The ethanol thread

Not much depresses me more than ethanol.

Uh...fuel and agriculture-wise, that is.

I want to clear up a few things I've always been confused about - does ethanol only refer to corn fuel or is it also the sugar cane and other crop-based stuff I've heard about? And is it true that corn is actually less efficient than some of these other crops? And also are "biofuel" and "ethanol" synonymous?

This year, 27% of our corn will go to making ethanol. Even is 100% of it were to go to making fuel, it would only reduce our dependency on oil by 15%. "Boondoggle" is one word for it. "Big juicy bone thrown to giant agri-business" is another way to put it. "Giant fucking lie" is yet another.

I am so sad that people like my governor/hopless presidential candidate Bill Richardson are trying to make strides in public energy with wind and solar power...I wish people would remember nuclear power exists. On an only vaguely related note that, please, don't let it derail thread... :(

Ah, ok, Wikipedia helps to answer my question:

Controversy

As reported in "The Energy Balance of Corn Ethanol: an Update"[20], the energy returned on energy invested (EROEI) for ethanol made from corn in the U.S. is 1.34 (it yields 34 percent more energy than it takes to produce it). Input energy includes natural gas based fertilizers, farm equipment, transformation from corn or other materials, and transportation. However, other researchers report that the production of ethanol costs more energy than it yields. [21]

Oil has historically had a much higher EROEI, especially on land in areas with pressure support, but also under the sea, which only offshore drilling rigs can reach. Apart from this, the amount of ethanol needed to run the United States, for example, is greater than its own farmland could produce, even if fields used for food were converted into cornfields. It has been estimated that "if every bushel of U.S. corn, wheat, rice and soybean were used to produce ethanol, it would only cover about 4 percent of U.S. energy needs on a net basis."[22] It is for these reasons that ethanol alone is generally not seen as a solution to replacing conventional oil.

Politics has played a significant role in this issue. Advocates for wheat, corn and sugar growers have succeeded in their attempts to lobby for regulatory intervention encouraging adoption of ethanol, [23] stimulating debate over who the major beneficiaries of increased use of ethanol would be. Some researchers have warned [24] that ethanol produced from agricultural feedstocks will cause a global food shortage, contributing to starvation in the third world. It has also been shown that ethanol production for fuels would cease if it were not subsidized.

This has led to the development of alternative production methods that use feedstocks such as municipal waste or recycled products, rice hulls, sugarcane bagasse, small diameter trees, wood chips, and switchgrass. [25] However, these methods are in early states of research.

Blends of up to 10 per cent are normally regarded as the safe maximum for a vehicle designed to operate on petroleum. However, ethanol blends can run at up to 85 per cent or higher in specially designed flexible fueled vehicles. The volume of consumption will increase with increasing ethanol consumption.

Consumer Reports, October 2006, questions the fuel economy of a flex fuel vehicle [6]. Specifically, the report notes that fuel economy drops when an automobile uses E85, a blend of 85 per cent ethanol and 15 per cent gasoline, which follows from the lower energy content of ethanol, compared to gasoline.

In July 2007, Brazil's president said that his nation's booming ethanol business won't hurt the Amazon Rainforest, dismissing criticism that the alternate fuel could cause deforestation. Environmentalists have voiced concerns that a global ethanol boom could accelerate rain forest destruction if trees are cleared to make room for crops. [26]

I wish people would remember nuclear power exists.

I do, too. No, SERIOUSLY. Remember it exists, and remember how dangerous it is, and pour money into safety and infrastructure and disposal of waste, and we don't have a clean solution, but at least we don't have huge swaths of the Gulf of Mexico where there are no fish.

Kenan has it right.

Ethanol packs less punch per gallon than gasoline. It's hardly any panacea. And it's still carbon-based fuel. It takes a significant expenditure of energy to make it, not only in the growing and harvesting of corn but also in its production from corn. Plus, it's driven up the price of corn and will drive up the cost of food. Wow, what a good deal.

The other buzzword frequently dispenced with it is "cellulosic," usually under the idea that sometime in the near future, ethanol will be made from "switch grass" or "corn stalks" or "wood chips." This relies on enzymatic digestion of cellulose, something nature makes happen.

Scientists have known about it since I got my doctorate in protein chemistry. The limitation is it's not cheap or particularly easy and for the amounts the United States is likely to be interested in, ehhh, don't hold your breath.

It's also just a tad idiotic to think that our problems with emissions are limited to cars. Every time you turn on a light, there's a dirty little puff of smoke somewhere.

I was hoping this would be a drinking thread

Global shipping actually coughs up more co2 than autos. I wish more interest was paid towards canola/soy ethanol.

<i>I was hoping this would be a drinking thread</i>

it still could be.

OK, hopefully this stealthily goes under the radar of anyone who would be pissed at me for saying it:

I work for a.. corn interest. In fact, the company's primary business is seed corn, so I've heard more than I need to about ethanol. It's interesting in that agribusiness, mostly in the form of companies like ADM and lobbyists, have created what amounts to one of the largest rackets in the country. Corn production is subsidized by the government, food has grown to be needlessly complex due to the integration of subsidized corn by-products as cheap filler material in everything, and ethanol is still somehow a fairly new ingredient to the whole game.

In the next decade or so, we're going to see the demand for corn production go through the roof since ethanol has been sold very well as an alternative fuel. I say sold well because there are more efficient crops to use for biofuels -- I mean, most processes are just using the ears of corn and not even the stalks. Basically there's a streamlined system already in place creating corn stockpiles and they're just being used for fuels instead of corn syrup, etc.

I think my best case scenario, in the coming years, is that corn prices go up as ethanol demand looms, leading to a reduced use of corn-based filler garbage in food, and spurning alternative biofuels like switchgrass.

Of course, in the ideal world, everyone eats reasonable food that's not 90% corn syrup and we drive a lot less and remember to turn off the damn lights, but hey, who's being picky?

Apart from turning off the lights, those are big, systemic problems, not necessarily lazy, dumb consumers.

I mean, I'd like to rewrite laws to penalize communities for not building good mixed-use communities instead of giant suburban office parks with no houses for miles, dump ag subsidies or shift them to encourage responsible farming with low transportation overhead costs, and diversify energy sources to use more wind and solar energy, but the fact is that consumers do have options but they're driving 10 miles to the grocery store then going through every aisle and putting processed food in their carts. Well, the half of the population that's not in cities, and even most cities are pretty spread out.

I have a vested interest in harvesting LNG from landfill waste gas, since we are shipping our first truckload of the same to an end user this week. Utilizing garbage and the products of its decomposition seems to me to be a better bio alternative than a process that requires growing specific crops for fuel. And currently, most of that methane from garbage dumps is just being burned in flares with no attempt to recover the energy.

the AP report on corn ethanol that was published earlier today should be mandatory reading: THE SECRET, DIRTY COST OF OBAMA'S GREEN POWER PUSH

for those that prefer to watch a video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX2f4JnfS74&noredirect=1

it's a long article that touches on many things, but this kind of sums it up:

What was once billed as an environmental boon has morphed into a government program to help rural America survive.

"I don't know whether I can make the environmental argument, or the economic argument," Vilsack said in an interview with the AP. "To me, it's an opportunity argument."

Congress and the administration could change the ethanol mandate, tweak its goals or demand more safeguards. Going to Congress and rewriting the law would mean picking a fight with agricultural lobbyists, a fight that would put the administration on the side of big oil companies, which despise the ethanol requirement.

So the ethanol policy cruises on autopilot.

and of course the ethanol industry (and the obama administration, to a degree) are pushing back hard, so you know they struck a nerve:
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/industry-takes-aim-ap-ethanol-investigation-20858940?singlePage=true

or for those who prefer an interactive graphic to an article or a video, there's this:

http://hosted.ap.org/interactives/2013/ethanol/