Letters to the Editor
-
Ethanol's bad rap for energy efficiency is bogus.
,This article is bogus,the plain fact is that it takes 41% more btu's to produce a gallon of ethanol than the gallon of ethanol will produce. Farm tractors don't use ethanol based fuels,neither do plants manufacturing mining equipment. this article is just plain gas.
-
What we know for sure
...is that oil is going to run out. And when it does, we'll find out if biofuels are energy efficient or not. If the price of biofuel goes up with the price of oil, then eventually we'll be forced to abandon biofuels along with oil. But if this doesn't happen, then we'll at least have one alternative source of energy.
The worst thing would be to give up and not try.
-
No silver bullets
Biofuels are not necessarily 'green' in the sense that they are manufactured by tree-hugging environmentalists. They are green in that they are renewable. Just like wood and other forms of renewable energies (to which animal fat could be added, if you want to stretch the definition). Doesn't make them environmentally friendly, necessarily - palm oil production is a perfect example of this dichotomy.
There are no silver bullets in the search for a petroleum replacement, no single 'energy' that we can grow enough of so we won't have to alter our attitudes or lifestyles in some way. Arguing over how many btu's ethanol vs. petroleum production consumes is just a distraction. There won't be enough petroleum at some point, period.
And keep in mind the various interested parties behind the various studies. Why isn't biodiesel (much more efficient to produce) even on the table in most of the US? Ask the agricultural community what they produce most of. Ask the car makers who don't make diesel engines for the US market but produce them for the diesel/biodiesel blends popular in Europe.
Why, if diesel is being produced, is it as a soy by-product and not with more potentially efficient plants? Ask the soy producers.
Why are studies published and then relentlessly repeated that discredit biofuel production? Ask the petroleum interests. Duh.
-
Repeat rinse repeat
And apologies for repeating some of the same arguments mentioned upthread.
The topic just gets me rambling.
-
Land use.
About a year ago, Wired Magazine ran a piece extolling the virtues of nuclear power. Therein, the authors seemed to suggest that in addition to biofuel being an energy sink--a charge addressed by Farrell's study--it also uses an impractical amount of land. Peter Schwartz and Spencer Reiss wrote, "What about biomass? Ethanol is clean, but growing the amount of cellulose required to shift US electricity production to biomass would require farming - no wilting organics, please - an area the size of 10 Iowas." [See http://wired-vig.wired.com/wired/archive/13.02/nuclear.html?pg=2.]
-
Quick Comment
" Pyrian's attempt to find logical flaws in ethanol detractors' arguments falls flat, not because it in turn is logically flawed, but because it is based on false statements. he suggests:
"...[ethanol] also replaces any gas used to power the pumping, refining, and, in the case of more distant sources, extra transportation required to get that gas out of the ground and to the pump. "
The gasoline that ethanol consumes in its production has ALREADY been pumped, refined, and transported long distances."
Indeed, but you're misrepresenting my statement; that proves beyond a doubt that gasoline is more efficient (no surprise there) but is insufficient to prove that ethanol production is inherently unsustainable.
-
Hemp and Chapparrel
I had no intention of snubbing hemp or chapparrel as fuel sources, however, speculating on their efficiencies is so far out of my knowledge or expertise that I really can't comment much.
-
Don't forget the massive subsidies
Right now, vast amounts of corn are being grown, such huge amounts that they cannot possibly get a fair price at market. So the US government subsidizes them. One of the reasons Americans are so fat is that corn syrup is dirt cheap, and so the sweetener is added to almost everything.
If we converted the majority of American corn production from food production to biodiesel or ethanol, the actual scarcity of food corn would rise to the point where it could be sold at market for a fair price. This would cut American consumption of corn, which, frankly, is direly needed -- corn is one of the most fattening and otherwise most nutritionally useless grains. The price of soda would finally rise above the price of fruit juice, as corn syrup sweetener became more expensive. Food fried in corn oil would get more expensive than food grilled, baked or broiled -- all better for us than frying. The US government could stop subsidizing corn; the corn subsidies could be turned into an incentive program to grow fuel for biodiesel or ethanol, which would be phased out.
The issue here, really, is not that we would have to grow a lot more corn in order to make bio-fuels, and that this would be more expensive and damaging to the environment. The issue is that we *already* grow way too much corn. Americans are getting fat because we can't consume all the corn our country produces without turning obese in the process. Taking the corn we *already* produce and converting it to biodiesel or ethanol is almost free; there are already government subsidies in place to support growing cheap corn, and if they were repurposed to support converting corn to biofuel there would be no additional cost to biofuel.
Biofuel is local, renewable, and in this era of unrest in the Middle East, is good for world peace by reducing American interest in Mideast oil. It doesn't actually matter if growing extra corn costs more than refining and transporting oil, because the corn is already there. (Which is why corn rather than hemp or jojoba; it would cost more to get American farmers to plant a completely different crop.) No, it isn't a magic bullet that's going to solve all our energy problems, but we can run homes on wind power and heat them with solar power. The question is not, where do we get the energy to heat our homes and make electricity to power our cool stuff, but where do we get the energy to drive our *cars?* I don't see Americans moving back to the cities any time real soon; we like space too much. So we need a portable fuel for our cars, which wind, water and solar won't directly provide; perhaps we can use those (and nuclear, maybe) fuel sources to create hydrogen cells, but the advantage to biofuel is that it's a lot easier to use the existing infrastructure for biofuel than for hydrogen. At the *very* least it could help us get off foreign oil while transitioning to a battery technology like hydrogen.
Personally I think biofuel is a no-brainer. Right now the corn is there, our taxes are paying for it, and all it's doing is making us fat. Turn it into fuel and you get thinner Americans, who can direct their tax money to better causes, and who are less dependent on foreign oil, making us less imperialistic and less dependent on corrupt regimes like the Saudis. It makes jobs for Americans, it frees us from some degree of foreign control, what's not to like? Yeah, it's not perfect, but frankly nothing is.