Domestic Fuel

Good comment Ian. One of the reasons we started this news blog was to provide good factual information. If you read through the posts we’ve done you’ll find some information that should allay your concerns.

1. Food vs. Fuel: There is no credible evidence that using corn for ethanol production will create any feed or food problems here or anywhere else in the world. I just interviewed the VP of ADM a couple days ago and he said there is no reason to fear this. Food will come first as it should but we can grow a lot more corn. Syngenta is currently developing a drought tolerant gene into corn which will be on the market in a few years so it can be grown in even more areas of the world. The only competition effect for using corn for ethanol might be in the price of corn and that’s a good thing for our corn growers who need a better price for their commodity!

2. We haven’t even scratched the surface of improving ethanol production, including from corn. If you look at this post on Domestic Fuel: http://domesticfuel.com/index.php?s=syngenta you’ll find a link to an interview with Syngenta which covers a new corn trait that will increase ethanol production efficiency when it come on the market in just a couple years. There’s a lot of work ramping up on ethanol production improvements as we speak.

3. The current high price of ethanol is a short term market aberration caused by dropping MTBE as a fuel oxygenate which only left ethanol as the replacement. This tight supply situation will change as ethanol production increases over the next year or so.

4. There’s an overwhelming amount of research that shows the positive energy return from the production of ethanol.

The bottom line is that ethanol is good for the environment, good for your car and good for America. I have yet to find the down side in creating less green house gas emissions, increasing the performance of my car and keeping my money in America, helping people like our farmers instead of foreign terrorist-supporting nations.

So what’s your solution? The people I know in this business are working as hard as they can to move us in the right direction. Are you demanding an immediate silver bullet solution or are you willing to acknowledge that there isn’t one and that the long term answer to our energy independence is going to take lots of people working on lots of different ideas.

Kurt

You need to realize that we are at the beginning of the move to produce these bio fuels, and that in the long term many of the concerns you voice will be reduced or eliminated . To begin with, as ethanol production increases we will see a shift to farm equipment that runs on ethanol, not just for economic reasons but also becuase the American farmer is fiercly independant and patriotic and will like the idea of U.S. born fuels. The market will eventually move to favor what makes the most efficient use of energy unit consumed to energy unit produced, rather than simply the maximum yield per acre.

Fuel feedstocks will not need herbicides and pesticides in nearly the amounts used on foodstock, it simply will not matter if the corn is perfect.Likewise the fuel corn will not need to be irrageted and fertilized to the point of making absolutely perfect plump grains that we expect to see on an ear at our summer BBQ. Also we will gladly use fertilizers on fuel corn that Western society would find distasteful to use on food we are going to eat.

Currently most of the ethanol production comes from the grain, but as we progress we will also use the rest of the plant for some of this as techniques to break down and ferment mash made from the fibrous stalks etc come into use. I have also seen the complaint that conventional fuels are used to power the distilleries, in many cases this is true, but these too will be run on bio fuels such as the stalks and other chaf. Some will of course be turned under to help renew the soil, this is another function of the energy economics that I mentioned earlier.

For that matter I have heard people question if corn is indeed the best crop for this use, answere, maybe not for the whole country.. but corn is a good source, we are very good at producing it, we are familiar with it, we have an infrastructure and machinery already designed to grow , harvest and handle it. Eventually we will likely see other crops used in the U.S. in areas where they make more economic sense than corn does, but we need to start somewhere, corn has a strong and powerful lobby pushing…why not start with corn. If my vision is correct this will lead to far more acres in cultivation at a lower yeild per acre, but we have land.

Are Education and conservation important? YES!! I am a mechanical engineer with a good grasp of thermodynamic principles, do we waste energy? YES!!! Can we be more efficient? YES!! Will we need to drive more efficient and MUCH smaller and less powerful vehicles in the future on the whole? YES!!! etc. etc. etc. But in the end we are not ready or even able to regress to a society without the modern conveniences we love and depend on.

We need to face facts, without a nearly endless supply of extremely cheap or free power, the so called hydrogen economy of the future is a joke. Fossil fuels are limited and possibly bring other problems of global impact, Nuclear is limited, partly due to a limited amount of feedstocks but also due to public fear. Solar, wind, hydro ( current use plus low velocity flow hydro and wave action), geothermal etc will all play a part, but we need a potable fuel that is easy to use and ethanol is easily used in our current infrastructure to either stretch , replace or reduce use of current fuels. This is a part of the answere, spend you energy and time working towardsfinding and implementing others, not attacking this one.

Just a thought
Scott