Corn based fuels a really bad idea?

Driving up the price of crops is popular in farming states -- remember Dairy Boy Proxmire gunning for NASA's budget, because it "took money away" from dairy subsidies?

You'd think the "bekauz itz good fer you" nannies would rather see them make fuel from rye or barley -- the stuff that's been used to make alcohol for centuries.

Burning alcohol doesn't have any technical benefits over gasolene. If the use of local energy sources was the goal, there's coal burning under Pennsylvania nobody's even bothered to put out.

For that matter, check out http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1976afr..symp..449S and http://www.ext.colostate.edu/pubs/farmmgt/05002.html -- (adds volumes to the definition of a ricer's "phart pipe" )

(Would biofueled ricers really run on rice wine? A saki Subaru? A KawaSaki?)

This whole green/energy thing is shaping up like a bunch of uninformed paper pushers abusing the public, just because they can.

Because the public doesn't know any better either. The post-mergers press and fifty years of Federal fiddling with local schools has produced one of the most poorly educated generations in US history.

And the US isn't alone on this. I watch the beeb and wonder what happened to the Brits. (They seem determined to attack their best shows -- like Top Gear.) Brazil has also jumped on the ethanol bandwagon big time (although I don't know if they have alternatives like coal they're ignoring). The EU is pushing the anti-tobacco buttons (which may be economically driven) and pushing PC-isms at the public and at racing venues.

The WHO is frantic about bird flu and mad cow diseases. But has anyone else noticed a global pandemic of the dumbs?

(Maybe this thread belongs in P&R, or silver?)

 

Those points, while being far from newly discovered, are mystifying in their lack of press. John Stossel (sp?) finally did a piece that covered many of these issues, but was seen (and comprehended) by far too few.
A couple of points that you missed, and I can't recall if Stossel hit them or not, were:
a) Ethanol's Energy/Volume inefficiency. While it's not only more cost-intensive to produce, it also requires more volume of the stuff to produce a simlar amount of energy as gasoline. Those 20 gallons of Ethanol-heavy E85 (or ANY amount of Eth. filler) will only get you a proportional percentage of how far you got on the same 20 gallon tank of gasoline - and it ain't gonna be a triple-digit percentage, either.
And it probably cost you more.
b) Brazil has been using ethanol for years, as they have been making it from Sugar, which they grow without the disincentives used here to keep the production down, and thus the price bolstered. Sugar cane is significantly more efficient for making alcohol, IF it makes market sense to grow it. Our current economic policies here kill that market sense at the moment,so it falls to corn, by default (and more than a bit of political wrangling). As somone once said, "Follow the money".

That's brilliant !!!!!!

 

Diverting one of the world's major food crops to "feel good" fuel is a bad idea.

There are significant organic material sources that can be fermented into ethanol without impacting the price and availability of food.

 

corn for fuel is a crap idea. u can get more energy from other sources of grown crops.

switch grass yields about 450 gallons of alcohol per acre, Corn about 200-400, sugar beets 400-700, sugarcane 550, cattails (wild) 1075 (managed) 2500-10000, cassava 1600-2000, sorghum 3500

I don't like the idea of using any of them. Electric cars are the future. No more complicated 1000 part fuel burning engines. Less parts=more reliable. Zero emmissions! Electric cars will kill a lot of auto related industries. So lets get over that & embrace the future.

 

You're right.

Sugar cane is a better candidate for ethanol. Higher energy yields! Ethanol is our savior... too bad idiots are bashing it.

What about the battery fallout? All those heavy metals everywhere? Or do you know of a cheaper energy containment cells? And... where will the electricity come from? Coal burning power plants?

 

The lithium batteries are "deactivated" through a "hydrosaline" process which renders them non-hazardous. The remains are interned into a double lined environmental protection facility.

 

Somewhere around 4th or 5th grade we learned that steam Locomotive engines were VERY inefficient. Yet compared to a coal powered steam turbine driving a generator to make electricity, the steam Locomotive is probably about 100% more efficient at converting heat into motive force.

If you burned corn directly to produce heat, to heat your home for example, it would be pretty inexpensive and fairly efficient, depending on the furnace. A bushel of corn has roughly 400,000 BTU of energy. But what if you first converted the corn into alcohol? It takes about 2.6 bushels of corn to make one gallon of alcohol, and current figures work out to about 120 bushels per acre. So at best, each acre could yield about 47 gallons of alcohol. So now all you have done is converted 2.6 bushels of corn that had a potential energy of 1,200,000 BTU down to something that will give you only about 78,000 BTU. We just lost 15 times the available energy the corn could have produced directly.

Oh, but were going to use electricity to make the alcohol? Coal produced electricity, or oil or gas produced energy?

If we had steam powered automobiles that were fired directly with corn, the car would probably be somewhere around 4 times more fuel efficient than burning alcohol fuel directly in an internal combustion engine to power a car of the same mass and drag. If we powered the boiler with coal, the difference could be over double that efficiency. In other words, 13 pounds of coal burned in a boiler to power your vehicle directly, would probably put you more than 8 times farther down the road, than burning the same amount of coal at the electric generating plant, which boils water to make steam, steam to drive a turbine, the turbine to drive an electric generator, the generator to produce electrical energy which is used to convert 2.6 bushels of corn into one gallon of alcohol, which now has the available energy of four pounds of coal. This does not even take into count the line losses carrying the electric power, or the energy lost through transformers and power substations.

Pound of coal = 10,377 BTU
Pound of dry corn = 8250 BTU
gallon of gasoline = 125,000BTU
Pound of alcohol
1 bushel of corn = 56 pounds, 462,000 BTU per bushel
1 Kilowatt = 3,412 BTU
Gallon of alcohol = 78,000 BTU
Energy input (loss) to make one gallon of alcohol = 131,000 BTU
Energy lost making one gallon of alcohol = 1,248,200 BTU

Do the math. The more you look into the issue, the worse it gets. Converting an acre of corn into 46 gallons of low energy alcohol is totally retarded. Only a PHD with some twisted agenda could find a way to double talk around it to convince people to believe its a good deal. And if you think this is stupid, try calculating the energy loss in charging car batteries with coal produced electric power. Its got to be about 4 times worse. If average miles per year driven today is 15,000 miles, with average fuel economy of 20 mpg, thats 750 gallons of fuel. If we burned E-85, we would consume 637 gallons of alcohol, or almost 14 acres of corn crop per vehicle. Add in the fuel the farrmer burned plowing his fields, traveling to get the seed, petrochemicals to debug and deweed it, avgas to power the airplane to spray it, harvesting, drying, and transporting it, and it gets way beyond idiotic. The Government is trying to subsidise the farmer by hiding all these costs and passing it off to the taxpayers. Bad idea? You decide. I think the people starving overseas would have to ask what the hell were doing over here.

Its really simple. What makes an internal engine efficient is that it produces power internally by the direct burning of fuel. Alcohol fuel turns it back into an external combustion engine, with energy converted by an external combustion engine. Corn is food, and should be used as such, especially with people starving in the world. To use our resources so inefficiently just to haul our fat butts around is ludicrous considering the circumstances.

 

+1. Artvonne is very right.

In addition to what Artvonne quotes above, someone also calculated it would take every square inch of the US, EVERY square inch and part of Mexico and Canada, to grow the corn necessary to feed just the US's fuel requirements. And those crops would have to be 100% grade-A, no draughts, disease, etc. And since Canada and Mexico would probably balk, we'd have to invade.

You have to look at the entire product chain from very beginning to very end to see if a replacement candidate for anything is really a good idea. When you do, rarely does a replacement candidate make sense, but nuclear power does come to mind.

Biofuel, at least corn based, is perhaps one of the worst ideas to come along in a long, long time.

 

just another make work bondoggle same as the r-12 freon phaseout. the real problem with it is the auto manufacturers are devoting man hours putting out e 85 compatable vehicles that could be better utilised on developing the electric car.

 

Brilliant points and one of the most well argued posts I have read here. Corn is simply among the worst choices for bio-fuel as it yields 354 gallons per acre, or roughly half the beet and cane yields which are at 714 gallons per acre from sugar beets and 665 gallons per acre for sugarcane.

Using corn as our leading derivative for ethanol was dreamed up by lobbyists. $5.7 billion in federal tax credits is slated to help support the ethanol market over the next 4 years. Corn ethanol does reduce atmosphere-warming carbon emissions, but environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club say it actually is worse than gasoline in making smog. Meanwhile, builders of the nearly 200 ethanol manufacturing facilities under construction or planned are being tempted to power their facilities with coal. That's because it's less expensive than their current choice, natural gas. Coal power would wipe out or reduce the greenhouse gains of ethanol. Brazil's widely consumed sugar-cane ethanol on the other hand, is almost eight times more fossil energy efficient to produce than the US corn-based stuff. Its ethanol manufacturing is powered not by fossil fuels, but by cane-stalk residue. Problem is, there is no way to work in lobbyist money for sugar-cane ethanol.

 

Well, IMVHO the electric car is just as bad if not worse. We still make electricity with coal fired steam generators. Think about it. This is like powering your electric lawnmower with a gas powered generator, only its WAY WAY worse than that even. Its not a gas powered generator, its a coal fired boiler driving a steam engine powered generator, that powers your electric lawnmower. Oh but an electric car adds some more steps into it.

A battery charger, a real good one, might be about 90% efficient. An electric motor might be about 80% efficient. If the car needed 1000 watts to move, it would take a motor with an input of of 1250 watts. The batteries are maybe 90% efficient, so you would need to put in 1380 watts to get 1250 watts out. Now add your battery charger efficiency, and the power needed is about 1500 watts. Thats an overall loss rate of 500 watts for every 1000 needed. When you back up farther and consider the power plant making the electricity, its not an electric. Its a coal powered obstacle course designed to waste as much energy as is humanly possible. Age and corrosion is going to push all those numbers further up, making it less efficient as it goes along.

The only way the electric car seems feasible, is with nuclear power. But then we are going to have to deal with a mountain of toxic recycling waste from the 40 to 50 times increase in batteries as well as the hazards they impose to accidents and fires. Hydrogen, while not very efficient to produce, may be our best single hope for the future. Its still far more efficient than charging car batteries or cooking corn.

 

Electric only makes sense, if the power generation is something with low emissions, e.g. solar, wind, geothermal...I leave out nuclear for the reasons Artvonne already covered.

Governments are starting to realize that EtOH is not such a great idea.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/01/18/business/biofuels.php

 

We are getting there without nuclear. It's not by huge leaps but money (& I'ts BIG MONEY) is being spent for a non-nuclear electric solution.
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Solar isnt practical because its not reliable. I would rather turn off more lights than see the planet covered with mirrors, windmills, or any other ugly POS. One power plant standing out in the countryside is bad enough, but thousands of square miles of mirrors and propellors is not acceptable. Our local neighborhood power plant puts out 2400 megawatts. Thats 218 times what that solar plant produces. You would have mirrors as far as the eye could see in every direction to equal that amount of power, and at night it would be useless.

 

How many years worth of operation does it take solar to offset the resources used in the manufacture of the panels?

 

I would estimate the environmental impact of using corn for fuel is going to wind up being greater than if we just kept on using gasoline. We've been doing the same thing ever since Jamestown. Back then they were making tons of money on tobacco so thats all the grew. They starved because they hadn't grown enough food. The huge amount of corn we're already growing is driving up the cost of food and the run off down the Mississippi is wreaking havoc on the gulf. Algae is the best source of crop based fuel but the true fuel of the future will be hydrogen IMO.

 

Electric cars are very popular with urban politicos because it moves the pollution to the power plant.
(e.g. NIMBY: "Not In *My* Back Yard")

Import electricty, export dead batteries, let somebody else deal with the problems.
(Sure, you can talk about "deactivating" lithium -- but you still have the waste to dispose of. A gasolene engine can last decades, and then is recycleable steel or alumium. A battery lasts a few years, then gets "deactivated" and tossed on the dump.)

Electric motors have to get a lot lighter (superconductor ceramics?) before they're well suited to mobile applications. (Look how long it took to even get electric window motors in performance cars.)
Electric energy storage has to get both lighter and more resusable.

How many economic bubbles have we seen burst, because people were sold on the notion that "new and neato" was "better"?

Burning hydrogen in air doesn't generate "just water". Putting air under any kind of thermal stress produces NOx compounds.

I'm still holding out hopes for catalytic fusion. We've had "hard way" fusion since the '50s. Cold fusion theories have been around since the 19th century. How quickly could we get cold fusion if we weren't diverting resources into dead end technologies to create temporary artificial market "blips" for special interest groups?

On the other hand, one great untapped oil source is all the waste grease from fast burger joints.
(Actually, there was a guy that built a "serial" hybrid Hummer -- an electric hummer with the electricity supplied by a gas turbine generator powered by used french fry grease.)

 

I agree with u with the unsightliness of mirrors in society. But the key to solar doesn't lie within our communities but in our deserts. If 10% of the Sahari was used in current solar tech it would supply the entire world's electrity needs currently. Molten salts heated during the daylight hours supply electricity during the night. As of right now these solar plants increases the price of electrity about 2 - 3 times the price of electrity now. This price will be reduced as newer tech comes along & it the componets used to create these plants become more mass produced. Everything is custom made now, very pricey.
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So, what you are saying is to pour some salt water on them and then bury them in the car equivalent of Yucca Mountain?

If the salt brine got them "deactivated", then what is the double-blind crypt for? Wouldn't it be about as good to just dump them into the deep blue say (it is reportedly salty...)

Sorry to be a little of the non-believer, but we see so many over-simplifications of complex things nowadays.

 

Here is the complicated answer from Sony & Sumitomo Metal in Japan who created the recycling process for lithium-ion battery recycling.

The method relates to a pyrometallurgical and hydrometallurgical process for the recovery and recycling of lithium and vanadium compounds from a material comprising spent rechargeable lithium batteries, particularly lithium metal gel and solid polymer electrolyte rechargeable batteries. The method involves providing a mass of the material, hardening it by cooling at a temperature below room temperature, comminuting the mass of cooled and hardened material, digesting with an acid its ashes obtained by incineration, or its solidified salts obtained by molten salt oxidation, or the comminuted mass itself, to give a mother liquor, extracting vanadium compounds from the mother liquor, separating heavy metals and aluminium therefrom, and precipitating lithium carbonate from the remaining solution.

 

And here I thought it sounded terribly complicated the way others had explained it.

I guess it isn't, really -

 

Makes you wonder if corn is being marketed as fuel primarily because the infrastructure is in place not because its particularly well suited to the task.

 

I agree with many of your comments (how many Happy Meals does it take to run a Hummer for 300 miles?); however, hydrogen based fuel cells are not a high temperature combustion process, i.e. no NOx is formed from a fuel cell.
http://physics.nist.gov/MajResFac/NIF/pemFuelCells.html Air and water exits at 85C. NOX formation occurs at temps in the hundreds.

 

Who needs to worry about peak oil because peak corn is far more rapid.

Can you grow corn fast enough to cover the need is the question.