- First of all, realize that corn is processed to not only produce direct food products, like corn meal, corn chips, and animal feeds, but also to produce indirect products like corn starch (much of which is used in paper production) and corn oil.
- You waste more gas having to truck corn to ethanol plants. It normally has to be shipped somewhere for processing by either truck or rail Unless the individual farmer uses it for his own livestock), so little or no difference if it goes for ethanol or food production.
- You waste more gas having to truck ethanol from the ethanol plants to the gas companies for mixing. The end product has to be shipped to some market, so little or no difference if it goes for ethanol or food production.
Your second paragraph: yes, I know, I said nothing contrary.
Your third paragraph: I am talking in terms of having to make gas+ethanol versus pure gasoline. The ethanol folks talk about how much emissions go down with ethanol+gas, but they never factor in the extra trucking around of corn to ethanol plants, and then trucking the ethanol to the gas companies for mixing. You can’t pipeline it. So when you consider the two extra trip steps requiring trucks to burn fuel to make ethanol and then get it back to gas companies, does gas+ethanol really reduce emissions over pure gasoline? No.
So I think you didn’t understand the point being made.
your fourth paragraph: same response as above because you didn’t get the point being made.
A little history behind this issue of:
“The end product has to be shipped to some market, so little or no difference if it goes for ethanol or food production. “
OK, let’s back up a bit and give all these dazzling urbanites a little lesson in ag history.
Farmers have been shipping grains as ethanol (aka “whiskey”) for hundreds of years. Why?
Because farm grain commodities have always suffered from a problem of “low value density” when we start trying to transport them to market.
Let’s take a truckload of grain or ethanol as an example. Let’s assume that a class 8 truck has a useful payload of about 50,000 lbs, regardless of whether we’re talking grain or ethanol.
A “test weight” bushel of corn is 56lbs. 50,000 / 56 = 893 bu.
Let’s say that a farmer is getting about $6/bu for his corn right now. The market is higher, but I’m assuming he gets hit for basis.
The total value of 50,000 lbs of corn going down the road is $5358.
OK, let’s look at ethanol. Currently, conversion ratios are about 2.7 gal of ethanol for 1 bushel of corn (and many plants are exceeding this). That means that those 893 bushels of corn become 2411 gallons of ethanol.
Huh. That’s not enough to fill up a class 8 truck trailer - not by a long shot.
Since ethanol is about the same density as gasoline, we’ll assume a gasoline trailer for the truck of about 8,000 gallons. In some states, they allow a “truck and a pup” which comes to 12,000 gallons, but let’s not worry abou that here.
To make 8,000 gallons, we’d need 2,962 bushels of corn assuming a conversion of 2.7 gallons of ethanol per bushel.
We’ve tripled the quantity of “corn” going down the road now.
OK, assume about $2.50/gal for fuel ethanol (which is a recent national average for “rack ethanol,”) what do we have for “dollars per truck?”
About $20,000.
Compared to $5358 for grain (above).
Farmers have been converting grain (any grain) to ethanol for transport for centuries - long before trucks and trains showed up. People should read up on the “Whiskey Rebellion” just after the US Revolution - and why farmers were so pissed off at the taxation placed upon whiskey production. It was about profits and transporting grain to markets in some other form than grains.