Posted on 02/03/2010 2:39:46 PM PST by PilotDave
The group nodded to concerns that were raised two years ago about the risks that the expanding ethanol industry was pushing up food prices by taking over land used for growing food. The group said that "more intensive, multiple-year management strategies could be used to get greater production from the same amount of land, and thus reduce pressure to expand production onto environmentally sensitive or marginally viable lands."
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Biofule from corn is not the same corn used for human consuption.
Too bad it’s so destructive to our engines.
Why do liberals want to take food out of the mouths of the world's starving children?
Drill Baby Drill !!
“Biofule from corn is not the same corn used for human consuption.”
I’ll ignore the spelling errors. You are wrong, although that is the liberal argument. It is feed corn, and it is used in normal times to feed the chickens, turkeys, hogs, and cows that we then eat. It is also used for the corn syrupfructose (sugar) used in almost every modern food product. It is that sugar that they distil into alchohol/ethanol. BTW- it takes 30% more energy to produce a gallon of ethanol than it produces. IOW’s evertime you burn a gallon of ethanol you are also burning 1.3 gallons of fossil fuel. This is paid for by gov. subsidies, increasing our debt. It should be called deathanol....
What kind of corn is used for biofuel then? All corn is used for human consumption.
“Saying that higher-concentration ethanol blends will require investment in a new storage and distribution structure,”
“But the group “warned that the existing fuel-distribution system will need upgrades to handle gasoline with higher ethanol concentrations.”
“higher-concentration ethanol blends will requires investment in a new storage and distribution structure.”
Get in line. - High speed rail requires investment - new infrastructure requires investment - highways and bridges to rebuild requires investment.
“But the group “warned that the existing fuel-distribution system will need upgrades to handle gasoline with higher ethanol concentrations.”
“higher-concentration ethanol blends will requires investment in a new storage and distribution structure.”
Get in line. - High speed rail requires investment - new infrastructure requires investment - highways and bridges to rebuild requires investment.
tell that to Ray LaHoodlum
Corn intended for human consumption is segregated from feed corn from planting all the way through harvest, storage and processing.
While ethanol distillation removes the sugar from corn, it does not remove the other nutrients. You've doubtless noticed from personal experience that corn is not at all efficiently digested. Raw corn fosters a condition known as acidosis in animals when fed in amounts over about 1/2 per cent of body weight per day. This condition is avoided by feeding distillers dried grains.
My miles per gal. went down over 12% with 10% ethanol,
on long trips, 300 miles and above. I have checked this
going and coming on several occasions. Apparently using
more gas plus the ethanol. Another gov’t screw up.
From my younger days, I remember that carb. jets size had to be increased, to run alcohol in racing engines.
So true. Not mentioned also is the cost depletion of water from underground aquifers.
The absolute impact of using corn to produce alcohol on the food supply should be minimal. That's because only a small part of the food value of the corn kernel is converted to alcohol, the rest is still used as animal fodder.
The corn kernel consists of starches, some protein and other minerals, etc. It is ground and turned into meal. Water and yeast are added. The resulting mash ferments, turning some of the starches into alcohol. The alcohol is distilled off, leaving the mash. This residue - which is still the great majority of the nutritional value of the corn - is dried and sold as a high-protein and very valuable animal feed called "brewer's grain."
So, it's simplistic to say that corn-to-fuel has anything approaching an acre-for-acre impact on our food growing capacity.
The big criticism of corn-to-fuel is that the distilling process requires large energy inputs that some have very legitimately questioned whether you're coming out ahead on a total BTU basis. In other words, by putting in other fuels - like precious natural gas - to fuel the distillation process, do you really gain enough to make the corn-to-fuel process worthwhile?
That's a very legitimate concern. I would say that the answer is the so-called "closed loop" distillation process. In these systems, the brewer's grain is fed to hogs, which yeilds pork and copious amounts of pig manure (I can attest to that from personal experience). The pig manure is captured in large tanks where it undergoes anaerobic fermentation, producing methane (natural gas), which is then used to fuel the distillation process.
That makes perfect sense to me. I honestly see passingly little impact on food production and very large gains in energy production in these closed-loop systems.
As to whether we should subsidize it, I would say that let's first get honest about how much we subsidize oil. The Army and Navy in the Persian Gulf area are clearly there to, among other things, protect our oil supply, but those staggering costs are never included in the price a consumer pays for a gallon of gas at the pump. Our dependence on oil has a lot of other costs that the government externalizes onto the taxpayers, like paying for transportation infrastructure, and national security issues like the Gulf States financing terrorism on money we send them every time we fill 'er up at the pump, and on and on.
So, I'd say that granting a tax break for producers of alcohol in closed-looop systems makes sense. At least, if we can justify all the externalized costs of oil, then we certainly can give our corn producers a tax break and take other measures to ensure that E-85 is everywhere.
Sweet corn is the kind sold in grocery stores, whether on the cob, frozen or in the can. Field corn is the type raised to feed cattle, etc, either by combining for grain or cutting for silage. Either way, both are used for human consumption.
Pigs or chickens left to their own devices will eat all sorts of stuff that city folks would probably prefer not to know about; but just because a pig will dine on cow manure and chickens consider pig manure a delicacy, hardly makes cow and pig sh*t a human food.
I read somewhere that the government is considering raising the maximum ethanol content in "Regular Unleaded" from 10% to 15%. You can bet the price per gallon won't come down - and the cost per mile traveled keeps going up as fuel economy drops.
BTW, this is why none of the hybrids run on E85.
Impact On Water Supply Three Times Higher Than Once Thought ScienceDaily (Apr. 13, 2009) — 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. 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. However, a dozen states in the Corn Belt consume less than 100 gallons of water per gallon of ethanol, making them better suited for ethanol production. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090413102225.htm
The National Academy of Sciences recently published a report titled “Water Implications of Biofuel Production in the United States”. The paper outlines impacts and limitations on both water availability and water quality that would follow the pursuit of a national strategy to replace liquid fossil fuels with those made from biomass. COMMITTEE ON WATER IMPLICATIONS OF BIOFUELS PRODUCTION IN THE UNITED STATES http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3285
In some areas of the country, water resources already are significantly stressed. For example, large portions of the Ogallala (or High Plains) aquifer, which extends from west Texas up into South Dakota and Wyoming, show water table declines of over 100 feet. Deterioration in water quality may further reduce available supplies. Increased biofuels production adds pressure to the water management challenges the nation already faces.
It is equivalent to “mining” the water resource, and the loss of the resource is essentially irreversible.
Existing and planned ethanol facilities (2007) and their estimated total water use mapped
with the principal bedrock aquifers of the United States and total water use in year 2000.(Source USGS) Click to enlarge. http://www.theoildrum.com/files/ethanol_and_water.JPG
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