A million times yes, there needs to be more awareness of how ridiculous corn ethanol is.
Corn ethanol is more an indirect way of converting coal to something your car can run on. There are many other more efficient plant sources that do not require large doses of fertilizer and herbicides, usually drawn from coal energy.
I'm not going to defend corn ethanol, but I do think this debate is misguided. The problem is not the corn ethanol, the problem is the corn.
Corn is an indirect way of converting oil into sugar. It is just as inefficient at making food as it is at making fuel (though that's less obvious because the end product doesn't have the same units.) There's a great article in an old issue of Harper's called "The oil we eat" (http://www.harpers.org/archive/2004/02/0079915).
I find it amazing that people are complaining that diverting corn to make ethanol raises food prices, when you can make the same argument that diverting corn to feed cattle raises food prices. Making beef via corn is an extremely inefficent method that's only viable because of cheap oil.
If the real concern is feeding people, you eat vegetarian. From a food supply point of view it's pure waste to feed cattle food that humans can eat directly. (Letting cattle eat grass on land not suited for agriculture is different.) The only reason it's sustainable to raise cattle the way it's done in the U.S. is because of an abundance of cheap corn due to cheap oil.
Sure, but that just means you aren't price sensitive. By the same rationale, some people might use enough gasoline that they don't care whether food prices go up because it's more important to keep gas prices low. I spend 1/10 as much on gas as on food, so I'm the other way.
The problem with the food price argument is that it's usually put in terms of the poor people starving because food prices go up. And if that's your argument, you have several worse problems that should be fixed first.
Yes that's his point I believe. It's ok for us wealthy nations full of meat lovers. But a billion starving people say otherwise. (At least that's my understanding of the debate).
> If the real concern is feeding people, you eat vegetarian.
It is counter intuitive, but this statement is not exactly a fact. The corn->protein process via chickens is actually quite efficient. I'll give some sample numbers:
1 acre corn -> 150 bushels corn -> 10,000 lbs of corn -> 4000 lbs of chicken -> 1500 lbs of protein.
1 acre of peanuts -> 3000 pounds of peanuts -> 750 lbs of protein.
So the corn->chicken process is twice as efficient at producing protein as growing peanuts which are pretty efficient. Sure, a soy protein diet is the most efficient, but who wants to exclusively eat tofu?
Eating beef is wasteful, but chicken is comparatively efficient to eating vegetarian. Most vegetarians I know eat lots of tree nuts, avacados, etc, which from a food supply point of view, is far worse than getting protein from chicken or pork.
Interesting analysis. We've bred chickens, cows, and pigs to all produce more meat for a given diet, but I guess we've done this better with the chickens. Maybe we need to focus on breeding the cows into creatures that have no legs, fit within tightly packed rectangular cages, and don't need as much internal organ space dedicated to processing food, so that the space can be devoted to tender juicy muscle instead.
I don't even see the connection, other than that you're an incredible cynic perhaps making a reference to Oryx & Crake.
It's not about pounds of meat per animal, it's about input energy to output energy. Chickens are simply better at harvesting energy from their food, and not because we've "engineered" them to be.
You think chickens aren't engineered? American farm chickens are entirely different creatures than you'll find in parts of the world where the chickens are allowed to breed freely. Even on American farms the egg-laying chickens are very different from the for-meat chickens. The for-meat chickens, in particular, are bred to be very efficient at turning food into meat.
My tongue-in-cheek proposal was that we need to breed cows to use less energy in their day-to-day lives, so they can use that energy to produce more meat. Lots of their energy goes towards creating, fueling, and maintaining their legs so they can walk around, so that seems like the first thing that can go. We'd have to selectively breed the shorter cows, and keep going while their legs get shorter and shorter over the generations until they become too short for the cow to walk when it grows up. These essentially-legless cows can then be kept in cages.
The other thing cows spend a lot of energy on is their digestive system, which is the typical multi-chamber system needed for hard to digest grasses. Most American cows don't eat wild grass anymore (unfortunately), they eat what we choose to feed them. If we feed them easier to digest food, they don't need the complex stomach anymore. This is tougher to breed for, so some genetic engineering may be necessary to kick-start the process. But eventually we can get cows with minimal digestive systems that are only able to digest some kind of highly nutritious and easily digestible paste, which we can pump right into a tube in their neck since they're cage-bound anyway. So that'll reduce the energy they need for most of their digestive system, which can be diverted to producing more meat instead.
Now, at this point, their heads and tails aren't really of much use anymore, and eliminating most of their senses and higher brain functions would probably be a blessing...
Well, like I said above, eating industrial corn was not what I was referring to. Corn->chicken still relies on corn, so even if the loss is less than for corn->beef (corned beef? ;-) it will be no better than eating corn. And you just quoted the areal intensity, not the energy intensity which is what matters.
Well, I can't edit my comment, but I wrote it from estimates in my head, and there are some serious problems. The first is something I knew, and that you can't raise chickens on corn, but rather soy, which are substitutable, but soy has a much lower yield per acre. Feeding corn to animals just makes them fat, which is not what you want.
I have looked up some of this stuff, and doing the analysis a different way, gives a different answer.
According to wikipedia, a chicken is 33% efficient at turning food protein into meat protein. Soy is the protein used in all commercial animal feeds. So if the vegetarian food has a higher protein acreage yield than 1/3 of soy, then chicken is less efficient.
So soy give 40 bushels per acre, 60 pounds per bushel, and 36% protein. = 950 lbs of protein -> 316 pounds of chicken protein. A better yield for peanuts is probably 2500 lbs per acre, and 25% protein, so 625 lbs of protein. Peanuts and soy are both better than chicken for protein efficiency, though chicken is not all that bad.
SwiftFuel has the advantage of being able to run, in theory, in most/all aircraft engines without modification. (Fuel pumps need to be replaced, however)
One problem, land that is ready to grow such crops is finite in supply not infinite..ie same land that corn was used..which will also impact food supplies..
Biofuel researcher here: The nice thing about switchgrass is that it's a much hardier plant, meaning that you can get it to grow on marginal lands, which means land that wouldn't otherwise be used for crops.
Getting people to grow anything for biofuels is a bit of a double-edged sword, as you want the feedstock to be as cheap as possible, but you also want it to be profitable for the farmers to actually produce so that you can get enough of the biomass. If you improve the yield of viable biomass from the plants that'll go part of the way to solving this.
If the stuff is efficient enough as a source for gasoline replacement generation to be worth making gasoline from, subsidies shouldn't be necessary to ensure a sufficient stock. If it requires subsidies, that indicates a big problem with that plan. Unless the main goal is to reduce foreign oil independence. But I'm skeptical that that goal is remotely feasible with biofuels without making serious compromises in food-generating land. We should be spending this effort and funding on improving battery tech and creating business models that make electric vehicles appealing (swappable leased batteries, for example), as well as improving nuclear power tech to feed those vehicles.
EDIT: Algae seems like it could be promising, assuming we could find a way to mass farm it without disturbing ocean food cycles.
The article and its implications is worth reading in its entirety. Corn-based ethanol is a farm subsidy, an inefficient energy solution, and it's bad for the environment (corn is grown as a monoculture) and its growth takes up a lot of water. Corn just grown for ethanol (with 10% in our gas) takes up 115,800 square miles -- or more than the entire state of Arizona! Imagine other things we could do with that land. With talk of increasing it from 10% to 15%, that's another half a state of Arizona dedicated to corn. It increases the cost of land. Growing corn involves adding nitrogen fertilizer, tractors, transportation, and the net yield of energy is barely more than the energy put into growing it. And yet our dysfunctional country can't seem to get enough of this terrible idea. How do we stop it?
Ethanol itself is far superior to petroleum distillates for internal combustion engines, especially small displacement turbocharged ones. This point needs to be made /extremely/ clear to everyone before pursuing the political end of the discussion.
I don't see why that needs to be extremely clear for this discussion. But regardless:
Where the octane number is raised by blending in ethanol, energy content per volume is reduced. Gasoline has an energy density of almost 10,000 Wh/l and pure Ethanol only 6,000.
Ethanol is inferior compared to basically any combination of gasoline + non-ethanol octane booster.
Volumetric energy density isn't the only consideration for fuels though. Ethanol burns cooler, faster, and with more stability. When you raise the octane rating to reduce detonation you also reduce wear on the internals, allowing the manufacturer to use cheaper components. The same is true for the lower exhaust gas temperatures with exhaust values and turbo inlets. Current mileage standards have also caused manufacturers to jack up cruise-area ignition timing to extract a more complete burn before TDC from gasoline, which risks increased knock, and isn't as much an issue with ethanol. I also can't fail to mention the disgusting layer of grease and soot that covers the inside of engine, gas tank, and exhaust components (and the rear end of your car) from gasoline. Again, not much of an issue with ethanol.
These strengths are almost never written about or discussed. I agree with many of the points of the article in terms of the production efficiency issues, and corn being a weak production candidate, but I can't stand if/when this becomes an ethanol-substance bashing bonanza.
I also can't stand (in the overall discourse on the matter) when the article's points are used against the adoption of ethanol over petroleum. These aren't reasons against ethanol, they're reasons to work towards optimizing the means of production.
I also can't stand (in the overall discourse on the matter) when the article's points are used against the adoption of ethanol over petroleum. These aren't reasons against ethanol, they're reasons to work towards optimizing the means of production.
I agree, but I actually thought the article was pretty careful about specifying that it was ethanol produced from corn and sugarcane that they were talking about.
Energy/volume is irrelevant (at these levels). What really matters is the usable energy coming out the engine compared to the engine coming in. Because of its higher octane, ethanol could in principle be run in ICUs with much higher compression ratios than engines designed for gasoline use have, giving higher efficiency (like diesel engines have higher efficiencies). The problem is that no engines actually are tuned for maximum ethanol efficiency, since that makes them unusable with gasoline. (Turbocharging somewhat offsets this, which is why I assume the grandparent specified this, but only partially.)
That reads like an industry press release designed to confidently befuddle.
For example, addressing the concern that ethanol production crowds out food production, it simply states that a different kind of corn is used... ignoring that the same land and other inputs could be used for food crops.
Addressing the concern about greenhouse gases, it mainly talks a bunch about 'vehicular gaseous hazardous air pollutants' and carbon monoxide – not the same as 'greenhouse gases'. The only reference to "life cycle analysis" is a sentence-fragment quote from an unnamed study with unclear context.
And 'myths' #4 and #5, that ethanol takes more water to produce and results in lower gas mileage? Well, this 'debunking' actually concedes both those 'myths'.
That said, the guy is a mechanical engineer at ANL, so I wouldn't take it as a sanctioned response from ANL. Claiming that the other corn isn't used in food production is disingenuous by the guy, since it is being used, but just via animals.
If you look at the lab biofuels splash page (http://biofuels.es.anl.gov/), you'll see they're working on things like water, nutrients and algal biofuels to improve the process.
There's a lot of work going into making 2nd generation biofuels actually viable, using cellulosic biomass and crops that can grow on marginal land. People are even working on producing fuel molecules that aren't ethanol (e.g. butanol).
We have a saying at work: Ethanol is for drinking, not for driving.
"But even setting subsidies aside—after all, every energy source in use in the U.S. today continues to receive federal tax benefits, among other incentives—there's the simple economic cost of building all those corn mills, stainless steel fermentation tanks and other infrastructure needed to churn out ethanol on the tremendous scale of transportation fuels."
Maybe the subsidies should go there, to promote job creation in those areas for the infrastructure buildup.
Corn welfare must END (and I am very liberal/progressive if that matters).
But considering it's Iowa we are talking about, most politicians if they want to be president won't touch it with a 10-foot pole.
Ethanol is destroying small engines (generators, lawn mowers, etc) and most definitely reduces mpg by 10%
a gallon of ethanol costs approximately 17 percent less than that of a gallon of gasoline
That is why gas distributors love it - they not only get goverment welfare for using ethanol, it allows them to dilute the less profitable gasoline (to 'cut' it).
(and yes, I use "subsidies" and "welfare" interchangeably because it's corporate welfare)
Researchers at U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory
Let's get INDEPENDENT scientists not funded by the oil industry or government to write an article and I'll trust it.
> Ethanol is destroying small engines (generators, lawn mowers, etc) and most definitely reduces mpg by 10%
Yes it does. I took a trip cross country (florida to california) this past may. Ethanol infested gas killed MPG by at best 10%, at worst 20%. It wasn't even that much cheaper, too.
Not because ethanol is bad, but because they weren't designed for it
most definitely reduces mpg by 10%
This is because it has lower energy density. But before you make a big deal, it has a higher octane rating, so cars designed to run on high-ethanol can run leaner/more compression, and recover economy.
it allows them to dilute the less profitable gasoline (to 'cut' it)
Despite your paranoia, there are good reasons to add some ethanol. As I mentioned, it is a cheap octane booster, which is good for your engine. Additionally, being an alcohol, it absorbs water. This helps prevent rust and therefore sediment build-up in gas station holding tanks and the gas tank of your car.
Ethanol is a very good fuel. It is quite safe, relatively harmless as fuels go, burns very clean, has respectable energy density... Economics of producing it aside, it is perhaps one of the best fuels for small heat engines. It just doesn't look good when compared to gasoline, because gasoline is freakishly energy-dense, and all modern gasoline engines were designed to run on gasoline, giving gasoline the "home field advantage".
A potentially serious problem with ethanol is that it can be incompatible with older rubber compounds. Also in higher concentrations it can cause corrosion to steel and aluminum that is a part of older motorcycle fuel systems.
I know that US regulations for cars have required ethanol-resistant materials for fuel for quite a long time, like several decades IIRC. Do you know if motorcycles are exempt from those regulations? If not, it seems the issue should be the same as with (ie no more serious than) old cars.
Corn ethanol is more an indirect way of converting coal to something your car can run on. There are many other more efficient plant sources that do not require large doses of fertilizer and herbicides, usually drawn from coal energy.