Why Shouldn't we use Ethanol as a fuel for Cars?

Question

Hey

im kinda stuck on a project of mine and info u can give any websites would help and remember the bast asnswer will get more points

lol

cheers

Answer 1

We shouldn't use ethanol as a fuel because it actually costs too much to make. By cost I don't just mean money. Manufacturing ethanol is driving up the cost of corn. Which originally was a cheap and nutritious staple of our diet. Also, farmer's can get more money selling corn to fuel producers than food manufacturers. Ethanol is also time consuming to produce. Also it takes more ethanol to run a car than it does tradtional gas. If you get 30 miles per gallon of gas now. You will only get 20 miles per gallon with ethanol.

Answer 2

It's already being used in the US. If you've heard of E85, that means an 85% ethanol, 15% gasoline mixture.

Answer 3

Politically cos governments make a mint from all the taxes they recieve from people buying petrol (gas for out american readers)

it'd damage the economy and petrolium companies wont like this so they'll put prices of gas down and government will get less tax from them, then the money lost will have to be generated another way, and i can't see people liking Gorden Brown after he hikes up council tax not long b4 a general election.

Answer 4

Ethanol is not as efficient (34% less fuel efficiency) as gasoline (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fue... ), and with today's technology used in America, the corn-based ethanol fuel has it's many flaws.  

1. Corn needs a lot of land to grow to get ethanol.

2. Corn needs a lot of water to grow.

3. Corn prices go up since it is consumed for both food and energy.

4. When corn prices go up, price of livestock (beef, pork, chickens, etc.), and milk also go up since corn is used as feed.

Unless American farmers learn how to grow sugar-cane (which produces more ethanol per acre), or America invest more into cellulosic technology, the benefits only go to the farmers.

Although Ethanol produces less CO (carbon monoxide), it produces more CO2 (carbon dioxide) per gallon than gasoline.

Answer 5

Ethanol require a very large tank since the fuel supply to the engine requires a 10.mm dia. pipe to feed the average car using about ten gallons an hour

Answer 6

I dont know why no one has mentioned the simple fact that it takes more energy and is worse for the environment to produce corn ethanol as opposed to just using gasoline.

Personally I am all for electric vehicles or reusing old cooking oil, but ethanol is a very bad idea and the environment will pay for it as a result. the push to use corn ethanol was of course to financially benifit big agri-business in the midwestern states (thanks Bush).

The fact is ethanol is still going to pollute when it is burned, granted less than gasoline, but not enough less to offset the pollution caused during the farming, fertilizing, distilling and transportation of the ethanol.

Ethanol sucks people, its not green its just an illusion.

Answer 7

Ethanol is a great option for "biofuel", made from a renewable resource it would seem to be the perfect answer to the "energy crisis".

And it would be, too IF THIS WERE 1901!

There are far too many "resources" USING petroleum based fuels to make ethanol more than a wish.  If even one highly industrialized country would go 100% ethanol, then that country would no longer be able to produce any food for either humans or livestock.

Think about that for a while.   ALL the cropland devoted to corn from which to produce ethanol.

Take a look at Mexico's usage of corn for food...already the price of cornmeal there has gone beyond the budget of many Mexican families.

You may also look at hydrogen as a "non-polluting" fuel, but commercial sources of hydrogen use natural gas as the basis from which to produce that hydrogen.  Natural gas is methane, a fossil fuel. The electrolysis of water still takes more energy than can be recovered from the use of the evolved hydrogen.

Solar and hydro power is probably the best alternative to fossil fuels for stationary uses such as power plants, pumping stations, & etc.

If solar, geothermal, and hydro power were used to generate power for the national distribution grid, then electric cars actually would be non-polluting rather than just moving the pollution over to the riverside as electrics do now.

Answer 8

read this about ethanol production

Only transient Aliens could have approved that.

They are intending to replace most of 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 controlled 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 bio fuels 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 9

Well for one its used for drag cars or racing cars...why? Because it burns better so you can burn more of it quickly,hence more power from the engine. Down side is you need to burn 30 -40% more to get the same power as petrol. The amount of energy used to grow the sugar  then ferment it in containers ,then heat it to remove the ethanol then cool it back into a liquid again....that takes alot of energy and alot of effort. So I estimate for every 5 units of energy derived from ethanol ,it takes about 3-4 to produce the ethanol in the first place.... not very efficent huh.

Answer 10

Fuels made from plants are renewable energy.  They are CO2 neutral, as the next fuel crop takes in as much CO2 as is given off. They are ultimately solar powered fuels.  Ethanol was the darling fuel of the environmentalists, until people actually started making it.

Ethanol does not cost more energy to make than it provides and it could be made even cheaper by using solar heat for distilling.  Brazil is almost completely run on ethanol from sugar cane and they still export sugar.  Corn prices have gone up, but mainly because American farmers only know how to grow corn and they are selling a lot of it to be made into ethanol.  Sorghum and switch-grass would be better crops. Still there would be competition for farmland between fuel crops and food crops.

The environmentalists bemoan the overpopulation of the planet and the crowding of animals out of their habitat and want fewer people and still cry over people starving and thus decreasing the population.  So now they have turned against ethanol. Name any large source of energy that is capable of supporting our technological civilisation and there will be some environmental group opposing it.

In practical use it gets fewer mpg than petrol, so to go the same distance you would need a larger fuel tank or just stop and refuel more often. Big deal!  The boiling point has no bearing on its use in cars.  Most fuel lines in cars are large enough, you just pump the ethanol through faster.  Taxes would be placed on any fuel in proportion to mpg to maintain the roads, even electric cars would be taxed for that.  Taxes are one of two things you cannot escape.

Joe U - thinks ethanol is old fashioned.  He advises using solar electric, hydro-electric and geothermal electric power.  Build massive solar collectors covering hundreds of acres, it will damage the environment, be ugly and no power at night, so go to bed.  Hydro-electric dams change [damage, destroy] the environment, so we can't have them.  Any nice volcanic areas in the UK for use as geothermal power sites?  Get real Joe!  Besides no one says ethanol should replace all other fuels, it should just supplement them.  Electric cars do not have the range or convenience of regular cars and are too expensive.

byderule - get over it.  Modern farming is all about mono-cultures.  Biodiversity is a buzzword meaning, keep everything a primitive wilderness that people cannot benefit from. Now I agree about deforestation, but replacing a mixed forest with one having almost only one type of tree is not bad,  Trees are a crop which should be grown and harvested and replanted.  The trees still take in CO2 and give off oxygen.

Adam Beazley - and where does the cooking oil come from?  It too is a bio-fuel and much of it is corn oil.  Where does the electricity come from? Nuclear, hydro or coal-burning generating plants.  Electric cars just move the pollution elsewhere and if everyone went electric there would have to be a lot of new plants built to supply the demand.

Where do you people think energy comes from? Do you have the slightest notion of reality? Or do you think electricity magically comes out of the wall.  Would you even consider the genetic engineering of plants just for fuel production, that would grow on marginal land?  Name one large practical energy source that some environmental group does not oppose.  There isn't one.

Answer 11

because it's still damaging to the environment to manufacture/distill it.

there are better solutions out there... but at least it is  a start.

Answer 12

Because Ethanol has a very very low evaporating point, and things get quite hot inside a car, so petrol is used because it is easier to produce, it is more efficient at doing the job, and it has a higher boiling point. Good luck with the project!