The Alcohol Cure - How to break the oil monopoly in this decade.

National Review Online ^ | December 13, 2007 | Clifford D. May

[PsyOp]

Makes sense on the face of it. It certainly makes more sense than the non-solutions they’re squabling about in Bali.

[untrained skeptic]

They are both delivered by truck to the stations, however ethanol is much more corrosive than gasoline. That prevents using pipelines to transport the fuel from where it is produced to distribution points where it is put in tankers. It also means the tankers must be more corrosion resistant.

Basically you need to produce the ethanol close to where you will sell it, or your transportation costs rise quickly.

[neverdem]

To solve this problem you need leadership with a broad vision, not one fixated on appeasing this or that special interest group.

That's why I wrote to let the NAS hash it out in comment# 1. Demand from China and India is not going away. No one is doing any favors for the U.S. We need energy independence.

[buck61]

Alcohol is much more expensive than gasoline,

Take away the tax on alcohol and, you will find it to be much cheaper then gas. :-)

[Humble Servant]

” The effect of going to alcohol would be to rise the price of food everywhere in the world. “

Not just. The real effect will be widespread famine, and it will be called Bush’s fault.

[Mr. Lucky]

Well, yeah, but the pipeline thing is sort of a canard because alcohol is produced near where it is consumed. Were the US to import a substantial majority of its ethanol, as it does with petroleum, pipelines would present a logical mode of transportation, but being homegrown, the points of production are comparatively spread out and near the points of consumption, particularly here in the Midwest.

[denydenydeny]

And of course everyone on the thread goes immediately to the usual knee-jerk attacks on ethanol. I noticed that only one person on the entire thread bothered to mention methanol.

Apparently there is nothing to whine about with methanol. so I take that as an endorsement.

[untrained skeptic]

Were the US to import a substantial majority of its ethanol, as it does with petroleum, pipelines would present a logical mode of transportation, but being homegrown, the points of production are comparatively spread out and near the points of consumption, particularly here in the Midwest.

That works ok in the Midwest, especially where fresh water is plentiful.

It doesn't work so well out West or in population centers that are already stretching the supply of fresh water, which does include parts of the Midwest.

You can't grow crops efficiently without irrigation in much of the country, and producing ethanol on a large scale is going to require a lot of crops.

Transporting fuel across a state by truck isn't too bad. Transporting it across the country is a completely different story. If you want to deliver a significant portion of our nations fuel needs from places where crops can be grown, to where it is needed by truck, you'd better start expanding the capacity of our interstate highway system, because that will take time.

So will building pipelines, but at least they are vastly more efficient, and less expensive.

[Mr. Lucky]

The vast majority of field corn grown in the US in not irrigated. Corn based fuel ethanol is not the silver bullet. It is one of several viable sources of transportation fuel which can be produced without the necessity of funding islamo-terrorist regimes.

[neverdem]

You have to make 100% ethanol first, which can’t be done with simple distillation, and then blend it with gasoline at the refinery. From there you haul it by truck to a gas station.

[Jacquerie]

Right, is this after a big taxpayer subsidy. . .

The direct subsidy and tariff (to protect us from low cost sugarcane derived ethanol from Brazil) is just over a dollar per gallon.

The whole ethanol boondoggle is nothing more than payola to farm interests and their congress-critters. We sit on literal mountains of coal and pools of oil off our shores, as our government deliberately drives up food costs by burning it.

Domestic ethanol, while not in our national interest is in the political interest of some. It is another example of narrow political interests that work directly against our national interest.

[businessprofessor]

Ethanol is heavily subsidized and gets lower mileage. Ethanol also requires plenty of fossil fuel in its production.

Mandates will lead to boondoggles. With the high price of oil and gasoline, we do not need any mandates or subsidies. If alcohol based fueld becomes viable, people will demand it and the market will produce it along with vehicles that use it.

[Brad from Tennessee]

I agree. Instead of forcing Detroit to lower gas mileage Congress should be mandating nuclear plants. If states don’t want them they can be built on government land.

[Neidermeyer]

Ethanol also requires plenty of fossil fuel in its production.
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While this thread is moving along rationally I’d like to point out a pet peave of mine ,,, Fossil Fuels? That would be COAL ,,, when we are talking about oil/gasoline/natural gas we are talking about methane/heptane etc. etc. that gravity pulled into this planet from space and formed various compounds based on heat and pressure.. The universe contains methane clouds so vast we could never hope to measure... When I hear people refer to “synthetic” oils and “Dino” oils it drives me nutz!

[RightWhale]

Right. Titan has oceans of oil stuff and there were never dinosaurs there. Jupiter is mostly methane, which is natural gas and there was never ocean alga there.
On another note: Zubrin is also correct about the 1967 UN Outer Space Treaty, which he mentioned in the same interview on Coast.

[neverdem]

While this thread is moving along rationally I’d like to point out a pet peave of mine ,,, Fossil Fuels? That would be COAL ,,, when we are talking about oil/gasoline/natural gas we are talking about methane/heptane etc. etc. that gravity pulled into this planet from space and formed various compounds based on heat and pressure.. The universe contains methane clouds so vast we could never hope to measure... When I hear people refer to “synthetic” oils and “Dino” oils it drives me nutz!

Oil-eating bacteria make light work of heavy fuel

There's more than one way to skin a cat.

[untrained skeptic]

The vast majority of field corn grown in the US in not irrigated.

But how much more farmland is there to grow corn on without it effecting other crops as well as our supply of corn for food and feed?

We aren't talking about needing a small increase in the amount of corn, and producing ethanol from corn is not very efficient.

The location of where that corn can be grown without irrigation also brings us back to the issue of delivering it to market. The country's main population centers aren't in the Midwest.

[Mr. Lucky]

The historic increase in corn production has come from yield improvement not the expansion of tillable acres.

There is far less land in the US under cultivation today than 100 years ago and that trend will continue indefinitely. The average corn yield in the US in 1970 was 70 bushels per acre; this year it was over 150 and in my part of the mid-west yields of over 200 bushels per acre are common.

[G Larry]

Well, these discussions are driving me to drink.....

Using food for fuel is NOT an energy solution!

Try moving electrical production to NUCLEAR!

Move fuel cell production along at a meaningful pace, for transportation.

Open up ANWR and oil shale production, to fill the gap.

[Mr. Lucky]

OK, but domestic oil production is also heavily subsidized. You'll recall that the ethanol "subsidies" are not paid to the ethanol producers, but are given in the form of tax credits to oil companies, and oil companies have been forgiven the payment of royalties for drilling in public waters.

All subsidies distort the marketplace.