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Originally Posted by EcoVan
The studies done many years ago at IIT in Chicago regarding ethanol use are quite interesting. The only area which yielded a net gain or balance in energy use ( energy used for production versus output) was in Agricultural within a radius of maybe 30 miles of the production location. That radius has probably grown with improvements in diesel mpg of trucks, but the fundamentals still hold true.
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Oil wells and refineries are also within a long radius of the end users too.
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The other really interesting side discovery was that the area needed to be under ethanol producing crops to run the farm equipment was basically the same as the land area that needed to be under production to feed the horses that were used in the old days.
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Corn-based ethanol is not so bad at all, considering the distillation grain is even better to feed livestock than fresh corn, leading to a higher gain of weight within a given timeframe. And in other countries such as Brazil where sugarcane is the most common feedstock for ethanol, the leftovers are often used as fuel for thermal powerplants supplying both the sugar and ethanol mills and being integrated to the national electrical grid.
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Ethanol proved to be a negative energy source for nearly all applications, so it should be left to history, except for agricultural use.
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I am favorable to ethanol, not only for agricultural use to which I honestly prefer biodiesel or even straight vegetable oils (either fresh or as reclaimed cooking grease). Most people have been fooled to believe ethanol is some sort of "evil", while it can be integrated to food production and eventually resort to some residues and leftovers of the industrial processing of many crops intended for food.