ethanol the future????
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is this the future or a patch on a sinking ship....... i am not well educated on this and am wondering.......
all i know is that alot of plants are going up..... and corn futures are way up and that is not good all around unless your a greedy farmer that likes to cut down trees... here is what i do know besides 4.50 a bsl corn prices... opec is waiting and not this year or the next but maybe 2010 oil will drop like a rock.... here is why i think this.... ethanol plants are every 50 miles in the part of illinois i am in and when they are operational i am told that gas needs to be at least 2.00 to 2.30 to have it worth making e85(gas)..... if opec goes below 40 dollars a barrel e85 plants will be choked out....
another positive thing i have been told is that in 10-12 years technology will be there to run new cars with out any oil at all or corn or swithgrass or hog poop or whatever else they are thinking of...
all i know is that alot of plants are going up..... and corn futures are way up and that is not good all around unless your a greedy farmer that likes to cut down trees... here is what i do know besides 4.50 a bsl corn prices... opec is waiting and not this year or the next but maybe 2010 oil will drop like a rock.... here is why i think this.... ethanol plants are every 50 miles in the part of illinois i am in and when they are operational i am told that gas needs to be at least 2.00 to 2.30 to have it worth making e85(gas)..... if opec goes below 40 dollars a barrel e85 plants will be choked out....
another positive thing i have been told is that in 10-12 years technology will be there to run new cars with out any oil at all or corn or swithgrass or hog poop or whatever else they are thinking of...
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If all the nation's energy were to be produced tomorrow by ethanol, nearly 1/4 of the total land area of the United States would have to be dedicated to corn production alone.
Ethanol is a complete scam invented by farmers and the politicians who love them.
But, for a less biased review, you might want to check out this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol
and then this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_cell
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maybe it will reduce some of our consumption but larger strides and better cheaper technologies need to be found and soon.
Gasahol is essentially shitty gasoline and it's not good for your car. That's a fact, not to mention ethanol has less energy than gasoline.
I'm not saying this to be down on farmers, but ethanol is not a solution to anything. We could end price supports on tobacco farms and cotton farms though and put that money in to corn and soy beans or potatos if we want to create more alcohol. Paying people to farm tobacco is retarded. Paying people to farm cotton continues to harm Western Africa. We don't need to grow cotton in the US.
Exploit biomass of course, certainly it'd be good to try and maybe get some vehicles able to run on strait ethanol/biodiesel etc. but there is no way this puts much of a dent into oil consumption. Just because it can be a fuel dosen't make it a good one.
Agriculture is the one industry in this country that we must never let die. I support the new farm bill which will reduce the amount of subsidies since it is revenue based and not price based, which would give large payouts to farmers even if they had huge yields. But this type of rhetoric "scam invented by farmers" only fuels the hatred people have for farmers. It is ridiculous... "the family farm is the backbone of democracy " (Benjamin Franklin) - and it always will be. Farmers are the hardest workers in the world who make relatively little income... so lets stop trashing them.
That said, you are right about ethanol not being the answer, in and of itself. There are many renewable fuels that are better than corn. Willow trees, sugarcane, are two very good examples. But there is no infrastructure set up for these fuels. There is no way to handle and process these like there is with corn. But people have to remember - THERE IS NO SILVER BULLET TO REDUCE OUR DEPENDENCE ON FOREIGN OIL!!! - its more like "silver buckshot", there are many small things we have to do to accomplish this, renewable fuels are one of them. Research is being done so that we can go to sugarcane (in the south) and willow trees (in the north) in the future. But until then, ethanol is an excellent way to reduce our oil consumption AND stimulate the farming economy. A silver bullet may appear 20 or 30 years in the future (hydrogen probably) but until then renewable fuels from corn, soybeans, canola, biomass, etc. need to be exploited.
I don't hate farmers at all. They're free to invent whatever scams they like. But I do apologize for the language in my previous post -- I didn't intend to imply that somehow all farmers were behind the promotion of ethanol.
The fact remains, however, than the biggest promoters of ethanol are some farmers and some politicians from, shockingly, major corn producing states.
Anywho...farmers are cool. And I'm not too worried about agriculture dying in this country. Thankfully, people will have to eat for the foreseeable future. And American farmers are very good at what they do.
Of course there is. Hydrogen fuel cells coupled with nuclear and renewable power sources.
Hehe...I didn't say that farmers are "money-grubbing, scamming, no-good". I'm simply saying that some farmers and farming conglomerates are very much in favor of enthanol solely because it will drastically increase the price of corn. And their plan is very much a scam since it is based on largely empty promises.
Meh...I wouldn't really go that far. Ethanol is still energy-negative, I believe (though it certainly has the potential not to be). But hey, if people want to use E85 I'm certainly not for any plan that stops them from doing so.
My university (well alma mater I guess) is investing a lot of time and money looking at this. I went to school with a girl, now a grad. student, who is helping head up the research. Pretty neat stuff, but yeah ethanol has some draw-backs....but honestly I feel any alternative resource will ultimately have drawbacks....just a matter of which has the lesser of the con's....
President Bush's promise of 38 billion barrels of productions by 2019 is the only empty promise... it isn't even possible. And producers know this. If there is anyone who has lied about ethanol its either Bush or maybe ADM. Farmers only take the price given to them when they deliver to market.
When converting one form of energy into a more useful form of energy, by the second law of thermodynamics there is always a Btu loss. All transportation fuels made from petroleum have a negative energy balance. On the other hand, renewable fuels like biodiesel and ethanol have can have a positive energy balance because the solar energy captured by plants is considered to be energetically free.
Even with this in mind, energy balance tells us very little about:
Environmental effects
Health effects
Petroleum replacement/energy security
Sustainability
When you take these factors into account, ethanol from corn and biodiesel from soybeans/canola are the best option until there is that "silver bullet". The only question here, and I repeat, the ONLY QUESTION, is when we convert from corn based ethanol to sugarcane (in the south US) and willow (in the northern US).