Yes, fuel is an issue. Also gov’t mandated ethanol production increases has sent corn costs and other commodities through the roof. ie. need much more corn for ethanol, the price goes up, farmers switch from planting soybeans to corn for the better price, reducing the supply of soybeans, making the price go up. We are in the early stages of a 10 year cascading food inflation as a result. Have you seen how much ethanol production is going to increase in the next 10 years? In the hundreds of percent.
To me in a world where 2/3 of the population is starving it seems a sin to grow food and then burn it in the form of fuel. It is possible (since 1947) to produce ethanol directly from ethane gas and water. The process was developed by Shell Oil and has been used to produce ethanol on an industrial scale for forty years. Natural gas from the wellhead contains about 5 to 15% ethane and a variety of other gasses (the major constituent is methane at 70%). They are routinely stripped from the supply to leave almost pure methane to which is added an "odorant" to stink it up so people will notice leaks (methane has no smell!). The ethane is currently used mainly in the production of polyethylene. I would have more corn on the table and less polyethylene in the landfills. Yet all we hear about is production of ethanol from corn by fermentation and distillation which is fine if you are making "sipping whiskey". If you’re looking for the bad guys in this, its Archer Daniels Midland. Big agri-business is pushing this and the soybean diesel because of the huge government subsides involved. The real capper for this story is that ethanol is not a very good fuel. Any liquid petroleum has about 18,000 BTU per pound. Alcohol has about 12,000. In addition the difference in specific gravity is such that it's even worse on a volume basis. At the point of sale alcohol has about 60% of the energy content of petroleum. If that's not bad enough, alcohol is highly hydroscopic and will pull humidity out of the atmosphere to dilute itself down to 90% if it is exposed to air.
Regards,
GtG
Congress is COMPLETELY to blame for the drop in buying power of a legal consumer dollar.
The premium paid on everything from a gallon of milk to a gallon of gas is essentially a ‘global warming tax’ or alternatively a subsidy on ‘cheap imported labor’.