22 August 2001.

HowStuffWorks.com.

09 October 2008.

With so much volatility in today’s world oil market, many are seeking out alternative fuels to power cars. Some, including corn producers, have touted ethanol is a possible alternative fuel. Ethanol, or ethyl alcohol, is made by fermenting and distilling simple sugars from corn. Ethanol is sometimes blended with gasoline to produce gasohol. Ethanol-blended fuels account for 12 percent of all automotive fuels sold in the United States, according to the Renewable Fuels Association. In very pure forms, ethanol can be used as an alternative to gasoline in vehicles modified for its use.

In order to calculate how much corn you would have to grow to produce enough ethanol to fuel a trip across the country, there are a couple of basic factors we have to consider:

* Let’s assume that you drive a Toyota Camry, the best-selling car in America in 2000. We know that the Toyota Camry with automatic transmission gets 30 miles per gallon of gas on the highway.
* Gasoline is more efficient than ethanol. One gallon of gasoline is equal to 1.5 gallons of ethanol. This means that same Camry would only get about 20 miles to the gallon if it were running on ethanol.
* We also need to know how far you are traveling: Let’s say from Los Angeles to New York, which is 2,774 miles (4,464.2 km), according to MapQuest.com.
* Through research performed at Cornell University, we know that 1 acre of land can yield about 7,110 pounds (3,225 kg) of corn, which can be processed into 328 gallons (1240.61 liters) of ethanol. That is about 26.1 pounds (11.84 kg) of corn per gallon.

First, we need to figure out how much fuel we will need:

2,774 miles / 20 miles per gallon = 138.7 gallons
(METRIC: 4,464.2 km / 8.5 km per liter = 525.2 liters)

We know that it takes 26.1 pounds of corn to make 1 gallon of ethanol, so we can now calculate how many pounds of corn we need to fuel the Camry on its trip:

138.7 gallons * 26.1 pounds = 3,620.07 total pounds of corn
(METRIC: 525.2 liters * 3.13 kg = 1,642 kg)

You will need to plant a little more than a half an acre of corn to produce enough ethanol to fuel your trip.

If you think you would save any money by using ethanol, guess again. Ethanol is expensive to process. According to the research from Cornell, you need about 140 gallons (530 liters) of fossil fuel to plant, grow and harvest an acre of corn. So, even before the corn is converted to ethanol, you’re spending about $1.05 per gallon.

“The energy economics get worse at the processing plants, where the grain is crushed and fermented,” reads the Cornell report. The corn has to be processed with various enzymes; yeast is added to the mixture to ferment it and make alcohol; the alcohol is then distilled to fuel-grade ethanol that is 85- to 95-percent pure. To produce ethanol that can be used as fuel, it also has to be denatured with a small amount of gasoline.

The final cost of the fuel-grade ethanol is about $1.74 per gallon. (Of course, a lot of variables go into that number.) The average price for a gallon of gas in the United States is about $1.40 as of August 9, 2001, according to GasPriceWatch.com.

To make matters worse, tarriffs prevent the importation of sugar-cane based ethanol that could compete with corn-based ethanol and drive down the price even further. This further protects the corn-based ethanol industry at the expense of everybody else.

I fully share Dr. Zubrin’s enthusiasm for the FFV standard and for pursuing an open fuel standard that lets alcohol fuels compete with petroleum based fuels. But the subsidies and tarriffs have got to go, as they only distort the market and are more of an impediment to achieving the open fuel standard while lining the pockets of agribusiness.

If we are going to have any intervention in the market by the federal goverment, require automakers to produce FFV’s, and then get the tarriffs and subsidies out of the way. The market will finish the job.

We don’t affect the warmth of the planet. We don’t know what causes it. It could be nothing more than a slight ebb and flow of the sun’s output. It might have to do with Earth’s magnetism, or something else. We are just too insignificant compared to the Earth, and the studies that show otherwise are steadily being debunked.

You missed my point, however, in my earlier post. I’m on your side, because while I don’t buy into global warming, I am keenly aware of the effects of pollution. That gives us the same goal, regardless of motive. Take a chill pill.

Personally, I don’t give a rat’s a$$ how much the rest of the indoctrinated world shudders at “American ignorance”. Most of them can’t balance their checkbooks, much less understand the complexity of the math that deals with this issue. Global warming is just a theory. Hear that? Theory! How can you get so worked up about my ignorance, then rant on about religious fundies, when we’re talking about a theory? Get a life.

Obonga’s scheme makes it less likely that the oil companies will be able to drill our own resources. His taxation scheme directed at the energy companies amounts to de facto nationalization of that industry. When you have the power to punish and snatch like that, the rights of the owners/shareholders are gonzo.

I don’t want that $500 from the government that Obonga wants to pay me. I want people to have jobs, opportunity, prosperity, and a strong country. I want lower energy prices, and Obonga’s scheme does nothing to increase the supply of energy. In the intermediate term there are no breakthroughs which get around the laws of physics. These people are telling us that we have to suffer major economic pain for several decades while they solve the problems with hydrogen fuel, which requires the input of 15 units of conventional electrical energy to produce one unit of hydrogen fuel. My friends in engineering tell me that we are up against the laws of physics on this one, and many decades may pass and still no solution in sight.

These fools want the carbon tax enacted, which is their sly way of wanted to destroy our economy. THAT’S HOW BAD THE SOCIALISTS WANT IT DONE THIS WAY!!

That is the sort of American ignorance that makes the rest of the world, and a majority of Americans, shudder. Unfortunately, it is also associated with American Christian Fundies..

Man has had a profound impact on the planet. In 60,000 years since modern Homo sapiens emerged, we have driven half the large animal species to extinction, deforested 63% of the original landmass on Earth covered with trees, turned over a million square miles of landmass into desert in just the last 100 years. We have wiped out 9 of the 13 major oceanic fisheries we found after leaving Africa, and in many regions, have only left pockets of the original ecosystem wildlife is permitted to live in.

The only debate about AGW (and human overpopulation) impacting climate change is HOW MUCH they contribute.

OIL imports to USA is about 700 billion $$ a year

Military Budget to secure American defense against oil exporting and agressive totalitarian regtimes like Kremlin or radical Muslims is

around 700 a year

Lets say we keep military but reduce import to zero.

We have 700 billion dollars for the 2009 saved.

To built enough methanol(not ethanol) capacity we need

We need 2000 big methanol production plants to produce 500 billion gallons/ a year of methanol to replace 200 billion gallons of gas/diesel a year

Costs to built 1 methanol plant vary between 100 million and 1-2 billion
depending on feed stock, technology level of funds misuse, capacity

With 700 billion we can built enough

Also if a LAW will be adopted requiring ALL cars to convert to flex(methanol a must) -

ethanol production will increase as well,

because ethanol can be used in methanol equipped cars as well as gas

IS THIS SO COMPLICATED that average Joe with IQ under 100

CAN NOT GRASP IT?

I dont think so

I think, i am SURE that powerful people doesnt want us to be ENERGY INDEPENDENT

So what shouild we do?

I think it gets to us, The People to start acting DIRECTLY

it is not just a PETITION issue

We need DIRECT ACTION

We need to get up of our asses and MAKE government to mandate alcohol fuels
NOW

Ethanol subsidies to Iowa are responsible for soaring food costs which preferentially starve the world’s poor and impoverish even the first world’s lower-middle class. Such subsidies could be easily and immediately replaced by ending our current tariffs on Brazilian ethanol produced more economically from sugar cane; and, in so doing, we would be trading with a relatively decent, democratic society rather than with a hostile theocracy.

In the near future, it ought to be possible to replace both Iowan corn and Brazilian sugar cane with switchgrass, which has the great advantage of not displacing agricultural land and thus incrementally starving people, and which can be improved through modern genomics and reverse genetics.

http://lonestartimes.com/2008/07/18/den-beste-on-alternative-energy/

The archives of the USS Clueless are here:

http://www.denbeste.nu/archives.shtml

One of the smartest engineering fellows I’ve read debunks the alternate energy hype. Of course, so did Popular Mechanics but not as thoroughly with a lot of math to back it up. Basically, any energy source that cannot reliably on average supply at keast 1% of our annual energy usage (3.3 Terawatts a few years back) isn’t worth considering. Bye bye Wind, Solar.

Still, I understand the effect of pollutants in my life. Cap and trade is a whole new, needless level of bureaucracy. Just tax the emissions and pollutants. People will then find a way to control the emissins and such to lower business costs. Use the money for pollution clean-up.

And isn’t a proton a crouton made from tofu to add protein?