1: It's simply not economic. If it was there wouldn't be the need for subsidies or mandates to include it in fuel.
If the lack of subsidies determines economics then oil is not economical either. Fact is is there is no energy source used on a commercial scale in the US that does not receive government subsidies.
2: It's really stupid to burn food, which is what is happening here.
Sugarcane is a food we can do without. And switchgrass is not a food for humans.
3: It isn't that environmentally clean or carbon neutral when the entire process is considered.
Not many energy source meet those requirements. And some sources, coal, nuclear power, and oil get to pass on their costs to others.
Could this lead to a embrace and surge in biodiesel use?
Biodiesel has the same issues ethanol does, engines have to be designed to use it and it will take a lot of farm land to grow the feedstock on. What may be the best step now is to increasingly use plugin EVs. Of course that requires the total rebuilding of the electrical grid. By making it smart though, geothermal, solar, and wind sources can be added.
I would think that any person pushing to eliminate our need for foreign oil or oil in general and actually expecting some level of success would have done a tiny bit of research.
Oil billionaire T Boone Pickens did the research for his Pickens Plan. Of course some accuse him of using the plan to hide his plan to steal water.
We could reduce our need on oil by a massive amount with nuclear power
Yea, and create more problems. Nuclear power is not profitable, it is hooked on subsidies.
On the other hand, there's A Solar Grand Plan: "By 2050 solar power could end U.S. dependence on foreign oil and slash greenhouse gas emissions". There's also Wind: "The United States has enough wind resources to generate electricity for every home and business in the nation."
To tell the truth there is not one energy source operating on large enough scale to power the US that does not get subsidies. Even oil gets subsidies.
there is certainly evidence that the manufacture of ethanol consumes as much or more fossil fuel than the energy content of the ethanol.
And it's known producing ethanol requires no fossil fuel. Saving seeds year after year, so there's no fossil fuel required to obtain the seed, I can grow corn every year in my garden. I grow it organically then harvest it with no fossil fuels. I can then mash it and make ethanol. No fossil fuels needed. Using a solar still it can even be distilled without the use of fossil fuels.
Of course if these methods are used then ethanol is not commercially feasible currently.
Almost: In American political discourse, only unpopular subsidies, especially those that present some risk of giving money to poor people(some of the brown persuasion, even!), are referred to as "welfare".
You can believe science and chemistry or believe hype and marketing.
=Oh, I believe science. But according to your definition of poison "If it kills rats it's rat poison which makes it a pesticide" then water is a poison and a pesticide too because it can kill rats.
If that sound silly, it's only as silly as what you said.
Real world, they'd be lucky to pull off an EROEI of half that, or 0.5. Hence my "two barrels in, one out" summary is probably not all that far off from the article data.
Even if you're right about that being the EROEI of corn based ethanol it's not true of either sugarcane or switchgrass based ethanol. I have repeatedly said corn was a bad source for ethanol. Yet you treat them all the same.
Ethanol needs 20%-30% MORE fuel to extract the same energy out of it.
I already answered that. While corn based ethanol barely produces more energy than what it takes to make, using sugarcane as their feedstock Brazil has an Energy Returned On Energy Invested (EROEI) of from 8:1 (8 to 1) to 10:1 (10 to 1).
Of course the EROEI of all ethanol sources is currently beaten by petroleum's EROEI from 16:1 to 20:1. But as petroleum sources shift to heavy oil and tar sands that ratio will drop.
That's just the urban rich, though. The rural poor in China don't get to see a penny of that, and Chinese law prohibits them from migrating to the urban areas where they could actually make some money. What's more, they make up the vast majority of the population.
Only the first sentence is correct, and the first part of the second one. Yes, it's the urban who are getting rich, but Chinese are moving from rural farms and villages to the cities. China's war on inequality
"hirty years ago, 80% of China’s labor force was composed of farmers. But, while that figure is down now to about 30%, rural education has continued to suffer from inadequate funding and human capital relative to urban, industrializing regions."
In bad years, the Chinese government needs all its military might just to keep the rural areas from rising up in revolt.
In bad years? And only people in rural areas? HAHA!!! There was real fear in the Chinese Communist Party during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 that PLA, People's Liberation Army, units in Beijing would side with the student protesters. The 38th Army under General Xu Qinxian, "openly refused to use force against student protesters." Eventually army units from other parts of China had to be ordered to Beijing to put down the protests. Even then though they still worried the Beijing units would protect the protesters causing a civil war in the military itself.
China Income: Trends in Per Capita Levels: "In 1990, China’s average per capita national income was around $350. Within a decade, there was a threefold increase, taking the figure to $1,000. At the end of 2008, the figure tripled yet again and China’s average per capita national income reached another high of $3,000. If China’s average national income continues to rise at an annual rate of 8%, the country’s per capita income will reach $8,500 by 2020 and will touch the $20,000 mark by 2030. Hence, China’s average per capita income will exceed the current income of Taiwan and Korea and the country will qualify for an OECD membership."
China's war on inequality: "Those with less education, however, such as migrant workers and farmers, have fared much worse. The former earn an annual salary (including fringe benefits!) totaling $2,000; the later may earn only half that. They comprise, in roughly equal parts, the low-income workers who account for up to 65-70 percent of the total workforce. Their average income has grown, but more slowly than the 8-10 percent annual GDP growth rate of the past 20 years."
China's war on inequality - Comments and suggestions - People Forum: "Thirty years ago, 80% of China’s labor force was composed of farmers. But, while that figure is down now to about 30%, rural education has continued to suffer from inadequate funding and human capital relative to urban, industrializing regions."
Why The China Property Bubble Doesn't Exist : "Said differently, that average Chinese couple has twice the real purchasing power their nominal income implies because their relative cost of living (including real estate) is lower. It is estimated that almost half of the average Beijing worker's income is actually purely disposable. When you adjust for this fact and that the Chinese couple can easily divert more income to real estate as they choose, because other expenses are lower, it makes Beijing's real estate relative to income seem much more affordable."
it's not the rich which create demand, it's the poor and middle class.
The rich do create demand, just not as much as the middle class and poor. However the rich create jobs which boosts income for the poor.
I have provided links and data backing up what I said, now can you do the same? As they show the uneducated and rural population has had the lowest rise in income, but that population changed from 80% of the total population to 30%. More and more rural people leave the country er farms and move to cities where they get better paying jobs and more education. If you can prove I'm wrong then my mind can change.
Ultimately it becomes an engineering problem for the car makers more than anything.
I said as much myself in posts above this one. I specifically mentioned Brazil which has had cars running on ethanol as well as flex-fuels since the 1970s. And they're smarter there than politicians are here, they use sugarcane to make the ethanol and not corn. With the same amounts of inputs sugarcane produces more ethanol than corn does.
"Pesticide" isn't on that page, not once. Neither is "toxic" or "poison". What it does say is that high fructose corn syrup causes weight gain, duh. Of course it does, it's empty calories. It does say there's weight gain even if the calorie count remains the same though.
And the other problem is it takes two barrels of crude equivalent to manufacture one ethanol equivalent of a barrel of oil.
Citation, citation, citation, or its Bullshit! Here are som eof my own citations, which only took a couple of minutes to get and type up: Brazil has an energy returned on energy invested of between 8:1 and 10:1 for ethanol. In the US corn based ethanol may have an EROEI of about 1.1:1, just barely positive. While the EROEI for petroleum currently ranges between 16:1 and 20:1 ethanol does have a positive EROEI in the single digits.
Actually Canada and Saudi Arabia are about the same on imports.
Bullshit! The United States imports more oil from Canada than from any other country. Nigeria is second, far behind Canada, with Mexico third. Saudi Arabia comes in at fourth.
most small farmer don't get much or any subsidies for corn production
Most farmers get little subsides no matter what they grow. Who gets large subsidies are the ADMs and Cargills.
You may also want to consider the reasoning behind subsidies as well. It's essentially a safeguard so that American food supply will be adequate on a yearly basis. If you let market forces run it entirely, there would be large swings in price and availability.
Bullshit! If that were the reason for subsidies then those small and family farmers would be subsidized.
The society we live in today would not be possible without subsidies to encourage farmers to plant even when there is excess.
This is bullshit too. If food production goes down, food costs go up. And higher prices means more people will farm. As it is now it's hard for small farms to compeat against ADM and Cargill because they get those subsidies. Heck these large corporations can even grow, export, then sell corn to Mexico cheaper than Mexican farmers can grow it. And corn originated in Mexico.
If you leave ethanol based fuels sitting in your tank long enough you can literally get a water layer in the fuel made up entirely of the moisture in the air. Not good again.
That happens with gas only in the tank. I know, I left my car over at my sister's too long only to have to tow it to a repair shop to rebuild the engine. Partially because of the water in the tank.
Yes, I can make biofuels cheaper than that, both ethanol and biodiesel. And if I had 35 acres I could grow a lot.
I have actually advocated user fees or taxes. Not only raise fuel taxes but institute a mileage fee. Another thing I'd like to see, but probably won't for too many years, are trains I can drive right up onto so I can then ride the train into the city. I know there's a pale implementation of this in the US, Amtrak's Auto Train. It only runs between Lorton, Virginia, south of Washington DC, and Sanford, Florida, north of Orlando in Central Florida.
Corn was engineered thousands of years before Monsanto existed.
Humans were not inserting fish genes until recently. Beyond that selective breeding take many years, genetic engineering is much faster. And so are any problems it creates. Such as Roundup resistant weeds or superweeds. Nor has there been any long term studies done on any of these.
And if your crops are taking more and more chemicals each year you might want to try a new supplier.
Monsanto created Roundup Ready crops so they can be drowned with Roundup.
There's nothing wrong with the Adam Smith theory of free markets.. But that theory is so far divorced from reality as to be counter-productive to society.
What's counter productive is saying free markets brought us all the ills you list. You say the government should make the world's life/death decisions. Guess who has killed more people than any other thing... Government, that's what. Counting just Jews the NAZIs exterminated 600,000 people. While they were doing that Stalin massacred 20 million people, and south of the Soviet Union Mao killed an estimated 50 million.
Now how many people have businesses killed? There may be something that killed more people, I don't know, but Union Carbide'sBhupal disaster only killed an estimated 15,000.
I dare you to find a company that has killed more people than the governments listed above. Heck, to make is easier you can even include the USA, try to find a business that killed more than the US. However when doing so don't leave out the estimated 4000 Cherokee who died on the Trail of Tears, the 400 who died at Wounded Knee and all the other massacres of American Indians. But you don't need to consider the 200,000 East Timorese who were massacred after Indonesia invaded East Timor with President Ford's and Kissinger's support. Or all the other foreign adventures the US had.
Oh, one more thing. Who do you think is the world's biggest polluter? The US Military. Add in all the other agencies of the federal government and the US government beats everyone when it comes to pollution.
Slashdot Mirror
Brazil calling. Brazil has been using ethanol and flex-fuels since the 1970s.
Falcon
1: It's simply not economic. If it was there wouldn't be the need for subsidies or mandates to include it in fuel.
If the lack of subsidies determines economics then oil is not economical either. Fact is is there is no energy source used on a commercial scale in the US that does not receive government subsidies.
2: It's really stupid to burn food, which is what is happening here.
Sugarcane is a food we can do without. And switchgrass is not a food for humans.
3: It isn't that environmentally clean or carbon neutral when the entire process is considered.
Not many energy source meet those requirements. And some sources, coal, nuclear power, and oil get to pass on their costs to others.
Falcon
Could this lead to a embrace and surge in biodiesel use?
Biodiesel has the same issues ethanol does, engines have to be designed to use it and it will take a lot of farm land to grow the feedstock on. What may be the best step now is to increasingly use plugin EVs. Of course that requires the total rebuilding of the electrical grid. By making it smart though, geothermal, solar, and wind sources can be added.
Falcon
I would think that any person pushing to eliminate our need for foreign oil or oil in general and actually expecting some level of success would have done a tiny bit of research.
Oil billionaire T Boone Pickens did the research for his Pickens Plan. Of course some accuse him of using the plan to hide his plan to steal water.
We could reduce our need on oil by a massive amount with nuclear power
Yea, and create more problems. Nuclear power is not profitable, it is hooked on subsidies.
On the other hand, there's A Solar Grand Plan: "By 2050 solar power could end U.S. dependence on foreign oil and slash greenhouse gas emissions". There's also Wind: "The United States has enough wind resources to generate electricity for every home and business in the nation."
To tell the truth there is not one energy source operating on large enough scale to power the US that does not get subsidies. Even oil gets subsidies.
Falcon
there is certainly evidence that the manufacture of ethanol consumes as much or more fossil fuel than the energy content of the ethanol.
And it's known producing ethanol requires no fossil fuel. Saving seeds year after year, so there's no fossil fuel required to obtain the seed, I can grow corn every year in my garden. I grow it organically then harvest it with no fossil fuels. I can then mash it and make ethanol. No fossil fuels needed. Using a solar still it can even be distilled without the use of fossil fuels.
Of course if these methods are used then ethanol is not commercially feasible currently.
Open Source Beer Project by Flying Dog Brewery.
Falcon
Almost: In American political discourse, only unpopular subsidies, especially those that present some risk of giving money to poor people(some of the brown persuasion, even!), are referred to as "welfare".
Not even! Where I come from subsidies are called corporate welfare. Archer Daniels Midland is A Case Study In Corporate Welfare.
Falcon
You can believe science and chemistry or believe hype and marketing.
=Oh, I believe science. But according to your definition of poison "If it kills rats it's rat poison which makes it a pesticide" then water is a poison and a pesticide too because it can kill rats.
If that sound silly, it's only as silly as what you said.
Falcon
it could survive without a government subsidy
And what of oil subsidies? What of those who died for oil? What of the pollution created by getting and using oil?
Falcon
Real world, they'd be lucky to pull off an EROEI of half that, or 0.5. Hence my "two barrels in, one out" summary is probably not all that far off from the article data.
Even if you're right about that being the EROEI of corn based ethanol it's not true of either sugarcane or switchgrass based ethanol. I have repeatedly said corn was a bad source for ethanol. Yet you treat them all the same.
Falcon
Every time corn went in the tank, the miles per gallon plummeted.
Of course, gas has a high energy density, 45 megajoules per kilogram (MJ/kg). Ethanol's energy density is about 25 MJ/kg.
Doing the math on the way home, we discovered that even dollars per mile were way, way up on ethanol gas.
Again of course. Petroleum is cheap, that is unless the lives lost and pollution is added. Heck oil is subsidized beyond deaths and pollution.
I used to love ethanol and went out of my way to find a station with a blend.
Does knowing oil is subsidized too make you feel better?
Falcon
Ethanol needs 20%-30% MORE fuel to extract the same energy out of it.
I already answered that. While corn based ethanol barely produces more energy than what it takes to make, using sugarcane as their feedstock Brazil has an Energy Returned On Energy Invested (EROEI) of from 8:1 (8 to 1) to 10:1 (10 to 1).
Of course the EROEI of all ethanol sources is currently beaten by petroleum's EROEI from 16:1 to 20:1. But as petroleum sources shift to heavy oil and tar sands that ratio will drop.
Falcon
That's just the urban rich, though. The rural poor in China don't get to see a penny of that, and Chinese law prohibits them from migrating to the urban areas where they could actually make some money. What's more, they make up the vast majority of the population.
Only the first sentence is correct, and the first part of the second one. Yes, it's the urban who are getting rich, but Chinese are moving from rural farms and villages to the cities. China's war on inequality
"hirty years ago, 80% of China’s labor force was composed of farmers. But, while that figure is down now to about 30%, rural education has continued to suffer from inadequate funding and human capital relative to urban, industrializing regions."
In bad years, the Chinese government needs all its military might just to keep the rural areas from rising up in revolt.
In bad years? And only people in rural areas? HAHA!!! There was real fear in the Chinese Communist Party during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 that PLA, People's Liberation Army, units in Beijing would side with the student protesters. The 38th Army under General Xu Qinxian, "openly refused to use force against student protesters." Eventually army units from other parts of China had to be ordered to Beijing to put down the protests. Even then though they still worried the Beijing units would protect the protesters causing a civil war in the military itself.
Falcon
Yet the median barely budges
it's not the rich which create demand, it's the poor and middle class.
The rich do create demand, just not as much as the middle class and poor. However the rich create jobs which boosts income for the poor.
I have provided links and data backing up what I said, now can you do the same? As they show the uneducated and rural population has had the lowest rise in income, but that population changed from 80% of the total population to 30%. More and more rural people leave the country er farms and move to cities where they get better paying jobs and more education. If you can prove I'm wrong then my mind can change.
Falcon
Ultimately it becomes an engineering problem for the car makers more than anything.
I said as much myself in posts above this one. I specifically mentioned Brazil which has had cars running on ethanol as well as flex-fuels since the 1970s. And they're smarter there than politicians are here, they use sugarcane to make the ethanol and not corn. With the same amounts of inputs sugarcane produces more ethanol than corn does.
Falcon
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S26/91/22K07/
"Pesticide" isn't on that page, not once. Neither is "toxic" or "poison". What it does say is that high fructose corn syrup causes weight gain, duh. Of course it does, it's empty calories. It does say there's weight gain even if the calorie count remains the same though.
Falcon
And the other problem is it takes two barrels of crude equivalent to manufacture one ethanol equivalent of a barrel of oil.
Citation, citation, citation, or its Bullshit! Here are som eof my own citations, which only took a couple of minutes to get and type up: Brazil has an energy returned on energy invested of between 8:1 and 10:1 for ethanol. In the US corn based ethanol may have an EROEI of about 1.1:1, just barely positive. While the EROEI for petroleum currently ranges between 16:1 and 20:1 ethanol does have a positive EROEI in the single digits.
Falcon
You pay (currently) about 13% less at the pump for E85 [e85prices.com] but you get 35% less mileage:
When subsidies are added E85 is more expensive.
you've made a fools bargain.
What was made was Corporatism which is what Benito Mussolini said Fascism should appropriately be called.
E85 has never been cost effective at the pump IN SPITE of the massive subsidies and tax breaks.
By the same token oil would be more expensive if it wasn't subsidized. Oil subsidized? Yes, oil is subsidized in the US.
Falcon
Actually Canada and Saudi Arabia are about the same on imports.
Bullshit! The United States imports more oil from Canada than from any other country. Nigeria is second, far behind Canada, with Mexico third. Saudi Arabia comes in at fourth.
Falcon
North America has precious little land suitable for Sugar Cane. Beets many. Switchgrass maybe.
Switchgrass is native to North America, it grows natively from Canada to Mexico.
Falcon
most small farmer don't get much or any subsidies for corn production
Most farmers get little subsides no matter what they grow. Who gets large subsidies are the ADMs and Cargills.
You may also want to consider the reasoning behind subsidies as well. It's essentially a safeguard so that American food supply will be adequate on a yearly basis. If you let market forces run it entirely, there would be large swings in price and availability.
Bullshit! If that were the reason for subsidies then those small and family farmers would be subsidized.
The society we live in today would not be possible without subsidies to encourage farmers to plant even when there is excess.
This is bullshit too. If food production goes down, food costs go up. And higher prices means more people will farm. As it is now it's hard for small farms to compeat against ADM and Cargill because they get those subsidies. Heck these large corporations can even grow, export, then sell corn to Mexico cheaper than Mexican farmers can grow it. And corn originated in Mexico.
Falcon
If you leave ethanol based fuels sitting in your tank long enough you can literally get a water layer in the fuel made up entirely of the moisture in the air. Not good again.
That happens with gas only in the tank. I know, I left my car over at my sister's too long only to have to tow it to a repair shop to rebuild the engine. Partially because of the water in the tank.
Falcon
High fructose corn syrup has a negative nutritional value. It's a pesticide.
They're putting a pesticide in food for humans? Not on the crops but the actual food people will eat?
Falcon
Yes, I can make biofuels cheaper than that, both ethanol and biodiesel. And if I had 35 acres I could grow a lot.
I have actually advocated user fees or taxes. Not only raise fuel taxes but institute a mileage fee. Another thing I'd like to see, but probably won't for too many years, are trains I can drive right up onto so I can then ride the train into the city. I know there's a pale implementation of this in the US, Amtrak's Auto Train. It only runs between Lorton, Virginia, south of Washington DC, and Sanford, Florida, north of Orlando in Central Florida.
Falcon
Corn was engineered thousands of years before Monsanto existed.
Humans were not inserting fish genes until recently. Beyond that selective breeding take many years, genetic engineering is much faster. And so are any problems it creates. Such as Roundup resistant weeds or superweeds. Nor has there been any long term studies done on any of these.
And if your crops are taking more and more chemicals each year you might want to try a new supplier.
Monsanto created Roundup Ready crops so they can be drowned with Roundup.
Falcon
There's nothing wrong with the Adam Smith theory of free markets.. But that theory is so far divorced from reality as to be counter-productive to society.
What's counter productive is saying free markets brought us all the ills you list. You say the government should make the world's life/death decisions. Guess who has killed more people than any other thing... Government, that's what. Counting just Jews the NAZIs exterminated 600,000 people. While they were doing that Stalin massacred 20 million people, and south of the Soviet Union Mao killed an estimated 50 million.
Now how many people have businesses killed? There may be something that killed more people, I don't know, but Union Carbide's Bhupal disaster only killed an estimated 15,000.
I dare you to find a company that has killed more people than the governments listed above. Heck, to make is easier you can even include the USA, try to find a business that killed more than the US. However when doing so don't leave out the estimated 4000 Cherokee who died on the Trail of Tears, the 400 who died at Wounded Knee and all the other massacres of American Indians. But you don't need to consider the 200,000 East Timorese who were massacred after Indonesia invaded East Timor with President Ford's and Kissinger's support. Or all the other foreign adventures the US had.
Oh, one more thing. Who do you think is the world's biggest polluter? The US Military. Add in all the other agencies of the federal government and the US government beats everyone when it comes to pollution.