schemes.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Yup. IIRC, some "green" automobiles increase their efficiency by putting a sterling or other heat engine on the hot exhaust system, extracting another few % of energy.
It adds a lot of complexity without much gain, though. A permanent installation such as a iron forge and distillation plant would probably be much less complex -- sounds like you have a killer idea there. Quick, patent it!!
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'
Distilleries have waste heat left over at the end. They need heat at the beginning. Just move this heat from the end to the beginning. Voila. In fact, that's what most of them do.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
(The percentage went down due to price fluctuations and some wrong political decisions.)
Take it from me, I used to own an ethanol-run chevrolet.
Nowadays, the best thing you can do in Brazil is buy a hybrid car, engineered to run on any mixture of gas/ethanol. This is great because ethanol does not yield CO2. Also, the motor gets more potency (but burns faster - Ok because it's cheaper than gas - thanks to the Iraq War).
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ethanol15ju
This is obviously something orchestrated by big players. PR. Big Oil. Bush & Buddies, trying to brainwash American public opinion once more.
PS: Don't forget to buy stocks in oil. The barrels are gonna hit $100 by the end of the year, analysts say.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
"tax dollars spent to pay farmers to grow corn in Idaho"
As an Idahoan, I am deeply saddened by this comment. Idaho has spent thousands (we don't have millions) on its "Idaho Spuds" and "Real Idaho Potatoes" advertising compaigns, but obviously to no benefit. Sigh.
We do grow a little bit of corn here, but that's just to relieve the monotony of digging so many #$%^& potatoes.
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'
For a long time, I've had a sneaking suspicion that the reason government (and automobile companies) was so "hot" to have us use ethanol was (besides the obvious pork factor) that it burns in a way that the heat generated destoys engines (especially cheaper aluminum ones) over time.
I also wondered what the effect of alcohol and water "burning" in a mix with cheap gasoline would have on the older, cheaper, simpler engines.
Anyone know of research on that sort of thing?
"...take the bull by the tail and face the situation" --from a quote by W.C. Fields
You do have to get the stuff there, both the corn mash in and the ethanol out. Plus you have to get the fuel there too. And you have to grow the corn in the first place (fertilizer, fuel to run equipment, costs of irrigation).
And the plant does cost money, and it does require maintenance.
Remember, you are supposed to measure the total cost of producing the ethanol versus not doing so. Some of the numbers I saw in a rebuttal said that the ethanol came out ahead by 10% on average. That's not much in my book. It'll be tough to become much less energy dependent with a 10% clearance between the energy used and the energy produced. The same numbers said the best methods of producing the corn/corn mash allowed a 30% clearance. That's pretty decent, but it would require some effort to get the corn-growing industry up to a more efficient level.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
link
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
"1.29 gal of oil to create the ethanol equivalent of less than 1 gal of oil" - The "Duh" part is using oil to create oil rather than some other fuel (most of the energy is used for heat in distilation). Not to mention the "researcher's" figures have also been thoroughly discredited (eg: assuming 100% irrigation rather than the actual 16%, using only the corn kernnel not the whole plant, etc).
Before you accept and defend the nonesense of some yahoo on Yahoo, go back and read the UCS article. The USc are highly respected for thier impartiality and the scientific expertise they bring to bear on a problem. They claim the process can yield up to 10 times the input energy using current technology and different plant species.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
My whole point is that the UCS is not an established body of science. They're not made up of real scientists and engineers. I'd take up a debate with any one of them in a second because they don't have logic to stand on. I've designed hybrid vehicles before. I used to be an engineer for an auto company.
Don't forget energy required to plant, fertilize, irrigate, harvest and process the corn. (This includes preparing the fields and cleaning up between crops.) Then tack on energy required to handle, store, distribute and dispense the resultant fuel.
Let me ask you something: do you think fabrication of fuel-cell engines is less or more energy-intensive as an industrial process than the whole cycle of, say, producing ethanol from sugar cane? What about the hevay metal that go in the process of making those batteries?
Yet, the US seems to be headed that way. It's great for General Motors. Just like when they did everything in their powers to abort Los Angeles' public transportation system. They succeeded. Oil prices are going up and will hit 100 USD/barrel by the end of the year. Suburbia nightmare. Blame all those gaz-guzzlers, the SUVs.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
The energy cost is the ratio of energy put in to energy gained. The dollar cost will be affected by the market prices of ethanol from other sources, energy in general, and other factors.
The grandparent didn't mean 'empty calories', he meant artificial sweetening. When one consumes something 'sweet' without the calories, your body still reacts to it as if it had to deal with sugar.
This means that drinking a can of diet soda will trigger an insulin reaction, which will not only 'pack away' free blood sugar into glycogen and fats, but your blood sugar drops like a rock in expectation of incoming sugar.
The low blood-sugar condition kicks-off a hunger for food. In some people this is quite pronounced. For instance, I always get an immediate 'empty stomach' feeling and a craving for a piece of fruit when I drink a can of diet soda, and if I don't eat something I get VERY sleepy.
Most people probably aren't very conscious of their bodies, they drink a can of diet soda and then a few minutes later go get a snack because they're suddenly hungry, they don't put two-and-two together and they certainly don't know how their metabolisms work.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
I have heard that converting a fuel-injected engine to ethanol is as simple as altering the programming, but I do not know for sure.
No. Ethanol is highly corrosive for a common engine. The engine needs special adaptations, for instance in the metal alloy of the carburator. The engine was developed in the 70s by the Brazilian prof. Urbano Stumpf. It went through several iterations. Sensors in modern "flex-fuel" engines detect the mixture of ethanol and adapt the injection rate. There's other stuff, but it's not that simple.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
What we need to do now is to get cars that can run on 80/20 and 70/30 blends and to get gas stations to provide the fuel. When pure gasoline costs $2.50 a gallon and you can buy 70/30 blended ethanol for $2.00 WITHOUT the subsidy, I think that'll wake a lot of people up.
I've built my own vehicle simulations in MATLAB and shown that their studies are total BS.
Perhaps you will be so kind as to write up at article with data you collected, and paste a link here so we can see which party is actually right? The UCS is an environment friendly group, but I can't recall seeing them called liars and/or fakers elsewhere.
Biodiesel made from a variety of high-yield vegetable oil sources is the next step.
The country's has a huge agrobusiness, very developed technology-wise, and we have a proven track-record of deploying alternative fuels on a truly massive scale (Brazil has 170,000,000 people - and copulating).
Brazil Leads Drive to Biodiesel 'Clean Fuel' http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_vi ew.asp?no=224467&rel_n
BIODIESEL - BRAZIL RESEARCH: SOYBEAN, CASTOR, PALM, SUNFLOWER, PEANUT, AND COTTONSEED OILS, PLUS RECYCLING AND JUNGLE FRUITS http://www.nuclear.com/archive/2004/09/01/20040901 -002.html
Brazil Opens Another Biodiesel Plant; Wants to Be Largest Renewable Fuel Supplier http://www.greencarcongress.com/2005/05/brazil_ope ns_an.html
Some people reported some research cars running on certain mixtures of Biodiesel as smelling of French fries. Well, better than gasoline combustion...
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
The alcohol membrane problem gives me an idea - ferment wine, use regular reverse osmosis filter to pump out the water, drink brandy. If this works, you will be my personal hero for life.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
> more OIL used in the creation of the ethanol than the volume of oil it
> is replacing as a fuel.
From TFA:
"it takes 29 percent more FOSSIL ENERGY to turn corn into ethanol than the amount of fuel the process produces."
There's a reason they said "fossil energy" rather than "oil". That reason is because most of that energy doesn't come from oil---it's mostly either from natural gas (for the fertilizer, as someone else has mentioned) or coal for electricity, or natural gas again for heating during distillation.
Please, if you're going to tell us what the study says, know what it says!
> what. We've had plenty of airplane accidents
>
> Bad guys are going to get WMDs regardless of whether or not nuclear power is used.
Essentially, your argument boils down to "so what if there are possible problems, we're all going to die eventually anyway." This is a bogus argument which can be equally used to justify pretty much anything.
> Oh, and as far as uranium running out, yeah right. Fuel costs
> are a minor cost in the cost of a nuclear plant
No amount of money will buy more uranium if there's none left to be mined. While breeder reactors are a possible solution to this problem, money is not.
> Factored in all of the subsidies renewables receive?
All the comparisons I've seen have either not included any subsidies in the cost of renewables, or have explicitly examined how the available subsidies affect the cost.
There are valid and compelling arguments in favour of nuclear power; trying to handwave away the downsides of nuclear power with nonsense arguments is not at all useful.
So don't.
High-yield farming does not require extensive use of nitrogen fertilizers, and hence does not require fossil fuels. Even the tractors are prime candidates for electric vehicles (they stay within a small radius of a base station and are used on a very predictable schedule)---although the easy and obvious thing to do would be to run them on ethanol---so it should be entirely possible to conduct high-yield farming efficiently with little or no fossil fuel input.
That's why the Peak Oil Crash won't happen---everything that is now reliant on oil can be changed to use something else, and the change isn't as difficult as the doomsayers insist.
They may not be an established body of science, but what organization is? None. I sure hope you aren't expecting to tell me something like General Motors.
Even if there wasn't one scientist in the whole organization, they are inherently more believable than the auto manufacturers. Why? Motive. What does the UCS stand to gain if the public accepts some of their ideas, and conversely, what do they have to lose if the public doesn't? On the other hand, auto makers are for-profit entities. They have an interest in doing whatever they can to reduce costs and maximize profits. That's what corporations do. So we are left with an organization of concerned individuals and scientists versus corporations, and you want me to doubt the former? Ha.
Some people think nuclear power is simple - these people are called economists, and to them everything is simple. The rest of us Moorlocks have to obey the rules of physics.
I am an "hourly reader", I saw the article and agree with the GP post that Sodium is indeed an "absurd magic bullet". IANAChemist but when you read "the key is Sodium" and the article is talking about making Hydrogen for cars it doesn't take much to work out it's pure bullshit.
The whole point of making Hydrogen or Bio-fuel cars is to prevent pumping extra CO2 into the atmosphere. Currently Hydrogen is normally produced in commercial quantities by "cracking" hydrocarbons, (ie: oil is split into Hydrogen for your car, the CO2 still comes out of the refinery ), so that process has no real benifit.
It's true that Sodium mixed with water creates Hydrogen and zero C02. This "solves" the CO2 problem but the byproducts are much, much, worse than the existing CO2 byproduct. The water used to "release" the Hydrogen becomes dilluted Caustic Soda ("Draino"). The process used to create the Sodium in the first place (melting salt with an arc furnace) uses huge amounts of energy and creates an equal amount of Chlorine (Mustard gas) as a by-product.
As the GP post stated the way to create Hydrogen is via electrolysis but to be benificial the electricty needs to come from a "clean" source. Not from a source that creates a similar amount of CO2 byproduct (burning fossil fuels) and certainly not from something that creates a far worse eco-disaster than the one you are "solving".
"Not quite tested and perfected" - Magic bullets always seem to be in the NQR state, I wonder why?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Of course it takes more energy to make ethanol than comes out of it. This is *not* the point, the point is, once you produce the ethanol, it's now in a usable form for internal combustion engions. This is not about burning coal, oil, or whatnot to produce ethanol. If you're so worried about about dirty fuels, realize that solar, (or eventually fusion) power can be used to process ethanol, and being practical here, it is a hell of a lot less costly to develop new technologies when we can just use existing ones to produce a usable fuel source.
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
"(see Brazil)" - Your comment made me think of this article from the BBC. It gives a nice summary of Brazil's experience over the last three decades.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
It is the distillation. Ethanol energy is still a research area that is expected to yield results in 10 years time or so (40 some before fusion does).
The biggest breakthroughs currently is using crops that is designed for the purpose rather than using excess food production and developing processes of extracting the energy similar to those used in our stomach.
With these two changes, there would be almost no energy used on the production of Ethanol, but the technology is not yet ready.
That's a nice strawman ya got there. Where the hell did fuel cells come into this? And batteries? Did you know that the US grows almost no sugar cane at all (making it a poor choice for biofuel source)?
=Smidge=
There appears to be a relatively simple method to make ethanol and electricity from ag waste, but it doesn't involve corn.
Every fuel ethanol plant I've ever read about used natural gas to fire the distilleries. Do you have stats on what the various fuels are?I've heard of exactly one proposed plant that uses coal and cogenerates electricity before using the spent steam to run distilleries. Just one. And I can't find the link, either.
When the advocates deliberately confuse average and marginal impact, continue to use outdated information about fertilizer sources, and assume that highly exceptional (coal-fired, cogenerating) ethanol plants are the norm, there's good reason to call them dishonest too.Even if you can take them at their word, the results aren't all that great. Some claim 1.34 BTU of ethanol out per BTU of fossil fuels in (with a large fraction of that BTU coming from petroleum). In other words, barely more than 25% of the energy in ethanol is actually grown; the rest comes from fossil sources. If we are going to spend tax money to encourage people to convert e.g. coal to motor fuel, we shouldn't discriminate against those who aren't corn farmers.
PS: Modern cars don't gain tailpipe emissions benefits from ethanol, and ethanol increases smog-forming evaporative emissions. To compensate for the high vapor pressure of ethanol, the petroleum fraction must be refined to remove high vapor-pressure components. I've never seen a listing of the energy costs of ethanol which accounted for the additional refining losses involved with meeting emissions standards.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Here's one I'd been working-on, for a couple of days ( for Ask Slushdot ), but the story beat-me-to-it by a day, it seems, so:
Since solar-heating is sooo-much more cost-effective than solar-electricity, particularly when manufacturing silicon photovoltaics is considered, AND
since most of the cost of manufacturing [m]ethanol-fuel is the cost of evaporating-out the alcohol, has anyone implemented a solar-heating-assisted [m]ethanol production
( perhaps using wet-cloth-wrapped tubes for the condenser-section: evaporation on the outside of the tubes, condensation on the inside of the tubes, maybe a fan aimed over the wet-cloth-outside-tubes to assist that -- I think "swamp-coolers" are evaporation-based cooling-systems. . . )?
Anything that makes more-accessible clean fuel must be good to get, eh?
IPTables enhancement Fail2Ban bans cracker-login's
We as a country export a lot of food. If the price of oil did continue to rise (the idea that supply can't meet demand is silly, but it's also beside the point: the price may well go up) and limit transport, the value of food here in the US would go down, hurting small farmers here. Of course, that would help small farmers in the third world, but it would also raise the price of food in the third world. Given that starvation these days has little to do with the price of food, maybe that's a good thing for them, but this scenario would send the small farmer here the way of the blacksmith.
The current price of oil is just a short-term trend, as the demand for oil hasn't grown particularly faster than the supply this decade (a *lot* of capacity is coming online in deep gulf waters, some amazing technology there). The price of oil long term will be a question of whether India and China consume more oil than they produce, which does seem likely but shouldn't affect prices this decade. It's also possible, of course, that India or China will decide to go with natural gas for their national vehicle fueling infrastructure, as they're both at a point that the change is easy, and the worries about oil prices will be unfounded.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It kind of pisses me off though, that every time I talk about the Hubbert Peak - I'm lumped into the wack-jobs who say we're all gonna die. I never said "Peak Oil Crash".
I'm basically looking at the coming Hubbert Peak with optimism. Ethanol powered tractors? Fine. Organic farming. Fine. Shipping stuff from all over the world when it can be grown at home? That's going away. Maybe sooner, maybe later.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that most, if not all, funny cars ran on a very specific nitromethane methanol mix, and ran really low compression ratios... Because the oxygen in the fuel made it much more prone to detonation. I think they're almost functionally identical in many respects to Top Fuel dragsters, except the body.
I'm admit, I'm not a dragster person, but I think NHRA rules are very strict regarding fuel types. Maybe you're thinking about pro mod class, or maybe there's an an ethanol funny car class. I admit, I'm not sure..
I've heard of problems with certian rubbers and plastics being eaten by ehtanol, but with the E10 and E85 mixes coming out, I'd assume that manufactuers have resolved those problems with better suited materials. It's also possible that these problems could be caused by the substances they use to "denature" the alcohol, which includes acetone, methanol, and used to include the ever so friendly M.E.K. Before it was a known cancer causer, that is.. Wouldn't want those poor bastards to get a cheap high and live to tell about it!
I've never heard of engine deposits resulting from ethanol... In fact I'd guess the exact opposite would happen. It's a great solvent, which is part of the rubber problem, and it's a very simple compound compared to gasoline's components... I'd guess that it would losen varnish deposits in the gasoline fuel system and foul the plugs/fuel lines/filters quickly until that stuff was out of the system.
I'll have to look into it, because I've not once heard an anecdote that indicates ethanol causes deposits, and I run around the sand-rail and rock crawling crowd, where some people use it all the time and have great success. It is cheaper and easier to use than race gas, afterall.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
I am not saying we should destroy the entire system but trim some of the fat off the sides.
From what I understand agri-businesses also receive significant subsidies, but more importantly we are "wasting" a lot of resources by over production and I think that's stupid. Personally I think we should buy out the small farmers for a variety of reasons such the ease of regulating 50 companies vs. 50,000. But, people seem to have this idealist view of what small farming is while ignoring the fact it's basically a huge lightly regulated chemical factory. Take X plant place in barren soil, add fertilizer, weed killer, bug spray, and H2O; repeat then harvest. If people would get the idea that farming is natural out of their heads they would be appalled at how damaging and wastefull all this excess / useless food is.
The land might not be useless. There are plenty of plants that would work great for fuel, and because the fuel is basically long carbon and hydrogen chains or water + CO2 + energy > gas + oxygen your not striping the soil of all the things your dumping fatherlier to replenish. By using something like fast growth pine you can avoid weed killer after a few years so it's just pest control after a while but trying to use corn is a bad idea. Hell we can make plastics out of a lot of plants but people are stuck on the idea that we need to make as much food as possible and thus feed all the starving people or something.
The average HS student in the US can make enough money to buy a day's worth of rice in around 15 min of work at 5.25/h, that's insane. The reason food is this cheep is not that food has no value or it's simply that easy to make but rather we are subsidizing it to such a degree that we are over producing it to a level that crushes food's intrinsic value. Cut back US food production by 5% and I don't think the price would go up noticeably. But by cutting out 5% of farms and 5% of 180billion in subsidies would easily cover say the US costs to fund ITER 10x over.
It's not that we need new technology or to adopt a better system but rather we need to shift closer to a free market system. However, rather than forcing a lot farmers to go broke and introduce wild price fluctuations I say we store the current surplus to help ease the basic problems. Yes, this would hurt the 3rd world in the short term but when / if farming can become profitable without subsidies then you can transport that model anywhere in the world.
Thanks; I don't really know much about the Amish. My understanding was they do sell some products to the out side world and they also use some services but when compared to 180,000,000,000$/year in agro subsides they are not causing much damage. I don't know if they taxes on their land or what not but my understanding was they where mostly self-sufficient. An 18 year old with a life sentence can easily cost 800,000$ to keep in jail for most of their life but they not part of the agro subsidies and they are not really what I was talking about.
PS: I think I should read up more on them before using them as an example. Anyway, I expect that some farmers don't receive any form of subsidies but I can't really think of any.
Top Fuel is nitromethane. When last I followed the sport (it's been a while) "funny cars" could use any sort of automotive fuel except nitromethane or propylene oxide, but ethanol was what everyone chose. There are more I/NHRA classes than you can shake a stick at, and I don't pretend to understand the rules to them all, but ethanol is clearly a good racing fuel.
The downside is not that ethanol causes engine deposits, it's that any engine deposits are a big problem with nearly-pure ethanol. Perhaps there are fuel blends which don't leave any soot at all inside the engine, but I'm skeptical. But then, most of my knowlegde here is anecdotal, from folks who made untaxed ethanol from corn for, ummm, purely automotive purposes I'm sure.
In any case, claims about "effective octane ratings" of fuels with no actual octane content should be taken with a grain of salt - the engineering details that matter change from fuel to fuel, and a simple comparison isn't very meaningful. It's a lot easier to make a car built for gas run reliably on methane than on ethanol, for example. (Side note: methane/gasoline dual-fuel cars would solve most of the problems that people are concerned about with oil - it's a shame the cost of adding the dual infrastructure would be so high.)
What the world *really* needs is a fuel than can be created just from simple raw materials and heat, so that solar energy can be directly converted into something storable and portable. I'm not holding my breath on that on though - hydrogen is probably the closest we'll come, if we can ever find a good way to store it.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
if a BTU of energy is produced with wasteful methods, the waste will be reflected in the cost. i really worry about the place where the energy comes from or is produced. if we produced all our auto fuels in the USA, the wasted value would be made up for in terms of value spent and invested here...not somewhere else...
Too bad there's not an emoticon for sarcasm.
You're right, physics be damned, the UCS is right. It can easily be proven that what they publish violates basic laws of physics. That's why you don't see their "papers" in open journals like SAE. Go learn some engineering, actually read some of their stuff, and come back if you still think I'm wrong.
You misunderstand. Scientists don't get stirred up. We feel bad that people misunderstand methodologies. We feel bad that you don't 'get it'.
Nice try to troll. Write again when you get back to highschool and can check your 'scientific journals'...
Hrm, pretty interesting.. I didn't know they they ever ran funny cars on ethanol, always thought it was nitro/methanol. No doubt you're right since you've followed it and I've never, but I think the big thing at the moment is nitro.. So that's probably why I remember nitro.
/. a while a go sounded really promising. Too bad it apparently needs hot gasses and co2 from the coal plants. Heck, even a more efficient battery technology that hasn't been around since the 70's would be a big plus.
I was remembering after I wrote previously that another problem with ethanol was the fuel absorbing water. Apparently it just loves to suck up water. If you had plain steel, galvanized or aluminum fuel lines, that could cause some trouble. Also--it just dosen't have the lubrication value that gasoline has, and on top of that, it tends to clean away the oil film layer between the cylinder and piston if the mixture is too rich.
Methane and dual fuel is good in thoery... But there's some big problems with that, too. We're running very short on the sand that they use to hydraulicly fracture many wells--to extract more gas faster. Apparently, they can compact the shit out of it, along with water and it will still let the gas through--and it's found in only few spots in the country. It's getting scarce and much more expensive recently. They can use alternatives but they're even more expensive.
There's also loads of gas in Alaska, but there's no way to get it to the mainland yet. We already use lots and lots of it for electricity, I just don't think it would be smart to rely on one non-renewable fuel source to do so many things.
It'd be great if we could use some landfill/biomass fuels in cars but there's just not enough demand because the price is too high.
I can't argue about the need for a good clean efficient to store and move fuel. We totally need it, unless we come up with some killer superconductor technology, that is. That story about the bio-diesel from algae on
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
Nice try to troll. Write again when you get back to highschool and can check your 'scientific journals'...
Ha! You certainly did "get stirred up." I don't think an un-stirred-up scientist would have this kind of freak out...
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
bad example modern engines are fules injected so they don't even have a carburator.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Well, if you Google for the phrase "peak oil" or "hubbert peak" you get pages of whack-job results, so you sort of bring it in yourself. :)
But even the idea of a "peak" - that is, that oil production will go down before demand goes down - is unscientific. We just keep finding more oil, and the major oil companies, with trillions at stake and the best research money can buy, seem to think we won't run out particularly soon. The contrary argument is a couple of researchers claiming everyone else in the field is wrong, which is pretty much what junk science looks like.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Methane is an awesome fuel (the proven reserves are giant, it's much more environmentally friendly to burn than gas, and it doesn't have the various storage problems that propane or hydrogen do), except of course for its low energy density. A dual-fuel car solves the range problem: for daily commuting, where the miles driven daily is a known quantity, it's easy to make methane work (which makes it popular for city busses), but you need to be able to switch to a "real" fuel when you head off cross-country.
Of course, as you point out, the needed infrastructure would be daunting. Fuel transport, gas station changes, new car designs - gas would have to become substantially more expensive for that all to be worthwhile. But, unlike so many proposed alternative fuels, there's no unsolved fundamental engineering problem for methane.
I agree, magic batteries would also be a great breakthrough, but a *lot* of research money has been spent in that area without result. Satellites still mostly use kinetic storage batteries, as no one's ever come up with a chemical battery with a good energy density. Of course, until we have nearly-free electrical power to start with, neither hydrogen nor magic batteries are really that useful. Forget the flying cars, where's my fusion reactor?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Red or blue doesn't matter? Haven't you heard the slogan: "better dead than red"?
Corn also takes lots of diesel to harvest, plant and fertilize and heat and energy to extract. Oh, and that fertilizer is usually made using petroleum. In addition to energy needed to pump water to the fields. It's currently estimated that to get one barrel of ethanol to market, we need to use one and a half barrels of petroleum in the process. Sure, some technological and process advances will allow us to cut that down, and I believe that biodiesel is alot closer to the break-even point than pure ethanol, but we're still a ways off from being able to actually run an energy economy off of it. For comparison I believe it currently takes about one barrel of oil to get thirty barrels of oil to market. This used to be about one hundred barrels of oil to market for every barrel used in production, but alot of the easy to get oil is now gone. And we're shipping oil much further than we used to.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman