Bush to probe gas gouging

Said By Aron Schatz

Moving to ethanol ONLY fuel. Moving to Hydrogen based fuel cells. Moving infrastructure to nuclear or fusion (soon). The 1970s didn't teach us anything and we are now paying the price for our arrogance.

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The real problem with ethanol from corn is that it requires fuel to make the corn. David Pimentel a professor from Cornell has done the analysis [i]. An acre of U.S. corn can be processed into about 328 gallons of ethanol. But planting, growing and harvesting that much corn requires about 140 gallons of fossil fuels and costs $347 per acre, according to Pimentel. That is $1.05 per gallon of ethanol before the corn even moves off the farm.

The energy economics get worse at the processing plants, where the grain is crushed and fermented. As many as three distillation steps and other treatments are needed to separate the ethanol from the water. All these need energy.

Adding up the energy costs of corn production and its conversion to ethanol, 131,000 BTUs are needed to make 1 gallon of ethanol which has an energy value of only 77,000 BTU. "Put another way," Pimentel says, "about 70 percent more energy is required to produce ethanol than the energy that actually is in ethanol. Every time you make 1 gallon of ethanol, there is a net energy loss of 54,000 BTU."

Overall ethanol from corn costs about $1.74 per gallon to produce, compared with about 95 cents to produce a gallon of petrol. "That helps explain why fossil fuels -- not ethanol -- are used to produce ethanol" Pimentel says. "The growers and processors can't afford to burn ethanol to make ethanol. Drivers couldn't afford it, either, if it weren't for government subsidies to artificially lower the price."

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For reference, there are an estimated 600 million cars on the planet. Want to work those numbers with me?
600 million cars
Average car requires 11 acres corn per year (three field rotation = 33 acres per car per year).
19.8 billion acres of corn required per year for all the cars now (increasing at 40 million cars a year, or (1.3 billion acres).
Earth's land surface area = 36.8 billion acres

Said By Myself

High school chemistry tells you why hydrogen is a waste of resources: Transitive Loss of Energy dictates that converting one energy source to another results in energy lost. Somewhere around 90% of man-made hydrogen is produced with fossil fuels. Hydrogen is a more efficient fuel, but not enough of one to balance out the energy lost making it in the first place, aside from the obvious fossil fuel issues. In addition, it would be impossible to convert the hundreds of millions of non-hydrogen cars. Cars that run on natural gas such as propane is basically switching it from one non-renewable energy source to another.