Expensive, wasteful ethanol can't solve our problems

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.suntimes.com/news/otherviews/231613,CST-EDT-REF27B.article

January 27, 2007
BY JERRY TAYLOR AND PETER VAN DOREN

In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Bush spoke a lot about energy independence and alternative energy sources like ethanol. According to the president, ethanol is the magical elixir that will solve virtually every economic, environmental and foreign policy problem on the horizon. In reality, it's enormously expensive and wasteful.

Lie No. 1: Ethanol will lead to energy independence. If all the corn produced in America last year were dedicated to ethanol production (and only 14.3 percent of it was), U.S. gasoline consumption would drop by only 12 percent. For corn ethanol to displace gasoline in this country, we would need to appropriate all cropland, turn it over to corn-ethanol production, and then find 20 percent more land on top of that for cultivation. The U.S. Energy Information Administration believes that the practical limit for domestic ethanol production is about 700,000 barrels a day -- a figure they don't think is realistic until 2030.

Lie No. 2: Ethanol is economically competitive now. According to a 2005 report by the U.S. Agriculture Department, corn ethanol costs an average of $2.53 to produce, or several times what it costs to produce a gallon of gasoline. Without the subsidies, costs would be higher still.

Lie No. 3: Ethanol reduces gasoline prices. If you lived in urban areas that used reformulated gasoline last summer -- that's the environmentally "clean" gasoline required for areas with air pollution problems -- you might have paid up to 60 cents a gallon more for gasoline than you would have otherwise. That's because the federal government required oil refineries to use 4 billion gallons of ethanol in 2006 regardless of price.

Lie No. 4: Ethanol is a renewable fuel. According to a group of academics from the University of California at Berkeley who published in Science magazine, only 5 to 26 percent of the energy content of ethanol is "renewable." The balance of ethanol's energy actually comes from the staggering amount of coal, natural gas and nuclear power necessary to produce corn and process it into ethanol.

[TomInTib]

1. This is so important

Bush's lies re ethanol are totally outrageous.

Everyone in the industry knows it, but MSM is clueless.

K&R

[RC]

2. If ethanol is so great then why aren't we using sugar beets and

sugar cane. The sugar beet farmers in the Red River Valley had to plow under or destroy something like 8% of their crop because Crystal Sugar could not process all the beets. The farmers had to suck up the expense of growing the extra beets. Because of contracts the beets belong to Crystal Sugar, so the farmers could not sell them anywhere else.

[greenman3610]

3. I'm sure in Bush's version, biofues are probably a hoax

But that doesnt mean that there is no role in the future for
biofuels.
We are currently in biofuel 1.0.
Down the road, biofuels 2.0 and 3.0 will move first to
closed cycle production facilities like this one in Mead, Nebraska,
where an integrated cattle feedlot provides biogas for the
production energy.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.10/ethanol.html
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/061030/nym133.html?.v=57

Then we'll move to more productive feedstocks, probably
algae, which can be thousands of times more
productive than conventional crops in a given area.
http://www.renewableenergyaccess.com/rea/news/story?id=47237&src=rss

presumably, any city that has a waste treatment plant, any cattle
feedlot, dairy farm, chicken ranch, or food processing facility,
could become an energy producer.