Where is the Ethanol going?

Question

Where are the stockpiles of ethanol?

There must be a huge amount around the country, ie: biofuel holdings.

Answer 1

What stockpiles? Sorry but America consumes around 10 million gallons of gas a day of which 10% is ethanol. There building distilleries as fast as possible and can't keep up with demand. Most are using corn kernals now but were designed to be easily switched to celulosic ethanol as that infrastructure becomes more avalible.

ethanol will replace gas soon along side electric generated by nuclear and renewables solar, wind, hydro as well as bio desiel made from algee, which turns out to be a fabulous carbon sequester. not everything can be made electric aircraft in particular.  Every one forgets oil is finite all the easy to get crude is gone what is left is difficult and expensive to get to and theres only about 30 years left at present demand.

Answer 2

Only a very small amount of ethanol fuel is produced here in North America.  There are no big stockpiles.

That's probably not too bad a thing because you spend more energy harvesting the corn to make the ethanol than you get out of the ethanol afterwards.  It's a big losing proposition.

Answer 3

Some of it goes in my mouth every evening.

Answer 4

700,000 tons of the stuff was shipped to Europe last year.   Not sure how many gallons that is, but the US government was paying the producers 50 cents per gallon to produce the stuff, then they send it across the ocean where they can get paid more for it than here.   The EU is planning to file an anti dumping lawsuit against the US for allowing this to happen.   I for once agree with them.

Answer 5

What the Big 5 (oil) doesn't want to tell you is there is no way enough physical land or sun to generate ethanol from corn to replace the oil needed every day.  They perpetuate the idea that biofuels will end up taking over oil consumption which can never happen.

What the Big 5 lobby against every day is nuclear power.  Nuclear power is the only energy source large enough to replace oil 10times over with the power generated.  Will oil go away completely, NO.  However, the population densities of cities will be served by nuclear power in terms of mass transit and other resources.  The fringe remaining population will utilize the remainder of oil at an expense.

Life will end up looking like bumper cars (in a sense)- as our cars will receive power from a universal source as we travel (think about where the power comes from for a bumper car).

As for ethanol, it's a clean burning fuel which is great for the environment, but gallon-for-gallon is at best 20% of the energy resource of petroleum products.

After the realization what the US (and China) will require every day in terms of petroleum based energy needs - ethanol cannot replace this.