Are there any environmental problems with ethanol fuel?

Question

Are there any environmental problems with ethanol fuel?

Answer 1

Yes.

Ethanol Cons:

- Not as efficient fuel usage as petroleum gas or diesel.

- Land Use Conversion - guess what, the US will probably import the required crops from other countries who will happily cut down their forests for more farmland.

- Pesticide use increase

- fertilizer increase

- Water consumption

- affect on food prices (have you looked at the price of corn lately?)

Hopefully this is just a pit stop on the road to a truly green solution to our dependence on oil. It's looking like further up the road synfuels are going to be a good substitution. Diesel properly refined from coal is more efficient and more green burning. By properly refined, I mean use ALL the available technology like CO2 capturing & regenerable metal-oxide-based systems for CO2 Sequestration. It's not the solution, but it's a start.

Answer 2

Yes there are some e-problems that this ethanol craze is overlooking...the actual production (even though using renewable resourves) produces alot of pollution, and secondly the BTU's that you get from an E-something blend is not nearly close to that of gasonline ( we are talking 84K to 110K)  what that translates to is poorer fuel efficiency and therefore more stops to the pump...so in an essence, burning ethanol might be cleaner but the production and the lesser fuel efficiency negates any positive gains from the cleaner burning issue.....all in all we need to stop our dependence on foreign oil all together and look at other options that truly are realistic options at replacing oil...ethanol NOT....making liquid fuel from coal probably is the most realistic option we have here in the near future!

Answer 3

Every action has an opposite and equal reaction.  If you include everything being our human environment, you do the math.  We tend to get so short sighted and narrow minded.  The real answer is use less fuel.  The consequences down the road haven't even been touched.  Current "environmental" consequence:  anything that uses corn in its production is now higher priced which means you work more to feed your family which uses more energy....Get the picture?

Answer 4

All energy sources create pollution but we can learn to minimize those effects with pollution control devices.  I think in the end the environmental problem with ethanol is that it will take too much land to grow the goods needed to create the supply.  If we tried to power everything with ethanol, we couldn't grow enough to create that supply.

Answer 5

the problems are fewer than with oil based gas. and ethanol comes from a renewable source so it kinda out weighs the negative side.

Answer 6

ANY approach that provides us with energy will have environmental problems. The question is how much.

Compared to fossil fuels it is far better.

Solar panels, wind power, electric cars all have their own environmental problems. Mainly due to chemical polution from their manufacture. The new compact flourescent lightbulbs will add huge quantities of mercury to our environment. The question is are the problems smaller than the alternative of using the existing technology.

For ethanol, compact flourescent bulbs and many other new technologies the answer is yes. The environmental problems of the new technology although real are smaller than the existing current ways.

Answer 7

Lots of problems like misusing food to make it just to state the frist problem.

Answer 8

yes there are environmental problem with people who are suffering from resperatory tract disease.

Answer 9

yes, because it takes an ungodly amount of water to grow corn and then it takes a large amount of water at the ethanol plant to produce the ethanol.

Answer 10

Substituting ethanol in place of gasoline helps reduce the amount of green-house gas (CO2) that we put into the air, so it helps reduce global warming. This is surprising to many people, since, as one reader pointed out, burning ethanol releases as much CO2 into the air as burning gasoline. The reason why burning ethanol is "greener" than burning gasoline is that the carbon that is released into the air by burning ethanol is the same carbon that plants took out of the air a few months ago. So no net increase in CO2 levels happens when you burn ethanol. By contrast, when you burn gasoline, you are putting carbon into the air that has been under the ground for millions of years, thus raising the level of CO2 in the atmosphere and contributing to global warming.

One major issue with ethanol is related to the fact that in order to produce ethanol you need to supply heat. To be "honest", the producers of ethanol would be supplying that process heat by burning a portion of their ethanol output, or else using heat from other energy sources that are not contributing to global warming. The problem is if ethanol producers "cheat" and derive their process heat from non-environmentally-friendly sources, such as burning coal. If that is the case, then we are not getting the full environmental benefit that we would get from ehtanol produced "honestly".

Answer 11

Ethanol fuel pros:

*reduced dependence on fossil fuels

*using a renewable energy source

Ethanol fuel cons:

*emits roughly the same amount of CO2 as burning gasoline

*increased demand for the utilized crop means increased food prices.  It also means more water and fertilizer, etc. to grow more of the crop.

Overall ethanol is a slight improvement over gas, but we shouldn't rely on it too much.