Um, no. Burning food is a terrible idea. Doesn’t matter though because America has enormous untapped hydrocarbon resources in the form of unconventional oil, gas and of course coal. If you add in methane hydrates you are probably talking a few thousand years of fuel and feedstock.
The next time you go to buy a car, a fridge, shoes, a TV, boxer shorts or lipstick, what if there were only one choice – a single product in the marketplace for each category – take it or leave it? Worse, what if the price of that item were set by a foreign cartel that is dominated by autocrats who are not our friends? Sound far-fetched? That’s essentially what you face each time you fill your car’s gas tank. Why is that not OK? Let me count the ways.
Our entire transportation system – that is, the vast majority of anything that moves anything from Point A to Point B (i.e., aircraft, trucks, ships and your family automobile) runs on a petroleum product. Oil has become a strategic commodity – a good that if priced extravagantly or if its supply is disrupted literally can bring down the global economy. Yet this year, we will send $400 billion overseas to buy oil whose price is set by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). In addition, we also will spend an additional $150 billion (about one-third of the Pentagon’s budget) to keep this nonsensical arrangement working. Think how many soldiers’ lives could be saved and jobs created at home if we solved this problem. In sum, for the past 40 years, our country has endured this outrageous national security, economic and environmental problem, all the while whistling past the graveyard, hoping that we will muddle through somehow. And the outrage is on course to persist into the future as far as the eye can see.
It’s also interesting to note that oil’s strategic status affects not just our transportation sector but chemicals and agriculture as well. Just about 90 percent of the products that Dupont and Dow put on the shelves of American stores – from synthetic fibers (i.e., the clothes on your back) to plastics that wrap everything else to the molded material in your dashboard – rely on oil as the feedstock. In short, we – and everyone else in the world – live in a global economy that runs, at its peril, on oil.
What a maroon. Foreign oil dependence is produced by the U. S. government. So let’s switch to alcohol,
an inferior fuel, because the government won’t let us use our own oil.
Hey, Bobby, you don’t like benzene, xylene and toluene in gas? It’s there because creeps like you got tetra ethyl lead banned. And now you have the temerity to complain about the chemicals in gas? You own it.
First off, ethanol isn’t truly ‘burning food’. Ethanol is a by-product of producing high-protein animal feed from corn. So that’s not really worth getting riled up about, or even annoyed.
The real question is, do we really need that much ethanol. Here’s where the bogus crap comes in. No we don’t need that much ethanol, for the simple reason that we can’t produce enough of it.
That’s right. We cannot produce enough ethanol to ‘end foreign oil dependence’. We cannot produce enough ethanol to ‘stop global warming’. Since we cannot do these things, trying to do them anyhow is more than a little bit strange. Nonetheless, these make excellent excuses for what amounts to a subsidy for US farmers. Back when farming paid so poorly that most farmers didn’t even meet the minimum hourly wage, this approach to subsidies was a match made in heaven, for both the Left and the Right, and greenies everywhere.
US farmers are finally getting the sort of prices that make farming a worthwhile occupation. Now that they don’t need the subsidy, all that’s left is empty rhetoric about climate and imports — and an ethanol industry that’s ‘too big to fail’.
He’s talking about METHANOL. Has nothing to do with corn or farmers.
GC, he’s actually talking hydrocarbons:
:end inclusion]
[Post script inclusion: The gasoline depicted above is heptane (7 carbon atoms) but gasoline is actually a mixture of hydrocarbons ranging from 5-9 carbon atoms in the chain - in case you wanted to know
Note the reference to oil as a feedstock for plastics etc.. The “ol” in ethanol, methanol and so on simply means the inclusion of oxygen:
We have two choices if avoiding crude oil, we can either start with hugely complex mixes of really complex hydrocarbon chains and chemically chop them up to suit our desired output (more expensive than beginning with flowing crude but entirely doable, as South Africa demonstrated during the Apartheid era and still does and so did Nazi Germany) or we start with the simple and abundant – natural gas is mainly methane – and we build the chains we want (also more expensive than processing flowing crude but entirely doable).
It is true that we can make plastics from corn and indeed have done so but again, that is essentially burning food.
I’m afraid I disagree Eric.
While spent ethanol corn is used in stock feed that is most definitely not its primary purpose and the denatured corn has a much reduced energy content. Moreover the competition for whole corn from ethanol manufacture has driven the price of corn much higher, adding pressure across the vegetable oil, starch and filler sectors. Diverting grain like this has increased global food prices by creating an artificial shortage in whole grain supplies.
Gentlemen, when he talks about transport fuel, he’s talking about methanol.
“Methanol, which a recent Massachusetts Institute of Technology study concluded is the most desirable alternative to gasoline, can be made from natural gas – think shale gas – which is being found in great abundance both here and throughout the world. The best news is that methanol producers think they will be able to deliver at the pump the energy equivalent to a gallon of gasoline for about $3″
Ed, he says, “methanol.” 4 times. Yes, derived from methane.
n-heptane has an octane of ZERO. Not suitable for motor fuel.
When he talks about a pound of sugar replacing a barrel of oil, he’s gone looney tunes.
“the time isn’t far off when a pound of sugar will replace a barrel of oil and enable the growth of a huge biochemical industry that doesn’t rely on any food feedstock to produce those fibers and plastics mentioned earlier. To reach that day, the industry may need a little help – in the way of investment tax credits or loan guarantees – to complete the necessary research and development. But that support will be short-lived and could be offset by no longer needing to give $40 billion annually in subsidies to the oil industry. It would be the best bargain we’d ever make.”
If there is money to be made in this business, there is absolutely no need for government subsidies. Like I said, he’s a maroon.
The problem with all of these alternative fuel-alternative feedstock schemes is that they are not needed in the marketplace. They may be needed 300 years from now, but they aren’t needed now. Forcing the future on today is evil.
Not transport alone GC and not methanol alone:
I was expecting the pedantic low compression detonation (“knock”) quibble over heptane’s depiction, which is why I added the postscript about gasoline actually being a mixture of hydrocarbons.
As I noted earlier, natural gas, which is mainly methane, does make a suitable feedstock and not the only one.
I’m proud to be your pedant.