Ethanol does it hurt or help?

[aplusmnt]

Reading up some more on Ethanol, seems the list is long on who it hurts and short for who it helps.

Milk prices going up (dairies feed corn)

Cereal prices going up (or boxes get less in them to trick us)

Beef prices rising

Pork prices going up

Chick prices going up

Soybean prices up 36% due to acreage going to corn

Cotton going up 20% less acreage being planted with cotton

Up or headed that way

Bread up

Cookies up

Syrups

Pop up lots of corn syrup in it

soups,

cake mixes,

baked goods and,

plastic,

paper,

adhesives

textiles.

Railroad are being pressured due to ethanol not able to be shipped in existing pipelines so much is shipped on to few railroad lines.

And the real kicker since corn needs much more fertilizer than crops like soybeans, not only is the price (up 35%) of fertilizer going up but Much of that fertilizer will be imported. It takes natural gas to produce nitrogen fertilizers. In 2005 the United States imported 21% of the urea it turns into nitrogen fertilizer from Saudi Arabia and Qatar How much you think they will import now and in the future.

Here we are being sold ethanol at the hope of reducing our dependency on foreign oil from countries like Saudi Arabia but in the end we are importing more of their product as a result of it.

And most of all our tax dollars are going up to subsidies an industry that is on its way to cripple America all for a false sense of security sold to us from politicians and corn lobbyist

 

[63DH8]

I don't like ethanol. It takes too much energy to produce. To me, the most promising is either biodiesel (I HATE that term!) or polymerized synthetic crude oil. The polymerized synthetic crude oil can be made from anything that is biodegradable, including trash, slaughter yard waste, old bails of hay, et al. From there, it can be refined like regular crude oil.

The reason I don’t like the term "bio-diesel" is it's not diesel oil as we are use to calling it. It's simply a type of oil that is usable in a diesel engine. You can use corn oil, sunflower oil, rapeseed oil, and just about any other burnable oily fluid to run a diesel engine. Originally, the diesel engine was designed to run off coal dust. Unfortunately, coal dust was too abrasive for the engine to last any length of time. However, it did run.

Logically, diesel engines is the way to go as the fuel is easy to make and can totally get us off foreign oil. At the same time, we don't have to do without our internal combustion engines. This means there's no lag time while we wait for someone to invent a hydrogen powered engine or something else exotic. I seriously doubt electric powered cars will go far in the US because of how large the US is and how far commuters drive. A diesel-electric is possible for better fuel economy. It's actually a better, more efficient way of using the energy from the fuel to the ground. The engine gets to turn at it's optimal RPM for fuel economy while the electric motors have the ability to vary their RPM through electrical means. Think of the drive train of locomotives but on a smaller scale.

Ever see what it takes to make alcohol? It's quite a bit compared to making oil that's going to be burnt in a diesel engine. Basically, to make diesel engine fuel, you press the oil-bearing nut or seed, filter the oil, then remove the glycerin with lye. All this can be done with a set up that'll fit in the bed of a pick-up truck. Not so with ethanol for gasohol.

The thing about alcohol and bio diesel is they don't address everything else that is made from crude oil. How about tar for roofing? How about asphalt? How about lubricating oil? How about kerosene? How about jet fuel? This is where polymerized synthetic crude oil comes in. Once you have the synthetic crude, you can make everything you did with regular crude oil.

This topic is one that's been an interest of mine for the past 30 years. I've been trying to keep up to date on this as much as I could.

 

[iowahawkeyes]

I live in NW Iowa, heart of corn country. We have a 110 million gallon plant going up 4 miles away. There are ethanol plants all over around here. I just wonder when we will run out of corn... We have a plant close that's looking at celluose instead of corn. Prices for everything have gone up, land rent, fertilizer, chemicals, machinery, land itself has skyrocketed here.

Biodiesel is more efficient to produce, just wish more people would use it, it's much cleaner burning.

 

[MikeC]

Corn is worth more for auto fuel than it is for food. Scary.

 

[63DH8]

One of the biggest problem with ethanol is it's highly subistized by the Federal Government to make it affordable to the public. You can use corn to make fuel for diesel engine easier and cheaper than turning it into ethanol.

The biggest downfall with biodeisel is you have all these gas engines all over the country that need fuel. That's where the polymerized synthetic crude oil comes in. It's more expensive to make than bio-diesel, but it's covers areas that making only bio-diesel or only ethanol. At the moment, it's too early to say if it's cheaper. It's fairly new technology. I'm sure it can be made cheaper because you no longer have to ship the crude from the other side of the world, and you don't have to drill for it.