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The Great Ethanol Scam
theodp writes "Over at BusinessWeek, Ed Wallace is creating quite a stir, reporting that not only is ethanol proving to be a dud as a fuel substitute, but there is increasing evidence that it is destroying engines in large numbers. Before lobbyists convince the government to increase the allowable amount of ethanol in fuel to 15%, Wallace suggests it's time to look at ethanol's effect on smog, fuel efficiency, global warming emissions, and food prices. Wallace concedes there will be some winners if the government moves the ethanol mandate to 15% — auto mechanics, for whom he says it will be the dawn of a new golden age."
Instead of using corn (worse than sugar cane), soy beans and bio diesel would be beter. I always thought that diesel engines get better mileage.
"Does the average citizen understand what this means?" No. Does the average /.er?
More than anything, this cartoon puts me off the whole ethanol idea. It still creeps me out seeing it again now.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Stop the subsidies, tax carbon to account for externalities, and then let the market decide. The negative effects of biofuels have been on display ever since the Dutch dropped palm oil. Instead of the government pushing this obviously failed product, they should make sure that consumers bear the entire cost of their decisions and let companies develop a way to reduce fossil fuel consumption. And less biofuels means the price of my beer goes down, dammit! Won't someone think of my beer?
http://bgcommonsense.blogspot.com
it's not ethanol itself, it's just the way US produce it... none of those arguments would apply to sugar cane. about the engines, brazil is using pure ethanol for quite sometime and it just doesn't destroy the engines the way tfa implies. if it's happening on US, maybe you should take another look at the auto industries.
It doesn't have to be a linear curve, dude. It could be 30% at 15%, and 50% at 90%.
Not saying anything about the veracity of the article, just sayin'.
It doesn't matter that bio-ethanol always was so utterly bone-headed from a thermo-dynamic and food-price point of view (and now this as well) - utterly wrong, right from the start, with back of the envelope calculations.
Some people can make vast amounts of money out of it under cover of doing the "right thing" morally (much like the war on drugs), and hence it gets government support.
Azural - instrumentals
Not of ethanol, I'm really skeptical of it. It takes so much energy to make, I'm not sure what the point is.
I'm more skeptical of the other things listed. An E85 vehicle typically will run on E100 with no damage. The only real issue is that if you let the engine cool down, it won't start since ethanol won't vaporize properly in a room temperature engine. But it won't cause any damage, and merely putting 100% gas in the tank (assuming there is room, pumping out ethanol if necessary) until the percentage gets high enough to start the engine is all that is needed.
Also, ethanol doesn't reduce "gas mileage" (the words used in the article) 40-60%, it reduces FUEL mileage 40-60% by volume. This is because ethanol contains less energy per gallon. So consumption goes up, but what you really want to measure is energy efficiency, and burning ethanol isn't significantly less energy efficient (note, I'm not speaking of the energy required to make the ethanol, merely the combustion in the engine). So as long as the fuel is priced correctly and you have the space for the ethanol needed, it isn't an efficiency issue.
I do have problems with E10 ("standard gas") more than E85. With E85 at least you know what you're getting into. With E10, we are made to pay regular rates (or even more!) per gallon for the fuel even though it contains 4% less energy than straight gas.
For the record, I'm against a move to E15. We'll end up paying the same amount again (per gallon), while getting another 2% worse economy (per gallon). And it doesn't seem to decrease our dependence on foreign oil, since the corn used to make it is generally grown using nitrogen fertilizers made from petroleum.
I still like the idea of flex-fuel, but we need to find better wats to make alternative fuels before they represent a real viable alternative.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
That is not exactly true. The power output of an internal combustion depends not only on the energy content of the fuel but on on other factors as well, such as, *VERY IMPORTANT* compression ratio. The higher the better and ethanol allows the use of considerably higher compression ratios without detonation. It doesn't compensate the lower calorific power of the ethanol (25% less mileage) but for the same engine, ethanol usually has a little higher rated power (it can operate on higher RPMs).
Aspiration to and the living of Western styles of life are a much bigger problem than over population. America uses much more energy than the 5% of global consumption that would be more reasonable if you want to make population the biggest problem.
That doesn't make population growth a non problem.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
The ad hom aside, I've never met an "enviro wacko" who supported corn ethanol.
In fact, anyone who's given any thought to it at all, and subscribes to the wacko idea that our civilization can't handle environmental upheaval of the scale predicted by real scientists... is against the idea of using our topsoil to power our craptacular personal transport. No "enviro wacko" supports an energy infrastructure that damages topsoil that is already in trouble (guess what black gooey stuff is the raw material for organics re-introduced to soil overworked to sterility?) and probably makes the GHG problem worse. And what functional human being wants to use food resources to power Cadillac Escalades?
In other words, you can't blame those of us who think the biosphere of our planet is required for our continued survival (wacky, right?). However, feel free to blame jingoists who marketed this monstrosity as "energy security".
After reading all the articles linked to, I noticed not one mentioned one part of the scam. Business Week and Chicago Tribune said the ethanol was corn based. However the same amount of land would produce more ethanol if sugarcane was used instead. With the world's largest biofuels program Brazil uses sugarcane. And switchgrass produces even more. Another benefit of using switchgrass to make ethanol is that it will grow on marginal land other crops aren't grown on.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Apparently there is some difficult understanding here; allow me to provide the information that you seemed to neglect.
95% ethanol doesn't ruin cars designed to run it. However, 15% ethanol will ruin cars designed to run 10%.
See the difference here? If we go all ethanol, fine, do it. This wishy washy crap is just horrible and suckling up to the gas needs of countries which hold us by the balls due to gas dependency.
Brazillians seem to have a good climate for cane sugar, some of the US may or may not as well. I am not an agricultural specialist.
Of course, to do this today a farmer would need to file applications with the government for the 'right' to distill fuel for his own use from his own crops. To distill alcohol for personal use without a fuel permit or to, gasp! drink it , would be a federal offense.
Brazil has been deforesting to grow food because already-cleared land has been converted to sugar cane production for Ethanol. The Amazon may already be past the point of collapse. Ethanol is a major source of ecological destruction in Brazil.
The big problem with corn is that most corn is grown continuously without crop rotation. That means that not only is it fertilized with oil (so any energy not coming from sunlight is coming from dino juice anyway, and it has a carbon debt) but it also destroys the soil. So it's all bad. Also, many people depend on that corn for food. Making corn fuel feedstocks raises the price of corn for food, because less food corn is produced.
IF you RTFA you'd see that it's not engines being ruined by ethanol, it's fuel pumps and pickup lines. Running alcohol requires a major refit, and many of those vehicles no longer even have their original engines.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
yeah, and you got it completely backwards, what he says is that all cars run on some degree of ethanol mixed gasoline, but some cars run on pure ethanol. Nowhere does the wiki article refute his claim.
i find your lack of faith in science disturbing!