Only by a very little part. Brazil primarily is energy independent because they started producing their petroleum resources instead of leaving them in the ground.
International Petroleum Production Tables, All Countries, Years 1980-2004
Posted on 01/26/2007 5:55:38 AM PST by randita
Blindness on Biofuels
By Robert J. Samuelson
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
President Bush joined the biofuels enthusiasm in his State of the Union address, and no one can doubt the powerful allure. Farmers, scientists and venture capitalists will liberate us from insecure foreign oil by converting corn, prairie grass and much more into gasoline substitutes. Biofuels will even curb greenhouse gases. Already, production of ethanol from corn has surged from 1.6 billion gallons in 2000 to 5 billion in 2006. Bush set an interim target of 35 billion gallons in 2017 on the way to the administration's ultimate goal of 60 billion in 2030. Sounds great, but be wary. It may be a mirage.
The great danger of the biofuels craze is that it will divert us from stronger steps to limit dependence on foreign oil: higher fuel taxes to prod Americans to buy more gasoline-efficient vehicles and tougher federal fuel economy standards to force auto companies to produce them. True, Bush supports tougher -- but unspecified -- fuel economy standards. But the implied increase above today's 27.5 miles per gallon for cars is modest, because the administration expects gasoline savings from biofuels to be triple those from higher fuel economy standards.
The politics are simple enough. Americans dislike high fuel prices; auto companies dislike tougher fuel economy standards. By contrast, everyone seems to win with biofuels: farmers, consumers, capitalists. American technology triumphs. Biofuels create rural jobs and drain money from foreign oil producers. What's not to like? Unfortunately, this enticing vision is dramatically overdrawn.
Let's do some basic math. In 2006, Americans used about 7.5 billion barrels of oil. By 2030, that could increase about 30 percent to 9.8 billion barrels, projects the Energy Information Administration.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
http://www2.slac.stanford.edu/vvc/theory/relativity.html
In fact Einstein's relationship tells us more, it says Energy and mass are interchangeable. Or, better said, rest mass is just one form of energy. For a compound object, the mass of the composite is not just the sum of the masses of the constituents but the sum of their energies, including kinetic, potential, and mass energy. The equation E=mc2 shows how to convert between energy units and mass units. Even a small mass corresponds to a significant amount of energy.
In the case of an atomic explosion, mass energy is released as kinetic energy of the resulting material, which has slightly less mass than the original material. In any particle decay process, some of the initial mass energy becomes kinetic energy of the products. Even in chemical processes there are tiny changes in mass which correspond to the energy released or absorbed in a process. When chemists talk about conservation of mass, they mean that the sum of the masses of the atoms involved does not change. However, the masses of molecules are slightly smaller than the sum of the masses of the atoms they contain (which is why molecules do not just fall apart into atoms). If we look at the actual molecular masses, we find tiny mass changes do occur in any chemical reaction.
LOL!!!
Do you believe your point is made more clear by large print?
True. IMO the article was a realistic review of the downside of ethanol/biofuels. However, at the end the author goes into the standand enviro-lib line:
Our primary need is to curb reliance on foreign oil. ... The most obvious way is to improve the efficiency of vehicles by 30 to 50 percent over the next few decades. Americans need more hybrids and more small vehicles. Biofuels might be a complement, but if they blind us to this larger reality, they will be a step backward.
Nothing about increasing our domestic exploration and production. Can't have that; its against their party line that says we can't be strong on our own and of course the only sources of energy acceptable to them are solar and wind. So we must build smaller cramped cars, etc. Nothing about nuclear power (HORRORS!!), or conversion of coal to synfuel as we have vast resources of coal and that technology does not have the downside of the ethanol/biofuels boondoggle. I'm completely in agreement with from occupied ga and thackney on these points.
--Maybe you would be happier talking to Mr. Lucky's cows. It makes for interesting theoretical discussions, but meaningless to the topic to which you applied it.--
I take that to mean that you now concede the point but are too small a person to actually admit you were wrong.
Didn't see anything in it that said there was 28+ billion gallons a year to use, though.
Only by a very little part. Brazil primarily is energy independent because they started producing their petroleum resources instead of leaving them in the ground.
International Petroleum Production Tables, All Countries, Years 1980-2004
In 2005 Brazil consumed on average more than 1.1 billion liters of ethanol/month. Ethanol accounts for about 40% of the fuel consumed by vehicles and 80% of all new cars sold in the country are flex-fuel. More than 50% of the WORLD'S ethanol comes from Brazil, replacing about 1.44 billion barrels of oil since 1976. I am only suggesting it is indeed part of the solution and the efficiency of ethanol production is likely to go from 400 gallons/acre to 2500 sgallons/acre.
No, not vehicles. Only what the Brazil government classifies as passenger cars. If they drive a pickup truck, it is not in that figure. Diesel provides the majority of Brazil transportation fuel.
Brazilian Ethanol Fantasies (Busting the Brazilian Ethanol myth)
So is farm journal publishing myths now. That is news in itself.
Brazil is a great example of what we should do. They drilled their petroleum resources, are planning new nuclear power plants and made a small contribution by alternative energy sources like ethanol.
farm journal publishing
No bias in that source concerning promoting ethanol...
Brazil Sugar Ethanol Update – February 2006, USDA Foreign Agricultural Service
In my world, a billion liters of ethanol is not a trivial amount. I never said farm journal isn't biased, a concept common to every publication in the public domain.
Brazil's 1.9 MMBPD converst to 6.8 Trillion liters a month. So what is Brazil really doing to gain energy independence.
--(as defined as defined by high-energy physics) --
We are talking about simple combustion, not high-energy physics.
Yes, we were talking about simple combustion and the energy released in burning ethanol. And by using any and all testing equipment in a modern laboratory built to check the efficiency of combustion and measure those components both before and afterwards for a major automobile manufacture's testing facility, do you think any difference in mass could be measured?
The nutrients in the corn are starch (mostly) oil (a little) and protein (a little). There is very little free sugar in corn. It's mostly stored as starch.
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