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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.
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!
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.
These guys say they have a production facilities with uses no outside energy. http://www.iogen.ca/
...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...
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.
More
This article brought to you by your friendly Oilcompany-sponsored government.
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...
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
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!
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
In terms of gasoline addatives, I think we should use Ethanol. I mean, Ethanol is an alcohol, which is somewhat toxic, but it isn't nearly as poisonous as MTBE. Also, the article isn't talking about toxicity, but rather about amount of fossil fuel needed to produce it. So, my bottom line for this is: Even if ethanol really doesn't save more on gasoline, it is still far better solution then polluting the ground water and soil with MTBE
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
Absolutely not. Subsidizing is not the way to go. If you want to improve the environment then eliminate subsidies:
- By eliminating the subsidies used to build freeway systems that allow urban sprawl people will be enouraged to live closer to their places of work and play. PLEASE NOTE While I am opposed to sprawl I am not anti-sprawl. Developers should be allowed to build on their land more or less as they see fit. I am opposed to the spending of public funds to make said private land more valuable. If the developers want to get together and build a 5 line highway out to Clear Hidden Creek Golf Ridge Mystic Forest Hills Estates then so be it. So don't even go there.
- Start charging fair market value for oil/gas lease and exploration rights on public lands.
- Guarantee tax exemption for any and all new forms of energy or energy generation for the five years immediately following patent approval.
Personally I am an advocate of nuclear power. Pebble bed reactors are clean, safe and can take advantage of economies of scale. Somebody (GE, probably) has developed a "disposable" reactor that is comparitively maintenance free, designed as a free-standing generator that can be placed in a village. At the end of its 20-25 year lifespan it is trucked away, waste and all (which is not removed from the structure while on-site) and a new one dropped in its place.If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
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.
It's just a sweet fizzy drink. Nothing special.
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.
$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.
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.
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
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
Ethanol is the waste product from various yeasts which consume either sugars or cellulose, which is later distilled. Ethanol is more suited to spark ignition engines which I suppose why it gets the attention it does in the US. If memory serves gasohol is 5-10% ethanol. For what it's worth I use Biodiesel almost exclusively in my car.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
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.
We aren't worried about total energy here, but 'replacement energy'. This study says that it currently takes 129 miles worth of petrochemical energy to create 100 miles of ethanol, *in addition* to the solar energy stored in the ethanol. Until that ratio is below 1:1, every gallon of ethanol is using more petroleum than just using the petroleum directly would.
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.
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...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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)
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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..
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....
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.
Your ideas definitely have merit, especially reducing or eliminating subsidization of highway systems.
However, I think there are a couple of things that have possible been overlooked.
1) If private companies are to fund infrastructure creation, how is right-of-way for land use determined? This goes back to the issue of seizure of private land for public benefit.
2) There is a huge barrier to entry for companies that would want to enter the mass transit market, simply because more extensive infrastructure is needed before the public would choose to use the system. In addition, the operating costs are likely higher. Given today's corporate environment (c'mon, fix those numbers this quarter!!!), I'm not sure how many companies would choose to enter a market that would take years to get a decent (if any) return on investment.
3) The environmental costs of different systems are basically neglected. Environmental quality is a public good that is hard to assign values to. Would the government bill these companies for the pollutants they produce? Or for noise or light pollution?
4) Federal highway subsidies definitely affect fuel use, but they were a product of the auto industry lobbying the Eisenhower (and others) administration. If both the federal and state governments were to stop, the automakers and fuel companies would need to pick up the slack. I believe this would lead to a collapse of the economy.
I think the best way to handle this would be to preferentially subsidize more environmentally friendly programs, such as train and bus lines. This has the added advantage of allowing the market to steer growth to preferred areas -- for example, near train stations. Over time, the mass transit industry could take most of the market share from the auto industry, but slowly enough to mediate some of the economic problems.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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.
You're missing the point. Ethanol costs MORE fossil fuel to produce than it replaces. Ethanol production increases our dependence on oil products; it does not reduce it. Those harvesters and tractors are running on gasoline, not self-produced ethanol.
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.
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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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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.