Re: UN Warns of Biofuels' Environmental Risk

There are varying accounts of the exact "energy budget" of using corn as a
fuel. The most optimistic number I've seen or heard from the experts over
the last 5 years claims the net energy benefit of corn as a fuel ranges
from -5% to +20%. Corn is pretty lousy as a fuel, no matter what you do.
Sugar is about 3-4 times more useful as a fuel but the US can't produce
anything like a decent amount of sugar for fuel purposes. There isn't
enough of the US that has tropical weather for enough of the year to make
even as much biofuels from sugar as from corn.

One thing a few people have heard is that Brazil became energy independent
and Brazil produces vast amounts of ethanol from sugar cane. While Brazil
was working toward producing enough sugar to become energy indepent using
ethanol they discovered more oil offshore than we discovered in Alaska
decades ago. It's that newly found oil that caused Brazil to become energy
independent, not the sugar and ethanol. Brazil is also clearing vast
amounts of forrest to increase sugar production. That puts huge amounts of
carbon into the atmoshpere. If you listen to the greenies the two worst
aspects of even going down the road with biofuels is that is give one more
incentive for poor people around the world to burn down the forrests and
start intensive agriculture and poor people are priced ot of the market for
food.

There's no avoiding the point that there is no easy replacement for oil.
There are hundreds of ideas that will work as one-off attempts to move one
specialized vehicle over a known course. But what will and what won't work
comes down to a matter of scale and economics. Everything that appears to
have hope for the needed scale is more expensive than oil. Everything that
appears to be cheaper than oil hasn't nearly the prospect for a fraction of
the necessary scale required to replace oil. Whatever anyone hopes to use
rather than oil is going to require changes on a scale one can hardly
imagine. The smallest changes would be something like needing 6 times as
many electrical generation plants as we currently have operating. The less
practical ideas make Apollo moon programs look like someone's hobby during
the summer vacation.

--

Scott

The North American Union and SPP are just convenient retreats for the same
crooks and kooks that were telling you to panic about Y2K.

"nothermark" <nothermark@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:qbkip3d0gqcjh1luq0cog2nddh8lsepsrh@xxxxxxxxxx
On Thu, 24 Jan 2008 14:13:14 -0800 (PST), CCBlack
<ccblack120@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Jan 24, 2:37 am, "tscottme" <blahb...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
http://tinyurl.com/yrgrft

BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) -- The world's rush to embrace biofuels is
causing a
spike in the price of corn and other crops and could worsen water
shortages
and force poor communities off their land, a U.N. official said
Wednesday.

Speaking at a regional forum on bioenergy, Regan Suzuki of the U.N.'s
Food
and Agriculture Organization acknowledged that biofuels are better for
the
environment than fossil fuels and boost energy security for many
countries.

However, she said those benefits must be weighed against the pitfalls -
many
of which are just now emerging as countries convert millions of acres to
palm oil, sugar cane and other crops used to make biofuels.

--

Scott

The North American Union and SPP are just convenient retreats for the
same
crooks and kooks that were telling you to panic about Y2K.

The new energy bill requires that the U.S. produce 36 billion gallons
of bio fuels per year by 2022. That sounds like a lot, but the U.S.
uses more that 320 billion gallons of oil per year. Of which nearly
200 billion gallons are imported.

Bio fuels alone cannot wean the United States off oil.

Let's say the country converted all the soybean crops into bio diesel,
and all the corn crops into ethanol. Each would only add up to about
7.5 percent of U.S. oil needs.

What about cellulosic ethanol, the much hyped bio fuel that can be
produced from grass, wood and other plant sources ? It's commercial
viability is a bit like the tooth fairy : Many believe in it, but no
one ever actually sees it.

Even with heavy federal subsidies, it took 13 years before the corn-
ethanol sector was able to produce 1 billion gallons of fuel per
year. Two and a half decades elapsed before annual corn ethanol
production reached 5 billion gallons, as it did in 2006.

But now Congress is demanding that the cellulosic-ethanol business
magically produce many times that volume of fuel in just 15 years. It
won't happen.

Chris

Don't leave out that they use about a gallon of diesel for
each gallon they produce.


.

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