"Biofuel boom raises tough questions"

[thewayne]

A decent Q&A/discussion of the "advantages" of biofuel/ethanol vs gasoline. I particularly liked this quote:

IS ETHANOL BETTER THAN GASOLINE?

For all the environmental and economic troubles it causes, gasoline turns out to be a remarkably efficient automobile fuel. The energy required to pump crude out of the ground, refine it and transport it from oil well to gas tank is about 6 percent of the energy in the gasoline itself.


TFA (The Fine Article) goes on to say that it takes about four gallons of ethanol used in the raising/harvesting/etc. of corn to produce three gallons of ethanol.

Uh-huh.

Doesn't that mean that it is -25% fuel efficient to produce?

It was my understanding that sugar cane was the ideal crop for producing ethanol and that it was more energy efficient than oil production, but TFA doesn't mention it. Heaven forbid that the gub'mint should reduce or eliminate, nay, even discourage!, the production of corn!

The concept of fuel production competing with food production concerns me.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/ETHANOL_QA

Comments

[deborak]

Ethanol is such a scam. Here's one of my favorite quotes from an article about it.

"President Bush proposes that we replace 20 percent of our current gasoline consumption with ethanol over the next decade. But it's well-known that even if we turned every kernel of American corn into ethanol, it would displace only 12 percent of our annual gasoline consumption. The effect on global warming, like Kyoto, would be too small to measure, though the U.S. would become the first nation in history to burn up its food supply to please a political mob."

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=8021

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

I know. It's amazing how much money the gov't gives to corn producers, then add in the buckets they give people not to grow things!

As I understand it, sugar cane is also an amazingly self-regenerating crop that's pretty easy on the land, but why should we bother with that? Might as well grow hemp. ;-)

[thedragonweaver.livejournal.com]

Totally on a tangent, but you know that there was a huge slave revolt a couple of thousand years ago in the Fertile Crescent? These slaves were producing sugar cane, but first they had to hack out a couple of feet of salty soil— the result of thousands of years of cultivation and irrigation.

I'm not sure why I thought of that. Maybe it's because growing sugar isn't necessarily easy.