People say ethonal uses too much gas to make?

Question

so what i wanna know is how much gas does it take to make .. gas. oil etc.

my idea is that .. so yeah.. it takes gas to make ethonal for power.. but eventually we will have EVERYTHING ethonal friendly to where it takes ethonal to make more ethonal.. which will kill the need for gas.. which is the whole point anyway... is my way of thinking illogical?

Answer 1

Well, maybe...

Except that most of the oil used to make ethanol is from converting petroleum waste products into fertilizer for the corn.

Also, gallon per gallon, it takes more energy to make the ethanol than it produces.

Without the oil industry, there would be no petroleum byproducts to make fertilizer, so the corn would have to be grown using other sources... steer manure, sewage sludge... Hey, this corn isn't for eating anyway, right?  Fair enough, but I bet there'd be less corn grown.

But the real problem is that even if you used ethanol fueled vehicles to fertilize the fields, plant the seeds, and harvest the crop, you'd be using more than you make.  If it takes ten acres of corn to make ten gallons of ethanol, it would still take eleven gallons of ethanol to fuel the vehicles needed to get those ten gallons made.

I guess you might look into solar powered farm equippment in order to cut down on your ethanol needs.  Then it might work... maybe.

Answer 2

There are crops that are much more efficient than corn, and will affect little or NONE of the food market in the world.

Beets, and Hemp from Cannabis are two. These two crops are also much milder on the soil they are grown in. Corn is pretty rough and will rob the soil of nutrients.

Answer 3

Forget ethanol, it's a losing proposition. Go with natural gas (methane) instead. My cars run on it and have for years. There is plenty of natural gas in the USA so the money for it stays in our economy, plus it's very clean for the environment compared to regular gasoline powered cars. Not every state has figured this out yet, so not every place has a filling station for it. Check out my source below to see if you are in an area that has it available. If so, go get yourself a car that runs on natural gas! It's cheap ($10 to fill up in Utah), plentifiul, and here now - not just some wish or dream.

Answer 4

I have read it can be upwards of a 20% loss of energy to produce ethanol and similarly in the 20% gain if done correctly. As several other users pointed out there are much better alternatives. I have heard that for example sugar cane is near 3 times more efficient or if Jazz Fan is correct Switchgrass blows this out of the water with a 540% yield gain. And it can be grown in not the best of lands. Other great bio-fuels would be hemp and Jathropha (40%) oil. These also can grow in less than optimum land and need little water.

I believe however our best bets are with algae based fuels. Currently an American Company processing company is working with an Israeli growing company and these strains can even be fed smokestack emissions cleaning the air to boot.

The potential for algae is utterly outstanding compared to other food based fuels. "Algae also are highly productive compared to conventional crops. For example, a productivity model estimates that 48 gallons of bio-diesel can be produced from an acre of soybeans, whereas algae could produce 819 gallons – and theoretically as much as 5,000 gallons – from a single acre.

Moral of the Story: Use just about anything other than corn, which is a corporate scam than only empowers the seed and fertilizer companies and a few rich farmers.

Answer 5

Very interesting interview on youtube.com with David Blume on alternative energy concepts.

Search for: Alcohol can be a gas, part 1

                    Alcohol can be a gas, part 2

It takes about an hour to watch both of them.

Answer 6

Here is where your thinking is out of kilter here- you can't use ethanol to make ethanol- ethanol is made currently out of corn- the energy it consumes to grow the corn and make the ethanol is a break even situation - we make it  out of corn, because of the lobbyist for the mid west farming industry are very effective in bribing congress so that gigantic profits may be made by the corn industry and the people that grow it- the ideal method that is very cost effective is sugar cane- it is 7 times more cost and energy efficient then corn- plus the price of corn is affecting every bit of food cost in the US- Sugar cane would not do this.

Answer 7

O.K.some myths about ethanol

1) It harms engines - not true

2) It the cause of food price rises - partially true

but there are several other reasons fuel/transport costs are up, drought, increased demand for food (china/India)

3) It takes more energy to make the ethanol than it produces. - A totally silly statement, the suggestion here is that a natural product that is usually processed locally and used fairly locally uses more energy than a product that needs a billion dollar rig to extract it, before it sent half way round the world by tanker to be refined, a process that takes as much energy as the processing of ethanol.

Experts say that at best ethanol will give us about 25% of our fuel, the above rumors have an obvious origin, oil companies, for them a 25% drop in business would be a serious issue.

Answer 8

Ethanol could be used to produce more ethanol but it doesn't make sense to produce it from corn or other food crops. We could use either switchgrass or a strain of algae to produce ethanol far more efficiently and without using prime farmland. Corn returns at most 25% more energy than it takes to produce it, while switchgrass gives back 540% and can be grown on marginal land that the USDA currently pays farmers not to use. Ethanol from algae may be even better, there is reportedly a strain that produces gaseous ethanol directly, you simply condense that fuel and put it in your tank. An acre of corn yields about 370 gallons of ethanol compared to 6,000 gallons for this strain of algae. And the algae tank could be put anywhere there is warm enough weather with good sunlight, possibly even in a fully sealed tank in the desert for maximum results.

There are problems with emissions with lower mixes of ethanol but in a mix above 90% they're greatly reduced.

Answer 9

The other problem is it takes about 5 gallons of water to make one gallon of ethanol. I'm not sure if that's true for all ethanol products, but it's true for corn based ethanol.