Biofuels From Corn Can Create More Greenhouse Gases Than Gasoline 159
New submitter Chipmunk100 (3619141) writes "Using corn crop residue to make ethanol and other biofuels reduces soil carbon and can generate more greenhouse gases than gasoline, according to a study published today in the journal Nature Climate Change. The findings by a University of Nebraska-Lincoln team of researchers cast doubt on whether corn residue can be used to meet federal mandates to ramp up ethanol production and reduce greenhouse gas emissions."
Uh ... it's still carbon neutral, isn't it? (Score:1, Interesting)
Surely it's still carbon neutral, given it's from already-present carbon grown from air in the first place (like all plants)?
Re:Uh ... it's still carbon neutral, isn't it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Surely it's still carbon neutral[?]
We use tons of petrochemicals to grow corn.
Re:Uh ... it's still carbon neutral, isn't it? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's taking a lot of the carbon from the soil instead of the air... so no. Also, consider all the gasoline used to plant/harvest/transport it. Ethanol is a corn-state boondoggle. It drives up corn prices and brings in massive revenue to the midwest. Ethanol support is critical for any politician that wants to win in states like Iowa. When you hear a 60yr old farmer start talking about "green energy" you know he grows corn.
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Ethanol support is critical for any politician that wants to win in states like Iowa.
Now if we could just push back the date of the Iowa Caucuses . . .
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The only thing that runs on gasoline now are the Gators [deere.com]; everything else is diesel, even the pickup trucks.
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It's taking a lot of the carbon from the soil instead of the air... so no. Also, consider all the gasoline used to plant/harvest/transport it. Ethanol is a corn-state boondoggle. It drives up corn prices and brings in massive revenue to the midwest. Ethanol support is critical for any politician that wants to win in states like Iowa. When you hear a 60yr old farmer start talking about "green energy" you know he grows corn.
But the vast majority of the carbon in corn comes from the air, not the soil! It might surprise you to learn that most of the bulk of a huge tree, for example, was produced from the air, not the ground. The ground supplies trace minerals and water, and little else.
Another real problem with ethanol is that it is a low energy density fuel, compared to gasoline. So beyond a certain small percentage, it actually reduces the efficiency of your vehicle and causes it to burn MORE gasoline per mile, rather than
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It's taking a lot of the carbon from the soil instead of the air... so no.
Virtually none of the carbon plants are made of comes from the soil. What most plants take from the soil is nitrogen and micronutrients. Some plants, however, actually put nitrogen into the soil. Sadly, instead of planting crops in guilds, we opted for gross machine cultivation which not only demands planting massive monocultures but which also requires using varieties bred for machine harvestability rather than optimal nutrition, flavor, or texture. It also attracts pests while failing to attract their nat
Re:Uh ... it's still carbon neutral, isn't it? (Score:5, Informative)
No it's not that simple. Plants require nutrients from the soil, which have to be replenished each year[1] partly by natural in-soil processes that break down residue from previous crops, but mostly from the application of synthetic fertilizer, which is synthesized using a process that burn natural gas. See the wikipedia article on the Haber Process [wikipedia.org].
Also there are fossil fuels used in the planting, cultivation, harvest, and irrigation of the crop.
If corn could fix its own nitrogen like legumes do, it might be a lot closer to carbon neutral.
[1] In many parts of the world, including the Brazillian rainforest, farmers are actively "mining" nutrients from the soil. The soil left from burning the rainforest is extremely rich in nutrients, allowing intensive farming for a few years. After a while, though, the soil is depleted of nutrients and organic matter and yields drop. Sadly many farms just burn down more forest. Some methods of farming, including zero-till, try to foster natural soil processes to produce more nitrogen in natural ways, reducing synthetic inputs.
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I don't think that's true unless its waste and/or corpse gets buried deeply enough that bacteria can't cause it to decompose. When bacteria eats plants/animals/organic waste, it releases a lot of CO2 back into the atmosphere.
"beofuels from corn" is not just stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
It is brain-dead stupid!
How much of the total plant bio-mass are you processing to start with when you are dealing with corn? 2%? 3%? (That is until you get to
the actual fuel, which is much less than that.) When you do Biofuels from farming monoculture the proper way (if such a thing is possible at all), like from sugar-cane, where maybe 30-50% of the biomass is the part to be processed into biofuel, you may be getting some improvement over oil status-quo. With algae you maybe can achieve 100% of the biomass to start processing, sounds even nicer.
But from Corn? It is so stupid, it does not even deserve a proper adjective. It is even stupid to waste time making "studies" on it.
Trying to do it is only about corn super-production, hype, and abuse of government subsidies to plant corn, all mixed with a large, big
dose of the reverse of common sense.
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Imagine a beofuels cluster of these
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Sounds like a crate full of stupid my friend. Imagine how many people could be fed from that corn? Well as long as the environmentalists didn't throw a hissy fit over it and try claiming it was poisonous or something.
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Corn is a shitty food. Better food could be grown in its place though.
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Corn is a shitty food. Better food could be grown in its place though.
That's nice to say when you have plenty to eat.
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Corn is high in starch, low in nutrition. We can do better.
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Not saying anything against people who like those foods (not a big fan myself), just there are better foods to be grown if we're talking about feeding people.
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How much of the total plant bio-mass are you processing to start with when you are dealing with corn? 2%? 3%?
This research was about making biofuel from cellulose, which means that stems, leaves etc are used as well. But apparently even that is not sustainable because corn takes a lot of its carbon from the soil instead of from the air.
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I have had a 265mile per tank vs 300 mile per tank difference between 10% ethanol vs 0% ethanol on three occasions. I've never gotten 300 miles per tank on 10% ethanol.
So -- for a 2010 Honda Element, my experience is the same as yours.
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But I have measured that I get AT LEAST 10% less millage in my 2013 Mazda on gasoline diluted with alcohol than I do with pure gasoline.
Assuming that's true: is it likely to be due to the way the ECU and the emissions system treat the ethanol/fuel mix? Lots of cars are optimized for lowest production of NOx, carbon monoxide, etc, as opposed to highest efficiency. Just an example: the PZEV version of my Mazda gets 10% less HP and torque than the same car with the then standard (non California) emissions package.
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But I have measured that I get AT LEAST 10% less millage in my 2013 Mazda on gasoline diluted with alcohol than I do with pure gasoline.
So where did you get the "pure gasoline"?
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duckduckgo for "real gasoline" or "pure gasoline" and you will find stations in your state that sell gasoline without ethanol.
I recently started using ddg as well as google since google tailors the results and profiles me and sometimes I want to see a raw search result. (My other option would be to go to the library and use google there). The creepy bit is that their profile works whether I'm logged in or not.
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Here you go..
http://pure-gas.org/ [pure-gas.org]
It's worth trying a tankful and seeing how your car performs.
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Should we take ethanol out of gasoline and put MTBE back in? Discuss.
Re:"beofuels from corn" is not just stupid (Score:4, Insightful)
>It is brain-dead stupid!
Only from a science perspective.
Supporting corn ethanol is how candidates win primaries, so it makes perfect sense for our presidents to support it.
>But from Corn? It is so stupid, it does not even deserve a proper adjective. It is even stupid to waste time making "studies" on it.
If we're going to eliminate corn ethanol (which we should), it will require putting pressure on politicians from non-corn belt states. And to do so will require studies like these.
Corn ethanol isn't good for the environment, and it drives food prices through the roof, both domestically and abroad.
I highly recommend reading The Economics of Food for anyone interested in the subject.
Something's not right (Score:4, Interesting)
If they're counting the carbon to harvest the stalks, then the comparison for gasoline should include the carbon from oil extraction, transportation and refinement. The article also doesn't state if the carbon reduction from plant uptake is offsetting the carbon emissions of burning biofuels. Sounds like they're saying, look at the carbon you get from burning ethanol, add in the diesel to run the tractor, worse than gasoline!
I remember a study by the airline industry trying to claim air transportation was more efficient than high speed trains. This study reminds me of that kind of science.
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I was asking myself the same question: do they really consider that gasoline comes for free from the oil wheel to the car?
Someone will need to read the academic paper to tell us
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Oil has wheels???
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I found the article confusing as well, but here is what I've come up with. I don't think they are talking about any indirect carbon emissions due to say, running the tractors or fertilizer. So the study doesn't address total life cycle carbon costs of ethanol or gas. (It does address it, but just uses standard previously compiled models). It's main focus is to study how much CO2 the soil will give off after the corn plant leftovers are removed from the field. Literally, the soil has carbon trapped in it
So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Biofuels are about government subsidies and nothing more. All the talk about biofuels and the environment is just to trick the rubes.
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Biofuels are about government subsidies and nothing more.
That is bullshit. Biodiesel or green diesel from waste fats are pure benefit, as are biofuels from algae. Unfortunately, the best of them (Butanol) is being suppressed by BP and DuPont until such a time as they can control it completely. If that's never, so be it, to them.
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Biodiesel or green diesel from waste fats are pure benefit, as are biofuels from algae.
Most biodiesel is essentially a by-product [wikipedia.org]. It's a nice way to reduce waste and arguably worth doing but let's not pretend that there is enough to go around to really make a big dent in oil consumption overall. And NOTHING is "pure benefit". There are drawbacks to everything. Diesel isn't the cleanest burning fuel available and it has all the problems you get from any form of fossil fuel when it comes to pollution. Good? Yes. "Pure benefit"? Not remotely.
There is close to no industrial scale product
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Source please?
Butamax is a shell company of BP and DuPont. It is suing Gevo to prevent it from selling Butanol fuel based on an obvious patent developed at public university, partly with our tax money.
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I've got your source right here: BP-DuPont Biofuels JV Takes Gevo to Court [cleantechies.com]. Any questions?
Harvesting the Corn stover .. (Score:2)
Switch Grass (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone who knows anything about Ethanol knows that the two best sources are sugar cane and switch grass. Switch grass should be the choice for North America as it can grow just about anywhere. Corn, on the other hand, takes up valuable farm land, requires more water, and has higher production costs. Ethanol from corn is a nothing but a scam perpetrated by the corn industry. Believe this study or not, but there are much better options than corn...
http://www.scientificamerican.... [scientificamerican.com]
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Anyone who knows anything about Ethanol knows that the two best sources are sugar cane and switch grass.
'Best' how? Both of those are still soil-based crops. Algae is better because you can grow it on dirty water in most weather conditions above freezing, and it takes less processing than basically any other bio feedstock but shit.
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Not necessarily. Plants vary in the amount they derive from air vs soil. Much like some plants deplete nitrogen from the soil and others fix atmospheric nitrogen into the soil.
Goal? (Score:2)
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That and the fact that the U.S. is a net exporter of fossil fuels leaked out.
Government incompetence as usual (Score:1)
Re:Government incompetence as usual (Score:5, Insightful)
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The telco's basically run the NSA spying program, but nobody is complaining about anything but the NSA.
Telcos cannot function without the capability to run a telephone spying program, at least the listening-in part. And that's all they provide, besides basic records which they need for billing and for diagnostics. The federal government itself operates the facilities which actually centralize and process the data. You may (or may not) have seen some articles go by here on slashdot about massive federal data centers for use by certain three-letter agencies.
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Because the taxpayers are notorious skinflints. You get what you pay for.
Stop using Corn. (Score:1, Insightful)
Given the vastly superior alternatives to corn for this.
Using Corn for this crap is about as smart as grinding up phone books for ink. Using corn for this is just asking for it to look bad.
Food crops as fuel is immoral (Score:1)
Using food crops as fuel is immoral. Our ethanol program has made the price of food go up just not here but in countries whose people can ill afford to pay more for food. It needs to go away now. There is plenty of oil in the ground for a long time.
Yeast Eats Sugars, Cows Eat the Rest (Score:1)
Slashdot is becoming a corporatists plaything. Filled with tech naives who would die in the dark without electricity after an EMP. And wouldn't be able to thing of anything else but the present paradigm. What a sorry read that was. Oh, by the way, I did try to be equitable, generous, patient, tolerant. After having it pester me so persistently, now I, too, *Curse Beta*!
Most of the corn grown in the US is used to feed cows. Cows (via their symbionts) eat the wood and protein. They pass most of the starches.
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Corn *is* a low-return case as a fuel.
We already knew corn is a very bad biofuel. (Score:3)
Corn (maize) is one of the worst possible plant masses you could grow to make biofuel. It's horribly inefficient compared to other crops.
We've always known this. And it drives up the price of food. Globally.
Why are we still using corn to make ethanol? Farm lobby.
Biofuels = Faster breakdown of engine parts (Score:2)
Go ask any mechanic who deals with vehicles that run on Biofuels such as BioDiesel, Green diesel, Bioethanol or >10% blends and you will find that they often clog up the injectors so badly that they need to be replaced (injector) 45% more frequently (adjusted % based on time injector was installed and comparing same brand part durability on the same vehicle until breakage).
That may not seem like much to some, but for those running public transportation and school buses, the political "go green" machine
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Go ask any mechanic who deals with vehicles that run on Biofuels such as BioDiesel, Green diesel, Bioethanol or >10% blends and you will find that they often clog up the injectors so badly that they need to be replaced (injector) 45% more frequently
Uh what? Biodiesel and green diesel remove varnish left behind by petrodiesel. Ethanol sucks because it attracts water and because you get poor output when you run it through an engine which also expects to run on gasoline. Running veg oil will certainly clog things up, though, or waste motor oil.
In any case, the cure for deposits from running one or the other kind of diesel (petro or bio) is to occasionally run a tank of the other. Problem solved.
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The viscosity caused by those fuels are not meant to be handled by most engines for any long duration, period. Anyone running >10% blend over long periods is asking for trouble. If you do not believe me, go run some 50/50 "WMO" mix for 10k miles and check how many of your injectors are clogged, gaskets ruined and seals leaking. Engines in todays vehicles are still not ready to handle it.
This wasn't obvious from the start? (Score:1)
Since the energy required to produce corn ethanol is nearly equal or sometimes greater than the energy gained as fuel, corn sucks. It should be obvious that you are going to produce more emissions with corn. Even when the tarsands require large amounts of refining, that tarsand oil will be used to produce corn ethanol. Oil is used today in corn agriculture and production of ethanol. Corn as a biofuel is an odd stop-gap. If we have to use subsidies, why not encourage farmers to make some other crop that tran
Prohibition set us back 100 years on biofuels (Score:2)
If farmers were not forced to destroy their alcohol stills in the early days of Prohibition we would have known long ago about the viability of biofuels. Almost a century ago farmers would make ethanol for use as a fuel to run tractors. No doubt they'd also drink some of it, or sell some of it for others to drink. Prohibition destroyed the hobbyist experimentation of ethanol as a fuel. It made any use of ethanol a legal nightmare.
When Prohibition was lifted it didn't improve things much. Ethanol produc
The only real winner from corn ethanol... (Score:2)
The only real winner from corn ethanol is giant agribusiness companies who produce the GM corn seeds, sell the massive amount of chemicals the corn requires and makes ethanol from the result. It does nothing to reduce green house gas emissions. It does nothing to reduce the dependance on foreign oil (especially given all the oil-derived products required to grown that corn including the diesel for the tractors and harvesters). And it probably doesn't put all that much extra money in the pockets of small cor
Not New News... (Score:1)
I remember reading this argument like 10 years ago. I don't know if it is true, but it seems reasonable... all things being equal, it would take a lot more work to get a diesel fuel out of corn than crude oil.
But the true stupidity in using corn for fuel is using food as fuel. That just pushes food costs higher. Consider that there are a lot of other cleaner ways to make bio-diesel that don't compete with the food supply, it is hard to pin this study on the oil companies. Corn for bio-diesel is just mor
Comment removed (Score:3)
Why so much *corn*? (Score:2)
Corn's incredibly harsh on the soil. It annually needs a lot of fertilizer (that is, modern corn). Biofuels - pretty much everyone before the corn lobby got into it was talking lots of other, easy, fast-growing *weeds*, like switchgrass comes to mind. No fertilizer, etc... I mean, it's a *weed*.
But agribusiness industry (petrochemicals into fertilzer, for example) aren't interested in *that*....
mark
Re:100% distrust (Score:5, Insightful)
If oil companies are willing to pay off scientists, start entire shill foundations, websites and TV shows... why would this carry any weight?
As one sided as it might sound, I approach any article or discovery that would improve the oil industries' image or standing with the utmost distrust.
You hate the oil industry but you'll trust the corn lobby?
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Both are fairly evil:
1: HFCS. Enough said.
2: I wish there were concrete figures if using for ethanol takes food out of hungry people's mouths. Food prices sure jumped when ethanol was mandated in the US in gasoline.
3: Ethanol does a number on small engines.
If ethanol wasn't jacking up food prices, engines were designed to handle it, and it didn't affect the shelf life of gasoline, it would be a useful fuel. I've found that my E85 vehicle gets more horsepower (useful when towing) than on plain gas... o
10% ethanol also means 20% MPG lost (Score:2, Interesting)
Contrary to what ignorant people believe, oil companies actually love the mandated 10% ethanol.
E-90 (10% ethanol blend) has the side effect of dropping the MPG of ANY vehicle by at least 20% ... meaning that you have to buy more gas ... and pay more for it.
Re:10% ethanol also means 20% MPG lost (Score:4, Insightful)
E-90 (10% ethanol blend) has the side effect of dropping the MPG of ANY vehicle by at least 20% ...
Baloney. Depending on your engine's compression ratio, E-90 will reduce your MPG by about 3-5%. Ethanol does not have the energy density of gasoline, but it is not a net negative.
Re:10% ethanol also means 20% MPG lost (Score:5, Interesting)
Even so, growing corn to make ethanol is just dumb. Methanol would be a much better choice, since it can be made from any biomass, not just starch or sugar. The only reason we use ethanol is as an excuse to grow so much corn, which is heavily subsidized. Also, methanol is CHEAP... about $1.50/gal.
An easy solution would be to enact a flex-fuel standard for automobiles, [openfuelstandard.org] which would require that all new cars be fully flex-fuel capable: able to run on any mixture of gasoline, ethanol, methanol, or butanol. (In most cases, the "flex-fuel" cars on the market today can only use ethanol, not methanol.) To convert an existing car costs 500 bucks, but if it's built that way at the factory, it only adds about $100 to the cost of the vehicle.
Such a requirement would change the market. With millions of cars able to use it, gas station owners would start selling methanol on one or two pumps. This would effectively break the current monopoly that petroleum has on transportation fuel.
Oil-alcohol-fuel vs oil-fuel (Score:2)
Methanol would be a much better choice, since it can be made from any biomass, not just starch or sugar.
That does not the same thing as saying you can create a net energy increase from methanol or that once all factors are accounted for that it is less polluting than just refining oil directly. Modern agriculture essentially converts oil into crops - both from fertilizers (which are oil derived) as well as transport and planting/tending/harvesting. With ethanol/methanol you are converting the crops back into oil products. For that to make sense you have to establish that there is somehow a net usable energ
Re:Oil-alcohol-fuel vs oil-fuel (Score:5, Informative)
Modern agriculture essentially converts oil into crops
"Modern agriculture" is based largely on annual crops, which deplete the soil and require massive inputs. Methanol can be made from perennial crops which can be harvested economically with little to no inputs.
And since perennials do not require tillage, there is very little environmental degradation. Indeed, if herbivores are incorporated in the farming scheme, the combination can actually increase the topsoil. [youtube.com] Without tillage, such crops can be raised on lands which are currently considered marginal or unusable for conventional row-cropping. So methanol (unlike ethanol) would not compete with food crops at all.
How do you think methanol would be produced at industrial scale?
It already is produced at industrial scale. It's one of the most common "industrial" chemicals on the market. Unfortunately, a good chunk is currently produced from natural gas, but it is (and has been) made from various feedstocks for more than a century.
Industrial scale methanol (Score:3)
Methanol can be made from perennial crops which can be harvested economically with little to no inputs.
Perennial crops still need water, pest control, harvesting, tending, processing, and some amount of fertilizing, ALL of which require oil and other petroleum products. Methanol would likely be a big improvement on ethanol but it doesn't solve the fundamental problem of eliminating the need for oil inputs and it's not even clear if it would get the need for such inputs below the energy output of the methanol produced. I don't have any problem with using methanol as a fuel source (at least no more than any
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Perennial crops still need water, pest control, harvesting, tending, processing, and some amount of fertilizing
No, they don't. Not if you do it right.
Sure, if you try to raise a "mono-species" crop like modern-day corn or beans, you'll need inputs. But you just don't need that kind of approach. All you need is healthy, multi-species prairie (preferably fertilized by occasional ruminants) and you can mow it all down every couple of months and feed it to your fermenters. The simple fact of having a natural diversity of species means that you don't have to put any petro-inputs onto the land. There is no difference betw
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You are completely ignoring the most important question. Can methanol be produced without consuming more energy than it creates, particularly with regard to fossil fuels, once all inputs are accounted for? I've seen no credible evidence that this is possible with any existing or near term likely technology. I'd be happy to be wrong but so far I see methanol fuel production as merely a less stupid version of ethanol fuel production. Same fundamental issues exist. It still is a carbon based fuel with the
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You are completely ignoring the most important question. Can methanol be produced without consuming more energy than it creates
No, I'm not ignoring that question, I'm trying to answer it. Ethanol does not do the job, methanol does.
I've seen no credible evidence that this is possible with any existing or near term likely technology
Well, I don't know, perhaps you're not up to date on the latest developments. I'm not talking about using standard "green revolution" farming techniques, I'm talking about using the native productivity of the land... understanding how that system works, and "nudging" it a bit to maximize yields of stuff we can use.
In a word, it's called Permaculture. [wikipedia.org] Check it out, it's kinda cool.
starch derived ethanol is a very different process than cellulose derived ethanol
Seriously? After all this
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Hmm... this is weird. Our comments seem to be stacking up at this level of depth. Did we max-out the allowable depth in slashcode? At least the "parent" link still leads to your comment. Whatever... it's late on this side of the world, I gotta sleep...
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How do you think methanol would be produced at industrial scale?
You can produce methanol from methane (a problem greenhouse gas), and more importantly carbon dioxide.
From wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
Methanol has been generated directly from carbon dioxide in solution using copper oxide (CuO) nanorods coated by cuprous oxide (Cu2O) and energy from (simulated) sunlight. The process operated with 95% electrochemical efficiency and is claimed to be scalable to industrial size.
It's astonishing this technology isn't more widely used.
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We can make methanol from your lawn mower's grass clippings. America currently has about 30 million acres of lawn.
'Nuff said?
Also, imagine the economic boost when we no longer have to send $400 billion per year to Middle Eastern states that don't really like us very much.
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Even so, growing corn to make ethanol is just dumb.
Absolutely right - but this is about making ethanol from the crop residue from growing corn for other things.
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Fair enough, but why bother with that when we can already make methanol from the same feedstock?
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I'm no expert, but I reckon it'd be a lot cheaper to engineer the right material for some gaskets than to dredge up the last megaton of tar-sands (and still be no further along toward the goal of energy independence).
Re:10% ethanol also means 20% MPG lost (Score:5, Informative)
E85 is 85% ethanol, 15% gasoline, not the other way around. A 10% ethanol blend (10% ethanol, 90% gasoline) is called E10, not E90. Using E10 reduces your fuel economy by about 3–4%, and a 15% blend reduces your miles per tank by about 4–5%, assuming a modern, fuel-injected engine. I would expect the impact to be worse for an engine with a carburetor, but I don't know for certain. Either way, I'm pretty sure it's nowhere near 20% even with older engines.
Yes, if it were legal to sell E90, it would reduce your fuel economy by somewhere in the neighborhood of 20%. Of course, your car wouldn't start in the winter, and in most cars, parts of your fuel system would likely rust out pretty quickly, spewing fuel all over the hot engine, thus ending your life in a blaze of glory, so fuel economy would be the least of your problems....
Not rusting out (Score:2)
Ethanol is a dumb idea but... (Score:2)
I think using ethanol is basically retarded. We're using fossil fuels to do a bunch of farming to produce a bunch of fossil fuels with lower energy density than the ones that went into the farming and doing so basically as a subsidy to corn farmers. Stupid policy.
That said:
1: HFCS. Enough said.
Which has exactly what to do with ethanol? HFCS is a function of price supports and import restrictions [wikipedia.org] for sugar. HFCS is cheaper as a result. Take away the price supports and the need for HFCS will drop. All of this has precisely
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I had no idea such a thing as a "corn lobby" existed.
Weird times.
They were involved, under many layers, in the celery/bacon fiasco. [youtube.com]
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Re:100% distrust (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason to push for ethanol is that corn ethanol could be a temporary bridge to cellulosic ethanol, which is much lower in GHGs. The science isn't there yet to do cellulosic at scale, but regs like the LCFS or EPA's Renewable Fuel Standard guarantee that there will be a long-term market, and make private industry more comfortable in investing in the technology.
Some times you do actually have to read the article, the article is not about making Ethanol from the sugars and starches in the grain portion of the corn plant like everybody is assuming, it's about making ethanol from the stalks, leaves and cobs normally left on the fields.
This is a bad idea because it removes organic matter from the soil and making it less fertile, more easily compacted and more prone to errotion. Fields in that condition require more fertilizer and increased tillage to maintain productivity.
Re:100% distrust (Score:5, Funny)
This is a bad idea because it removes organic matter from the soil and making it less fertile, more easily compacted and more prone to errotion. Fields in that condition require more fertilizer
Then we just add petroleum based fertilizers to the soil. Problem solved,
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The problem is that It isn't a closed carbon cycle. There are a lot of inputs into the process that release carbon. For example what do you think the basic ingredients for fertilizer are?
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It's not closed when you are using large quantities of fossil fuels and petrochemical inputs to grow the corn.
There are better feedstocks than corn, for reasons of both environmental impact and efficiency, which also don't drive up food prices in international and domestic markets.
The feedstock isn't the root problem (Score:2)
There are better feedstocks than corn, for reasons of both environmental impact and efficiency, which also don't drive up food prices in international and domestic markets.
They still require arable land, oil, fertilizer, transport, tending, harvesting, refining and more. I've not seen any biofuel based on planting and harvesting crops that shows credible evidence of being more efficient than simply refining the oil directly. It sounds like a good idea (plants = green, right?) but once you account for the entire system it simply makes things more complicated and sometimes more polluting with no actual improvement at the end of the day. Sure there are plenty of better feedst
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it does matter, for two reasons (Score:2)
There are two major reasons it DOES matter, as explained in TFA. First, much of the CO2 is not from burning the ethanol, but from producing it. Imagine if the tractors, stills, etc. burned four gallons if diesel to produce on gallon of ethanol. Every gallon of ethanol you put in your car caused four gallons of diesel to be burned. That's the concept, though of course it's not quite that simple.
Secondly, it isn't the total amount of carbon that matters. There is always the exact same amount of carbon on
Come again? Photosynthesis? (Score:1)
Most of the Carbon in the plant comes from Co2, not from the ground numb nuts. That's what plants do, they convert Co2 into biomass.
no, dummy. Heard if nitrogen fertilizer? Why corn (Score:2)
Unfortunately, no. You may be aware that the air is 79% nitrogen, yet fertilizer is mostly nitrogen, because plants take nitrogen from the soil , not from the air. Corn does the same with carbon. That's one reason that corn is a stupid way to produce ethanol and switchgrass is a better choice.
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It's only a problem if you are taking too much of the plant away from the field. Growing corn isn't the problem, growing corn and carrying away the waste instead of turning it in is the problem. Corn still gets most of its carbon from the air like every other plant.
true, only if you make ethanol instead of tilling (Score:2)
I started to mention that and link to a study that measured soil C, but the rude AC didn't merit it. As you said, growing corn for food kernels and tilling the rest in is fine. The amount of carbon that comes out of the soil is roughly equal to the amount that's in the leaves and stalks, so tilling those back in makes food production roughly carbon neutral. If you take those tillings to make cellulistic ethanol, then the soil carbon is reduced. The carbon that was in the soil ends up in the air.
Of course
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But dude, you completely fail to account for the huge tragedy of people who will close their garage door and leave the engine running to get a good dose of fumes.