Think Ethanol Is A Safe Alternative Fuel? Think Again- Read This

The great danger of confronting peak oil and global warming isn't that we will sit on our collective asses and do nothing while civilization collapses, but that we will plunge after "solutions" that will make our problems even worse.
One of these dead end solutions is corn-derived Ethanol which is the favorite of politicians, corporations and media.
Ethanol doesn't burn cleaner than gasoline, nor is it cheaper. Our current ethanol production represents only 3.5 percent of our gasoline consumption -- yet it consumes twenty percent of the entire U.S. corn crop, causing the price of corn to double in the last two years and raising the threat of hunger in the Third World. And the increasing acreage devoted to corn for ethanol means less land for other staple crops, giving farmers in South America an incentive to carve fields out of tropical forests that help to cool the planet and stave off global warming.
Three factors are driving the ethanol hype. The first is panic: Many energy experts believe that the world's oil supplies have already peaked or will peak within the next decade. The second is election-year politics. With the first vote to be held in Iowa, the largest corn-producing state in the nation, former skeptics like Sens. Hillary Clinton and John McCain now pay tribute to the wonders of ethanol. Earlier this year, Sen. Barack Obama pleased his agricultural backers in Illinois by co-authoring legislation to raise production of biofuels to 60 billion gallons by 2030. A few weeks later, rival Democrat John Edwards, who was staking his campaign on a victory in the Iowa caucus, upped the ante to 65 billion gallons by 2025.
The third factor stoking the ethanol frenzy is the war in Iraq, which has made energy independence a universal political slogan. Unlike coal, another heavily subsidized energy source, ethanol has the added political benefit of elevating the American farmer to national hero. It takes some talent to be such a good spin master that you can put the American farmer growing corn as “the top of the spear on the war against terrorism as a former CIA director (James Woolsey) did but he did it! So, if you love America, how can you not love ethanol?
Well, I love America but I sure as heck don’t love ethanol! As a gasoline substitute, ethanol has big problems: Its energy density is one-third less than gasoline, which means you have to burn more of it to get the same amount of power. It also has a nasty tendency to absorb water, so it can't be transported in existing pipelines and it must be distributed by truck or rail, which majorly adds to the costs involved.
Nor is all ethanol created equal. Brazilian ethanol derived from sugar cane produces 8 units of energy compared to one unit of energy utilized for production which is an advantage over petroleum which is in a 5 to 1 ratio. But corn ethanol only outputs 1.3 units for every one unit consumed in the energy production process which makes it pretty much a wash and useless. "Corn ethanol is essentially a way of recycling natural gas," says Robert Rapier, an oil-industry engineer who runs the R-Squared Energy Blog.
But as seen in an article in today's New York Times, residents of River Bend Farm, a suburb of Alabama lying near a biodiesel plant, noticed a black yucky slime that was fouling the Black Warrior River. It turns out that the stuff was 450 times higher than regulations for black yuck goo of this nature allow and that it had traveled two miles from its source.
It was a unholy mix of oil and glycerin, emissions of biodiesel production. They deplete oxygen in waters very rapidly, killing fish. And the slime is equally deadly to birds as the Valdez spill. Alabama isn't alone in this problem. In January a Missouri businessman was charged for a discharge that murdered 25,000 fish and wiped out the population of fat pocketbook mussels, which is on the endangered species list. Can you say... "OOOPS"???
More recently, a study from the University of British Columbia predicted that a boost in corn production for ethanol will worsen what is known as the "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico, the dead zone is a location with so little oxygen that sea life literally suffocates. And today's "Des Moines Register" reports that Cargill, Inc., has been levied a $100,000 penalty--the largest an Iowa biofuels plant has ever been hit--for multiple violations involving toxic discharges.
Despite the serious drawbacks of ethanol, some technological visionaries believe that the fuel can be done right. "Corn ethanol is just a platform, the first step in a much larger transition we are undergoing from a hydrocarbon-based economy to a carbohydrate-based economy," says Vinod Khosla, a pioneering venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. Next-generation corn- ethanol plants, he argues, will be much more efficient and environmentally friendly. He points to a company called E3 BioFuels that just opened an ethanol plant in Mead, Nebraska. The facility runs largely on biogas made from cow manure, and feeds leftover grain back to the cows, making it a "closed-loop system" -- one that requires very few fossil fuels to create ethanol.
Still, biofuels are, at best, a huge gamble. They may help cushion the fall when cheap oil vanishes, but if we rely on ethanol to save the day, we could soon find ourselves forced to make a choice between feeding our SUVs and feeding children in the Third World. And we all know how that decision will go.
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Article Source: http://www.search4allinfo.com

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