Ethanol Boom? What Ethanol Boom?
by Jasmin Malik Chua, Jersey City, USA on 10. 2.07
The biofuel goldrush may be petering out, says The New York Times, along with hopes of a new future for rural America.
Companies and farm co-ops have built so many distilleries so quickly that the ethanol market is facing a glut, in part because the means to distribute it have not kept pace with production. The average national ethanol price has plunged 30 percent since May, with the decline escalating sharply in the last few weeks of September.
"While generous government support is expected to keep the output of ethanol fuel growing," writes NYT's Clifford Krause, "the poorly planned overexpansion of the industry raises questions about its ability to fulfill the hopes of President Bush and other policy makers to serve as a serious antidote to the nation’s heavy reliance on foreign oil." ::The New York Times
Big surprise here, NOT.
People in general are not adopting greener lifestyles to the numbers needed to justify all of this fuel. As long as the oil flows from the sands.
ethanol is not the answer it is parts of a green equation.
D~W
I would buy it, but don't know where to get it. Maybe the problem isn't that people don't want to live a greener lifestyle; maybe its more to do with distribution and availability.
Environmentalists should be happy about ethanol petering out. It was never truly a help to the environment when one considers fuel used in cultivation and the clearing of forests for farmland. I say good riddance to corn ethanol, time to focus on solutions that are about the environment rather than subsidizing corporate farms.
I use the 90/10 mix, but unfortunately my vehicles cannot use anything higher. I cannot afford to buy another car for about 7-10 more years, so I am hoping the car companies get more on the green-wagon by then...if not sooner.
". Maybe the problem isn't that people don't want to live a greener lifestyle;"
I wouldn't buy it and I know where to buy it because 1) I don't like using food for fuel; 2) ethanol contains less energy than gas; 3) growing corn uses up groundwater, depletes soil and strains affordability of food.
I ride my bicycle and work from home when I can. As far as I can remember, I only had to fill my gas tank once in september.
It was a ruse to continue farm subsidies. The fact that it was being marketed as a green solution is a sham. It comes from carbon based life. I believe any carbon emissions benefit is minimal. If you wanted based upon reducing foreign dependency okay...not sure it could fill a significant fraction of our needs, but at least a reasonable argument.
The farm land is already there. Just that farmers are growing corn instead of other things. Ethanol is by no means the miracle fuel, but it is one part of the large picture. There isn't going to be one single product that will replace oil, it will take everything. Ethanol, electric, hydrogen, bio-diesel, solar, wind, nuclear, ect. Plus corn is a bad crop to grow anyways for ethanol. Switch grass can grow anywhere in the US, and it provides almost 3 times the ethanol yielding rate that corn does.
Sure you pollute to get the corn to turn into fuel from the tracker and the refineries, but that pollution is still going to be there whether they grow corn or wheat. Ethanol refineries are also more eco friendly then oil refineries as they can be much smaller to produce the same amount of fuel and require less energy to produce the required fuels.
Seems to not have gone bust. Just that it didn't take off like it everyone made it out to do, just like all the other alternatives. Ethanol will still stay around, produce more fuel and grow into something much bigger, at least in the midwest states. Kansas is supposed to be able to claim energy dependence by 2015 or something like that because of ethanol.
Corn ethonal is horrible all the way around. It is making food cost go up all over the world. Also it is not efficent at all, could get 8 times better by using sugar cane, but then the politions would not get the mid west vote.
So... let me get this straight. You're telling me that the problem is that rural America doesn't have expertise in the area of distributing corn-based alcohol? Okay, just ponder that for a moment. If you still don't get it, go read about where NASCAR came from.
I believe too much fuel is a good thing. It drives the cost down. When the boom was going on renewable fuel was just as expensive as the fuel you can't renew. Does that make sense? If i had a ethanol business I would undercut the Middle East by the knees.
CORN ETHANOL = EVERCLEAR...... Lets all get drunk and forget about driving anywhere!!
Interesting debate on where the future lies. This post follows up:
http://wattwatt.com/pulses/110/bioethanol-not-necessarily-the-be-all-and-end-all/
"could get 8 times better by using sugar cane"
Its not that high. 400 gallons per acre for Corn, 800 for Sugar Cane, and a touch over 1000 for Switch Grass.
What we need are E85 engines that are designed for E85. Not these regular petrol motors that are compatable with E85. We need E85 that is compatible with petrol. The fuels are totally different, and if we had engines built from the ground up with E85 as the primary source, litre per litre we would see a HUGE performance increase and much better economy that what we have today.
Koenigsegg has done just that, and with E85, their sportscar has an increase of 200hp over the petrol model. Our current E85 motors have an insignificant increase if any increase at all. If they applied that technology to E85 motors, we could have smaller more efficient motors for E85 that are just as powerful as the large petrol motors.
All of the technology has followed accept for the motors.
Unlike corn ethanol, which has an energy ratio that's about at the breakeven point, sugarcane ethanol gets about 8 units of ethanol for every one unit of fossil fuel, and it generates some 55 to 90 percent less carbon than gasoline, and Brazilian drivers have been running on sugarcane for decades. But sugarcane ethanol has tradeoffs too, according to this biofuels story in National Geo: http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/2007-10/biofuels/biofuels.html
> Switch grass can grow anywhere in the US, and it provides almost 3 times the ethanol yielding rate that corn does.
Miscanthus kicks switchgrass' butt in terms of production of cellulose biomass per acre, and is essentially the Ron Popiel ShowTime Oven'Set it, and Forget It' crop -- www.miscanthus.uiuc.edu -- however the real problem is that production of cellulosic ethanol is not a streamlined process; production factories need solid, relatively easy chemistries (as compared to lab-based) to become reality.
i'm all for finding solutions to the fuel problem...living in new york i don't drive, but i know that that is not true for most of the country. i thought this was interesting...i hadn't heard this before...anyone's take?
Noble Prize Laureate Paul Crutzen's 2006 study was posted and commented on by Stoat on October 4, hypothesizing "that the production of commonly used biofuels, such as biodiesel from rapeseed and bioethanol from corn (maize), can contribute as much or more to global warming by N2O emissions than cooling by fossil fuel savings."
http://www.collectiveintellect.com/2007/10/ethanol_and_biofuel_bust.php