AutoblogGreen

"Corn ethanol is increasingly looking like a very short term expedient at best and at worst maybe a solution worse than the original problem."

Ethanol never looked like a solution to those who were paying attention. Nobody has been able to definatively prove that its EROEI is more than 1, which means that even if ethanol production didn't create a host of other problems, it really does nothing more than transmute energy from one form to another.

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Sam, repeat after me "corn ethanol has *nothing* to do with tortilla prices in Mexico. Mexican tortilla prices resulted from large monopolies, closed markets and corrupt government officials."

Stop repeating WRONG information!

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Producing ethanol in vast amounts would be detrimental to the environment...isn't this what we're trying to prevent.

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If ethanol and/or butanol is ever to be successful and good for the environment, it can't be produced from corn. We should be using wild grasses, weeds, noxious/invasive plant species, yard waste, and other plant waste... IOW - stuff that requires no watering, fertilizing, or pesticides to produce.

Even if we don't use water/energy resources to produce ethanol, we already take out 4-10x more water from underground North American aquifers (just for growing food crops) every year than gets put back in by natural rain and snowfall. After the dust bowl of the 1920s US/Canadian mid-west, we found lots of deep aquifers to extract water from... and the system of wells and the rate of draw is unsustainable and will some day cripple the US and Canada because we won't be able to grow food crops in the mid-west anymore (and if you'll notice, we don't have much comparable room for farming elsewhere).

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3 "Producing ethanol in vast amounts would be detrimental to the environment."

This is a vague and unfounded comment. Ethanol production, even from corn, can be done in a very environmentally friendly manner. Near future ethanol production from non-food crops will be even better. Check out the latest published study from Colorado State University: http://newsinfo.colostate.edu/index.asp?url=news_item_display&news_item_id=11182593

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#5 Near future? Even the "test" commercial plants are 10 years out. There there is the logistic problems of transporting and storing bio-mass.

http://www.omaha.com/index.php?u_page=1208&u_sid=2354471

"Even a small ethanol plant using 2,000 tons of stover a day would require 100 acres stacked 25 feet high with stover to run a refinery for a year.

A three-year study in Chase County indicates that an 80-million-gallon ethanol plant would require corn stover from 500,000 acres of corn within a 50-mile radius of the plant and 500 acres to store it after harvest.

"That will give you an idea of the logistical nightmare this thing is," said Lex Thompson, one of the Chase County coordinators."

The devil is in the details....

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Jay, there is more to cellulosic ethanol than corn stover. See http://www.autobloggreen.com/2006/09/08/doe-cellulosic-ethanol-within-5-years/

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Corn stover, woodchips, grass... it's all bio-mass and doesn't change the logistics problems of keeping a plant supplied with raw material.

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"Producing ethanol in vast amounts would be detrimental to the environment...isn't this what we're trying to prevent." --Don

"This is a vague and unfounded comment." --Jimmy

"Surprise: Ethanol as Deadly as Gasoline For Now" --Charles Q. Choi, LiveScience (http://www.livescience.com/environment/070418_ethanol_harm.html)

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#9 First, Jacobson's study is entirely a simulation. Roland Hwang of the Natural Resources Defense Council notes that the ozone difference that Jacobson finds is so small that it may be in the margin of error of calculations. Further, Jacobson *criticizes* ethanol for reducing NOx emissions!

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