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Chuck as for the cartoon If you read what I said was corn ethanol is not so great. The better ethanol crops are better at converting sun into energy. Do not need the pesticides and chemical fertilizers corn does also they can grow on land not suitable for food crops. As for the water used if sewage water is used you are using water that's not drinkable and takes a lot of energy to process. Plants will help clean the sewage water and grow better because of it. AS for how much land would be needed studies have been done that proves that it is possible to produce all the ethanol we need and it would not use all our farm land.
Ethanol can be made from food waste that's stuff that would go to land fill if not made into ethanol, more then one company does this.
Anyone can make ethanol this changes who has control of the fuel supply and where the money is going.
I worked with a group that was not a big aggro or oil company just a bunch of people that make ethanol on their day off. They make their fuel from bad wine, most of the wine is made locally. In the county they are located LOTS of wine its produced and its estimated that 1% of the wine produced is bad/waste that would make about 1 million gallons of ethanol. Their source for wine wants to give them more and faster then they can process.
Yes you can make ethanol without any petroleum input Brazil does.
Nerys You do not need to buy a new car just to be able to use ethanol I ran my old Subaru on 50% ethanol no changes and it even ran better. The only problem I had with using ethanol is I had to change my fuel filter because it cleaned all the gum out my fuel system. To be able to run a vehicle on high blends of ethanol or 100% you plug a little box into the fuel injectors that changes the signal going to the injectors I have done it.
The reason you cant run a gas engine on high % of ethanol with out tuning is it needs more fuel or it runs to lean why is this its because their is oxygen molecules in the fuel this also makes it burn more complete and in turn cleaner. If an engine's compression ratio is increased the engine will run more efficient on ethanol. Ethanol can handle 15-1 compression ratio. I ran a 5hp Briggs and Stratton engine on ethanol all I did was close down the choke so the engine was not getting as much air, you could not tell it was not running on gasoline other then it smelled better. The other advantage of ethanol is it burns cooler so your engine will last longer.
Also Nerys you said a gasoline engine can only run on gas that's no true ethanol, methanol, propane, methane and wood gas will run on gas engines granted not all will work with out a few mods.
As for electric cars I like them and have worked on building/converting EVs but they have their own problems. Most electricity produced is not clean or green and very inefficient to produce. Another problem with EVs is batteries, what about all the energy to mine refine and ship from other parts of the world. What do we do with all the dead batteries?
UFO as for cellulose ethanol I am not buying into that just yet. Millions of dollars have been spent on research over many years and still no tried and true method for making it. Also the one who patents the organism/process to make cellulose ethanol has all the control.
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