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Dept. of Energy Rejects Corn Fuel Future
eldavojohn writes "The United States' Department of Energy is stating that corn based fuel is not the future. From the article, "I'm not going to predict what the price of corn is going to do, but I will tell you the future of biofuels is not based on corn," U.S. Deputy Energy Secretary Clay Sell said in an interview. Output of U.S. ethanol, which is mostly made from corn, is expected to jump in 2007 from 5.6 billion gallons per year to 8 billion gpy, as nearly 80 bio-refineries sprout up. In related news, Fidel Castro is blasting the production of corn fuel as a blatant waste of food that would otherwise feed 3 billion people who will die of hunger."
They (like sugar cane) all grow in a 2d space. In addition, a log of energy goes into growing corn and sugar. In addition, these crops are basically batched. You may plant and then lose it all in the end.
Instead, ethanol and bio-deasil will come from algae or other microbes. The simple fact is that it allows for a continual stream of fuel as well as feeds on our waste. Finally, the amount of fuel that it uses is a fraction of regular crops.
Have to laugh at what castro is saying. There is plenty of food for the world. The issue is one of distribution. Correct that, and we could cut back on crops.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
How come aren't there any diesel hybrids available? They should provide even more mpg than a prius.
While I'm thinking about it, why aren't the car engines run like the train engines, with the diesel motor running at a more or less constant rate refueling the batteries that run the electric motors that actually turn the wheels - the diesel engine could be much smaller than normal because it won't have to peak to provide power - just a nice steady constant - wouldn't even have to be a normal 4 stroke engine - it could be a stirling engine that is highly efficient but has problems speeding up - though Ford managed to get it's 0-60 speed down to 17 seconds while experimenting with alternate engines during the 70s oil crisis - making it's marriage to this application ideal.
Any thoughts on this? I admit I don't have much knowledge in this area and probably missed something very basic that is wrong with the idea.
I mean, when you eat corn, it's pretty much in one end and out the other, anyway, right? Just make everyone in America eat a cob of corn every day, and let the sewage treatment plants separate the fuel from the... Well, you know.
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
Ethanol is not the way forward, the BBC has an interesting article on this, some excerpts:
So it seems the right decisions are being made here. I'm quite suprised as I thought lobby groups were already springing up around so-called 'green fuels', I've seen some suspicious adverts for ethanol fuels on Canadian TV recently.
I'm going to transform myself into a mighty hawk. Either that or I'll just go and work at Dixons, haven't decided yet.
Think about the total amount of food grown and the land used to grow food. The average person eats about 2000-2500 kCal per day in food. The average person consumes about 36,000 kCal per day worth of oil (just oil, not including coal, nat gas, etc.).
Is the Earth big enough to provide 15-20 times the current food production level of biofuel-grade plant material? And if we plant more energy crops won't we be planting less food crops?
The US will be fine, but any one who eats food grown on land that could be used to grow an energy crop will see higher food prices.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I'm all for figuring out that corn isn't a miracle for anything except winning votes in Iowa, but where did you get the idea that potatoes require "next to no fertilizers"? I grow potatoes and you have to fertilize the bejeezus out of the things or you end up with cute little micro-potatoes.
More data:
http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/1000/1619.html
Potatoes are still better than corn; for all I know you're right that they're the most efficient. But I just wanted to point out that fertilizers are still going to be necessary.
There are several smaller producers out there who use cane sugar. Jones Soda is switching over.
Here's the froogle results for cane sugar sodas.
They are available if you look.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
flame me if you will....
You may joke about the "demonstrations" all you like.
me -->
89 F-350 super crew
7.3 liter
B-100 for the last 20,000 miles
Get 15% more HP
Get 20% more torque
Petro Diesel is currently $2.71 per gallon where I live
I can buy B-100 for $2.50
I make it for $1.21 per gallon
I use no fossil fuels in its production.
I use only the oil itself to render the oil (oil feed heater)
All it takes is the gumption to do it and the willingness to tell big oil where to shove it.
As for the crop on my farm, they are not for sale to the government as subsidies.
Nor do I sell to anyone that is not local.
So no whining about the lack of food, grow your own and stop buying from big business
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
On a better note there is commericial cellulose based ethanol production going on in the USA - it's just still at a small scale apparently. That's the answer to corn ethanol - use the stalks and leaves instead of the kernels.
Cellulosic ethanol is a proven technology, the only issue now is ramping it up to industrial scale. Iogen and SunOpta (both Canadian biotech companies) have already built pilot plants, and are selecting sites to build industrial scale plants (In Iogen's case, they're contemplating offers from the US, Canada, and European countries to host the plant, which would produce 50 million+ gallons of ethanol a year.)
The great thing about sugarcane and cellulosic ethanol production is they don't require outside power to run, unlike corn ethanol plants. They take a byproduct of the production process and use it for fuel.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Look, corn isn't the most efficient method of producing ethanol by a long shot. But that it takes more energy to produce simply isn't true.
This used to be true when talking about old inefficient ethanol plants. Today's corn ethanol production sees a net gain in energy. It's roughly a 1:1.3 ratio of BTUs in to BTUs out. These are well substantiated and accepted numbers. That paper put out by Berkley that everyone uses to spout that old myth wasn't accurate. It made a lot of assumptions to the low end of crop production, and efficiency, but high assumptions for fossil fuel based fertilizers and diesel farm equipment. It was set up to make corn ethanol look worse than it was, and quickly moved towards an anti agribusiness bias.
I realize that 1:1.3 is barely more, but consider that the goal isn't so much to remove our dependence on fossil fuels, but foreign oil. Natual gas and coal are what fire the distilleries, not oil. So essentially, when using corn based ethanol, we are using coal, natual gas, and a little solar energy to fuel our vehicles. I'm OK with that for now. We have a lot of it. Eventually, other better crops will supplement and perhaps replace corn. The distilleries don't really have to do a lot of retrofitting and changing to take new sources of carbohydrate.
Nothing is foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
We can only hope that the new ULSD (Ultra Low Sulfur Diesel) now required in the US will usher in a boom of popularity for diesel passenger cars now that emissions are less of an issue. The diesel Jeep Liberty is a step in the right direction -- we might even dream of someday buying an American passenger car with a diesel engine in it... I'm not holding my breath, though.
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'
The unstated point of the whole question of "alternative" fuels probably has something to do with "global warming" (which probably IS happening) and the underlying assumption that we human critters have a gnat's-ass of influence on said warming (which we do - have a gnat's-ass worth of input, i.e. not much.) Google "The Great Global Warming Swindle" for some interesting links.
You can choose a "side", but think about it a bit first.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Chavez is moving from elected to dictatorship! Look at the statements he has made when the constitution requires him to step down. He says he will not step down, but change the constitution. He also now has power to do whatever he wants. BTW one tell tale sign that he is a dictator is his every increasing majority! After all Saddam had something like 98% of the vote, but I doubt anybody would say he was democratically elected!
Holding an election does not necessarily imply democracy... Democracy is the ability to vote and have freedoms without the interference of government. The interference part is definitely not happening with Chavez!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
There is no future that would allow everyone on this planet to drive around at will, fly around at will, eat strawberries flewn around the globe and tons of meat at will at the same cost and with equal or less ecological impact as/than now.
This is simply not possible, mathematically. Either we want to utilize some renewable energy, then the sheer area of land needed to grow the apropriate crop would not be ecologically acceptable. Or we find a better and cheaper way to exploit still more fossile energy: that would further increase the amount of CO2 released to the atmosphere. Finally, even with some "magic" endless form of energy the future looks dim: if e.g. fusion or something similar would finally work then the cheap and endless supply of energy would make it possible to sustain an even larger number of people and give them the means to drive around at will, fly around at will, eat strawberries flewn around the globe and meat at will which would in turn indirectly lead to the exploitation and destruction of an even bigger part of the environment (all these people living in luxury need natural resources, produce waste, produce toxic substances, need their own houses, roads etc.)
So, in order for people living on this planet without eating it up, destroying most of their fellow species, and totally covering it with artefacts and trash at some point, the only chance really is that energy gets more expensive and more precious. The only way to prevent utter destruction is that energy is costly and not available to everyone in huge quantities.
As far as I can see, with a more long term vision of "future", nothing can be the future except precious, expensive energy.
How to make yourself unpopular on a US based system...
However, seriously, between 1845 and 1849 Ireland had successive years of record harvests, and in each year exported huge amounts of grain. What's famous about those years? Yes, that's the Great Famine. People worked all day producing wheat which they couldn't afford to buy, so it was exported and they starved. There was no shortage of food in Ireland during the famine; there was a shortage of food ordinary Irish people could afford to buy. Similarly, in the Ethiopian famine of the mid 1980s which led to the formation of Live Aid, Ethiopia - so plagued with drought that it could not feed its people - was exporting so many water melons to Europe that it could afford to buy helicopter gunships with the proceeds. Again, people starved not because there was no food, but because they could not afford the food that was plentiful.
The world's agricultural system is at full stretch at present producing enough food for (most of) the world's population. But our machines consume far more calories than we do ourselves. So if we switch our machines from consuming fossil fuels to consuming bio-fuels, then all the worlds agricultural land put together is not enough.
One of the inevitable consequences of capitalism is that it distributes scarce goods inequitably. In a drought, the poor go thirsty while the rich water their golf courses. In a famine, the poor starve while the rich put biodiesel into their SUVs. This flies in the face of every system of ethics we know, and yet it is the inevitable consequence of capitalism. Ghandi said 'the earth produces enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed'. Personally, I think he was an optimist; but nevertheless, one person's biodiesel is - inevitably - another person's hunger.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
My wife doesn't like sad movies. When we were watching Peter Jackson's King Kong, right about the point where the ape is spinning on the frozen pond in Central Park, and the army is setting-up, she asks, "Nothing bad happens to him, right?" I didn't know that she didn't know how King Kong ends. So that's where we stopped it. As far as she knows, King Kong ends with a happy beastie butt-skating in Central Park.
If you do that same thing with U.S. History stopping at WWII, we look pretty decent.
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
Ethanol, burned to produce an equal amount of energy to a specific amount of octane is going to produce an equal amount of carbon dioxide. The whole motivation to use ethanol as fuel is completely misguided. (Or a not so clever ploy.)
...equalised by mols of CO2:
Heats of combustion of Ethanol vs n-Octane from my 1989 CRC Handbook (in kilogram calories per gram molecular weight):
Ethanol: 326.68 (~327 kcal/mol ~= 1367 kJ/mol)
n-Octane: 1302.7 (~1303 kcal/mol ~= 5450 kJ/mol)
Complete combustion reactions:
Ethanol: C2H5OH + 3 O2 = 2 CO2 + 3 H2O (-1367 kJ/mol)
Octane: 2 C8H18 + 25 O2 = 18 H2O + 16 CO2 (-5450 kJ/mol)
Ethanol: 8 C2H5OH + 24 O2 = 24 H2O + 16 CO2 (-10.9 MJ)
Octane: 2 C8H18 + 25 O2 = 18 H2O + 16 CO2 (-10.9 MJ)
So, you can see that to produce equal amounts of energy by combustion of either fuel, one must produce equal amounts of carbon dioxide.
In fact, ethanol from corn will produce more carbon dioxide overall, as the carbon dioxide produced by fermentation of corn to produce ethanol will more than offset the benefits of its relatively clean combustion.
Burning ethanol does nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It is a convenient way for the petrochemical industry to prolong its inevitable death. A number of petro stations in Canada have been selling gasoline with up to 15% by volume ethanol for decades now (Sunoco in particular).
Granted, gasoline is of course not pure n-Octane, and contains lots of other crap. Its mostly the toluenes and related aromatics that give gasoline its smell, pure octanes have very little aroma, slightly minty if anything.
Combustion of gasoline is less likely to be complete, so burning ethanol is going to be cleaner in terms of emissions and will produce fewer toxic byproducts of combustion, but will do NOTHING WHATSOEVER to help global warming. I find it amusing how easily the public and businesses are fooled.
Now, what does make some sense to me is to produce biodiesel from rapeseed (canola) or hempseed (marijuana), in terms of ease of production and sustainability, but again, burning these fuels for energy is not going to help global warming, the same amount of CO2 will be produced.
The answer obviously is CANDU nuclear reactors and electric/flywheel vehicles, but this would destroy the profits of many powerful corporations, and so will not happen under democratic capitalism. The market indices must never decrease, regardless of the cost, even if that cost is the future of humanity. We are on a path to self destruction and violent revolution is the only way out, but I fear that will never happen.
The price of corn has nothing to do with it, feeding the poor has nothing to do with it, its all about protecting the financial interests of those in control. The future of man be damned.
Sleep well.
There are farmers that would rather plow under their healthy crops than sell it unprofitably.
There are farmers that would rather grow illegal crops for drug production than sell current unprofitable food researves to be given to countries (that make NO efforts on population control or social resposibility).
Farmers in starving countries are going bankrupt from the free food given to the country so future food supply in that country is greatly harmed.
More free food to starving countries that have no population control simply equals more starving babies and children... a never ending story of starvation and poverty for both farmers and poverty stricken countries.
BioFuels helps the War against Drugs and fighting poverty world-wide.
I am sorry for being so cold and callous as I enjoy my luxurious life in the US, but why do we fight so hard to have more people living in areas where they apparently shouldn't be living per Mother Nature? I get so frustrated when people talk about the food supply problems and the water supply problems and how are we going to solve all these problems when perhaps, maybe, just maybe it is time to consider that the planet has enough human beings on it and adding to the population isn't the best move? Reminds me of the Matrix and Agent Smith's analysis of the human species as the only one that doesn't live within its bounds.