Do people realize that ethanol is not as environmentally-friendly as we may think?

Question

After transfering, processing, and turning the ethanol into a fuel, the environmental benefits of ethanol are almost close to none.

Whatever happened to the hydrogen-feul cell cars and solar powered automobiles that the government promised to promote and increase a couple of years ago?

Answer 1

First off, the big oil companies own them. They either bought them or killed the people who invented them. Secondly I would say your wrong about ethanol. think of it like this? Yes you have to refine it and all that jazz, But by the time you capture a small country you have wasted more recourse's than need be. If we grew our own gas here then we would save the Tree's our war time pollution's and save our selves from having to deal with OPEC. Some things you cant put a value on my friend.

Answer 2

hydrogen is being tested by shell as well as other companies in europe. Solar power is being looked at as a way to recharge hybrid electric cars. Solar technology is not where it needs to be. It should not be up to the government to tell companies how to invest. If the car buying public showed more interest in hybrids, electric etc things would change. A good example is the huge flop of the GM EV1 when it first came out. I don't see people junking their cars and buying electrics any time soon. They could and should but they don't and won't. As a fleet company we are pushing fuel efficent green vehicles where ever we think they are practial. Haveing a fleet of E85 cars is not good if you can't get the fuel. The largest percentage of the gas stations in the US are independently owned. The owners do not want to spend the money it takes to add hydrogen or E85 pumps.

Answer 3

There are a lot of great answers so far, but I would like to add water to the equation. It takes 5,000 gallons of water to produce one gallon of ethanol. It takes 10,000 gallons of water to produce one gallon of biodiesel.

We are already feeling the stress of clean water. The Colorado River does not even reach the Ocean anymore! It is diverted by too many cities/irrigation and now the River delta ecosystem has changed drastically. And with global warming reducing mountain snow caps which control the SLOW release of water, it seems like an ill conceived idea to use this precious resource to feed our inefficient transportation needs.

That said, the energy input:output for ethanol is 1:1.5  This means that for every unit of energy put in, we only get 1.5 units out. Hello!!!! That is extremely INEFFICIENT!

Sugarcane is 1:8  Brazil is using sugarcane and has since become energy independent.

Another issue that is already starting to smack us in the face is that we will have to choose what our corn will be used for. Will we feed people, feed animals (to eventually, and inefficiently feed people), or make ethanol to satisfy our ever hungry, ever growing fuel needs?

Answer 4

First of all big oil companies do not own ethanol plants. Farmers form co-operatives trying to make more money for their crops. Two years ago corn prices were around $2 a bushel and soybeans were $4.50 to 5.00 range. This wasn't a very good price for farmers when the cost of production was at or near the price they sold their crops. Since the price was so low the government was subsidizing them with payments (ldp, ampta, crp) to help them cover their costs and be able to farm another year. When the price of crude oil started going up over $60 a barrel the value of ethanol was close to the value of gas so the prospect of ethanol looked good on paper, but not when you look at all the costs of producing it. To farmers, $4.00 corn is double what they were getting so the ethanol boom set in and there are ethanol plants or ones trying to get started in just about every county of most states that are in the corn belt. But now our fertilizer prices are over $300 a ton, double what they were four years ago. The cost of fuel is double what it was five years ago. The cost of land rent is double what it was two years ago. So farmers probably won't make any more money than five years ago, in my opinion. But our government is subsidizing these ventures with about $1 to 1.40 per gallon of every gallon produced. That's alot. Take that away and then ethanol plants won't be feasible then. What will happen I don't know, but the way things are going your 99 cent menu at McDonald's will be more like the $1.99 menu, milk will be more than $5 dollars a gallon, and like you see every thing you buy to eat will double in price. Are you doubling your wages to help you cover these increases?

Answer 5

I think the answer is corporate. They say that the hydrogen is to explosive, I would like to know why we are so behind on mass transit. I have lived in europe for months at a time and never needed a car and crossed other Countries borders. Corporate can't make record breaking profits selling gas if they fix the problem, I think ethanol is just something to make them appear to be making a effort, we don't even have the resources to even provide enough ethanol to make real difference.

Answer 6

To the first section I say no, people don't know or think about the ethanol processing issues any more than they think about gasoline proccessing issues.  Also theres the fact that while ethanol may be cleaner as a fuel it gives significantly less miles per gallon than gas.  Soy Biodiesel on the other hand... while it has the same proccess issues has almost no reduction in power of milage per gallon compared to standard diesel.  Anyone remember those little VW diesels a few years back?  Could be a partial solution.

  But to the second your absoluetley right, where ARE my electric cars?  Their abscence is wholly due to A. people not caring or willing to repair their world and B. Massive corporate power fighting the massive California government power that started the renewed interest in electrics.

  Let me leave these two interests:  Recently american auto-makers started a multi-million dollar campaign to fight increased milage standards for new autos.  Fighting to not have to design better cars... yeah that makes sense...  And two: pure electric cars have been possible for decades IF you are will to sacrifice ONE of the following: Speed, Acceleration, Distance, or Weight limits.  Sacrifice one and an electric car cost drops to the price of a conventional car or less (example, do you need a car that can go 100mph? would 60 cut it for you? if so than an electric is certainly possible.  Or distance, do you need a car that can routinely drive 300+ miles before refilling? Or would 50 miles and a nightly charge do it?  Engineering is just applied physics and the physics say it can and has been done).  What if you NEED a car with no restrictions? Buy a Soy-Diesel hybrid, or an electric with a range extending soy-diesel trailer.

Alright... I'm done.  

CS

Answer 7

Sure, as we do it now.  The scientists and policy makers are very aware of the facts.

But if we start to make ethanol from something like switchgrass, which grows with little water on poor land, it will be a bigger winner.

It's not a cure for everything, but it is a useful tool in fighting global warming.

Neither all good nor all bad.

Answer 8

There have been a number of studies analyzing the efficiency of corn-based ethanol that have concluded that the energy savings are pretty small, maybe 5%.  It takes petroleum fuel to plant, fertilize and harvest the corn, fuel to convert the corn into ethanol, fuel to ship the corn to the processing plant and fuel to ship the ethanol to places where it is blended with petroleum-based products.

It would save much more energy and cut the cost of feed corn if we just mandated minimum fuel economy standards for vechicles, say no car/van/SUV can be sold unless it gets 30 MPG City ratings.

Sorry folks, but ethanol is just politicians trying to look like they are doing something when they have really done next to nothing.

Solar powered autos are not likely, at least not soon.  Solar cells don't generate enough energy to run a car in real time, so you have to store the energy in batteries.  More practical are electric cars (still use batteries, of course) that are charged by plugging into the electric grid.  These make sense to me, although they are not pollution-free.  Electricity is generated principally from fossil fuels (coal, natural gas and oil), so those items will have to be used to create the electricity.

Electricity generation is pretty fuel inefficient in terms of the energy content of the fuel to create the electricity versus the electrical energy that actually makes it to an outlet (but gasoline engines are also inefficient).  There may be some beneits from pllution control at a central generating station as opposed to pollution control at millions of auto exhaust pipes.

I don't buy the "auto/oil companies are holding back" conspiracy theories.  Auto companies have provided consumers with vehicles that ran on what has been the most readily-available and cheapest energy source for decades.  Like it or not, gasoline has a built-in infrastructure to create and deliver the product.  That is what I like about electric  vehicles -- most of the infrastructure exists.

Hydrogen has no delivery system and at the moment hydrogen is pretty expansive to create.  We can use electrolysis to separate hydrogen atoms from water, but we have to use electrical energy to do that.  Hydrogen from natural gas also uses natural gas.  We could use solar electricity or wind power as the energy source to separate hydrogen from water, but the gas has to be pressurized to be stored or shipped, so the whole affair involves not just technology to build a hydrogen car but also how to create teh hydrogen fuel supply, how to ship and store it and how to get it into the hydrogen tank of the vehicle.

Consider this.  Cost.  Kuwait recently decided not to build a refinery to process 650,000 barrels of oil a day because the construction bids were in the tens of billions of dollars.  And 650,000 barrels is less than 8% of US daily consumption.  Imagine what it will cost to build processing plants for enough hydrogen to fuel 250,000,000 vehicles -- in the US alone.  It will probably be staggering.

Answer 9

Yes, ethanol is not perfect, but better that fossil fuels

Some hydrogen cars have been launched to the market, BMW launched a luxury car this year. Some gaz stations serve hydrogen in Europe and Japan, but not in other countries probably.

Answer 10

THERE IS MUCH MORE TO IT THAN THAT

They have a really hot plan to replace all the indigenous Forrest's in the world ,with mono cultures for the production of Ethanol,

Non sustainable, chemically grown ,heavily irrigated (with water needed for communities)one specie Forrest's,that have only plagues of insects as fauna which are combated with pesticides.

Killing all bio diversity,in both flora and fauna ,adding to the destruction and extinction of species ,like nothing we have ever seen before.

All in the quest for alternative energy and to save the Environment ,

The irony here is that the growing eagerness to slow climate change by using biofuels and planting millions of trees for carbon credits has resulted in new major causes of deforestation, say activists. And that is making climate change worse because deforestation puts far more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the entire world's fleet of cars, trucks, planes, trains and ships combined.

"Biofuels are rapidly becoming the main cause of deforestation in countries like Indonesia, Malaysia and Brazil," said Simone Lovera, managing coordinator of the Global Forest Coalition, an environmental NGO based in Asunción, Paraguay. "We call it 'deforestation diesel'," Lovera told IPS.

Oil from African palm trees is considered to be one of the best and cheapest sources of biodiesel and energy companies are investing billions into acquiring or developing oil-palm plantations in developing countries. Vast tracts of forest in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and many other countries have been cleared to grow oil palms. Oil palm has become the world's number one fruit crop, well ahead of bananas.

Biodiesel offers many environmental benefits over diesel from petroleum, including reductions in air pollutants, but the enormous global thirst means millions more hectares could be converted into monocultures of oil palm. Getting accurate numbers on how much forest is being lost is very difficult.

The FAO's State of the World's Forests 2007 released last week reports that globally, net forest loss is 20,000 hectares per day -- equivalent to an area twice the size of Paris. However, that number includes plantation forests, which masks the actual extent of tropical deforestation, about 40,000 hectares (ha) per day, says Matti Palo, a forest economics expert who is affiliated with the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center (CATIE) in Costa Rica.

"The half a million ha per year deforestation of Mexico is covered by the increase of forests in the U.S., for example," Palo told IPS.

National governments provide all the statistics, and countries like Canada do not produce anything reliable, he said. Canada has claimed no net change in its forests for 15 years despite being the largest producer of pulp and paper. "Canada has a moral responsibility to tell the rest of the world what kind of changes have taken place there," he said.

Plantation forests are nothing like natural or native forests. More akin to a field of maize, plantation forests are hostile environments to nearly every animal, bird and even insects. Such forests have been shown to have a negative impact on the water cycle because non-native, fast-growing trees use high volumes of water. Pesticides are also commonly used to suppress competing growth from other plants and to prevent disease outbreaks, also impacting water quality.

Plantation forests also offer very few employment opportunities, resulting in a net loss of jobs. "Plantation forests are a tremendous disaster for biodiversity and local people," Lovera said. Even if farmland or savanna are only used for oil palm or other plantations, it often forces the local people off the land and into nearby forests, including national parks, which they clear to grow crops, pasture animals and collect firewood. That has been the pattern with pulp and timber plantation forests in much of the world, says Lovera.

Ethanol is other major biofuel, which is made from maize, sugar cane or other crops. As prices for biofuels climb, more land is cleared to grow the crops. U.S. farmers are switching from soy to maize to meet the ethanol demand. That is having a knock on effect of pushing up soy prices, which is driving the conversion of the Amazon rainforest into soy, she says. Meanwhile rich countries are starting to plant trees to offset their emissions of carbon dioxide, called carbon sequestration. Most of this planting is taking place in the South in the form of plantations, which are just the latest threat to existing forests. "Europe's carbon credit market could be disastrous," Lovera said.

The multi-billion-euro European carbon market does not permit the use of reforestation projects for carbon credits. But there has been a tremendous surge in private companies offering such credits for tree planting projects. Very little of this money goes to small land holders, she says. Plantation forests also contain much less carbon, notes Palo, citing a recent study that showed carbon content of plantation forests in some Asian tropical countries was only 45 percent of that in the respective natural forests. Nor has the world community been able to properly account for the value of the enormous volumes of carbon stored in existing forests.

One recent estimate found that the northern Boreal forest provided 250 billion dollars a year in ecosystem services such as absorbing carbon emissions from the atmosphere and cleaning water. The good news is that deforestation, even in remote areas, is easily stopped. All it takes is access to some low-cost satellite imagery and governments that actually want to slow or halt deforestation. Costa Rica has nearly eliminated deforestation by making it illegal to convert forest into farmland, says Lovera.

Paraguay enacted similar laws in 2004, and then regularly checked satellite images of its forests, sending forestry officials and police to enforce the law where it was being violated. "Deforestation has been reduced by 85 percent in less than two years in the eastern part of the country," Lovera noted. The other part of the solution is to give control over forests to the local people. This community or model forest concept has proved to be sustainable in many parts of the world. India recently passed a bill returning the bulk of its forests back to local communities for management, she said.

However, economic interests pushing deforestation in countries like Brazil and Indonesia are so powerful, there may eventually be little natural forest left. "Governments are beginning to realize that their natural forests have enormous value left standing," Lovera said. "A moratorium or ban on deforestation is the only way to stop this."

This story is part of a series of features on sustainable development by IPS and IFEJ - International Federation of Environmental Journalists.

© 2007 IPS - Inter Press Service

Source: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines07/...

Answer 11

Some people do and some people dont.

Lots of people believe it is very environmentally friendly just because it doesn't run on gasoline or diesel. Other people support it because ethanol is a renewable source and there is plenty of corn in the world. (corn produces ethanol)

There are other people who have done a large amount of research and dont support it since the ethanol cars have an atrocious gas mileage so they nearly put the same amount of greenhouse gases in the air as gas guzzlers do.

I do not support ethanol vechiles.

Answer 12

Big companies are not willing to spend so much money for new fuel-cell projects and stuff like that.They prefer to sit behind the table and look at their money pile up.And ethanol is much better than stinky old gasoline.First of all you can grow it so we'll always have enough and it releases less carbon dioxide and other potent gasses.I have a saying if we are gonna continue to s***w the earth,one day the earth will s***w us.PERIOD YA DIG

Answer 13

One big thing about ethanol: you have to grow the corn or whatever, and then harvest it. That brings to mind big diesel tractors.

Hydrogen cars currently cost about a million bucks to produce, literally. Solar power is still not efficient enough.

It's coming but it's going to take a while.