Ethanolonomics

Re: [spiers] Ethanolonomics

I've heard Pollan's arguments before; it's
regurgitated oil company propaganda and talking
points. Say it enough and people start believing it.
Pollan is believing it. He needs to research his
story a little more.

Not all ethanol comes from corn, and not all ethanol
is produced the same way. Pollan's article almost
fails to mention cellulosic ethanol. Here is his one
sentence, nearly asinine statement...

"And although the technology for making ethanol from
grasses (cellulosic ethanol - distilled from plant
cellulose rather than starch) is not quite there yet,
it holds real potential."

The cellulosic technology would take minimal effort to
implement. It takes less than a 1/3 of the energy to
make the alcohol as traditional methods. Pollan only
mentions grass, but you can convert nearly any plant
biomass, ie plant waste such as husks from corn,
sawdust, straw, lawn clippings, wood chips, etc....
Switchgrass shows a lot of promise. It covered the
Great Plains with no human intervention at all, no
fertilizer, no cultivation.

Implementing alternative fuels is a political problem,
not one of feasibility. There are great ideas for
producing alternative fuels and increasing the
efficiency of the machines that use them. But, an
aggregate of government inaction, ineptitude and oil
company influence have stymied any attempt.

Anthony


--- Alan Fishman wrote:

> Here is a guest columnist article that appeared in
> the New York Times in May on the feasability of
> ethanol...
> alan
>
> The Great Yellow Hope
> By Michael Pollan
>
>
>
> Michael Pollan is the author, most recently, of "The
> Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural history of Four
> Meals," which was published in
> April. His previous books include: "Second Nature,"
> "A Place of My Own" and "The Botany of Desire," a
> New York Times bestseller.
>
> A contributing writer for The New York Times
> Magazine, Mr. Pollan is the Knight Professor of
> Journalism at the University of
> California, Berkeley. Many of his food articles can
> be found at michaelpollan.com
>
>
>
> I've been traveling in the American Corn Belt this
> past week, and wherever I go, people are talking
> about the promise of ethanol.
> Corn-distillation plants are popping up across the
> country like dandelions, and local ethanol boosters
> in Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa
> and even Washington State (where Bill Gates is
> jumping into the business) are giddy at the prospect
> of supplanting OPEC with a
> homegrown, America-first corn cartel. But as much as
> I'd like to have a greener fuel to power my car, I'm
> afraid corn-based ethanol
> is not that fuel.
>
>
>
> In principle, making fuel from plants makes good
> sense. Instead of spewing fossilized carbon into the
> atmosphere, you're burning the
> same carbon that a plant removed from the air only a
> few months earlier - so, theoretically, you've added
> no additional carbon.
> Sounds pretty green - and would be, if the plant you
> proposed to make the ethanol from were grown in a
> green way. But corn is not.
>
>
>
> The way we grow corn in this country consumes
> tremendous quantities of fossil fuel. Corn receives
> more synthetic fertilizer than any
> other crop, and that fertilizer is made from fossil
> fuels - mostly natural gas. Corn also receives more
> pesticide than any other
> crop, and most of that pesticide is made from
> petroleum. To plow or disc the cornfields, plant the
> seed, spray the corn and harvest
> it takes large amounts of diesel fuel, and to dry
> the corn after harvest requires natural gas. So by
> the time your "green" raw
> material arrives at the ethanol plant, it is already
> drenched in fossil fuel. Every bushel of corn grown
> in America has consumed the
> equivalent of between a third and a half gallon of
> gasoline.
>
>
>
> And that's before you distill the corn into ethanol,
> an energy-intensive process that requires still more
> fossil fuel. Estimates
> vary, but they range from two-thirds to nine-tenths
> of a gallon of oil to produce a single gallon of
> ethanol. (The more generous
> number does not count all the energy costs of
> growing the corn.) Some estimates are still more
> dismal, suggesting it may actually
> take more than a gallon of fossil fuel to produce a
> gallon of our putative alternative to fossil fuel.
>
>
>
> Making ethanol from corn makes no more sense from an
> economic point of view. The federal government
> offers a tax break of 54 cents
> for every gallon of ethanol produced, and this
> incentive is what has generated the enthusiasm for
> ethanol refining: the spigot of
> public money is open and the pigs are rushing to the
> trough. (At the same time, the government protects
> domestic ethanol producers
> by imposing a tariff of 54 cents a gallon on
> imported ethanol.) According to the Wall Street
> Journal, it will cost U.S. taxpayers
> $120 for every barrel of oil saved by making
> ethanol. Some "savings." This is very good news
> indeed for Archer Daniels Midland, the
> agricultural processing company that controls about
> 30 percent of the ethanol market. (And, it would
> seem, a comparable percentage
> of the U.S. Congress, which has been showering the
> company with ethanol subsidies since the days when
> Bob Dole of Kansas was known
> as the senator from A.D.M.)
>
>
>
> Absurd as it is, the rush to turn our corn surplus
> into ethanol appears unstoppable, and the corn belt,
> laboring under the weight of
> falling corn prices for the past several years, is
> celebrating the great good fortune of $3-a-gallon
> gas prices. We're desperate for
> alternatives, and all that corn is waiting to be
> distilled. As corn prices rise (and the giddiness
> has already given them a bump),
> farmers will be tempted to produce yet more corn,
> which is not good news for the environment this
> whole deal is supposed to help.
> Why not? Because farmers will apply more nitrogen to
> boost yields (leading to more nitrogen pollution)
> and, since soy bean prices
> are down, they will be tempted to return to a
> "corn-on-corn" rotation. That is, rather than rotate
> their corn crops with soy beans
> (a legume that builds nitrogen in he soil), farmers
> will plant corn year after year, requiring still
> more synthetic nitrogen and
> doing long-term damage to the land.
>
>
>
> It's not easy being green.
>
>
>
> But just because making ethanol from corn is an
> environmentally and economically absurd proposition
> doesn't mean ethanol made from
> other plants is a bad idea. If you can make ethanol
> from a plant that doesn't take so much energy to
> grow in the first place, the
> economics and energetics begin look a lot better.
> The Brazilians make ethanol from sugar cane, a
> perennial crop that doesn't require
> nearly as much fossil fuel to grow. Switch grass,
> too, is a perennial crop that grows just about
> anywhere, requires little or no
> fertilizer and needs no plowing or annual
> replanting. And although the technology for making
> ethanol from grasses (cellulosic
> ethanol - distilled from plant cellulose rather than
> starch) is not quite there yet, it holds real
> potential.
>
>
>
> So why the stampede to make ethanol from corn?
> Because we have so much of it, and such a powerful
> lobby promoting its consumption.
> Ethanol is just the latest chapter in a long, sorry
> history of clever and profitable schemes to dispose
> of surplus corn: there was
> corn liquor in the 19th century; feedlot meat
> starting in the 1950's and, since 1980, high
> fructose corn syrup. We grow more than 10
> billion bushels of corn a year in this country, far
> more than we can possibly eat - though God knows
> we're doing our best, bingeing
> on corn-based fast food and high fructose corn syrup
> till we're fat and diabetic. We probably can't eat
> much more of the stuff
> without exploding, so the corn lobby is targeting
> the next unsuspecting beast that might help chomp
> through the surplus: your car.
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "spiersegroups"
> To:
> Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2006 9:27 AM
> Subject: [spiers] Ethanolonomics
>
>
> Folks,
>
> Brazil is offered as the way for ethanol, so let's
> hear a Brazilian voice on the topic.
>
> http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig7/desousa1.html
>
> John

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