1328, that was very concisely stated, and you saved me a
lot of typing.

Those opposed to biofuel are absolutely determined to
ignore the precedent set by Brazil.

agape,
robb

McCain is way ahead of Obama on this issue. You have to hope that Obama is just using it politically. Or it could be that the only way to sell a huge alternative energy platform is to include ethanol since it has serious support in the Midwest.

Like Armageddon is a “very bad idea”.

I’d say yes, and no, to that, Ed (polite smile). I think Armageddon is a bad idea for those who have rejected Christ, but a good idea for those who have accepted Him. Armageddon is when Christ returns to set up His earthly kingdom. That is, when Armageddon begins (Armageddon is when all nations march against Israel to destroy her) Jesus will return to earth. In a nutshell, the Battle of Armageddon will happen in Israel, specifically the Holy City of Jerusalem. It’s laid out in Scripture. Nations will march against Israel in hopes to finally destroy the Jews. This is when Jesus will return to defeat the antichrist, and the armies of the world:

“Then the LORD will go out and fight against those nations (at Armageddon), as he fights in the day of battle. On that day his feet will stand on the Mount of Olives, east of Jerusalem, and the Mount of Olives will be split in two from east to west, forming a great valley, with half of the mountain moving north and half moving south.” Zechariah 14:3-4

So I don’t think that’s such a bad idea, in fact, I can’t wait!

IMF: Fuel from food a “very bad idea”

What they could be doing is making fuel from plant waste matter — energy from bio waste. It doesn’t have to be fresh and look appetizing okay… lol… the fact is, ANY kind of biomass can be converted to energy (that is, oil, gasoline, ethanol, electricity). They don’t have to use food to make fuel. They are dumping “free” sources of energy such as garden waste and used cooking oil into landfills, not to mention forestry waste, and municipal solid waste (more commonly known as trash or garbage). Folks, waste product turns into fuel. They can make energy out of all of that.

I mean think about it? How can we lose water? Even if it evaporates (through burn off) it comes right back down in the form of rain. Unless you think water just randomly floats around in space.

MobileVideoEngineer on October 23, 2008 at 9:15 AM

I think you missed a word there — fresh. Fresh water is not an unlimited resource. Rain – A lot of rain lands in the ocean.

Ever heard of ‘water treatment plants’. Even though our nuclear subs go around the world with water all around them, they still treat the water before using it.

IMF: Fuel from food a “very bad idea”
The International Monetary Fund has learned a lesson
from its flirtation with biofuels, one that Barack Obama still has
ignored. Turning food into fuel for cars not only takes sustenance
from……

Couple that with the new scientific understanding that oil is NOT a “fossil fuel” built out of decaying dinosaur carcasses but a substance which is constantly being produced by natural processes deep within the earth. Also, you can’t make clothes, chemicals, or medicines out of wind or solar power…and ethanol is of very, very limited usefulness in these areas compared to oil.

The only logical conclusion is that the present push for Ethanol, Wind, and Solar as the most promising new technologies is completely misguided. We ought to be pursuing the new technologies which bring us oil more efficiently and less intrusively. We ought to be pursuing things like hydraulic energy storage instead of foolishness like highly inefficient and dangerous battery storage.

One is methanol. Methanol doesn’t have quite the energy content as ethanol, but it can still be used as a fuel substitute for gasoline. Furthermore, methanol can be made from all kinds of feedstock, including any biomass as well as from natural gas and coal. By some estimates, clean coal technology can be used to make methanol at 50 cents per gallon. Since methanol has about 54% of the energy as a gallon of gasoline, at 50 cents per gallons it is roughly equivalent to gasoline down near $1 per gallon.

And methanol is a proven auto fuel. Among other things, it was the fuel of choice for the Indianapolis 500 for over 3 decades, and it has been proven in ‘normal’ automobiles as well. While it has the disadvantage of having less energy per gallon than gasoline (and therefore gets fewer miles per gallon), the fact that it can be produced cheaply means that it can be competetive with gasoline on a miles per dollar basis.

With regard to ethanol, there are some promising developments as well – see the website for this company. Ethanol from algae makes moot the whole food vs. fuel argument moot, and if the linked company is successful, it also makes moot the idea of needing fresh water for its production, as they can do it with seawater. Ethanol is ultimately a better option for auto fuel than methanol (since it has more energy per gallon, although less than gasoline), but as of now cannot be produced from such a wide variety of feedstocks as can methanol.

However, one big disadvantage of most ethanol production in the U.S. is actually the subsidies and tarriffs. The ethanol subsidies you read about are for corn-based ethanoal – companies that produce it from other sources, such as the one I linked, do not get the subsidy. That puts them in a 51 cent hole right from the beginning. Second, the U.S. has very high tarriffs to imported sugar cane ethanol (e.g., from Brazil), which can be produce much more efficiently than corn-based ethanol.

In short, the problems are not biofuels (or more precisely, alcohol fuels, since methanol can be produced from non-biological feedstocks) in and of themselves, it’s the means of producing them and government interference in the marketplace. Both the subsidies and tarriffs must go. Their presence actually inhibits the marketplace from coming up with good alternatives for biofuel production. OPEC must be delighted by the fact that we subsidized corn-based ethanol while putting tarrifs on sugar-can based ethanol.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not against drilling for more oil, far from it. I say let’s drill every last bit we can domestically and put as much in the market as we can. But ultimatly, we need to break the monopoly on gasoline as our only source of auto fuel, and alcohol based fuels is probably the easiest path to take, since converting a car to a flex-fuel vehicle can be done relatively easily and inexpensively. If you can throw alcohol based fuels into the mix and give consumers the option, you can flood the market with autofuels even more and bring down the price of all of them. That should be the goal.

It’s one thing to disagree on reasonable alternatives to a problem (here, energy), but it’s complete waste of time to be discuss and to fund an alternative such as ethanol that makes no sense whatsoever. Why is the U.S. cutting its losses and turning elsewhere?

And if McCain needs an issue if he loses the election, why doesn’t he spend his remaining days exposing Obama and the handful of corn states for the frauds that they are. How can such a narrow lobby have so much clout. This alternative is useless; let’s move on to something else.

I’d hate to see a perfectly good alternative like post-consumer biodiesel (recycled french fry grease) lumped in with fuel ethanol.

DrSteve on October 23, 2008 at 10:32 AM

I agree. See also below.

You don’t have to be an eco-nazi to appreciate that it is in our best interests to apply superior American science, engineering, and technology to develop alternative fuels for various energy needs (not just cars). What I like about the post-consumer approach is that, if successful, it may help address two challenges at once: waste disposal and renewable energy sources. In addition, such efforts encourage innovation which may lead to other, as yet unanticipated break-through technologies.

I’m for drilling, but not to the exclusion of pushing the development of alternative and renewable energy sources.

GM to make biofuel out of garbage

Published: Monday January 14, 2008

General Motors Corp. is planning on making biofuel with garbage at a cost of less than a dollar a gallon, the company’s chief has said.

The US automaker has entered into a partnership with Illinois-based Coskata Inc. which has developed a way to make ethanol from practically any renewable source, including old tires and plant waste.

The process is a significant improvement over corn-base ethanol because it uses far less water and energy and does not divert food into fuel.

Strains the water supply.

Someone ought to ask Obama which one is more important.

If the US alone would reverse its policy to replace fuel with biofuels, food prices would stabilize, he stated.

Nestle chief executive Peter Brabeck-Letmathe

Hey U.S. Congress, you are literally killing people with your misguided biofuels policies…… STOP IT NOW !!

Turning food into fuel for cars not only takes sustenance from the people who can least afford it, it also wastes a tremendous amount of water. In short, biofuels are a “very bad idea”:

Ed Morrissey

Agree. I must admit I was on the biofuels bandwagon for a brief period, I thought, yea, that might work. But now I agree, biofuels is a very bad idea. You may make a dent in the manufactured fuel shortage, but you have created a much bigger problem than you have solved. Now what do people eat?

We have more oil than the Middle East, lets get it, and start building nuclear power plants !!!

Now we just need to get President Bush on board…..oh wait he won’t be president anymore, so it doesn’t matter.

thuja on October 23, 2008 at 10:15 AM

It isn’t that the planet is overpopulated (go drive around Montana, Wyoming or the Dakotas), but that there is a strong socialist drive among politicians to place control of resources in the hands of the Federal Government… which is the least efficient organization in the country.

We could do so much more, if Government were involved so much less!

MobileVideoEngineer on October 23, 2008 at 9:15 AM

Ahhh… a technical purist.

How about this… Water is pumped out of the ground and used to irrigate and process corn into ethanol. The process of converting corn into ethanol requires a LOT of water. That water eventually evaporates and rains… in the same place, in other places, over the ocean.

The problem is not whether water is destroyed, but that it is redistributed to areas that may make it more difficult to extract. Over time, farm lands will become more arid as water is redistributed to other areas… think the dust bowl of the 1930s. This is where we got the soil and water conservation programs… so that we wouldn’t make the same mistakes again… or would we?

“Feed grains” are grown on land which might be used for “food grains”; there is a fixed amount of arable land available to any farmer, and the farmer decides what to grow on that land in order to maximize his/her profit. If “feed grains” are being used for ethanol, they are being grown as “fuel grains”, not “feed grains” — and competition for that quality of biomass drives up the profitability of growing it.

The moral aspect comes into play when the ethanol created is not used for necessities of society (such as transporting other foodstuffs to market) but for recreation (as in allowing the Rich Democratic Presidential Hopeful to buy and fuel his Hemi-powered Chrysler 300 rather than a Smart). When people starve so RDPH can drive his 300 about town, that certainly falls into the morality category.

This covers the problem in a nutshell. Note page 12 — 1/2 acre of soybeans to fly a single passenger from LA to Washington DC. Page 13 says even more — if the jet fleet currently servicing the United States were to switch to 15% biofuels, about 10% of total US cropland would be allocated to building the necessary additive. Simple arithmetic says that if we needed 100% biofuel for that jet fleet, two-thirds of all our cropland would be allocated to growing that fuel. My point: there’s only so much cropland available, and food, feed, and fuel will compete for that land; with that competition, the price of food will rise.

Of course, we will need to get used to that, given the interesting chart on page 4 of the Boeing slideshow I reference above, which shows the levels of oil reserves available for use historically and into the near future. Is there a way out? Doesn’t look like it to me. But everyone who uses energy frivolously at some point in the near future will obviously be contributing to the starvation of a less fortunate human being elsewhere on the planet as more of our croplands are diverted to fuel production.

The Boeing powerpoint slides show the issue in such stark terms that there’s no question that we would have to starve just to power our domestic airliners on biofuels. What was interesting about the comments to the Anchoress’ post is one which points out that Obama’s protectionist friends have placed a $.54 per gallon tariff on ethanol imported from Brazil. I guess that domestic ethanol production needs to be protected at all costs, even if it isn’t the highest and wisest use of land in our temporate climes.

That must explain why the Sahara is awash in water.

WHile the amount of water is not decreasing. The amount of water available in any one place is limited. Think about it for a minute.

MarkTheGreat on October 23, 2008 at 9:29 AM

Asking this particular commenter to think may be a bit unfair and harmful to his self-esteem.