Posted on 02/08/2007 7:35:28 PM PST by Kitten Festival
Energy: Could lowly switch grass mow down the petropower tyranny of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez? A U.S.-Brazil ethanol pact signed this week may supply the fuel to do just that.
Chavez's hostile anti-American dictatorship grows worse as his oil earnings pile up. With the U.S. as his best customer, buying about a quarter, or 1.1 million barrels, of Venezuelan crude oil each day, the bitter coda is that every barrel we buy fuels his anti-U.S. actions.
These range from crazed speeches to colonial acquisitions like Bolivia to rogue-state alliances with Iran and Zimbabwe to menacing moves against neighbors like Dominica, Guyana and Colombia with $4 billion in weapons purchases.
High oil prices, low supply and his own expropriations of foreign oil partners in Venezuela only increase Chavez's oil cash and clout. The U.S. has been largely helpless, because it has few alternatives to buying Venezuelan crude.
But a new deal announced with Brazil to pool ethanol technology and produce greater quantities of ethanol in both countries could help. ...
The ultimate aim of the ethanol deal is to create a commodity market. This could give every country in the region alternatives for energy buying. In turn, it will undercut Chavez's monopoly and abusive influence.
Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, who flew to Brazil to iron out the deal, made no secret of that. "Energy has tended to distort the power of some of the states we find to be negative in the world — Venezuela, Iran," said Burns, quoted in the Washington Post. "And so the more we can diversify our energy sources and depend less on oil, the better off we will be."
...this signals an impressive new U.S. diplomatic offensive
(Excerpt) Read more at investors.com ...
Would you agree that one way to look at a "still" is as a refinery where sugars, starches, and cellulose are "cracked" to produce various alcohols?
Would you settle for simply ''plowing under''?...g!
All the cane burning aside, there is absolutely no economic rationale for growing cane in the continental US...except if you count ''Hey! I can get handouts world without end if I grow cane!'' as a valid economic premise.
Said compact is still in force -- informally, of course, mustn't step over the anti-trust line, y'know.
Awful long way for a tanker to go, but then again lots of empty tankers do show up in Venezuela. OTOH, the CHICOM have a lot of oil a lot closer.
On yet another hand, his relations with FARC could mean he means to go big-time in the self-administered botanical medication business. He's going to go bankrupt and will need the cash-flow.
(Yea, yeah, I know, broken record and all that...)
Your points are right.
I AGREE!!!! But when you can't drill oil at all due to leftists in congress who are now scheming to make anwr PERMANENTLY off limits, switchgrass is your only option to increasing the energy supply. The more you increase it, the more you thwack Hugo.
But I agree - oil is always better.
One of the advantages of cellulosic alcohol production, particularly of butanol, is that it does not depend on a subsidized sugar raw material.
Converting cornstalks and other biowaste into butanol, (and hydrogen), would permit a slow growth into the fuel industry, gradually reducing our dependence on foreign suppliers and boosting our agricultural production.
You're dead-bang on about the subsidies making ethanol much more expensive than it needs to be, but the fact that the gov't are proceeding regardless with this huge programme is yet another indication of how far they're removed from economic reality. That said, it makes no difference (except cost) to the factual situation; ethanol is and always will be a crappy motor fuel.
Oh, and you missed out one of the downsides. By artificially making sugar expensive, we all get the ''benefits'' of having HFCS dumped into some 70%+ of processed food products. Good for ADM, of course, but horrible for everyone else.
I'm all for getting rid of domestic cane growing, entirely. Now, all we have to do (haha) is outbid the sugar lobby for the 'Critters.
Nothing against them in general, but I've no interest in generating yet **another** subsidy-hog programme. And they will have to be subsidised, make no mistake about it. Way too dollar-costly for the consumer unless subsidised.
Well, I have not solved that problem yet, but Daniel Kammen of butanol.com is asserting that a two stage process of producing first butyric acid, and then converting that to butanol, produces about 2.5 gallons of butanol per bushel of corn, with hydrogen as a bonus product.
We are agreed that corn is not the best starting position, and that generalized organic wastes would be better, but it does appear to solve the enzyme problem to which you allude.
I am not entirely prepared to buy into all the hype that seems to accompany his message, but I do have hope that such a process does exixt, or can be contrived.
Various methods of extracting the useful energy of agricultural waste will be developed, and a direction that yields butanol, which is said to be a direct replacement for gasoline without engine modifications, seems to offer the most potential for a rapid integration into our existing systems.
Because I understand the value of commonsense! The energy contained in the molicules of ALL the alternative alternatives... Does not even begin to approach the energy contained in petroleum products!
The human race cannot survive long enough to change that on this planet!!! All the alternatives have already been totally checked out and that's the end of it till all you true believers finally wake up to that one simple fact!!!
It's all such an unbelievable waste of time and mental energy! We simply need nuclear to save petroleum from being used, no wasted, in non-transport endeavors!!! But you can keep giving everyone a headache and wasting money and all you'll do is what the GovernMental EnvironMentalist are doing... And that is making everything cost more, for no good reason!!! I will never stop protesting that!!! Because it's stupid!!!
That second sentence should have read... "Does not even begin to compare to the energy contained in the molecules of petroleum products!"
I totally agree with you. But the fact remains, with leftists in power in congress, there will be no drilling going on. For now, we may well have to make do with the inefficient ethanol, (while Mexicans who need tortillas starve, the whole thing does not make sense). But the one thing we can do with it, in this temporary leftist era, is make ethanol out of it to destroy hugo chavez. I can live with this even if I know it is not perfect. every little thing that we can do to stick it to hugo is one less thing he can do to us. we have to destroy this thug. the military is not an option. the other latams are unwilling. pretty much all that is left is economic warfare. that leaves ethanol. if we can take hugie out with it, it will have served its purpose.
Don't forget soil-depleting, topsoil-erroding and chemical-fertilizer-polluting.
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