Posted on 04/13/2009 6:15:20 PM PDT by saganite
At a time when water supplies are scarce in many areas of the United States, scientists in Minnesota are reporting that production of bioethanol — often regarded as the clean-burning energy source of the future — may consume up to three times more water than previously thought.
Sangwon Suh and colleagues point out in the new study that annual bioethanol production in the U.S. is currently about 9 billion gallons and note that experts expect it to increase in the near future. The growing demand for bioethanol, particularly corn-based ethanol, has sparked significant concerns among researchers about its impact on water availability. Previous studies estimated that a gallon of corn-based bioethanol requires the use of 263 to 784 gallons of water from the farm to the fuel pump. But these estimates failed to account for widely varied regional irrigation practices, the scientists say.
The scientists made a new estimate of bioethanol's impact on the water supply using detailed irrigation data from 41 states. They found that bioethanol's water requirements can be as high as 861 billion gallons of water from the corn field to the fuel pump in 2007. And a gallon of ethanol may require up to over 2,100 gallons of water from farm to fuel pump, depending on the regional irrigation practice in growing corn.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencedaily.com ...
Franken will fix everything now .... not.
2100 gallons of water for ONE gallon of ethanol.
Which in turn gives you less gas milage a nice touch of engine corrosion.
And maybe even an offshore breakdown in your boat.
The only real answers to our energy questions
Less gas mileage, less energy and less horsepower but contented ADM execs. That is, after all, what it’s really all about.
I hate that we are forced by mandate to put 10 percent ethanol into our tanks here in WI. It’s a crime to force us to buy this crap. The fact ethanol is subsidized 7 ways to Sunday, proves it is not a viable commercial product. It’s a total scam-o-rama.
“The ethanol mandates that have been foisted on American taxpayers are not just fiscal insanity, they are immoral. Congress has created a system of subsidies and mandates that requires the U.S. to burn food to make motor fuel, at a time when there is a global shortage of food and no global shortage of motor fuel.”
....and drumroll please.....
(snip of above below)
“So, where did the claim that ethanol is more energy efficient originate? I believe it originates with researchers from Argonne National Laboratory, who developed a model (GREET) that is used to determine the energy inputs to turn crude oil into products (4). Since it will take some amount of energy to refine a barrel of crude oil, by definition the efficiency is less than 100% in the way they measured it. For example, if I have 1 BTU of energy, but it took .2 BTUs to turn it into a useable form, then the efficiency is 80%. This is the kind of calculation people use to show that the gasoline efficiency is less than 100%. However, ethanol is not measured in the same way. Look again at the example from the USDA paper, and lets do the equivalent calculation for ethanol. In that case, we got 98,333 BTUs out of the process, but we had to input 77,228 to get it out. In this case, comparing apples to apples, the efficiency of producing ethanol is just 21%. Again, gasoline is about 4 times higher.
OK, so Argonne originated the calculation. But are they really at fault here? Yes, they are. Not only did they promote the efficiency calculation for petroleum products with their GREET model, but they have proceeded to make apples and oranges comparisons in order to show ethanol in a positive light. They have themselves muddied the waters. Michael Wang, from Argonne, (and author of the GREET model) made a remarkable claim last September at The 15th Annual Symposium on Alcohol Fuels in San Diego (5). On his 4th slide , he claimed that it takes 0.74 MMBTU to make 1 MMBTU of ethanol, but 1.23 MMBTU to make 1 MMBTU of gasoline. That simply can’t be correct, as the calculations in the preceding paragraphs have shown.
Not only is his claim incorrect, but it is terribly irresponsible for someone from a government agency to make such a claim. I don’t know whether he is being intentionally misleading, but it certainly looks that way. Wang is also the co-author of the earlier USDA studies that I have critiqued and shown to be full of errors and misleading arguments. These people are publishing articles that bypass the peer review process designed to ferret out these kinds of blatant errors. I suspect a politically driven agenda in which they are putting out intentionally misleading information.
One of the reasons I haven’t written this up already, is that 2 weeks ago I sent an e-mail to Wang bringing this error to his attention. I immediately got an auto-reply saying that he was out of the office until March 31st. I have given him a week to reply and explain himself, but he has not done so. Therefore, at this time I must conclude that he knows the calculation is in error, but does not wish to address it. In the interim, ethanol proponents everywhere are pushing this false information in an effort to boost support for ethanol.
Look at the Minnesota Department of Agriculture claim again: "the energy yield of ethanol is (1.34/0.74) or 81 percent greater than the comparable yield for gasoline". If the energy balance was really this good for ethanol and that bad for gasoline, why would anyone ever make gasoline? Where would the economics be? Why would ethanol need subsidies to compete? It should be clear that the proponents in this case are promoting false information.”
Ethanol is so... last year.
Socialists and environmentalists in particular never think through anything as long as they “feel good” about what they are doing.
bttt
Add one more feedstock for transportation fuel, that requires little or no fresh water to produce - cultured ALGAE.
No, it is not yet cost effective, but as the original source of the kerogens that are the only source of the crude oil that we know how to find, extract, and turn into gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel, it is far closer to meeting our needs than ANY of the other proposed “new” fuels.
It needs development - a lot of it - but the raw materials are hydrogen from water, carbon from CO2 (atmospheric or industrial waste,) energy (probably sunlight, but maybe not,) and the algae itself. It worked before, and it can work again.
BTTT
And it’s all to burn the kids’ corn flakes in our vehicles instead of the oil waiting under the ground right here in America!
The stupidity of man knows no bounds.
AMTRAK is so last century but it’s still consuming tax dollars. So will bio ethanol from corn. It’s never going away even though we know the consequences.
Great post. Thanks for the info. These kind of claims by “scientists” are so prevalent in critical areas such as Global Warming that it’s impossible to keep up with the propaganda (you can’t really call it science, not even bad science)
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