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Hybrid Vehicles Ethanol - E85 FlexFuel The Inconvenient Truth About Ethanol
921 messages, Last post on Oct 07, 2009 at 10:53 AM
You are in the Ethanol - E85 FlexFuel Forum. Your Host is pf_flyer
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Replying to: gagrice (Jul 14, 2009 4:52 pm) I am certainly pretty green by thinking and this boondoggle is about as bad as it gets from an environmental standpoint. It's corporate welfare. It has nothing to do with environmental concerns.
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Replying to: fezo (Jul 14, 2009 6:03 pm)  The entire push seems to be part of this "green at ANY cost" attitude that's developed. Don't get me wrong, I'm NOT for wasting energy or pro-pollution, but the idea that we have to DO something immediately or we're all gonna die isn't the way to approach things. The "corporate welfare" is a political issue that I'm ignoring because it winds up distracting us from the point that the ONE thing ethanol is touted as doing, reducing dependence on oil, is the one thing I know for a fact it doesn't do. There's a lot of "bad science" out there that's accepted as general wisdom simply because it's repeated and parroted endlessly.
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Replying to: pf_flyer (Jul 15, 2009 2:32 am) I believe the “ethanol equals green myth” is marketing that grew out of the fact that ethanol was the least of two evils that is used to replace MTBE in gasoline. (I think MTBE is correct). I assume the EPA and greenies were in favor of it only because MTBE was more harmful than ethanol and it sounded good at the time. I’m sure neither the EPA nor the greenies had any idea of the unintended consequences or the sheer volume of land, corn and resources required to meet these needs. Then you have the big AG’s and politicians promoting ethanol even farther and it has now grown closer to being an environmental disaster than the salvation it was intended to be.
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Replying to: jkinzel (Jul 15, 2009 7:34 am)
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Replying to: texases (Jul 15, 2009 7:38 am)
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Wowie zowie... deformed watermelons as a source for ethanol. Just Eat It Food isn't fuel |
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Replying to: pf_flyer (Jul 15, 2009 2:32 pm) Adding 10% ethanol = poorer mileage. Add in all the equipment (using energy) to produce that ethanol and the net effect could be we actually burn more dino fuel.
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Replying to: kipk (Aug 31, 2009 4:59 am)
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Replying to: pf_flyer (Aug 31, 2009 10:45 am) Considering: tractors tilling the ground and planting the seed Power to irrigate the fields Tractors harvesting the crop transporting the crop by truck energy to convert the crop into ethanol trucking the ethanol to a facility to "mix" the ethanol with dino fuel poorer mileage from the finished product A lot of dino fuel is burned just to get 10% ready for our fuel tanks. |
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Forbes Magazine dated September 07, 2009 If the U.S. insists on getting motor fuel from crops, it should think about putting them closer to the equator. Corn ethanol swallows tax subsidies, jacks up food prices and doesn't do much to reduce the world's carbon footprint. So what does one say about the newest contender in the biofuels industry, sweet sorghum? Perhaps the most compelling sales pitch that can be offered about it is this: It's no worse than the alternative. Federal law mandates that by 2012 gasoline refiners use at least 7.5 billion gallons of renewable fuel a year. If agribusiness executive Vikram Shroff has his way, sorghum will get a significant share of this market. Shroff runs United Phosphorus, an Indian firm founded by his father that sells sorghum seeds, as well as fertilizers, pesticides and industrial chemicals. He says many American farmers looking for a piece of the biofuels market should try growing sorghum along with sugarcane on their land. A sorghum-sugarcane mix, says Shroff, can yield double the ethanol per acre of land as corn, uses less fertilizer and doesn't raise food prices (not directly, anyway). Persuading farmers in the southern U.S. to give his fuel-producing plant a try would give his firm a nice boost but not have a huge impact. How much will spend to save on foreign oil? |
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