Maybe Biofuels Are Not An Answer

From Sea to Shining Sea ^ | 7/22/06 | Purple Mountains

[PurpleMountains]

In an earlier series I wrote on energy, I advanced the thought that we must reduce our dependence on foreign oil immediately and on oil altogether in the long run by: 1. drilling for domestic oil, 2. switching temporarily to biofuels, 3. building the new, safe, hydrogen-producing PBR nuclear plants by the hundreds, and 4, creating a hydrogen-based fuel system for vehicles. The need for reducing as fast as possible our dependence on foreign-supplied fuel becomes more evident every day:

[Lokibob]

Why exerpt your own blog? Obviously to get hits.

Post it all here or I'm not reading it....Bob

[William Terrell]

What does the rest of your article say?

[PurpleMountains]

To Bob and Bill,
It's just a click; no registration; you might even like it.

[TKDietz]

"Pimentel calculates that the average U.S. auto, driven 10,000 miles a year on pure ethanol, would require corn from 11 acres -- enough land to feed seven people. If all U.S. cars guzzled pure ethanol, he adds, corn would have to cover nearly the entire U.S. land surface." Whyfiles.org"

Pimentel is full of bull on this. Modern farmers in the corn belt get now in the neighborhood of 130 to 160 bushels of corn per acre on average. Each bushel will produce 2.8 gallons of ethanol and 18 pounds of animal feed. Producing only 130 bushels per acre, ethanol producers can get 364 gallons per acre, or 448 gallons per acre if they get 160 bushels per acre. They'd also get between 2340 and 2880 pounds of animal feed. As methods and technology improve, those numbers ought to improve.

Now, pure ethanol has about 70% the energy content of pure gasoline. A car burning pure ethanol will get about one third fewer miles per gallon than if it were burning gasoline. Using E85 most cars will get about 25% fewer miles per gallon than with straight gasoline, but it can vary a little depending upon how well a particular engine is optimized for burning ethanol. A vehicle that gets 20 miles to the gallon on gasoline is only going to get about 14 miles per gallon on pure ethanol. To go 10,000, that 20 mpg vehicle would need 500 gallons of pure gasoline. To go 10,000 miles on pure ethanol, that same vehicle would need 714.29 gallons. That works out to about two acres of land, not eleven. Pimentel's conclusions aren't anywhere close to reality. He's just wrong.

Ethanol is not the solution to our energy problems, but that doesn't necessarily mean it cannot be part of the solution. It provides income for American farmers, a market for their product. It puts people to work. It provides incentive to actually farm our best farmland rather than building strip malls and suburbs on it. It's a fuel that is relatively inexpensive to produce, and if not for current demand problems would be very much price competitive as a fuel compared to today's high priced gasoline. Obviously it will never supply more than a small part of our needs, and it would be stupid to try to go any farther than that, but every little bit helps. World oil supplies are diminishing, and what is left in the ground is becoming harder and more expensive to find, pump out of the ground and refine. Until we replace internal combustion engines with something like hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, at a monumental cost in upgrading our infrastructure, we're going to have to make do with what we have. In the next few decades I think we'll see a lot of use of different alternative fuels to stretch our fuel supply, alternative fuels that require little or no changes to existing infrastructure and existing engines. We probably won't ever have just a whole lot of vehicles running on E85, but we'll see a lot more ethanol blended with our gasoline, and we'll see a lot more use of fuel coming from oil shale, tar sands, coal liquefaction, thermal depolymerization, and so on. Fuels like ethanol, biobutanol, biodiesel won't replace gasoline, but they'll act as a supplement. I foresee fuels like this being used even just as a way to deal with waste and excess crop production even after something better comes along that really can replace gasoline. Why not?

[TKDietz]

"A car burning pure ethanol will get about one third fewer miles per gallon than if it were burning gasoline."

Should say :"A car burning pure ethanol will get about 30% fewer miles per gallon than if it were burning gasoline."