Quote:
Originally Posted by ChazInMT
Scientific American magazine, and the internet. Where do you do your research?
Why don't you start by going point by point on what I said and tell me why you think Everything I said is false? It's easy to make a blanket statement like that, but I made 7 statements in what I said, and you say they're All wrong. Tell us why so we can discuss it. And tell us where you get your facts, that should be interesting too.
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Your myths are old and rehashed, so I didn't want to but who else is going to...
Do you want me to debunk all of them? okay. Everything has had a push back since the economy slowed down. Oil consumption is down and so are Oil prices, which is bad for alternatives period. Electric is not doing so bad actually, there are two BEV(including the volt) released and they're selling. Will have to wait for the first year figures to know how successful it is though. Needless to say public support for Ethanol is low compared to 10 years ago. OEMs stopped linking to E85 info and new FFV are not announced much anymore.
Only a minor portion of our Corn crop is needed for Food. The rest is inedible feed corn which is used for livestock and Ethanol. I found a graph for Ethanol as a % of the current corn crop (40%) but it didn't include Livestock or Sweet corn so it's worthless.
A byproduct of Ethanol is distiller's grain which is a higher quality feed, it replaces a larger poundage of corn due to higher % protein. It doesn't make up for all of the Corn maybe 2/3 but too much Corn/distiller's grain is bad for livestock. We need more grass fed meat or simply less meat consumption
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There is 7 cents of corn in a $3 pound size package of Corn Cereal. If the price of corn triples that's 21 cents. A partial increase of Oil is larger than a doubling of Corn prices. Oil prices > Corn Prices for food.
Corn Ethanol has been proven to reduce Carbon emissions by 20%,
source DOE. It also reduce Petrol imports by 2/3
DOE. That is imports not Petrol consumption.
Did I miss any? I spent quite a bit of time looking for the actual US subsidy figures but eventually ended up on AlJazeara
before I gave up...All I could find was estimates for the study by the IEA for US subsides in 2010; $60B for Oil. And there are $45B for all renewable programs from the EthanolProducers website. They estimate Ethanol is $35B of those subsidies but that includes $6B in VEETC.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mwebb
[COLOR="Blue"]if ethanol in fuel is such a great thing then
remove all subsidies for ethanol .
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Ethanol isn't the problem, it's the industry and the market. Only a portion of vehicles are marked for running on E85 and the pumps are limited. And many Ethanol groups are more concerning with increasing the "Blend wall" instead of pushing for more E85 pumps or Blender pumps. It will take both to reduce our dependence on Foreign Oil but we will potentially have Hybrid and Electric cars to help offset that even more.
I don't know if the industry has matured enough to be profitable in our current market, I'm not an insider, but they're still in business and the bulk of the current industry is post 2001.
Iowa, actually, offers Gasoline next to Gasohol. It's a state by state program though. I support it but you have to push for it in your state.
And the shelf life argument is silly, Gasoline has a shelf life before it turns into varnish. Ethanol does not seperate unless exposed to air. A sealed container is a requirement for both or they both absorb water. There are additives to fix the phase separation but I wouldn't risk it myself if fuel sits too long.
(That took awhile, I never got around to renewing all my links so I had to refind everything. I didn't have sources for the price of Oil since that should be easy for you to find and the subsidies which is hard to pin because subsidy is a buzz word not a definition. Plus the % of the Corn crop, I hope the high price of Corn encourages alternatives. Lord knows we need them, there's no reason for Corn to be the only feedstock. We all know it's not the best source of Ethanol. I know we can't get very far with just Corn anyway, we're at 40% of a record corn crop and we just passed the point where 10% of our fuel is Ethanol. I'm an Ethanol supporter not a Corn supporter.)