Is Domestically Produced Ethanol Worth the Cost?
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
Corn ethanol is more an indirect way of converting coal to something your car can run on. There are many other more efficient plant sources that do not require large doses of fertilizer and herbicides, usually drawn from coal energy.
Corn is an indirect way of converting oil into sugar. It is just as inefficient at making food as it is at making fuel (though that's less obvious because the end product doesn't have the same units.) There's a great article in an old issue of Harper's called "The oil we eat" (http://www.harpers.org/archive/2004/02/0079915).
I find it amazing that people are complaining that diverting corn to make ethanol raises food prices, when you can make the same argument that diverting corn to feed cattle raises food prices. Making beef via corn is an extremely inefficent method that's only viable because of cheap oil.
If the real concern is feeding people, you eat vegetarian. From a food supply point of view it's pure waste to feed cattle food that humans can eat directly. (Letting cattle eat grass on land not suited for agriculture is different.) The only reason it's sustainable to raise cattle the way it's done in the U.S. is because of an abundance of cheap corn due to cheap oil.
As far as I can figure out, diverting corn to feed cattle raises corn prices and lowers beef prices.
Since beef eats up a much larger fraction of my grocery budget than corn (and is, additionally, far more delicious) I'm cool with this.
The problem with the food price argument is that it's usually put in terms of the poor people starving because food prices go up. And if that's your argument, you have several worse problems that should be fixed first.
It is counter intuitive, but this statement is not exactly a fact. The corn->protein process via chickens is actually quite efficient. I'll give some sample numbers:
1 acre corn -> 150 bushels corn -> 10,000 lbs of corn -> 4000 lbs of chicken -> 1500 lbs of protein.
1 acre of peanuts -> 3000 pounds of peanuts -> 750 lbs of protein.
So the corn->chicken process is twice as efficient at producing protein as growing peanuts which are pretty efficient. Sure, a soy protein diet is the most efficient, but who wants to exclusively eat tofu?
Eating beef is wasteful, but chicken is comparatively efficient to eating vegetarian. Most vegetarians I know eat lots of tree nuts, avacados, etc, which from a food supply point of view, is far worse than getting protein from chicken or pork.
It's not about pounds of meat per animal, it's about input energy to output energy. Chickens are simply better at harvesting energy from their food, and not because we've "engineered" them to be.
You think chickens aren't engineered? American farm chickens are entirely different creatures than you'll find in parts of the world where the chickens are allowed to breed freely. Even on American farms the egg-laying chickens are very different from the for-meat chickens. The for-meat chickens, in particular, are bred to be very efficient at turning food into meat.
My tongue-in-cheek proposal was that we need to breed cows to use less energy in their day-to-day lives, so they can use that energy to produce more meat. Lots of their energy goes towards creating, fueling, and maintaining their legs so they can walk around, so that seems like the first thing that can go. We'd have to selectively breed the shorter cows, and keep going while their legs get shorter and shorter over the generations until they become too short for the cow to walk when it grows up. These essentially-legless cows can then be kept in cages.
The other thing cows spend a lot of energy on is their digestive system, which is the typical multi-chamber system needed for hard to digest grasses. Most American cows don't eat wild grass anymore (unfortunately), they eat what we choose to feed them. If we feed them easier to digest food, they don't need the complex stomach anymore. This is tougher to breed for, so some genetic engineering may be necessary to kick-start the process. But eventually we can get cows with minimal digestive systems that are only able to digest some kind of highly nutritious and easily digestible paste, which we can pump right into a tube in their neck since they're cage-bound anyway. So that'll reduce the energy they need for most of their digestive system, which can be diverted to producing more meat instead.
Now, at this point, their heads and tails aren't really of much use anymore, and eliminating most of their senses and higher brain functions would probably be a blessing...
I have looked up some of this stuff, and doing the analysis a different way, gives a different answer.
According to wikipedia, a chicken is 33% efficient at turning food protein into meat protein. Soy is the protein used in all commercial animal feeds. So if the vegetarian food has a higher protein acreage yield than 1/3 of soy, then chicken is less efficient.
So soy give 40 bushels per acre, 60 pounds per bushel, and 36% protein. = 950 lbs of protein -> 316 pounds of chicken protein. A better yield for peanuts is probably 2500 lbs per acre, and 25% protein, so 625 lbs of protein. Peanuts and soy are both better than chicken for protein efficiency, though chicken is not all that bad.
The FAA, due to pressure from the EPA, is looking to switch the entire aviation industry to SwiftFuel from low-lead fuels.
More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avgas#Swift_fuel
SwiftFuel has the advantage of being able to run, in theory, in most/all aircraft engines without modification. (Fuel pumps need to be replaced, however)
Getting people to grow anything for biofuels is a bit of a double-edged sword, as you want the feedstock to be as cheap as possible, but you also want it to be profitable for the farmers to actually produce so that you can get enough of the biomass. If you improve the yield of viable biomass from the plants that'll go part of the way to solving this.
EDIT: Algae seems like it could be promising, assuming we could find a way to mass farm it without disturbing ocean food cycles.
If oil prices reflected the true cost of using it, it would disappear by itself. Without cheap oil it's not cost efficient.
Anyone here good with changing laws? :)
I'm sure there are a few places that irrigate corn, but here in Ohio the water that grows the corn falls from the sky.
Where the octane number is raised by blending in ethanol, energy content per volume is reduced. Gasoline has an energy density of almost 10,000 Wh/l and pure Ethanol only 6,000.
Ethanol is inferior compared to basically any combination of gasoline + non-ethanol octane booster.
These strengths are almost never written about or discussed. I agree with many of the points of the article in terms of the production efficiency issues, and corn being a weak production candidate, but I can't stand if/when this becomes an ethanol-substance bashing bonanza.
I also can't stand (in the overall discourse on the matter) when the article's points are used against the adoption of ethanol over petroleum. These aren't reasons against ethanol, they're reasons to work towards optimizing the means of production.
I agree, but I actually thought the article was pretty careful about specifying that it was ethanol produced from corn and sugarcane that they were talking about.
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2011/06/five-ethanol-myths-bust...
For example, addressing the concern that ethanol production crowds out food production, it simply states that a different kind of corn is used... ignoring that the same land and other inputs could be used for food crops.
Addressing the concern about greenhouse gases, it mainly talks a bunch about 'vehicular gaseous hazardous air pollutants' and carbon monoxide – not the same as 'greenhouse gases'. The only reference to "life cycle analysis" is a sentence-fragment quote from an unnamed study with unclear context.
And 'myths' #4 and #5, that ethanol takes more water to produce and results in lower gas mileage? Well, this 'debunking' actually concedes both those 'myths'.
Not an impressive ethanol defense.
That said, the guy is a mechanical engineer at ANL, so I wouldn't take it as a sanctioned response from ANL. Claiming that the other corn isn't used in food production is disingenuous by the guy, since it is being used, but just via animals.
If you look at the lab biofuels splash page (http://biofuels.es.anl.gov/), you'll see they're working on things like water, nutrients and algal biofuels to improve the process.
There's a lot of work going into making 2nd generation biofuels actually viable, using cellulosic biomass and crops that can grow on marginal land. People are even working on producing fuel molecules that aren't ethanol (e.g. butanol).
We have a saying at work: Ethanol is for drinking, not for driving.
Maybe the subsidies should go there, to promote job creation in those areas for the infrastructure buildup.
But considering it's Iowa we are talking about, most politicians if they want to be president won't touch it with a 10-foot pole.
Ethanol is destroying small engines (generators, lawn mowers, etc) and most definitely reduces mpg by 10%
a gallon of ethanol costs approximately 17 percent less than that of a gallon of gasoline
(and yes, I use "subsidies" and "welfare" interchangeably because it's corporate welfare)
Researchers at U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory
Yes it does. I took a trip cross country (florida to california) this past may. Ethanol infested gas killed MPG by at best 10%, at worst 20%. It wasn't even that much cheaper, too.
Err... who the hell do you think would fund such a study? I doubt there is any bias from taking government money.
Not because ethanol is bad, but because they weren't designed for it
most definitely reduces mpg by 10%
This is because it has lower energy density. But before you make a big deal, it has a higher octane rating, so cars designed to run on high-ethanol can run leaner/more compression, and recover economy.
it allows them to dilute the less profitable gasoline (to 'cut' it)
Despite your paranoia, there are good reasons to add some ethanol. As I mentioned, it is a cheap octane booster, which is good for your engine. Additionally, being an alcohol, it absorbs water. This helps prevent rust and therefore sediment build-up in gas station holding tanks and the gas tank of your car.
Ethanol is a very good fuel. It is quite safe, relatively harmless as fuels go, burns very clean, has respectable energy density... Economics of producing it aside, it is perhaps one of the best fuels for small heat engines. It just doesn't look good when compared to gasoline, because gasoline is freakishly energy-dense, and all modern gasoline engines were designed to run on gasoline, giving gasoline the "home field advantage".
(Didn't read the article)