[LINK] ethanol and the US drought

Frank O'Connor francisoconnor3 at bigpond.com
Sun Aug 19 17:20:55 AEST 2012


Mmmm ...

I've never had a lot of time for the ethanol alternative. It makes money for farmers, distillers and the like but has always been more carbon intensive than oil/gasoline when one takes the production carbon costs into account. Factor in that it also takes up valuable arable land that could be better used for food production, that the unit cost per litre is unlikely to drop much given ints already intensive resource usage, and that it basically perpetuates the energy equation which has got us here in the first place ... it's simply not viable in the long run.

Hydrogen alternatives however ... be they in battery, power pack or as an internal combustion engine fuel have a lot more promise.

Factor in improvements in battery technology (for example, last week some South Korean boffins discovered a design that decreases the recharge time between 30 and 120 times .... which starts to make the puppies viable for transport and other energy uses) and inevitable design efficiencies and the like that still have to be explored, and which can be expected to make our technology more energy efficient, and I think ethanol and other bio-alternatives for IC engine fuels are simply a temporary dead end.

Made some moolah for a few .... but not a long term solution.

Just my 2 cents worth ...
---
On 19/08/2012, at 2:16 PM, Jan Whitaker <jwhit at janwhitaker.com> wrote:

> I don't know what plant materials go in our ethanol production (sugar 
> cane???), but in the US it's corn. And what with the drought up 
> there, the impact on food prices is massive as a result of a govt 
> mandate to have ethanol in all petrol. Wasn't this a Golden Age of 
> the Howard Govt initiative?
> 
> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/17/ethanol-mandate_n_1799046.html
> As for the environmental virtues of ethanol, those were debunked long 
> ago. True, gasoline-ethanol blends can lower greenhouse emissions by 
> 20 percent, and ethanol can replace toxic additives such as benzene 
> that make gasoline more combustible. But growing corn is energy 
> intensive. Tractors that run on 
> <http://topics.bloomberg.com/diesel-fuel/>diesel fuel must plow 
> fields, plant seed, spread fertilizer and pesticides (that run into 
> local waterways), harvest the crop and haul it to refining plants. 
> Unlike oil, ethanol is highly corrosive and can't be transported by 
> pipeline. Trucks or trains must carry the finished product to 
> gasoline blenders. By some 
> <http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/ethanol.html>calculations, 
> ethanol takes more energy to produce than it yields, negating the 
> environmental benefits.
> 
> 
> Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
> jwhit at janwhitaker.com
> blog: http://janwhitaker.com/jansblog/
> business: http://www.janwhitaker.com
> 
> Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or 
> sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.
> ~Madeline L'Engle, writer
> 
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