It is curious, at the end of your diatribe about drilling for more oil you say you want to put efforts into something sustainable. The irony lies in the fact that the 10 billion barrels of oil that are in the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge to which you allude would last the US about 18 months. Assuming that there are twenty similar sized untapped oil reserves in the country, that puts us out of domestic oil in 30 years. Not a problem for anyone over the age of 40, but by no means sustainable.
Drilling for oil to solve an energy crisis is like spending frivolously to save for retirement. There is a finite amount of oil in the world. We need it for far more important uses than driving an SUV to the corner store for beer and cigarettes.
In my experience anyone who says anything bad about ethanol falls into one of three categories.
1) Someone who makes money from oil
2) A conservative who will listen to anyone who says anything related to keeping things that same.
3) An environmentalist who will listen to anyone who says anything is bad for the environment, even if they are from category 1.
Ethanol is not the answer. There is not one answer, but ethanol is definitely one of the answers.
While on the surface corn seems like a bad idea. And trust me...it is a bad idea. It shows us the right way to do things. Make no mistake, ethanol from corn does not affect the price of food.
Why? Because corn grown in the US, the corn that we are talking about in this topic is not your corn flakes, corn on the cob or the high fructose corn syrup in your energy drink. This corn is animal feed. We grow so much animal feed corn in the US that if we made it all into ethanol we would have 16 billion gallons of ethanol. Thatâ(TM)s 10% of our fuel usage for a year. But if we did that what would the cows eat?
Well it is a little known fact that cows don't really do well eating corn. Cows "eat" by having bacteria break down fiber (cellulose) in their stomachs. Corn being high is starch is not really all that great for this process. The starch turns mainly into methane, a green house gas. When you make ethanol from corn, you only use starch; the fiber, vitamins, minerals and protein are left untouched. This is called dried distillersâ(TM) grains(DDGS) and it is well known by farmers to be a superior feed product. So we can make our ethanol and fed our cows from the same crop. While the recent increase in the price of corn has raised eyebrows, even though it is due mainly to the increase cost of fuel, what has gone unnoticed is the bottoming of the price of DDGs.
By switching to a different, better crop we could produce all of our feed needs and 60% of our fuel needs.
Another thing I have learned from experience is that anyone who's car have been damaged by ethanol is either lying or stupid. Of the 100 or so cars that I have seen converted to ethanol, the 6 instances of failure are all purely user error. (for the sake of honesty I am one of those six, and for the record, storing ethanol in an old, dirty diesel tank and using it in your car is a bad idea)
Also keep in mind that the BTU content of a fuel has little or nothing to do with its merits as a fuel. Candle wax has way more BTU's than gasoline, but I want to see your mileage running your car on wax. Ethanol is a superior fuel, it can be used at much higher compression ratios than gas, yielding a more efficient engine. A Swedish company has a concept conversion kit that runs on ethanol and gets 48mpg with 200hp. Thatâ(TM)s double the US national average. If we double our national average, we would cut or consumption in half and the 60% from before is now 120%.
120% of our yearly fuel needs from the acreage that is currently planted. No drilling, no wars, no green house gases, no biggie. Just happy farmers, happy fuel companies, happy cows, happy consumers.
By the way, most of the tree huggers from CA don't eat mid-western corn and wheat because it is from more than 100 miles away, has too much gluten and is GMO.
