Back in 2004 I wrote about how ethanol is a bad idea for an alternative fuel — among other things, it takes too much energy to create it, and we would need to plant a lot of corn to make it.
To get a gallon of ethanol, you need a little more than 26 pounds of corn, and an acre of land can yield about 9,400 pounds per year. In other words, one acre of land can generate about 362 gallons of ethanol per year.
But people in the U.S. use about 174 million gallons of gasoline per day just for their cars (so says the Department of Energy). If the Magic Fairy came down and all our cars suddenly ran on ethanol we would need about 261 million gallons per day.
That would require more than 260 million acres of corn to produce. Considering that in 2000 farmers in the U.S. harvested about 73 million acres of corn, it looks like they’ll need to get cracking.
Now I get a mild told you so.
The Fray
Anonymous says:
I still think that an electric car is still a viable option. With lithium-ion batteries they can go quite far now-a-days without a recharge. “Who killed the electric car?” is a good documentary to watch on the subject.
gnomic says:
Check out this discussion from MIT: The Role of New Technologies in a Sustainable Energy Economy at http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/414/ Its very understandable and puts the energy problem in easy to understand terms:
Right now humans globally require 13 trillion watts (or terawatts) of power. By 2050, we’ll [Very conservitively] need 28 terawatts. Nocera pokes holes in some hypothetical scenarios offered to achieve this objective. If you gave over every square inch of cropland on the face of the earth to biomass production, you’d only get 7 additional terawatts. Plus, “you couldn’t eat anymore.” You’d still need to add 8,000 nuclear power plants, by building a new plant every 1.6 days for the next 45 years; put wind turbines everywhere; and dam every available river, to approach the 28 terawatt goal. These technologies don’t scale up realistically, says Nocera, so we must look to the sun, which in one hour puts out as much energy as humans use during an entire year.
tommy says:
Have you read “The Omnivore’s Dilemma?” This whole situation is part of a much bigger problem.
Do you know how much corn is grown in the US on subsidies? It would be nice to have an actual reason to grow the corn aside from our obligation to support farmers who would otherwise have ‘nothing’ to do. To use the corn for anything but HFCS would be a Good Thing.
Solar
Wind
Hydroelectric
recombination of Hydrogen (what else should we do with the excess of free water from the melting icecaps?)
and dare I suggest ‘Nucular’ energy?
All of these may be more costly to implement (perhaps) than burning oil and coal (at the moment), and unsightly (perhaps to some, in some cases) but we pay farmers to grow corn we have no use for, and we pay them to grow it even in times when the money we pay them could help to offset our national debt. blah blah blah…
Our worldwide selfish addiction to automobiles and other motorized forms of personal transportation (to me) is the primary indicator that a *social* change is the first thing which needs to happen. That’s much more of a problem than any technological puzzle we can confront ourselves with. I don’t exclude myself from the addiction, by the way; I’m as much of a hypocrite as the next person -almost.
There are ways to solve the energy problems the world is confronted with, but we need buy-in, or someone needs to step up and lay their balls out there on the block. The US has claimed the lead position in production of the technologies which consume that energy; why can’t we take the responsible role of leading the world into an age of clean, safe (and abundant!!) energy? Before we fry the planet, please…
gnomic says:
Tommy,
You really should watch the MIT video; you won’t look at energy supply the same way.
As to why the US won’t step up – our political system bearly works when things go well; until there is a crisis with dead bodies in our front yards or a direct threat to the viagra supply – we’ll continue to ignore it. We have a long history of it.
Hank Carr says:
The problem with biodiesel is that it gells at a very warm temperature. Once you get down to winter temperatures in the north you’ve got to mix in a large portion of regular petrodiesel to keep the biodiesel liquid. The alternative is to have both petrodiesel and biodiesel fuel tanks and to start with petrodiesel and use the heat of the engine to melt the biodiesel then to convert back to petrodiesel before you stop to let the fuel pump and lines fill up with petrodiesel which then acts as antifreeze.
An alternative is Iogen Corporation’s cellulose ethanol process (http://www.iogen.ca/). They convert straw (which kind of scares me since I build houses with straw bales) or any other cellulose biomass into ethanol. The process will be MUCH less expensive than grain or corn ethanol once it is scaled up to commercial production. There is a company building an ethnol plant near my home. They’re leaving a module empty to allow them to plug in a biomass ethanol plant once it becomes commercial.
Hank
gnomic says:
“Get Cracking” Heh. Funny.
I think Ethanol is simply a inferior product – biodiesel has much higher energy density and can be transported and run in unmodified vehicles. Ethanol can’t be run through existing pipelines and used over 10% concentration mixed with gas in existing cars (although most cars can be modified for less than $500 to run on almost any concentration). Newer technologies are finding cost-effective ways to converts animal processing wastes and non-food plant sources to both biodesiel and ethanol. Unless the government interferes with market forces (and what are the chances that might happen?), biodesiel should win out in the short term.
If you are interested in alternative energy – check out hugg.com