Alternative Fuels: What’s the Fuss?
Lets try something: I’m going to write a phrase, you say the first thing that comes into your head. Ready? Foreign Oil. Did you say Gasoline prices or George Bush? Lets just ignore Bush for a moment and think about all the things Foreign Oil is used for. Highways, Plastics, heating oil, diesel, gasoline, jet fuel and lubricants all use some form of black gold. So as you can see, the US being dependent upon foreign oil means more than just gas for your car.
Back to Bush. One of his propositions to “reduce our dependence upon foreign oil” is a substance called Ethanol. Ethanol produces less hydrocarbons while being burned, but it also has a lower energy content. About 30% less energy, and that’s not a little. This means that it takes more ethanol to go the same distance in your car. 1 gallon of gas = 1.5 gallons ethanol
Ethanol in the US is primarily made from corn and other biodegradable products and the government is giving incentives to farmers that grow corn for use as fuel. Good for the farmers, but what about the droughts over the Midwest these past years? Corn is also fed to the cows to produce our meats. Should we divert that corn to power our cars? The amount of fuel needed to harvest an acre of corn is in fact larger than the amount of energy said acre would yield. USA Today did an article about using corn as a replacement fuel for gas. They did the math, but did not take into account the energy cots associated with harvesting that amount of corn (Math is the 6th or 7th paragraph). The government initiative, Renewable Fuel Standard states that at least 4 of the roughly 150 Billion gallons of fuel this year be from renewable sources. This number is intended to increase to approximately 7.5 Billion by 2012.
Lets recap: It takes more ethanol to drive a vehicle the same distance as gasoline (Roughly 1.5 times as much fuel). Ethanol is mainly produced from corn, and it costs more in energy to harvest the corn than is produced from the harvest. We would need to harvest nearly three and a half times as much corn to make enough fuel for one day.
Should we replace fossil fuels with Ethanol? I say no, but supplementing our gas with ethanol produced from biomass and bio-diesel from cooking oil combined with a weight reduction in current automobiles… I think that we could make some good steps in the right direction, but it is clearly not enough.
In all honesty, we should have done this years ago.
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by Larry
On December 27, 2006 at 7:39 am
Actually, my roomate did some research on Ethanol (e-85 is the variety being pushed in the U.S. at the moment) and it’s still 85% gasoline, which doesn’t really make it an alternative fuel in my books. Yes, it reduces the amount of gasoline used overall, but considering the cost, the fact that people will see it as a reason to buy more of it than they would gasoline normally, and so forth, I don’t see it as a solution to a problem, just a mechanism for delaying the inevitable.
I love the concept of it in theory though. Marketed as a renewable solution / alternative to gasoline, it sounds great. Fuel made from corn? Finally, the stripped areas that once served as oxygen-giving rainforests can provide us with utility once more! (I could make a business out of selling sarcasm by the pound.)
Great concept, exercise in futility in practice, to me. Dunno though, they’re on the right track, just gotta put some more effort into it.
by Chris HP
On December 28, 2006 at 10:33 am
“Foreign Oil” is two words.
by travis
On December 28, 2006 at 9:20 pm
Yes indeed. Fixed now.
by Chris HP
On December 29, 2006 at 4:22 pm
Aw man.
by Ashley
On January 13, 2007 at 7:13 am
If we made a larger market for ethanol, all the corporate farms (which is like 90%) would begin producing corn, drive the prices lower, and we’d be stuck with really expensive lettuce at the stores; this would piss people off even more than a 10% increase in fuel costs. Ooo, cereal prices would go up, too. That’s sad. I like frosted mini-wheats. All things considered, corn is already the most important agricultural commodity in our country. Since they subsidised it, farmers have an incentive to grow it, there’s no standard for its quality, and its guaranteed to go somewhere. They even inject livestock with some concoction that makes them capable of digesting corn, so that we can have a cheap feed for them…creepy…so meats, cereals, sodas, snacks, yogurts, almost anything sweetened from a non-organic/natural foods company is bound to contain corn. We really can’t grow any more of the crap, there will be no soil left to produce wheat, or oats, or greens…not to mention encouraging poor soil management…I’ll stop before I go into crop rotation (how do you rotate your crops if all you grow is corn? No ones going to leave a productive field dormant to restore it.) So yeah, no ethanol, try nuclear, or electric, or possibly hydrogen…or, wow, this is a novel one…your bike?
by travis
On January 13, 2007 at 7:27 am
You know, it had never even crossed my mind that so many food products were sweetened with corn. High-fructose corn syrup, its the second or third ingredient on just about everything sweet. Honestly, the scope of this whole problem is slowly becoming clear to me. I’m willing to bet that nearly all of those products that are sweetened with corn, are in a container that was made with or contains oil.