Ethanol requirement

Rune said:
Yes, they are in their infancy in modern incarnation but with zero doubt are our transitional solution at a minimum and permanent solution in many instances.
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dude.....ethanol is a way to reduce oil consumption UNTIL they become a permanent solution.....it works NOW.....
 
PostmodernProphet said:
you can buy all the lead free gasoline you want in the US....
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Yes, but I am talking about high octane fuel that is designed for engines that haven't or can't be run on normal lead free petrol. MMT (Methylcyclopentadienyl manganese tricarbonyl) is used in refineries worldwide to raise the octane of fuel as an alternative to TEL (Tetra-ethyl lead) but is far more environmentally friendly than lead and is not harmful to emission control devices. This is the favoured active compound in most good quality octane boosters.
 
PostmodernProphet said:
not if you are claiming that the production of ethanol eliminates the use of corn for feeding animals.....
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Again, when used as silage, the entire plant is ground up. When used as ethanol feedstock only the kernels are used, the entire reason corn based food for fuel is a flop.

So, as usual, your point is totally invalid.
 
Rune said:
Again, when used as silage, the entire plant is ground up. When used as ethanol feedstock only the kernels are used, the entire reason corn based food for fuel is a flop.

So, as usual, your point is totally invalid.
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????.....you don't know much about feeding corn to animals, do you.....very little corn is fed as silage and is generally fed only to dairy cattle.....the purpose of raising corn in the first place was to use the stalks of the harvested corn as a way of replenishing the soil......they harvested the corn, ground it into meal and fed it to animals......that's what they are talking about when they say "grain-fed beef", not green silage.......hogs and chickens can't eat silage at all.....only ruminants....

Source:
U.S. USDA. National Agricultural Statistics Service. Crop Production. March 8, 2013.

Corn: The United States is, by far, the largest producer of corn in the world, producing 32 percent of the world's corn crop in the early 2010s. Corn is grown on over 400,000 U.S. farms. The U.S. exports about 20 percent of the U.S. farmer's corn production. Corn grown for grain accounts for almost one quarter of the harvested crop acres in this country. Corn grown for silage accounts for about two percent of the total harvested cropland or about 6 million acres. The amount of land dedicated to corn silage production varies based on growing conditions. In years that produce weather unfavorable to high corn grain yields, corn can be "salvaged" by harvesting the entire plant as silage. Additionally, corn farming has become exponentially more efficient. If U.S. farmers in 1931 wanted to equivalently yield the same amount of corn as farmers in 2008, the 1931 farmers would need an additional 490 million acres!

According to the National Corn Growers Association, about eighty percent of all corn grown in the U.S. is consumed by domestic and overseas livestock, poultry, and fish production. The National Corn Growers Association also reports that each American consumes 25 pounds of corn annually. The crop is fed as ground grain, silage, high-moisture, and high-oil corn. About 12% of the U.S. corn crop ends up in foods that are either consumed directly (e.g. corn chips) or indirectly (e.g. high fructose corn syrup). Cornhas a wide array of industrial uses including ethanol, a popular oxygenate in cleaner burning auto fuels. In addition many household products contain corn, including paints, candles, fireworks, drywall, sandpaper, dyes, crayons, shoe polish, antibiotics, and adhesives.
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http://www.epa.gov/agriculture/ag101/cropmajor.html
 
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add up the numbers from 2012....80% for animal feed......12% for human consumption....that leaves only 8% for ethanol and all other uses....is that the 8% you're claiming is causing the world to starve?......
 
Rune said:
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.
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That's simply not true. You're hung up on ethanol being produced from corn or other cereal grains. Ethanol can easily be made from cellulosic material harvested from non arable land.

The real problem with ethanol, as a biofuel, is that it is azeotropic and an excellent solvent making it difficult to transport via pipeline, although that technological hurdle has been resolved and would really be a matter of implementing it.

This whole argument that using corn for ethanol is also a red herring. Very little of US corn is exported for food purposes. Most corn is grown and used domestically, excluding ethanol production, for livestock feed with a small percentage of it going to directly to human consumption. I'd also like to show me evidence of any starvation or runaway inflation in food cost due to use of corn as an ethanol feedstock. Which again is beside the point as corn is easily replaced by mulch, switchgrass or multiflora rosa as a feedstock material for distilling ethanol.

Speaking of beside the point, the whole discussion about using ethanol as a fuel or even as a gasoline oxygenator is beside the point.

The point is that LR claimed that government regulation requiring oxygenated fuel was an invasion of government upon his rights. My argument is that it is not. That for public health, safety and to protect the environment, via pollution prevention, it is very much within the prerogative of the government to require gasoline be oxygenated to reduce pollution.

I hear a lot of opinions against ethanol as a biofuel but most are not substantiated by fact. Ethanol is unquestionably a viable alternative fuel. It's simply a matter of deciding this is the route we wish to go and developing the technology and infrastructure that is required for using ethanol. Are there other alternatives that may be superior to ethanol as an alternative fuel. There probably are. That's not the point. Ethanol is certainly a viable alternative and most of the opposition I hear to the development of ethanol as a fuel are not backed up by fact.
 
Rune said:
Why do you ignore reality?

From the same wiki article;

According to DoE,[SUP][16][/SUP] to evaluate the net energy of ethanol four variables must be considered:

  1. the amount of energy contained in the final ethanol product
  2. the amount of energy directly consumed to make the ethanol (such as the diesel used in tractors)
  3. the quality of the resulting ethanol compared to the quality of refined gasoline
  4. the energy indirectly consumed (in order to make the ethanol processing plant, etc.).
Much of the current academic discussion regarding ethanol currently revolves around issues of system borders. This refers to how complete of a picture is drawn for energy inputs. There is debate on whether to include items like the energy required to feed the people tending and processing the corn, to erect and repair farm fences, even the amount of energy a tractor represents.
In addition, there is no consensus on what sort of value to give the rest of the corn (such as the stalk), commonly known as the 'coproduct.' Some studies leave it on the field to protect the soil from erosion and to add organic matter, while others take and burn the coproduct to power the ethanol plant, but do not address the resulting soil erosion (which would require energy in the form of fertilizer to replace). Depending on the ethanol study you read, net energy returns vary from .7-1.5 units of ethanol per unit of fossil fuel energy consumed. For comparison, that same one unit of fossil fuel invested in oil and gas extraction (in the lower 48 States) will yield 15 units of gasoline, a yield an order of magnitude better than current ethanol production technologies, ignoring the energy quality arguments above and the fact that the gain (14 units) is both declining and not carbon neutra
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Why do you keep evading the point that ethanol can be easily produced without corn? You keep basing your argument on that premise. Remove corn from the equation and your argument pretty much falls apart.
 
in Brazil ethanol is used as E85.....think of the consequences if 85% of our oil consumption for vehicle fuel was eliminated......
 
PostmodernProphet said:
add up the numbers from 2012....80% for animal feed......12% for human consumption....that leaves only 8% for ethanol and all other uses....is that the 8% you're claiming is causing the world to starve?......
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Right....and most of that corn is either green corn or surplus corn. Only about 5% of US corn production is exported (17 million metric tons in 2012) and the drought that year had a far, far greater impact than ethanol production did. Which again, is not really relevant as corn isn't needed to produce ethanol.
 
Mott the Hoople said:
LOL Hardly. I assume you're not familiar with multiflora rose and what a pain in the ass it is?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_multiflora
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actually I have one growing on my creekbank.....along with wild crabapple, red-twigged dogwood (about fifty feet of it), honeysuckle and several other bird friendly shrubs.....I have tons of birds feeding here and never have to buy a thing.....

cardinals and cedar waxwings love dogwood berries....
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PostmodernProphet said:
????.....you don't know much about feeding corn to animals, do you.....very little corn is fed as silage and is generally fed only to dairy cattle.....the purpose of raising corn in the first place was to use the stalks of the harvested corn as a way of replenishing the soil......they harvested the corn, ground it into meal and fed it to animals......that's what they are talking about when they say "grain-fed beef", not green silage.......hogs and chickens can't eat silage at all.....only ruminants....


http://www.epa.gov/agriculture/ag101/cropmajor.html
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In New England we predominantly have dairy farms, so yes, my experience is different than yours. My friend who owns a good sized herd uses silage all winter and it is a large volume needless to say. All the corn he grows goes to silage. None of this is relevant to the true issue though, which is that Brazil uses sugar cane and the entire plant is consumed in the process of fuel creation, hence a very positive gain, in additional to creating fuel independence, whereas here only the kernels are used, so when the idiot legislators, (with the assistance of the agra-business lobby) designed our fuel for food mandate and based it upon Brazil's successful program, the law of unintended consequences kicked in with devastating results world-wide, since the US, the bread basket, still produces half of the food consumed on this planet.

Your possibly borderline efficient program affects the entire world and is not nearly as simple nor as beneficial as was intended. Food costs worldwide have risen, starvation rates have risen, the standard of living for the poor and middle class in this country and all others has been legislatively lowered for an arguable at best gain, and likely an actual loss as all but your cherry-picked data indicates.

What we are actually dealing with is mandated purchasing from all consumers of gasoline, the very argument your side (incorrectly) used in your disgusting fight against universal healthcare.
 
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