Yes, the most subsidized, water-intensive, fetilizer-using crop sure does help the environment.

Please tell me you're sarcasm hat is on...

 

I always wear a hat. It helps hide the lost hairline

The big thing about the use of corn is we can do it now. We have the technology and the power to turn US auto's into biofeed cars. Crops can be grown naturally you know too. In the future we could even us genetics to produce more hardy corn variety's.

A full electric nation is still years off. Plus we'd need to work out the whole way to power all those electric cars. At the moment we have the choice of nuclear power or lots of importing oil and coal to further pollute the air.

Corn is more practical because its the simplest one to convert to. Electricity is costly, and more polluting.

 

Wow, I have to disagree with ALL of your statements. This guy would too: http://www.evnut.com/. Corn is not the answer and do the research...electricity is cleaner at the source than all those ICE cars. Please read his website. Internal combustion (gasoline, ethanol, whatever) will ALWAYS be dirty. Electrical generation can be even more clean and renewable in the the future...solar, wind, etc. Gas will never be a clean source. What uses more electricity than refining liquid fuels...nothing! Why not put it directly to use to turn a wheel or 2, instead of all the effort to pump, refine, transport gasoline, then to lose a great deal of the original energy to conversion losses, heat losses, etc. Seems a no-brainer to me. I'm so ready to plug-in and ditch all those inefficient, individually polluting ICE vehicles.

 

Europe octane rating is different than us octane rating. They come out about the same when you normalize the formula.

 

I make ethanol in an industrial size plant. ( 1 million gallons per week )
It takes 19,000 btu of fossil fuel and 489 watt-hours of electricity to produce 1 gallon of ethanol.

That one gallon can move a small car 35 miles.

It will take 7000 watt-hours of electricity from whatever source to charge your batteries and move a small EV car 35 miles.

Ethanol is solar power for your car. The corn sugar is a summer's worth of sunlight stored in a kernel. Corn (or any plant) is a solar battery.
A tree is a solar battery. Burning wood gives off lots of energy, right?
Where did that energy come from? The SUN! A mature tree = 50 years of stored sunlight!

Ethanol will not meet all our needs, but neither will photo-voltaic cells, or wind power. But, if we can get 25% of our transportation needs from ethanol, and 25% of our needs from wind power, that's 50% less demand on oil, and I'm sure you agree that is a good thing.

Photo-cells will NEVER be used for transportation, since the limit is the sun, not the cells. The sun is just not powerful enough to provide real-time transportation. You need a week of sunlight to travel 35 miles in my example. Not practical. One square meter of sunlight at noon = 1500 watts. Less as you move away from noon. And photo cells you can buy cheaply right now convert about 15% of what falls onto them into electricity. That equals 1 mile of transportation per hour of sunlight.

 

"With an average car travelling 1000 miles per month, you use 50 gallons of gasoline, or $150 at current rates. To go 1000 miles in an EV takes only 250 kWh of electric power in a RAV4-EV (less in an EV1), or the energy equivalent of less than 8 gallons of gasoline (35 kWh to one gallon of gasoline)."


Lots of good numbers here too: http://www.evnut.com/


"The energy used to convert corn to ethanol is based on a U.S. survey conducted in 2001 by BBI International. On the average, dry mill ethanol plants used 1.09 Kwh of electricity and about 34,700 Btu of thermal energy (LHV) per gallon of ethanol. When energy losses to produce electricity and natural gas were taken into account, the average dry mill ethanol plant consumed about 47,116 Btu of primary energy per gallon of ethanol produced. "

http://www.ethanol-gec.org/netenergy/NEYShapouri.htm

Six year old data...must be some newer data out there?

I think ethanol will have to exist just to employ all those involved with the process! How many steps are there??

Seems a nice solar/wind array charging an EV would be too simple to employ many people, thus THAT'S the real reason ehthanol will keep going. Same with hydrogen.

Jobs are important. But I can't help but see that a simple solution is not in the cards. We, as humans, love the more complex answers, when the simple one gets discarded. My opinion. YMMV.

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Something needs done, whatever it will be. At least we can all agree to that.