BoatBanter.com - Large scale ethanol production for...

wrote:
Harry Krause wrote:
...internal combustion engines:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4715332.stm

But....that don't come from an oil well in Texas.......

David Pimentel, an agricultural scientist at Cornell University and
one of the
foremost critics of ethanol, has conducted numerous cost analyses on
ethanol production.
He's made a name for himself mostly by driving the ethanol industry
raving mad.
From its very beginnings, when hoe enters soil, ethanol production has
not changed
much since the nineteenth century. Pimentel found that one acre of U.S.
corn field
yields about 7,110 pounds of corn, which in turn produces 328 gallons of
ethanol.

Setting aside the environmental implications (which are substantial),
the financial
costs already begin to mount. To plant, grow, and harvest the corn takes
about 140
gallons of fossil fuel and costs about $347 per acre. According to
Pimentel's analysis,
even before the corn is converted to ethanol, the feedstock alone costs
$0.69 per gallon
of ethanol.
More damning, however, is that converting corn to ethanol requires about
99,119 BTUs to make one gallon, which has 77,000 BTUs of available
energy. So about 29 percent more energy is required to produce a gallon
of ethanol than is stored in that gallon in the first place. "That helps
explain why fossil fuels (not ethanol) are used to produce ethanol,"
Pimentel says. "The growers and processors can't afford to burn ethanol
to make ethanol. U.S. drivers couldn't afford it, either, if it weren't
for government subsidies that artificially lower the price." All told, a
gallon of ethanol costs $2.24 to produce, compared to $0.63 for a gallon
of gasoline.

So, if we were to switch entirely to ethanol use, we'd run out of
petroleum four times
as fast.

another analysis

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2006...keley_stu.html

So even the "greencar congress" agrees that ethanol is not the answer to
our energy crisis. The problem is to ignore finding alternatives is
absolutely not an option.

--
Reggie
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That's my story and I am sticking to it.

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