Will food prices be that proverbial straw?

[Mike Irwin]

Also think about the new ethanol production methods that are being developed.

The old "brew in an open vat and distill over an open fire" isn't going to be the only method of production for long.

New production methods have the potential for increasing yield and reducing the amount of energy required to turn out a gallon of ethanol.

As demand advances, production methods also advance.

A good example is penicillin.

At the beginning of WW II the corn agar vat process was brand new. It required something like 5 days and 30 tons of agar just to produce 1 ton of penicillin.

By 1945 that was down to something like 1 day and 10 tons to produce 3 tons of penicillin.

Ultimately, is ethanol the "answer" to all of our energy needs?

No. Anyone who believes that is an idiot.

But is ethanol a potentially viable method of reducing our dependence on foreign oil?

Yeah, it is.

 

[jimpeel]

Here is a site that has a good chart on the btu output of various forms of fuel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline

While we have spoken at length on the merits or demerits of ethanol we have yet to address what the political implications of escalating food costs will be. Could we see food riots in this country and general discontent which would threaten the very fabric of the republic?

 

[jimpeel]

MDman

well we agreed on the same thing, ethanol absorbs water

The problem with ethanol, however, is that it absorbs moisture directly from the air which surrounds it.

 

[jimpeel]

Also think about the new ethanol production methods that are being developed.

Yes, there are great hopes for ethanol from algae

Recent announcements about Algae-to-Biodiesel are looking very interesting, and potentially vastly superior to crop-based options in many ways. Said to be up to or over 500 times more productive per acre than corn, algae would solve the competition-for-food dilemma, but also the serious soil mining and desertification issue that the mainstream media has been slow to pick up on to date.

A New Zealand company, Aquaflow Bionomic, recently demonstrated the successful development of it’s B5 Fuel Blend in the country’s capital, and Solix in conjunction with the Colarado State University are developing their own Algae-to-Biodiesel process.

With the incredibly rapid rate of construction of new corn ethanol plants, and the great deal of uncertainty (unlikelihood?) that politicians will heed Lester Brown’s warnings, could someone please light a fire under these Algae-to-Biodiesel companies?

Read the articles that are linked there and you find that ...

China gets it:

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=35910

…worried over surging crop prices China is now clamping down on the use of corn and other edible grains for producing biofuel. While it wants to support the growth of alternative energy sources, Beijing says the issue of national food security should take precedence over the country’s green agenda.

“In China the first thing is to provide food for its 1.3 billion people, and after that, we will support biofuel production,” the state-run newspaper People’s Daily quoted Wang Xiaobing, an official at the Agriculture Ministry ’s crops cultivation department as saying this week.

The Boston Globe gets it:

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/w.../05/ethanols_success_story_may_have_downside/

US factories producing ethanol fuel for cars may consume as much as half of the country’s corn crop next year — more than double earlier government predictions — creating competition for grain stocks that could drive up supermarket prices for cereals, meat, eggs, and dairy products, according to a report released yesterday.

Canada gets it:

http://www.edmontonsun.com/Business/News/2007/01/07/3215745-sun.html

Or maybe not. No sooner had a flurry of similar legislation hit the new Democratic-controlled U.S. Congress last week when an alarming study by the Earth Policy Institute surfaced that claimed this North American rush to ethanol might not be such a good thing after all.

Of course, outfits professing “earth policy” are in the business of raising alarm. But even with the torque wrench heavily applied, the document raises some interesting points….

The U.S. is undergoing a biofuel building blitz - 79 plants are under construction, 116 are operating and another 200 are in the planning stages.

That amounts to a lot of corn - 139 million tons, the study estimates. That’s half the entire 2008 projected U.S. harvest.

“With the corn supplies tightening fast,” the report warns, “rising prices will affect not only products made directly from corn but also those produced using corn.” That includes chicken, pork and beef.

“The risk is that soaring food prices could generate a consumer backlash against the fuel ethanol industry,” the Earth Policy Institute predicted.

Because the U.S. supplies 70% of the world’s corn exports, the price spike could trigger “urban food riots” in Third World countries.

In Alberta, substitute the word “barley” for “corn.”

These guys get it:

http://www.oilcrash.com/articles/pf_bio.htm

When plants grow on soil, they use up the low entropy of the soil as they extract nutrients from the soil. A natural ecosystem is considered sustainable because the plants bring in energy from sunlight to compensate for the entropy they create, and because the dead plants are recycled into the soil. In a natural ecosystem, entropy increases slower than the input of sun energy and the development of new soil from substrate….

Unsustainable agri-business now getting pushed into overdrive
Sustainable systems are cyclical. This is what makes them sustainable. They do not lose a significant amount of nutrients. And the energy lost to entropy must be more than compensated by incoming solar energy. Industrial systems are linear. They take a resource, and process it into a product which is eventually discarded once it has outlived its usefulness. All well-meaning attempts at recycling notwithstanding, industrial systems are not sustainable.

Modern agriculture is an industrial system, and as such, it is not sustainable. Nutrients extracted from the soil are removed from the farmland in the form of vegetable matter, and shipped to consumers. After being eaten, the nutrients are excreted as human wastes and then disposed of as sewage. Industrial agriculture breaks the cycle, leading on the one hand to soil and water depletion and on the other to pollution problems with raw sewage. Modern agriculture is a form of soil mining….

In food farming, the plant matter that is not harvested could (and should) be returned to the soil in an effort to help limit soil nutrient depletion, and to help limit erosion. Industrial production of biofuels depends on utilizing everything that can be harvested from the plantation or field. The nutrients removed from the ground in the form of biomass must be replaced with artificial fertilizers. And even then, soil depletion is hastened and the productivity of the crop land diminishes significantly from one generation to the next until it must be abandoned as unproductive. As it is, industrial agriculture has brought us to the brink of an agricultural crisis….

For this reason alone, biofuel production can never be sustainable. And, therefore, biofuels are not renewable.

 

[Manedwolf]

Corn Ethanol is a dead end that leads nowhere. It takes as much energy to make it as you get out of it. Ethanol from Sugar Cane is a good idea and they use it in Brazil to great effect.

Sugar cane or sugar beets, both are good.

And as a side effect, cane and beet sugar are a LOT better for you to eat than high-fructose corn syrup, which is a metabolic disaster and likely pretty much responsible for the American obesity epidemic.

 

[jimpeel]

The only thing that got past me about that statement was the attributable source that also provides economic studies for the claim.

I'll work on that. As I recall, it was on a news program but I will search for sites and cites.

 

[SecDef]

It takes more energy to produce a gallon of ethanol that the energy it can produce.

Can we stop using this statement? Ethanol, just like gasoline, or a battery OF COURSE takes more energy to create than it releases. I defy you to find ANY method of transferring energy that is 100% efficient. Even copper wires moving power across the desert from wind farms lose power over distance. That fact is simply meaningless.

It's called entropy, folks.

 

[Mike Irwin]

"…worried over surging crop prices..."

So, ethanol producers will keep making ethanol no matter how high the price of corn and other biomass goes?

In other words, the economic processes involved with a commodity-traded item (corn) are now obsolete?


All of this chicken littling is getting kind of old, but it's not surprising.

People see a radical new technology and, luddite that the human creature is, immediately fear it.

A few 'experts' of one stripe or another surface and begin to make grave pronouncements about how horrible this new technology is.

The people flock to the 'experts' and start chanting the mantra that the new technology is evil, evil, evil.

Meanwhile, the people who actually developed this new technology are continually refining it (given that they're now parriahs, and have no social lives, they have all the time in the world to do so) and all of a sudden its now far different from what was originally reported, far different from what everone is panicing about, and far more effective than first reported.

Everyone scratches their heads and mutter to themselves about that being a huge waste of time while they're rushing off to the next chicken little event.


Sigh.

I think I'll just lay back and wait for the ethanol induced starvation to take me away.

 

[Mike Irwin]

"Can we stop using this statement? Ethanol, just like gasoline, or a battery OF COURSE takes more energy to create than it releases. I defy you to find ANY method of transferring energy that is 100% efficient. Even copper wires moving power across the desert from wind farms lose power over distance. That fact is simply meaningless."

No no no no no NONO NONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONO !!! YOU'RE WRONG!!!!

I have it on good authority from the "I Hate Corn Council" that producing one ounce of ethanol requires 4.23 Flumptyzilabilgon jouls of energy! That's MORE energy than is released by the sun in a year!

But producing a gallon of gasoline gives off 7.2 megawatts of energy AND leaves your breath smelling minty fresh!



I wondered if anyone was ever going to bring that up.

Sigh.

 

[jimpeel]

So let's define what I said more completely.

It takes more energy from petroleum, coal, and other sources to produce a gallon of ethanol than the energy that gallon can produce to replace the energy one gallon of gasoline can produce.

Regular Gasoline 150,100 BTUs / imp gal or 125,000 BTUs / US gal

Ethanol 101,600 BTUs / imp gal or 84,600 BTUs / US gal

Loss / imp gal = 48,500 BTUs

Loss per US gal = 40,400 BTUs

 

[SecDef]

So let's define what I said more completely.

It takes more energy from petroleum, coal, and other sources to produce a gallon of ethanol than the energy that gallon can produce to replace the energy one gallon of gasoline can produce.

The POINT is that we move away from petroleum and coal and choose the other sources. We just aren't there yet technologically. Absolutely under current mass ethanol manufacturing techniques it makes no sense.

However, capture energy from a renewable resource (wind/wave/solar{maybe nuclear?!}) to power machinery to create ethanol and there you have it.

 

[TimRB]

"However, capture energy from a renewable resource (wind/wave/solar{maybe nuclear?!}) to power machinery to create ethanol and there you have it."

I believe one such device that can capture solar energy and put it into a form that can be used to create ethanol is called "corn".

Tim

 

[jimpeel]

MikeIrwin

You can make all of the derrogatory statements you want ala your post #29 but I simply didn't think I had to go to the lengths I did in my post #30 to make it clear that the power to make ethanol is not derived from gasoline. The original statement was:

It takes more energy to produce a gallon of ethanol that (sic) the energy it can produce.

I firmly believed, nowbeit incorrectly, that those who assemble here would have the wherewithall and good sense to know that ethanol is not being manufactured using the same material it is being produced to replace.

I am in the engineering field and I have worked in the petroleum industry. We all (that being engineering types) know that there are always losses involved in creating and distributing energy. We (that being engineering types) prove that every time we (that being engineering types) wire a generator in series with a motor and spin it up and watch it wind right back down. That is a basic exercise in engineering education 101. I guess you never got to that exercise but you did, apparently, get to snide comment 101.

I also have no enmity to your "Corn Council" or whatever your made-up-council-of-the-day may be. I am merely addressing the reality of the downside effects on the food supply that ethanol production may have on the political and economic aspects in the United States.

Do you think you can address those aspects seriously, without snide commentary, or not?

 

[SecDef]

"However, capture energy from a renewable resource (wind/wave/solar{maybe nuclear?!}) to power machinery to create ethanol and there you have it."

I believe one such device that can capture solar energy and put it into a form that can be used to create ethanol is called "corn".

Tim

Except we are talking about the last magic step of converting corn to ethanol

Maybe we should just invent a motor that accepts corn ala the Mr. Fusion in Back to the Future

 

[jimpeel]

The POINT is that we move away from petroleum and coal and choose the other sources. We just aren't there yet technologically. Absolutely under current mass ethanol manufacturing techniques it makes no sense.

However, capture energy from a renewable resource (wind/wave/solar{maybe nuclear?!}) to power machinery to create ethanol and there you have it.

You have to address the fact that wind, solar, and nuclear are being held up by the very people who espouse it. The windys want windmills but the bird watchers say they kill birds. Kennedy and Kerry want alternative energy but are opposed to the windmills off of Marthas Vinyard where they live.

Everywhere the sun shines brightest are declared endangered. Two million acres of California's desert were placed off limits to everything so don't think of going there to glean solar energy.

Wave technology? Don't even think about it. There are dolphins and other microscopic animals out there which could be harmed so we will need a 200 year environmental study before we deny the permits to build them.

Nuclear? Need I say more?

 

[jimpeel]

I believe one such device that can capture solar energy and put it into a form that can be used to create ethanol is called "corn".

Tongue-in-cheek, I know, but there is no magic way to make one gallon of ethanol from the energy output of one gallon of ethanol.

 

[jimpeel]

Any comments on the food riot and political ramifications aspect of this thread? The ramifications to third world countries and the American poor?

Anyone?

 

[SecDef]

The examples you give are simply the fits and starts in a new technology. That doesn't mean the technology is a bust. It just means that things don't sprout out full grown like Athena.

 

[jimpeel]

I am personally interested in Thermal Depolymerization.

Another article on Thermal Depolymerization.

 

[SecDef]

Any comments on the food riot and political ramifications aspect of this thread? The ramifications to third world countries and the American poor?

Sure.. blahblahblah invisible hand of the market at work blahblahlblah. The rising price of tequila ensures that not ALL farmers will move from agave to corn.

People have been starving and rioting all over the world and in your own backyard since oh, forever. Ethanol is hardly a root cause.