Don, I'm afraid economics have taken a back seat to political payoffs. Any rational approach to ethanol would be to make it from the cheapest, most easily grown commodity. It just so happens that the one crop they can grow in the caribbean is sugar cane. Of course, the US has a big tariff on cane because of the immense influence of the florida cane growers. Again, the unintended consequences are sickening. Cane growing sucks up water they can't spare in florida, plus it apparently is causing environmental devastation. then there is the matter of the haitians they bring in to work the cane fields. All in all, a total disaster.
the issue of time magazine from two weeks ago had a huge article on bullshit corn ethanol! What a croc.. the idiots need to realize that corn is ground up and used in 100"s of foods.. the answer right now isn't going to be a new super fuel.. it is going to be mass transit which is something this country has never had a good handle on ..ever.. This would also force our country to once again get away from our "isolated" thinking by putting a large socioeconomic and race mix on the same train or bus who can exchange ideas etc.. this 1 car 1 person doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Anyway her is the time link http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1725975,00.html
Mass Transit doesn't work because Americans like to live in houses away from "Downtown". Mass Transit is a waste of money and effort. Designed to employee more voters to vote for more socialism. John
Can you imagine what NYC traffic would look like if they halted bus, train, subway service? It works fine. Where there is sufficient people. And millions take it gladly, since it is cheaper or more convenient to them than the alternative. The problem is, when they try to set up mass transit routes in lightly populated areas, where the cost per person is several times what they pay. These lines should be mothballed, or cheaper alternatives studied. It is somewhat like air conditioning. Sometimes, you want whole-house AC. Sometimes a room AC is better.
corn and soy bean was a terrible idea to use towards biofuels. i believe that 1 acre of land, in 1 year's time, can produce 30 gallons of fuel with beans and 50 gallons with corn (or vice versa). note, thats not gallons. not sure if that includes using petro chemicals, but you can see how absurd of an idea this is. i read that article about the algae too about a week or two ago. mentioned on that the efficiency with algae goes up 2000-3000x's. seems like a much more practical solution, however the article didnt get into the downside. of course, they did this in anthony, texas. so the feasability, on a small scale, must be there.
Guys keep a couple of thoughts in mind. When the guv increased ethanol subs a couple of years back Corn was NOT in very high demand. Grain prices were in terrible shape and with fuel and fertilizer prices higher, farmers in 2006 were in trouble. Voila the dollar plunged and EVERY commodity is on fire. Yes corn based ethanol is a bad (though not new) idea. Chicago has sold ethanol blends for 2 decades. The concept was not sinister though. Low grain prices, a growing dependence on foreign energy-seemed like a plan. The irony of course is that until a year ago the bartender pouring you drinks at your yuppie hot spot was earning more than most farmers in Iowa. Everyone has a gripe.....
All I have to do is move my house to within walking distance of the nearest terminal that will allow me to travel easily to whatever destination I need to go to in a timely manner. Of course we could build regional massive high rise ,high cost cities. Force everyone to move into them,destroy all the then unused structures, and then we could all happily live together packed in like rats using our now suddenly efficient mass transit. Hummmmm. Who would then produce our food ,soft and hard goods mass transit goodies etc? Come on people use your brains for more than to fill the space within your skulls.Just a little common sense will go a long way.
Memo to Jim Rogers haters: All through the mid-90's the guy was beating table on buying up as much farm land as you could.
The OP's article just shows that we have a long way to go to integrate food and energy. I sketched a chart with a left center and right side. The origins of food is in agriculture and energy originates as a natural resource which was a long time in the making. One percent of incident solar supports life on our planet in a layer as thick as paint on a ballon. The big solar consumers are the hydrologic cycle (the Earth's water purification system) and reradiated energy either by reflection or thermal converstion and reradiation. The alcohol lines are red mostly. Coarse grains are containers of collected solar energy. they produce in about equal amounts carbs protein and CO-2. Carbs go to alcohol where the energy loop is a water feed back system: going from the column to the enzymes usage to frementation to the column. The protein (DDG) is pulled before the column and after fermentation usually. In the fuure it may be pulled before fermentation. This highest I ever got in use of DDG was feeding 14.2 million head Management fee was .50 dollars a head. A lot of the liguid protein was pulled to use as a cubie binder for alfalfa. The largest shipment size we did was 25K tons out of NW to japan. Conola oil was alo added to both the DDG and cubies to cut colesterol in Japanese beef and US beef. Urea is also an important artificial protien feed made from two waste gases in areas where acohol is produced and gases are pulled from oil production wells. The tonnage on urea is large and it is a very cheap animal feed. The greatest application of alcohol is to enlarge the capacity of existing coal fired steam generating plants. the capacity to flow steam is increased by a factor of five and the by product is used to reform gasoline. Here the local combination of farming and coal extraction makes for good efficient operations. One by product of the coal preparation is that the sulfur bound on clays of coal is removed and used for acid production. Another aspect that is fortunate is that the coal/alcohol slurry moves at four times the rate of coal water slurries and no drying or water losses are involved in water dear areas of origin. By using some of the organic aspects of recycling by products, growing grain is enhanced. Two fators include eleiminating summer fallow and fine grain increases of up to 25 bu/acre. (dakotas and Mont). This is all old stuff from the erley 70's. As you can see it take time to institutionalize work originating on the bench and going to batch and scale up to continuous processes. continuous fremantation was realtively difficult to achieve and is quite and energy savings since the column aspect of acohol production is eliminates. This simply means that the enrgey temperature range required is shifted from a much higher mean temperature (energy consumption wise) to one that is more in line with season weather variations. Therefore, systems operate more or less expensively in terms of energy requirements. The climate for leading the world in technical inovation in the US has shifted. When Bucky and E. F. schmacher held swat with intermediate, appropriate and small is beautiful technology al lot of decentralization was going on. Now Dr Seuss's antithesis rules with the biggering orientation. Going from place to place will ultimately be done with what comes after the battery and certainly carbon will not be involved.