You probably don’t know it, but the answer to America’s gasoline addiction could be under the hood of your car. More than five million Tauruses, Explorers, Stratuses, Suburbans, and other vehicles are already equipped with engines that can run on an energy source that costs less than gasoline, produces almost none of the emissions that cause global warming, and comes from the Midwest, not the Middle East.
These lucky drivers need never pay for gasoline again–if only they could find this elusive fuel, called ethanol. Chemically, ethanol is identical to the grain alcohol you may have spiked the punch with in college. It also went into gasohol, that 1970s concoction that brings back memories of Jimmy Carter in a cardigan and outrageous subsidies from Washington. But while the chemistry is the same, the economics, technology, and politics of ethanol are profoundly different.
Even the cautious Department of Energy predicts that ethanol could put a 30% dent in America’s gasoline consumption by 2030.
Has something changed since the last fawning ethanol post on this blog?
It’s amazing that many of the same people who oppose getting oil out of the wastelands of Alaska are all for putting the whole country to the till and blowing ground water and energy resources in an effort to make ethanol.
This ethanol craze is starting to get scary.
That’s just it. I don’t think it really is the same people. The people you heard fussing about Arctic drilling were mostly grassroots environmentalists (Greenpeace et al.), whereas a lot of the ethanol buzz seems to be coming from higher up. I get the feeling the agricultural lobbyists are harping to the administration, who see a way of diminishing America’s dependence on foreign oil without completely scrapping the gasoline model (after all, there’s still plenty of domestic oil), while hopefully appearing sympathetic to environmentalists.
The issue is not an environmental one. Ethanol is not, or is only barely, better for the environment than gasoline. It involves massive energy costs to produce, and, as Evil pointed out, huge corn monocultures put a heavy drain on groundwater, and can lead to significant soil erosion. This is not environmentalism. This is economics, pure and simple.
“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” – Albert Einstein
It’s funny that the people who object the most to drilling in Alaska don’t even live in the state. If I were an alaskan, I would be inclined to tell them to mind their own damned business.
HOw come no one talks about methanol?
> In my less than humble opinion the most sensible
> energy source is solar
Ethanol IS solar energy. Where do you think corn, sugar cane or whatever take the energy to grow? They absorb solar energy, CO2 and O2 from atmosphere and water from the soil and transform it in ethanol. Using ethanol you are essencialy recycling CO2 all the time, alleviating the green house effect. Another nice side-effect is that by using Ethanol your car don’t throw CO (carbon monoxide) on the atmosphere, only CO2 and water, which are both non-toxic.
> Are the farmers running their tractors on ethanol?
Here in Brazil, where we have massive use of Ethanol on cars, the answer is no, because diesel is cheaper than Alcohol or Gasoline thanks to subsidies. But there are now all sorts of projects to develop vegetable Diesel from soy oil, castor oil, etc. The Diesel sold here contains 2% of vegetable Diesel.
Brazil is also investing in wind energy. The advantage of wind mills is that they provide more energy on Summer, when the consumption increases. The idea here is to use wind energy as a complement of another sources of energy.
> HOw come no one talks about methanol?
Methanol is made mostly from natural gas, so people will not think of it as a environmental-friendly fuel. As Ethanol, Methanol only throws CO2 and water into atmosphere, so it’s cleaner than most fuels out there.
It should alse be noticed that Methanol is toxic for humans.
Lets just invade Iceland and get it over with…
http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=3947
and how many square feet of solar cells would it take to power the city of New York do you think?
Reality check, please on ethanol as fuel.
One of my hats is “chemical engineer,” though I haven’t done this line of work for awhile. Ethanol was produced in the 70s originally because there was a huge surplus of grain at the time. Not sure if that’s the case right now. The cost of the feedstock affects the viability of ethanol as fuel.
Ethanol will become a viable fuel (as opposed to a fuel additive, which is its current role) when someone shows that the energy used to produce the ethanol (everything–planting the grain, producing the crop, harvesting, moving to a distillery, distilling, and shipping the ethanol by pipeline and truck to filling stations) is less than the energy _in_ the ethanol. Direct solar energy could be used to to distill the stuff of course if the distilleries are in sunny parts of the country (the Southwest of course), but someone has to work this all out.
I too lived in Alaska, and while most there would prefer to not screw with the environment all would like to see their Permanent Fund Checks increase in value.
What’s the PFD, you ask? Simple: Every Alaskan, every year, gets a check from the state. That money is funded by a trust fund set up years ago when the state sold off the existing plots for drilling.
Pretty easy way to make a group of people pro-oil, too.
As for ethanol, I’d love to know who is pumping this news for print. Why are we talking about this again, and who’s making money off of it?
There are downsides to everything.
I like the idea of wind and solar. Except the energy must be stored in a battery before it may be used in a vehicle. The batteries negate any advantages of using a car on a long trip at highway speeds. Wind and solar could be used to supplement stationary users such as homes and businesses.
I don’t think there is near the excess capacity of grain crops to produce enough ethanol to make a serious dent in our overall petroleum consumption. How many gallons of ethanol could be produced per acre and how many acres would be needed to satisfy the average use of an individual driver. Although, the cake left over after the fermentation is a nutritious feed for livestock.
Around here most farm equipment is diesel. Some older or small equipment might be gasoline powered though. And the Amish still use horses for power.
> CO2 is toxic. and it is the primary greenhouse gas.
It’s only toxic when in high levels, but when you use Ethanol from vegetable sources you are recycling the CO2 in the atmosphere.
> how many acres would be needed to satisfy the
> average use of an individual driver
You shouldn’t think of Ethanol as a replacement but as a complement to petroleum. By using Ethanol, you can reduce CO2 emissions and the need for oil. It’s like solar and wind power, which are been used as a complement to existing sources of electrical power.