Here is how to make lots of biofuel; a solar concentrator in summer attains temperatures that break cellulose to fuels like methanol. In effect, we can store the hot summer sun in a chemical.

We can get biomass from the oceans. That is where the CO2, heat, and nutrients are. We need to save our farm lands and clean the oceans. Insurance companies might appreciate cooler oceans.

Methanol has been seen as the fuel base of the future for over 50 years.

Edwards launches plan to boost US ethanol use

Posted By: James the Older
Date: Sun 4 Jun 2006 9:15 am

Been seeing the cute ethanol ads lately? Did you see the Primetime piece on ethanol? Sounds great, doesn’t it? Fuel independence coming from farmers to boot. Less pollution, lower cost, Smokey the Bear smiling again, the ducks landing in clean water and the kids breathing fresh air. Absolutely wonderful.

Too bad it is all BS. Ethanol is a political joke, wasting billions of dollars of our money on something that doesn’t work, and never will. Is this blasphemy? Maybe political blasphemy, but physical truth. First of all, I work in the area of alternative fuels research, and I have to compete with the ethanol boys for dollars, both from the commercial sector and the government sector. Before you jump in and start accusing me of sour grapes, be advised that I could make a very nice living making ethanol if I so chose; but most knowledgeable people, including the Cato Institute and the Sierra Club agree with what I am about to present. That’s right, the Sierra Club and the Cato Institute, the most radical GREEN organizations on Earth are AGAINST ethanol.

Now why would anyone be against a fuel that is made by farmers, reduces emissions (from cars), and gives us independence from people we hate? Simply because it creates more emissions (manufacturing) and makes us more dependent on the people we hate, as well as making the oil companies richer than ever. It does make the farmers happy, and I live on a farm.

First of all, it cost $2.24/gallon to make ethanol and only $0.63/gallon to make gasoline (the difference in the $2.74/gallon current price and the $0.63 is a lot of state and federal taxes, and, believe it or not, a small profit for the explorer, the driller, the producer, the raw transporter, the refinery, the pipeline, the distributor, and the retailer). Since the feds and state don’t tax ethanol, and ethanol doesn’t have the intense infrastructure of gasoline, it appears to be price competitive because of the government subsidy. That will change once the infrastructure is in place. and your fuel cost will skyrocket.

We use 174 million gallons of gasoline a day in the US. We produce about 75 million tons of corn a year in the US, and that is 39% of the world’s production, of which we consume 26% internally in this country on things other than ethanol. It requires 99,119 BTU’s to produce one gallon of ethanol which contains 77,000 BTU’s. That’s 1 1/3 gallons of gasoline to produce 1 gallon of ethanol, which is approximately 50% less efficient than gasoline in your engine due to BTU content and other restraints. That is just in the distillation process. One acre of U.S. corn field yields about 9,400 pounds of corn, which in turn produces 362 gallons of ethanol. Setting aside the environmental implications (which are substantial), the financial costs already begin to mount. To plant, grow, and harvest the corn takes about 140 gallons of fossil fuel and costs about $347 per acre. Even before the corn is converted to ethanol, the feedstock alone costs $0.69 per gallon of ethanol, be it corn or corn stalks.

To produce the 261,000,000 gallons of ethanol it takes to replace the 174,000,000 gallons of gasoline we currently use, we will need about 260 million acres of corn harvested annually, instead of the current 73 million acres. But 19 million acres is consumed internally, and we know we aren’t going on a diet, so in reality, we will need an additional 361 million acres if we cease all exports of corn, 333 million acres if we don’t. That’s a 4.5 fold increase. Since the Farm Bureau is proclaiming the ever decreasing number of farmers, and lessening acreage available for farmland due to housing development, that just isn’t going to happen.

To grow all that corn, we will need fertilizer and weed control. At 137 lbs/acre of ammonia and 1 lb/acre of atrazine, we will need almost 13 million tons more fertilizer, and dump more than 93.5 million tons of atrazine into the environment every year. (The potential health effects of atrazine read like the small print in a drug ad: congestion of the heart, lungs, and kidneys; low blood pressure; muscle spasms; weight loss; damage to adrenal glands. And that’s in the short term.) Ammonia releases into the atmosphere would increase enormously, and in states like North Carolina, where ammonia levels on the East Coast are already dangerously high, the effect would be unpleasant to say the least. Eutrophication of our rivers would be a catastrophic problem.

The Environmental Protection Agency discovered in May 2002 that factories converting corn to ethanol were releasing carbon monoxide, methanol, and some carcinogens — formaldehyde and acetic acid, to name a couple — into the atmosphere in much greater amounts than anyone expected. it isn’t a clean fuel after all.

By the way, did I mention that we will have to increase our oil imports substantially to produce all that ethanol? Remember that it takes 1 1/3 gallons of fossil fuel to produce 1 gallon of ethanol, not counting the fuel required to plant and harvest the corn. Does this sound insane to anyone but me, the Sirra Club, and the Cato Institute? Or do they plan on burning 2 gallons of old ethanol to produce 1 gallon of new ethnaol?

So what is the answer? How about fuels like biodiesel and methanol? Biodiesel appears to have little or no downside except supply, and is one of my personal favorites. On the other hand, methanol can be made by thermophilically digesting animal manures and other organic wastes, converting it to methane, and converting the methane to methanol using atmospheric plasma generators. Either way, both are better alternatives than ethanol.

STOP the ETHANOL DRAIN!! It is a waste of money and resources. Researchers typically go where the money is, with only a few privately funded mavericks going off on their own. As long as ethanol is the “toast of the day”, the money will go into ethanol research, and unless someone re-invents chemistry and physics, ethanol will NEVER be the answer to our problems, and the ethanol effort actually makes our energy problem worse day by day, while draining mine and your pockets of our hard earned cash, and lots of it.

It is better, and wiser, to drink ethanol than to burn it in your vehicle.

Semper Fi
Jim

That is the profound export dependency of the crops we subsidize. We grow far more than we need for domestic purposes. So we depend on exports to market the rest. It can be 20 percent, 30 percent, 40 percent of production or much more, depending on the crop and the year.

But those markets aren’t very dependable, and our domestic production is continually increasing.

Which brings me to the new policy framework for debating farm subsidies: it is the context not of saving the family farm, or rural America, or feeding the world–a myth I presume I needn’t address in this audience.

The context is globalization. And the proper policy framework, domestically, is trade adjustment assistance.

And internationally, it is the dispute resolution and negotiation processes of the WTO. Brazil’s challenges to the U.S. cotton program–in which EWG played an important role–and its separate challenge to the European Union’s sugar program, introduce the other major new pressure factor for reform. (Budget crunches, of course, have been with us, and gamed, since time immemorial.)

Over the past few decades, farm policy makers have made a series of political decisions that obligate U.S. taxpayers to insulate some farmers from discontinuities in export markets. We insulate them, that is to say, from a globalized market that the entire subsidy crop sector is largely built around.

Crop export dependency should be thought of as the opposite side of the same globalization coin as import vulnerability. It is a reality of globalization, and we have known about it, and paid dearly for it through crop subsidies, since Earl Butz told farmers to plant fencerow to fencerow in the 1970s.

But instead of talking about this central problem within the narrow confines of farm subsidy program history and rhetoric, we should step back and think of it as another problem of trade adjustment. Specifically, trade adjustment assistance. And we should rethink and redesign farm subsidies accordingly.

Which brings me to those three people waiting in your office back home. All three want a loan, and because time is short, you meet with all three of them at once.

One is a large-scale commodity producer. You know just how large scale because you’ve gone on our database. You explain to the group how this farmer, and perhaps his wife and other relatives, received hundreds of thousands of subsidy dollars every year for a decade, with basically no limit. You explain how he’ll get those subsidies into the future, and how they’ve boosted his land values and net worth. You explain, in fact, how he’ll get tens of thousands every year no matter what happens to prices, income or trade.

The second customer takes this in. He is a small to mid-size farmer, maybe just starting out growing a commodity crop, maybe someone who grows something else. Not much to see on the farm subsidy database. Maybe, you say, the Farmers Home Administration would be a better place to look for help.

Finally, there’s a man–or a woman–who has worked hard all his or her life and supported the family at a factory, or a software firm, or a textile mill. He made $50,000 a year until he lost his job to imports.

You tell him that in addition to his unemployment insurance, which will pay a fraction of his salary, he can petition the Labor Dept. (in groups of three or more workers) for trade adjustment assistance. If he qualifies, he can receive training, limited income support amounting to a few thousand dollars on average, a job search allowance, and maybe a relocation allowance.

He’s one of hundreds of thousand of workers to apply for trade adjustment assistance. Including, recently, some farmers and aquaculture operations under a new trade adjustment assistance program for agriculture. But we are talking about a small amount of money and modest additional assistance for most workers who lose a job through trade.

Now as a banker, you know which one of these prospective customers you’re most likely to do business with. So do they.

But is it fair, is it right, for that big agribusiness operator to get so much trade-related adjustment assistance, for so many years, when those other hard working people get so little?

Does it not make sense, in the interest of fairness to all workers and to taxpayers, to combine trade-triggered commodity subsidy payments with trade adjustment assistance programs for all other workers including the new one added for agriculture, and create a single pot?

Does it make sense to then scale commodity programs back, target them and limit them to working farms, and limit the duration for which a recipient could receive support–like we do with everyone else?

And might other forms of assistance, such as conservation payments, and actuarially sound crop or income insurance expand to fill part of the gap for all farmers, not just the subsidized, dependent few at the top?

By the way, as of today (May 10, 2007) the Iowa interior elevator price for corn is $3.21 per bushel while the farmers’ cost to produce and transport it is about $3.00. He works all year to get yield a 6.5% net profit. You wouldn’t work and invest all your money for that kind of a return - would you?

So, what I’m trying to tell you, Rick, is that you’re full of crap when you say the farmers are getting fat on America’s fuel woes.