Corn and ethanol

[rmptr]

I found this short clip, last night....
So the govt subsidizes ethanol production which causes all our food prices to go up and 'tortilla riots' in Mexico... sure am glad they are putting my tax money to good work...

Letter Re: Biofuel Problems and Sustainability

A recent article in Der Spiegel gives us some real insight into food prices. My guess is that if we continue down this path we will see some important events start taking place in Third World nations that cannot afford high food prices.

Here is how this can effect us here. It takes 400 pounds of corn to make 25 gallons of ethanol. This might be a weeks worth of fuel for a person commuting to work. It could be many months worth of food for that same person. You may say that you don't eat that much corn. Actually you do. Dr. Henry Schwarcz at McMasters University in Canada, studies nitrogen isotopes in human bone and teeth. The average north American diet effectively consists of 47% corn! This is because what you eat, eats corn. Beef, Chicken, Pork, Milk, Ice Cream, Butter, Cheese, Eggs, etc. The figure I have seen for beef is six to seven pounds of corn to make one pound of beef. About 30% of the American corn crop is now going to bio fuels. With the number of people in the world (seven billion by 2012), I don't think that this is sustainable.

Also another note on sustainability: The American Solar Energy Society did a study that showed it takes 10 calories of fossil fuels to put 1 calorie of food on the average American's table. This includes planting, cultivation, harvesting, processing and transportation. Cooking too, I would guess. In looking at what is happening with oil and natural gas prices and their availability, I wonder how long we can sustain this.
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[someotherdude]

If I owned property in Hawaii or Fla or Luisiana I'd be planting sugar cane at a furious pace. It has demonstrated it's ability to fuel an entire nation. Other options for liquid fuels include sugar beets and or even certain fruits. But the real problem is we could never grow enough of anything known at a rate fast enough to touch our apetites for fuel at current rates of consumption. Vaporous gases are the only real answer. The technology to condense these gases is all that's needed to make this work. Even the conversions for vehicles would be minor in cost and application. How costly or complicated the pumping station conversions would be depends upon the method of condensation eventually developed. Methane is the obvious choice, readily availabe with huge reserves through out the world as well as being renewable.

 

[rmptr]

I'm all for the sugar cane!

If we can just keep those guys in Atlanta making that Coca Cola...

Best

 

[Zephyr]

The ethanol lobby has pretty much said "*bleep* You" to all the people opposed to it. They snuck in all their subsidies, tariffs on imported eth, and every other pork barrel gimme years before they forced this on everybody overnight. This was a planned scam from the get-go, and they aren't going to give it up no matter how many people they make suffer or how much damage they cause.
I wish there was a way for the little people (like me) to fight back when they're getting screwed....

 

[rmptr]

Zephyr, if you begin to 'fight' back, you get squashed like a bug...

I really don't think they considered things like the tortilla riots in mexico when they took so much of our corn for ethanol. But perhaps they knew those consequences would occur...

First they put that MTBE in the gas and polluted a lot of groundwater.
Then they put in ethanol, which develops less power and gives lower MPG's...

You could build an HHO HOD system for your auto.
Maybe just a bit over $100 by the time you get the little electronic device to modify sensor input to your car's computer. Depending on your vehicle, you can get at least 20 -30% improvement in MPG's.
If the engine is NOT the best design, you can do even better.

It's basically an old technology that has become practical now that gas is so expensive.
HHO acts as a catalyst and improves the burn giving more power, cleaner.
There is a side product, that may be of concern, though.

Best

 

[thompy]

don't think that HHO will work to well in the north, but is intresting, the one that looks reasonable is the algae to produce bio diesel, at least until hydrogen can be produced efficiently