Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Ethanol is a scam

As we knew from the beginning:

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Biofuel - gasoline or other fuel produced from refining food products - is being touted as a solution to the controversial global-warming problem. Leaving aside the faked science and the political interests behind the sudden hype about dangers of global warming, biofuels offer no net positive benefits over oil even under the best conditions.

Their advocates claim that present first-generation biofuels save up to 60% of the carbon emission of equivalent petroleum fuels. As well, amid rising oil prices at $75 per barrel for Brent marker grades, governments such as Brazil's are frantic to substitute home-grown biofuels for imported gasoline. In Brazil today, 70% of all cars have "flexi-fuel" engines able to switch from conventional gasoline to 100% biofuel or any mix. Biofuel production has become one of Brazil's major export industries as well.

The green claims for biofuel as a friendly and better fuel than gasoline are at best dubious, if not outright fraudulent. Depending on who runs the tests, ethanol has little if any effect on exhaust-pipe emissions in current car models. It has significant emission, however, of some toxins, including formaldehyde and acetaldehyde, a suspected neurotoxin that has been banned as carcinogenic in California.

Ethanol is not some benign substance as we are led to think from the industry propaganda. It is highly corrosive to pipelines as well as to seals and fuel systems of existing car or other gasoline engines. It requires special new pumps. All that conversion costs money.

But the killer about ethanol is that it holds at least 30% less energy per liter than normal gasoline, translating into a loss in fuel economy of at least 25% over gasoline for an Ethanol E-85% blend.

No advocate of the ethanol boondoggle addresses the huge social cost that is beginning to hit the dining-room tables across the US, Europe and the rest of the world. Food prices are exploding as corn, soybeans and all cereal-grain prices are going through the roof because of the astronomical - US Congress-driven - demand for corn to burn for biofuel.

This year the Massachusetts Institute of Technology issued a report concluding that using corn-based ethanol instead of gasoline would have no impact on greenhouse-gas emissions, and would even expand fossil-fuel use because of increased demand for fertilizer and irrigation to expand acreage of ethanol crops. And according to MIT, "natural-gas consumption is 66% of total corn-ethanol production energy", meaning huge new strains on natural-gas supply, pushing prices of that product higher.
The article concludes with this warning:
Today a new element has replaced Soviet grain demand and harvest shortfalls. Biofuel demand, fed by US government subsidies, is literally linking food prices to oil prices. The scale of the subsidized biofuel consumption has exploded so dramatically since the beginning of 2006, when the US Energy Policy Act of 2005 first began to impact crop-planting decisions, that there is emerging a de facto competition between people and cars for the same grains.

Environmental analyst Lester Brown recently noted, "We're looking at competition in the global market between 800 million automobiles and the world's 2 billion poorest people for the same commodity, the same grains. We are now in a new economic era where oil and food are interchangeable commodities because we can convert grain, sugarcane, soybeans - anything - into fuel for cars. In effect the price of oil is beginning to set the price of food."

In the mid-1970s, secretary of state Henry Kissinger, a protege of the Rockefeller family and of its institutions, stated, "Control the oil and you control entire nations; control the food and you control the people." The same cast of characters who brought the world the Iraq war, and who cry about the "problem of world overpopulation", are now backing conversion of global grain production to burn as fuel at a time of declining global grain reserves. That alone should give pause for thought. As the popular saying goes, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you."

16 comments:

hipparchia said...

meh.

there are probably crops that yield more ehtnaol per acre than does corn, but really, we've been growing more corn than we need for ages now. not only that, but much of the corn we're already growing is not the same kind of corn that humans actually eat [not directly anyway].

i forget what the ratio is, and i'm too lazy to go look for the links, but something like 60% of the corn we grow goes to feed cattle -- cattle that we eat, wear, and use milk from.

another link i can't lay my fingers on right at the moment, but americans eat something like twice [more] the amount of meat per person than we were eating at the dawn of modern-day mechanized agriculture. we really wouldn't die if we cut back on our meat and milk consumption and fed some of that corn to our cars instead of our bellies.

then there's all that high-fructose corn syrup we take in. cokes, granola bars, cereals, you name it. if we stopped eating all that crap and fed that corn to our cars, we still wouldn't die from starvation.

as for the carcinogens, gasoline and diesel both have [and produce when burned] carcinogens and other nasty chemicals that are bad for humans and bad for the environment. ethanol just produces some different ones, that's all.

it's true that ethanol is more corrosive to both pipelines and your car's engine than is gasoline, but [1] our cars have been using gasoline/ethanol blends for ages now, so we've developed corrosion-controlling chemicals to protect our enignes, and [2] various crudes can have significant amounts of corrosive chemicals in them, so it's not like all our pipelines were shiny clean and pristine before we dreamed up ethanol. corrosion engineering is a healthy portion of the pipeline business.

ethanol and biodiesel both aren't going to save us from ourselves, but incorporating their judicious use into our otherwise insatiable appetite for cheap energy [as well as cutting back on our consumption of both food and energy] is way more ethical, in my not at all humble opinion, than invading other countries to take their crude oil.

[apologies for the lengthy rant]

ellroon said...

Heavens, never apologize for rants, that's clearly why I'm here! I appreciate your viewpoint.

My chemistry teacher husband explained ethanol very simply to me as an extremely inefficient fuel.

Quoting from this post http://rantsfromtherookery.blogspot.com/2007/07/any-chemist-could-have-told-you-flat.html , I said: Any chemist could have told you flat out that ethanol is a ridiculous energy source. It is too small a hydrocarbon to produce much heat. The energy expended to till, fertilize, grow, harvest, take to the factory, change into ethanol, drive the ethanol to the gas refineries and then to the distributors will always be more than what we gain from using ethanol. They've even opened a coal-run plant to make ethanol. It's letting the farmers get some quick cash, but that's about it....

I'll be quick to point out that I am NOT against biofuels or alternative energy sources, and truly do expect we will have healthy sources of energy in a few decades. But ethanol itself is NOT efficient as an energy source. As an additive when there is a bumper crop, yes.

At the end of my post I cite Phila's post about Iowans having problems with ethanol crops ruining the water aquafiers.

Anonymous said...

Guess I'll keep asking until someone tells me, what's wrong with hemp oil?

Anonymous said...

I understand algae may be even more efficient at producing oil.

ellroon said...

Algae and hemp... nobody will touch it because it's too easy to grow. Big Oil would disappear and you know they will not go easily.

Anonymous said...

Impeach Big oil, then.

hipparchia said...

now look what you've started!

i've got a blog and i can't shut up!

when i first started blogging, i was going to get into biofuels, but then decided not to. but now you have unleashed my inner biofueler. it's ok, i needed a break from healthcare anyway.

ellroon said...

Ooo! A person with hands on experience with corn, soybeans and petroleum! I will read your blog with interest!

Maybe you could talk to whig about hemp. He knows ALL about it. His blog is Cannablog, btw.

Anonymous said...

I wouldn't say I know ALL about hemp. It seems to be a rather underutilized crop for all the good it may provide, and frankly doing without it is crippling ourselves. That doesn't mean it's the solution to every problem, but I view it as part of the solution.

ellroon said...

Lol, whig. Sorry. I am teasing. Because of you, I now have an appreciation for the plant I never had before. (I don't smoke and I don't drink, but if I were dictator, I'd make you Minister of All Hempiness. Just think of all the good we could do!)

Anonymous said...

I depose and nominate Jack Herer.

ellroon said...

Jack Herer it is! You can be Deputy Minister then...

hipparchia said...

i'm pretty much in agreement with whig on the many, many values of hemp, including its possible use as fuel. personally i prefer eating the oil-rich seeds and using hemp-oil soap over turning the oil into biodiesel.

converting the cellulose in the rest of the plant [stems, leaves] to ethanol would suit me though. then again, that cellulose is exceedingly valuable as paper and textiles, so maybe not even that would make me happy.

ellroon said...

Hemp paper? Hemp clothes? The poor doggies at the airports would go bonkers....

Anonymous said...

Hemp paper and clothes exist, Ellroon. They're often of excellent quality and do not bother the dogs because hemp products contain no THC.

ellroon said...

Rats. The things I learn....