Ethanol requirement

Mott the Hoople said:
Well while I question that using surplus corn in the USA to produce ethanol is advancing starvation across the planet might by hypberbole.

As for alternatives to ethanol as an oxygenator, I'm open minded. The point of this thread though is not about alternative fuels. It's about government having the authority to require that oxygenators be added to gasoline so as to meet Clean Air Act standards. You're glued in on using corn and grain crops to produce ethanol and missing the forest because of the trees. For example, cellulosic waste materials of all sorts can be used to distill ethanol, not just corn or other cereal grain crops, and that shoots your argument full of holes.
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Not really. Read my other reply to you, and by the way, it doesn't shoot any holes in my argument at all, it just confirms your limited understanding of the bigger picture.
You missed making methanol from the forest and the trees, which when done on a rotation basis on millions of already fallow, pulpwood producing acres becomes an awesome continuously renewable carbon sink. No carbon sink benefit is acquired using cellulosic waste, not that that would make waste utilization wrong.

More to follow.
 
Mott the Hoople said:
Yup, ethanol is hygroscopic as you well know. Again, that's an engineering problem that has pretty much been solved.
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LMAO, no it hasn't. Gasoline is now almost impossible to store, sometimes having a usable span of as little as two weeks before absorbing enough water to become non flammable.
 
PostmodernProphet said:
I remember similar complaints when they started taking the lead out of gasoline.....
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Not similar at all. Those complaints were about keeping old engines running. Unleaded fuel was introduced in the late sixties and everything built since then will burn it.

These complaints are of a much more dire and widespread nature.
 
Rune said:
LMAO, no it hasn't. Gasoline is now almost impossible to store, sometimes having a usable span of as little as two weeks before absorbing enough water to become non flammable.
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Um... I guess I'm not getting your context? I've kept gas in a gas can for weeks, months, almost a year, and was still able to start my weed whacker, chain saw, generator...
 
Mott the Hoople said:
#1. If your suffering from fuel line degradation your driving a very old vehicle. That's not a problem in modern vehicles.
#2. If your suffering from loss of fuel mileage and power, again, that's indicative that you're driving a very late model vehicle. Those are not problems win modern vehicles. Modern vehicles, pickup trucks included, have been designed to operate on oxygenated fuels and perform just as well. If you own a Pre 1990's vehicle....meh that may be a problem for you.
#3. Even if those were issues with modern vehicles, which they are not, public safety comes first. The dangers of the hazardous air pollutants emitted from vehicles burning non-oxygenated gasoline are well documented. You don't have the right to endanger my health, my families health or the publics health with the well documented toxic air pollutants emitted from non-oxygenated gasoline. Nor do you have the right to contaminate our private and public property with these toxic air pollutants and endanger our quality of life. You simply don't have that right.
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1. Wrong.
2. Wrong. Fuel use increases regardless of vehicle. Less energy in a gallon means more gallons needed.
3. No one is advocating increasing pollution levels. Where the hell is that coming from?
 
tekkychick said:
Um... I guess I'm not getting your context? I've kept gas in a gas can for weeks, months, almost a year, and was still able to start my weed whacker, chain saw, generator...
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Where do you live? I live on Cape Cod, and in high humidity in the summer gasoline containing ethanol goes bad in as little as 2 weeks.
No gasoline should be expected to last a year, but it is possible yet unlikely under ideal conditions.
 
PostmodernProphet said:
very little of it.....the majority of the US corn production consumed by humans is in the form of corn syrup used in the beverage industry......even with corn at its highest prices less than four cents worth of "corn" is in a can of Coke........even a box of cornflakes represents less than fifty cents worth of corn to a farmer, though it will cost you more than four dollars......

more of your grocery budget goes to buying the fuel it cost to get the things you buy to the shelf than goes to buy the corn that is in them.........
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Bullshit. More of it is consumed as meat, eggs and Dairy.
 
PostmodernProphet said:
sorry, but this claim was been shown to be bogus many times.....


this ignores the fact that farmers themselves are the primary users of biofuels, particularly biodiesel made from soy beans.....



it also ignores the fact that most of the energy utilized by ethanol plants is in fact plentiful American natural gas rather than imported crude oil......



this ignores the fact that since cattle can't digest the sugars in corn in the first place (think methane and cow farts) the byproduct of ethanol production (brewer's mash) is actually a more effective cattle feed than the corn that was used to produce it and is highly sought after.....



of course, we wouldn't want to compare that with the environmental damages of producing gasoline, would we.....



offset by the subsidies we used to pay farmers to grow corn as a rotation crop for the more profitable soybeans so that there would not be the soil depletion that the OP claims is the result of growing corn......

finally, the article overlooks the fact that ethanol can be produced from any cellulose and has proven successful from many products previously considered waste.....corn, before ethanol production began, was considered waste, suitable only as a green manure crop......they discovered ethanol as a fuel primarily because they were researching ways to utilize waste.....
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Bullshit. Corn is silage, at a minimum.

100% ethanol is an almost perfect fuel, just too expensive to use, unless cost is no object, like in a 1/4 mile dragster race.

10% ethanol is also too expensive to use.

Government payments for crop rotation is corporate welfare to Agribusiness and doesn't even belong in this thread and certainly can't be added into a cost equation in an attempt to use a more expensive fuel.
 
PostmodernProphet said:
for one thing, we haven't figured out how to operate a vehicle using energy from solar arrays.....we DO know how to run a vehicle on biofuels....
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Yes we have you fucking retard. Electric cars run fine on solar generated electricity and are readily available and offered by all major car manufacurers.
 
Rune said:
Where do you live? I live on Cape Cod, and in high humidity in the summer gasoline containing ethanol goes bad in as little as 2 weeks.
No gasoline should be expected to last a year, but it is possible yet unlikely under ideal conditions.
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Ah. I live in a part of California that has very low humidity. That must be the difference.

I was surprised when my weed whacker started after the gas had been sitting for so long, but was happy about it!
 
Mott the Hoople said:
That's a non-issue. Other cellulosic materials than grain crops can and are used to produce ethanol. Most Midwest ethanol plants subsist primarily on green corn, considered a waste product, and surplus corn for producing ethanol. When availability to green corn or surplus corn is limited these facilities readily switch to other cellulosic materials to produce ethanol. The fact is that your not calculating into your energy equation that most of that corn is, essentially waste in the first place. That energy will have been expended regardless of whether the corn is used for distilling ethanol or not. When increased demand or decreased production decrease the availability of corn as a raw material then other cellulosic material are readily used as a substitute.
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It's not a non-issue. What could be done differently doesn't matter, because we are mandated to use ethanol. Cost of food is certainly an issue since starvation rates are directly tied to the cost of food. You are actually being foolish in this thread. I am sorry, but I asked you to do more research. You should have.
 
PostmodernProphet said:
we should utilize ethanol whatever waste product it comes from.....in Brazil they used sugar beets because they had an oversupply of sugar beets.....we used corn because we had an oversupply of corn....in Florida they make it from leftover orange rinds.....in the NW they make it from left over wood chips and branches from logging.....sweetgrass is a better success rate than corn but it needs to be grown in entirely different conditions and would detract from wheat production so you don't gain much there......
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In Brazil they use sugarcane, which is why it works for them.
 
tekkychick said:
And while I don't think we should be a throw-away society, I bet replacing some of that equipment would not only help the environment, it would also reduce the amount of fuel used.

But if that chain saw is only used once or twice a year, I don't blame him for not replacing it if it's still working. Things that are rarely used don't put all that much pollutant into the air.
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While your statement is true, you are replying to Mott's strawman.
 
Mott the Hoople said:
Yes....but take you and multiply it a few million times and you have a serious problem. That's how we get back to your argument that this is an invasion of your rights by the government when it's really the other way around and the reason why we have a government with federal powers. Your actions are an invasion of our right to not be exposed to harmful levels of hazardous air pollutants.

Your argument was wrong when they were removing tetraethyl lead from gasoline and it's wrong now.
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No they are two different arguments. They cannot be compared.
 
Mott the Hoople said:
Not really, no. Is it ok for one person to dump a little bit of toxic pollution into the air I breath? How about 100 people? How about 100,000 people? How about 10,000,000 people?

That's why we have these sort of environmental regulations.

LR's using the same argument that was used when tetraethyl lead was prohibited. It was wrong then and it's wrong now.
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Again, it is not the same argument.
 
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