Excellent Commentary .................................................................. Charles Grassley is dead wrong. This just goes to show how important it is to get knowledgible people in positions of influence. The US and the World cannot afford the Grassleys and Bush/Cheneys to have positions of influence. Just look at what is happening, and has already happened. ..................................................................... Politics sometimes is just not connected to good economics, and good basic G scale government economists know this well.
Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa. âYou make ethanol out of corn,â he said. âI bet if I set a bushel of corn in front of any of those delegates, not one of them would eat it.â Well, if the ground that were used to plant corn is used to plant other plants then that stupid senator would eat it.
I would like to see a good analysis of the efficiency of Sugar Beets or Sugar Cane versus corn (southamerica??). My understanding is, even though we can probably only grow beets or cane in Florida, that cane is much more efficient. Now with Brazil talking about a possible big oil find, which if true, would take a few years to get benefits from...and with their proven use of ethanol, perhaps some "actual" free trade would be in order. We are a global economy, and we need to respect our neighbors in this hemisphere...I'm a "work together for the greater good" type of guy. Food or fuel, shouldn't have to be an "either or" type of thing, IMO. Any good references from anyone? Don
Don I wish I would have saved it, but I searched out a DOE report on corn based ethanol that showed at a "system level" that it was a net BTU loss. In other words it took more BTU's in fossil fuel for fertilizer, tractor tilling/harvest, transportation, fermenting and processing than we got out of the final ethanol stream. However another DOE report showed sugar cane, bio mass, and a big winner ALGAE. The algae cycle was based near a fossil fuel plant where the exhaust CO2 stream was introduced into the growing media (water). The algae grew in a racetrack like oval where the water circulated. The algae was skimmed off once per revolution. The conversion efficiency was phenomenal, like 45% to lipids. You could just sun dry the algae and burn it in a boiler. Good stuff, but a little "different."
I'd be interested in any of the links on algae. The articles I've seen have noted that it has tremendous potential but so far it is quite temperamental with it's requirements... (& thus difficult to scale up). R
'with their proven use of ethanol' I might be wrong but I think there are costs to the use of ethanol down the road in the form of carbon emissions, low efficiencies etc. There was a program in dateline or 48 hours about this. The use of Ethanol has become such a fad that no one wants to listen the side effects of this alternative. Run towards Ethanol can create scarcity of Corn for food and animal use and drive up commodity prices in the other direction. Save on gas but spill on food. Hyrdogen based fuels are very clean and have no side costs but are expensive to put to work.
You are correct that cane is more efficient but parts of Louisiana are know for it's sugar cane, so there is more than just Florida it can be grown.
NREL/TP-580-24190 National Renewal Energy Lab A Look Back at the Department of Energy's Aquatic SPecies Program: Biodiesel from Algae (Close Out Report)July 1998 By: J. Sheehan, TG Dunahay, JR Benemann, PG Roessler, JC Weissman 294 Pages.