Promoted by Albert
Gasoline prices are more than creeping up in the NE right now due to refinery issues. What does gas cost where you live? Any bio-fuel spots by you?
Ethanol is being touted as the wonder replacement for petroleum based fuels now demand has reached, if not exceeds, new finds of reserves. I want to raise some questions about whether this should be seen as a solution to avoid developing alternatives and improving the public transport systems. I would also argue that we are rapidly approaching, if have not already reached, peak ethanol.
It’s quite simple to make ethanol, humans have known the technique for millenia. All you do is take some sugar and add water and yeast. Sadly the result does not burn so you have to separate the ethanol from the water by heating the mixture and allowing the ethanol, which boils off first, to cool back to liquid form. Now you can produce the intermediate mixture using a range of biomass providing it is rich in sugars or even starches. Grape, cane, potatoes, fruit, rice or many other grains can be employed. Herein lies the problem.
The attraction is of course that these are food crops. Producing ethanol from them can soak up excess production (ideal if like France you have a big stock of indifferent wine) or use by products from other food production (like “high fructose corn syrup”(HFCS) which in the USA is used to sweeten soft drinks but in my opinion is fit for consumption by neither man nor beast.) However, just like oil reserves, the amount of land available to produce such crops are finite. Arguably, such land is already reducing and trying to increase it could have disasterous ecological effects. Unlike oil there are considerable alternative demands on the basic materials used for ethanol. The world has hungry mouths. Given equitable distribution we can just about feed everybody but I seriously question whether there is enough slack in the agricultural system for ethanol to significantly replace the current demand for petroleum.
Let’s look at the problem of the supply of arable land to produce food crops let alone the vast area required for significant ethanol-base production.
Global warming is already nibbling away at these lands. The Sahara is expanding, putting pressure on African crop production. Farming practice changes mean that the EU is just about food self-sufficient. Barring the odd good harvest there is not much spare capacity. The Great Plains in north America are starting to “dust bowl”. This is partly down to global warming, partly to competition for water resources and partly to the effects of monoculture on the soil structure. In the short term however some diversion of US agriculture’s products could have positive outcomes. For a start, the soft drinks will start to be less disgusting as the HFCS is used for ethanol. Less over-production being dumped as “food aid” should mean that 3rd world farmers are less pressured by this competition. On the other hand, there is no way that enough ethanol could be produced to replace the entire motor fuel consumption of the USA. Brazil is often touted as the great success story for ethanol but eeen here we have to seriously question the strategy. Sugar cane production needs land. In Brazil that land is currently occupied by the Amazon rain forests, a vital world reserve for CO2 sequestration. Areas the size of small European countries are being lost each year to food and sugar cane for ethanol production.
Here we come up against another problem. If you are using HFCS to make ethanol, not coke, your sweetener will revert to being cane sugar. Great for the smaller countries who will have a market again but hardly an environmentally satisfactory answer. After all that cane sugar will need transport. If some US senators have their way, once it’s landed in New Oreans it will have to go by road. Their short-term view of wanting to replace a railroad used for freight with a highway to serve the casinos is staggering, quite apart from the financial waste of repairing the tracks only to tear them up for the road
Others with more detailed knowledge of the area required to replace a litre of petroleum based gasoline with ethanol will no doubt provide some better information. But quite apart from the practicalities of being able to produce enough domestically, is it moral to tear the food from the starving to feed the fuel tanks of the rich world’s SUVs?
