Posted on 07/17/2005 4:09:40 PM PDT by Graybeard58
Work up the number of acres of corn required to replace one percent of oil consumption. Remember that about three fourths - four fifths of the energy output of the system is a required input. Work up the acreage required. Check the US arable acreage.
Replacing imported oil, using ethanol as described in the "Corn Growers - Archer Daniels Lobby Study" would take a lot more than the total US arable. Don't take my word for it, check it out for yourself.
Always get a laugh out of folks making believe that a Toyota Prius is fuel efficient. Ha ha.
I have! I can make 190-195 proof all day long for under 30 cents a gallon. Put 39 cents tax on it and that's a long way from $2.00. The problem lies in the gubmint is too afraid I'll take a swig without paying $20 a 100 proof gallon.
Why doesn't anyone ask how much energy does it take to make gasoline? Crackers heat the oil to 900+ degrees. How do they do that, with matches and farts? I can make ethanol at 172 deg ( with the sun if need be).
Everybody immediately jumps on corn as the food stock to use, but never think of cane, beets, sweet taters, Sunchokes, etc. With the new methods they have today, almost anything that you make methanol with can be used to make ethanol,(AKA garbage, grass clippings, pine needles, kudzu, seaweed), but it does take more energy than using high carbohydrate materials. Methanol is not good because it is poison and has less BTU's. Alcohol is the answer, but people that are stuck in the sand just don't get it. Just pass a law that says ADM doesn't get a dime if you want, that's fine with me. Instead of having concerts for Africa, maybe we could buy their cane or refined sugar or something. Central America could also benefit. We could be flooded with cheap fuel in 1 year, if we just made up our minds to do it. The car engines could be modified and turbo-charged if we had a permanent fuel policy. Brazil did it until oil went back to $11 a bbl. Put a 4 cyl in your pickup, with 12-1 compression, fuel injection, and a turbo, and just dial in your HP that you want. 350HP....easy, 450HP not a problemo. Remember 4 cly Offy's in the indy cars had 600+HP using ethanol.
Been there, done that. Did the research. Came to the same conclusion.
But I'm not sure you have done your homework. Did you even bother to follow the link to a previous post of mine on another thread?
If you had, then you'd have seen the following (quoting myself):
First, it is true that the energy per acre potential of corn ethanol is insufficient to meet the fuel needs of the United States.But I went on to say:
ethanol should not be considered a replacement energy source but rather a supplemental energy source in a combined multi source renewable energy economy
But that's not my point or argument in this particular discussion. My point here was that Pimental and Patzek's research is fundamentally flawed and suffers from their prejudicial bias, and their conclusion about the net energy balance of corn sourced ethanol is invalid.
They (and you) are correct in their assessment of the inability of corn sourced ethanol to be a replacement fuel source, but that's not specifically their finding; anyone who knows anything about renewable farmed energy sources knows it. And it's not a valid argument against ethanol fuel.
Only the hard core ethanol zealots, the ignorant (often one and the same), and the large agriculture lobbies (Big Corn) promote ethanol as a replacement for gasoline. Everyone else takes the real world view that ethanol is a supplementary fuel source. Growing corn specifically to produce ethanol for fuel is foolish, but growing corn for cattle feed (or other such products) and producing fuel ethanol as a byproduct makes a lot of sense. And, either way, ethanol has a positive (albeit not a very positive) net energy balance. There are better higher yielding renewable fuels out there than ethanol (as well as a few that are much worse), but they don't all immediately integrate into todays conventional fuel distribution network the way ethanol does (and has), and they don't run in today's conventional gasoline engines the way ethanol does (admittedly sometimes less than ideally).
Ethanol isn't perfect (I don't think anyone here has claimed that), but it does have a place in a renewable energy economy, and it is a start on the road to independence from foreign energy.
Like I said, embargo the OPEC countries of the middle east (save for Iraq they need all the help they can get but till the insurgency stops the oil flow will be inconsistent at best), starve them into submission (rooting out terrorists).
I didn't move. They did. And I can't really blame them in their old age for wanting a little sunny southern warmth on their cold northern bones. And it was so much more environmentaly friendly for them to move than for them to stay put and run the furnace through the cold wet local winters.
I get my data from James Duke's "Handbook of Energy Crops". If you're willing to dig, there's an amazing amount of information there which is extremely useful for comparing various energy crops.
According to Duke (assuming I'm reading his data correctly and my 4 AM math skills aren't totally screwy), rapeseed yelds almost 6.7 times the btu's per hectare as corn.
I'm pretty sure this is because rapeseed requires less fertilization, irrigation, and therefore input energy per hectare than corn, and the resulting oil has many more BTUs per kilogram than ethanol. Rapeseed is also a "doubleable" crop, and can be sown in a field alongside other crops. It's also used as a winter stabilizing crop, and farmers used to just plow it under under in the spring before sowing their "real" crops.
And there are better oil fuel crops out there than rapeseed. My personal favorite would be avacadoes. They produce more than twice the oil per hectare as rapeseed. Of course, the ultimate oil producing crop would be certain strains of algae. The fuel production capacity of some strains of algae is simply staggering. But fueling your car with algae is not nearly as humorous as fueling up with avacadoes.
The term "subsidy" is used to describe a large variety of different types of government economic fun and games used to manipulate, control, and regulate markets. Some are tax breaks, some are payments. Others are even wierder.
Not very many people seem to understand the major purpose of many agricultural subsidies is to reduce the harvest of certain crops and thereby inflate the market price. Just look at the peanut subsidy (and the whole ridiculous business of inheriting a license to grow peanuts!).
Of course, this doesn't mean some subsidies aren't just gigantic taxpayer funded handouts to large agricultural lobbies and the agri-corporations that control them. Some subsidies are a good idea, but many are bad, and many others represent hurdles (not incentives) to developing home grown energy crops.
Rapeseed (nobody really grows rapeseed anymore, by the way. Genetic engineering, and Canadian marketing savvy, have given us canola) does fairly well on dry, marginal land; it does not do particularly well on moist, fertile soils suited to corn. Crop practices in the third world bear almost no relation to crop practices in the US. An average acre of cropland planted to corn in the US will yield 160 bushels per acre (almost twice to figure from 30 years ago and probably 80 bushel less than in 30 years from now.)
As you point out, most subsides related to agriculture are intended to inhibit production and thereby keep prices artificially high. If these subsidy programs actually worked, they would increase, not decrease, the cost of producing ethanol. They generally don't work that well however. The average US farm family receives less than $50 per month in what might be called subsidies. The recipients of the breathtakingly huge subsidies are few, politically connected, and don't really farm all that much to begin with.
Good move on their part to escape the winter cold up here in the North. Hopefully they also saved a bit in taxes (which really would have driven the lieberals nuts).
I prefer to use these long term averages, because they yield more conservative predictions. Using modern peak productions numbers to predict the feasibility of future energy farming is fraught with peril. But using long term worldwide averages yields predictable results that are easily achievable and still show the feasibility of farming energy. And it leave room to be pleasantly surprised when energy farming is put into practice. It also predicts yields that are closer to what is achievable when the crop is grown to maximize the energy out to energy in ratio instead of just the total crop yield.
(nobody really grows rapeseed anymore, by the way. Genetic engineering, and Canadian marketing savvy, have given us canola)
Please. That's like saying nobody grows apples because we now have Golden Delicious. Canola (CAnada Napus Oil Low Acid) is rapeseed. It's still Brassica napus. Calling it Canola is just a clever marketing ploy because Americans get all squirmy when they hear the word "rape" in rapeseed.
You are correct when you say there are modern genetically engineered cultivars of rapeseed that yield massively higher amounts of oil per acre. However, there are other economic issues than just crop yield associated with these cultivars, the most significant being the fact that most of them are patented and highly regulated. The screwy patent enforcement for genetically engineered plants often cause farmers to get sued into oblivion simply because pollen from a genetically engineered field blew (or was carried by bees - the little buggers simply have no respect for patent law) into their own unregulated fields and fertilized their unregulated crops. I prefer to avoid all the sticky patent gobbledygook (and Monsanto legal bastardry) and just rely on numbers from unregulated open cultivars.
As an aside, did you know one of the "intellectual property genomes" Monsanto most often sues over is for a variety of rapeseed that has been genetically engineered to be impervious to Round-Up? I don't know about you, but I think that's more than a little scary. God help us if Monsanto accidentally puts those genes into a dandelion.
As you point out, most subsides related to agriculture are intended to inhibit production and thereby keep prices artificially high.
Definitely. Most subsidies are serious roadblocks to the development of farmed fuels. When added to other government incentive programs for growing farmed fuels, the economics of farmed fuels become so muddled it's often impossible to tell what's economically feasible and what isn't.
The problem with subsidies is that they attempt to maximize farmers profits by controlling the supply side of the supply demand equation. This works for food crops because there are only so many mouths in the country to feed. Profits are not the same thing as market price, though, and where fuel crops are concerned, farmers profits are harmed by limiting the supply (especially when you're trying to jump start a farmed fuel market), because profits from fuel crops are maximized by lowering the consumer cost, thereby increasing the demand and fuel crop consumed. In other words, farmers will make a hell of a lot more money selling billions of gallons of oil as BioDiesel at $1 a gallon than they will get from selling only thousands of gallons of oil as BioDiesel at the subsidy inflated price of $5 per gallon.
Am I the only one who thinks a taxpayer funded government incentive program that helps BioDiesel producers buy vegetable oil at a subsidy inflated $5 a gallon and sell it as BioDiesel at $4 a gallon is economically insane? It's better to just eliminate the subsidy and let the BioDiesel makers buy their vegetable oil at the free market $1 a gallon, and sell it at $1.50 a gallon as BioDiesel. A lot more oil and BioDiesel will be sold at free market prices, and everyone would make a hell of a lot more money (except for the terror funding Arabs that is).
The average US farm family receives less than $50 per month in what might be called subsidies. The recipients of the breathtakingly huge subsidies are few, politically connected, and don't really farm all that much to begin with.
Definitely. Subsidies exists to fatten corporate farm pockets. The individual family farmer gets a pittance. And farmed fuel prices remain artificially high.
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