"highly optimized, cost-effective process" usually equals "cheap oil needed". (I stress "usually" - not looking to pick a fight!)

I'll agree that all options & alternatives need to be looked at. More so, we should have been doing this for 30+ years. How many "wake-up calls" do we need? ('73, '79, '05). Using all alternatives possible is just going to delay the grim reaper - ultimately we need to change (reduce) our energy (all types) consumption patterns. This will help way more than any "inventions".

 

Wow, strait from the DOE.. now there's an unbiased source of information!

 

Hi Alex A:

___When has “By Hand” ever been “less” energy intensive then modern manufacturing? Maybe those that work the ethanol plants eat Sugar Can stalks for breakfast, lunch, and dinner

___Back in June of this year, the following was posted at MSNBC …

Brazil biofuel strategy pays off as gas prices soar
___A graph I saw over at Greencarcongress about US Corn and Brazilian Sugar Cane - Ethanol production included the following:



___See US Corn, see Brazilian Sugar Cane?

___The best article I know of was posted over at Greencarcongress last month. If you have ever followed the Ethanol - Net Energy debate, a guy by the name of Pimentel is almost always involved for some reason? Here is one of the fellow debaters giving his own Net Energy result commentary:

The Great Ethanol Energy Balance Debate …

___I read GCC religiously so I knew what was going on over there . The rest of the info was simply googled.

___This is a good debate but when Brazilian Ethanol (cost to manufacture) is running just 1/4 -1/3 (estimated at $25.00/BBl or ~ $0.50/gallon) of what wholesale gasoline is for NY Spot, what do you think the real story is?

___On a slight OT note, it was not that long ago that I used to hate having E10 in my fuel because of the FE hit I take at each and every fill. When considering how and where it is made, I think the FE hit is nothing compared to what oil and its refining are doing to our country …

___Good Luck

___Wayne R. Gerdes
___Waynegerdes@earthlink.net

 

I notice the focus is always price/gallon. Trouble is, the stoichometric air/fuel ratio for alcohol is about 7:1 instead of gasoline's 14.7:1. This is because ethanol has roughly half the energy content of gasoline.

All else being equal, your fuel economy on 100% alcohol would be halved compared to gasoline.

 

Hi Lifespeed:

___It isn’t a 50% loss, it is an ~ 20% loss in FE on straight Ethanol. We only lose about 2 - 3% using it in E10 and those automobiles that can run E85 are seeing an ~ 20% hit vs. straight up gasoline. The focus is on total cost per mile traveled (less expensive) and a renewable fuel we can manufacture here in the states. Ethanol is a win win if we can figure out the transportation side of the equation as Brazil does …

___Good Luck

___Wayne R. Gerdes
___Waynegerdes@earthlink.net

 

Ethanol-from sugar cane-sugar beets-corn-wood-cellulose scraps of any sort,is obvious it is hard to believe it is even worthy of discussion with oil at $70 and with the huge added cost-in all respects-of the middle east problems.
1)Ethanol is home grown.We have to depend on our enemies in the middle east for oil-or for oil prices.It really doesn't matter who we import the oil from,folks in the middle east control the price and supply-flow of oil.WE ARE HATED IN THE MIDDLE EAST!!Lat time I loked we are on good terms with folks in Kansas,Iowa,Minnesota etc.
2)The"it takes more energy to make than it produces"-absolute BS.
3)It is essentially non toxic.If a tank leaks-so what??Bunch of drunk worms!!Who cares,you will get a little pop with your groundwater instead of the carcinogen you get with the other oxygenators.
4)It doesn't produce as "nasty"(hot-smoky) a fire as gasoline if the car-plant etc catches on fire.It isn't safe of course,but not as potentially dangerous as gasoline.It isn't absorbed thru you skin,and it isn't a problem to breath it.

5)It does cost more to transport than gasoline.It produces fewer BTUs per pound and less per gallon,so it cost more to transport 1 million BTU's of ethanol than of gasoline.
Some of this can be offset by grinding the sugar cane close to the farms.(if we use sugar cane which I suspect is kinda expensive ).This is how it is done with sugar cane now in Louisiana.The cane is transported to a relatively close grinding plant(10-50 miles).It is turned into a liquid there-and some of the water is removed to make a thicker syrup.The syrup would then have to be transported to bigger fermenting refineries.There could be far more fermenting refineries than there could be oil refineries.A fermentation refinery won't have the environmental impact that an oil refinery has.There could be many much smaller(they could even be at the grinding plant) and more numerous than oil-gasoline-diesel refineries.
Equivalent setups for corn-wheat-beets-and wood cellulose scrap-paper could be setup.It will always cost more to transport than gasoline-less energy per weight,but maybe the average distance from refinery to gas station could be a lot less.
Ethanol is a winner-no net C02 added to the atm.There really isn't a downside now that oil is $70 and rising.The byproducts-bagasse-corn oil-diesel-high protein feed for humans or animals-building products etc are generally useful.Heck,if a "good" process is developed to "ferment" cellulose , the bagasse could be fermented.
Same situation for soy-soy oil diesel-rapeseed oil etc.
About time!I wish I could afford a FFV Titanto run on E85.They are the same price as the non FFV Titans.It might-should be posible to retrofit many vehicles for E85 if there is interest in doing it(O2 sensors are changed-some seals-maybe reprograming or piggybacking on the ECU-lotta junkyard potential-I will hunt for a junked 2005 FFV).Thanks.Charlie
PS-I forgot One of the most important reasons to push Ethanol iks to put price price pressure on the oil refinery owners.The problem with the "free market" is that it takes no interest in the national interest of the USA.Further the oil refining companies can price fix-not compete-without actually colluding.They have now discovered that we will pay $3.25 for gasoline-consumption won't drop much,and most importantly there wasn't a public outcry to nationalize the oil refining and producing companies-no serious congressional investigation etc.They charge what we will pay for oil;it has no relationship to the cost of them producing the gasoline,price is strictly based on what we will pay.
Ethanol is one of the few wedges we have to cause some real competition in the car fuel industry.Why should oil refineries compete with each other,and drop prices??I can't think of any reason for them to drop prices.They aren't stupid;they know we HAVE TO BUY all the gasoline that they can produce-there is no reason-other than public outcry-threats to nationalize(which wouldn't be serious in the USA)-for them to drop prices-or to build new refineries.Why build new refineries-so they can sell more for less and create more jobs??BS.
Ethanol-if it isn't controlled by energy companies(where is TR when you need him).
Hey,it the water works were privatized and they decided water would be $10/gal-you would pay $100 until you bought your own filter and drilled your own well.Can't do that with gasoline.The refinery companies have us over a barrel,and it is legal.Some might argue that $3 gas is good.Yeah,maybe if it was done slowly in conjunction with conservation etc,but not when all the excess profit goes to mulitnationals that have no concern for USA's national interests-one of which is to have a large middle class with a gently curve in both directions.

 

You may want to look at this article regarding alcohol....I think I will just go hybrid instead.


http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...umnist_hassett

 

Check out this Wikapedia article.

It's been said it would take more energy to produce ethanol than it would deliver, but some say that is the case with gasoline (disputed). An interesting point....

 

01) The EPA revokes Gasoline-additive mandate. Means potentially no more MTBE or Ethanol in gasoline. This should create economic issues for Ethanol by not having a large market segment. Related GreenHybrid link.

02) California has only one public Ethanol station, two private stations. California has more registered vehicles than any other state.

03) California has the largest concentration of FFV's in the nation, but with no fueling infrastructure.

 

Professor David Pimentel is somewhat surprising in that he is a well know Environmentalist, as far from Big Oil as you can be.

I usually disagree with him as he is a leader in "the sky is falling" type environmental alarmism and doom and gloom predictions.

Some of his ideas include:

The sustainable population of the US is 40-100 million max. How should we reduce our population by 85%?

He predicted massive increases in tuberculosis world wide, yet it's gone down.

He persists that there is an ever growing cancer epidemic, yet age-adjusted cancer deaths and incidence are stable or decreasing. As populations age more people will die from cancer which is highly age dependent. Your average 50 year old today will get cancer as often as a 50 year old in 1935.

He claimed that agriculture is causing the loss of 75 billion tons of top-soil annually, totally unsupported, but somehow based on increased yield per acre. This may be why he's not for crop increases for corn/fuel as it would certainly be necessary to vastly increase yield and land usage for crops, the opposite of bio-diversity. Genetic modification might be beneficial but that's obviously forbidden too.

He is one of the most ardent critics of pesticides and attributes the "cancer epidemic" to pesticides. One of his national articles was published in the local Boulder paper saying don't use pesticides including DEET against mosquitos because of west nile, because your chances of getting west nile are in the millions to one. He was off by an order of 50:1, 7 people died and there were 421 cases reported in Boulder County Colorado. It's unlikely that corn/fuel crops will be organic or sustainable by current definitions, another possible reason Pimentel isn't for it.

I'm not sure if Pimentel concerns himself with alternatives, my guess is he hopes humanity will collapse and return to a pre-industrial utopia as is inevitable and necessary.