ETHANOL
whtfucover said...
What about big Corn and Big Ethanol. Do you really think the alternative wont be attacked
Not all industries depend on ethanol the way they do oil. Petroleum based products affect our lives more than people realize.
PETROLEUM
A list of some of those items are:
 Solvents such as those used in paints, lacquers, and printing inks
 Lubricating oils and greases for automobile engines and other machinery
 Petroleum (or paraffin) wax used in candy making, packaging, candles, matches, and polishes
 Petrolatum (petroleum jelly) sometimes blended with paraffin wax in medical products and toiletries
 Asphalt used to pave roads and airfields, to surface canals and reservoirs, and to make roofing materials and floor coverings
 Petroleum coke used as a raw material for many carbon and graphite products, including furnace electrodes and liners, and the anodes used in the production of aluminum.
 Petroleum Feedstocks used as chemical feedstock derived from petroleum principally for the manufacture of chemicals, synthetic rubber, and a variety of plastics.
Now there is no way that Ethanol can take oils place in all those products.
Oh and one of the biggest complaints about our dependence on foreign oil is because we don't build any new refineries. Well, as any backwoods moonshiner can tell you, you don't have to build a still near the coast. And as environmentalomental effects, well you might get a few birds drunk as they fly over.
Ethanol will never have the stonghold that oil has on us now.
posted by Kenny @ 7:55 AM
1 comments
1 Comments:
Kenny,
The hard truth is that corn ethanol production is also dependent on oil and natural gas. In fact,the ethanol industry is built on a foundation of fossil fuel consumption:
-- Farmers must burn diesel fuel to run their tractors and corn pickers.
-- Tire companies must consume fossil fuels to make the millions of tires farmers and the trucks that haul ethanol use each year.
-- Chemical plants use natural gas to make the millions of tons of fertilizers; pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides farmers depend upon.
-- Ethanol plants burn still more natural gas to mill and distill corn into ethanol.
-- Trucking companies burn still more diesel fuel hauling corn from farm to ethanol plant, and finished ethanol from the plant to retailer.
It is ironic that if ethanol became our primary liquid fuel, we would still be dependent on an overseas fossil fuel.
Almost all ammonia fertilizer is now made from natural gas. What is not widely known is that an increasingly large percentage of that fertilizer is made overseas and must be imported into the U.S. Any increased use of ethanol only means an increased dependence on fertilizer made from foreign natural gas.
Unless you are a corn farmer, or run an ethanol plant and can use federal tax breaks and subsidies to make a profit, corn ethanol is a losing proposition.
It takes more fuel to make corn ethanol, than the fuel value of the ethanol. (Don't confuse energy and fuel. The ethanol lobby likes to brag that ethanol production returns more energy than it uses. While that is true, the excess energy is not in the form of a useable fuel. The excess energy is locked in the waste products from fermentation and distillation and is only useful as cattle feed.)
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