Ethanol Exposed - Finally

[Robroy]

The Great Biofuels Con: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.j ... xml&page=1

A snippet:

Rarely in political history can there have been such a rapid and dramatic reversal of a received wisdom as we have seen in the past 18 months over biofuels – the cropping of living plants, such as soya beans, wheat and sugar cane, to generate energy.Snip

Stage Four came in 2004-07 when – driven by everything from the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol (originating in that 1992 Rio summit) to Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth – hysteria over global warming reached its peak, pushing it to the top of the world's political agenda. The most obvious response came from the EU.

snip

A Cornell University study shows that biofuel production from farm crops such as corn takes 29 per cent more energy than is yielded by the fuel itself (although second-generation biofuel crops, such as hemp, are much more efficient).

If this was not so serious it would be funny.

[WestSideBilly]

What do you mean, finally?

A lot of people have known ethanol (especially corn based) is a sham and uses considerably more energy to make than it yields, not to mention removing food from the food chain is always a bad idea.

That people still think E85 is the solution to our fuel issues is telling of the power of advertising.

[Notabull]

[lamont]

Even sugarcane production leads to deforestation.

Burning waste fry oil was a good idea, but very limited. Planting hemp in marginal farmlands for ethanol production has seemed like another limited but useful idea to me (provided there's no deforestation to do it -- and with the byproduct that commerical hemp tends to pollenate illicit cannabis farms and ruin them). Algae biofuel is the only real glimmer of hope that ethanol is going to be a significant energy solution.

[jon]

They've been trying to get algae to work for 20 years. The whole idea of biofuels is an eco-religious crusade. For something as basic as converting sunlight into electricity there is just no need to put something as inefficient has a living organism in the loop. Just focus the light on a container of water and run the steam through a turbine. Seriously.

[Notabull]

[lamont]

[jon]

Take a look at the article that Robroy posted about the starvation resulting from ethanol. Then take a look at the progress that was being made prior to that, in a striking animation given in this talk:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/hans ... _seen.html

The number of people who will starve because progress in feeding the world reversed direction will no doubt exceed the number of people killed in the original crusades.

Prior to recent advances in battery technology, there might have been a reason to think that producing liquid fuels was the major goal, but now it makes no sense. I would have attributed our failure to stop ethanol development now to early primary states, but the obstinance in Europe indicates it is a deeper problem.

[Robroy]

[Robroy]

[Robroy]

[lamont]

[rose-colored-coolaid]

It has been clear all along that the net energy gain was (and would remain for the foreseeable future) essentially zero or even negative. This is especially true if you consider lifetime costs for equipment and shipping of the fuel. Given that, it was always an exchange of land

But it's actually insincere to blame the eco-lobby. This is not a very powerful group. If they were, don't you think all business would be shut down and people would be forced to grow their own vegetables for sustenance? Rather, the group of people motivated by an Inconvenient Truth were just the swing members. The real reason for the great ethanol push has been the corn lobby. They have a surprising pull in Washington, and are the reason that every processed food you eat contains copious amounts of high fructose corn syrup.

[Robroy]

[jon]

I first became aware of the eco-religion back in the 70s with the start of Earth Day and everything else. The Department of Energy was started to help push through programs that were economically unfeasible. When Reagan tried to shut it down, he was criticized for being anti-environment. The criticism is that people who are opposed to economically unfeasible ideas are opposed to the end goal of protecting the environment. The simple fact is that if something is uneconomic, it means that more resources are going into an effort than are coming out. So it should have been no surprise whatsoever to anyone that more fuel was going into bio-fuels than would come out, because tax dollars had to be pumped in, directly or through mandates, and that is necessarily going to correlate with fuel.

Everyone has some metric they use to decide if something is worthwhile, and if a proposal looks good, things downstream from there get ignored. For some people that metric is the progress towards a vision of a self-sustaining zero fossil fuel world. That I believe is what is behind the current Congressional leadership saying "we can't drill our way out" of the current energy crisis. I read an article this morning by someone saying how great the current high energy prices are to change our thinking. But those prices mean that people less well off are suffering. A different religion places it focus on those people.

To avoid a repeat of the ethanol mess, we have to be extremely careful to look at all the consequences of any proposal. That was the problem for example with Kyoto. The economic dislocation proposed were huge, and the underlying science is "of course is it humans," with very shaky data, limited models, and a lot of personal attack.