Is this thread being sponsored by Exxon/Mobil?
Nope.
Distilling Ethanol produces a lot less pollution than refining oil does.
True
Ethanol is completely renewable...
Completely false. Approximately 20% to 45% of the resources that go into producing a gallon of ethanol are renewable. In fact, David Pimentel, an ecology professor at Cornell who's been studying grain alcohol for 20 years co-wrote a recent report that estimates that ethanol from seed to gas tank requires 29% more fossil energy than the fuel itself actually contains. They came to the conclusion that it takes 98,000 BTUs of fossil energy to create a gallon of ethanol which contains 84,000 BTUs. Gasoline produces 125,000 BTUs. From drilling to pumping to refining to your gas tank takes 22,000 BTUs.
...and does not pose the risks to the environment that drilling for oil does.
It doesn't pose the same risks, but it does pose risks. Right now, like it or not, corn is the cheapest way to make ethanol and even that is only price competitive because of government subsidy. Corn requires "cooking" using fossil fuels to produce ethanol, so it's not an ultimate panacea and also makes the ethanol industry a slave to fossil fuel prices.
It is just plain stupid to use corn to make ethanol. There are other crops that are much better for this purpose. Most of the Southern USA could grow sawgrass, a crop that grows fast like a week and is well suited to be distilled into ethanol.
True in principle, but right now, as mentioned earlier, extracting ethanol from sawgrass and other cellulose sources is mostly experimental, definitely not commercial-ready, and will not be fiscally viable for at least a decade.
Brazil is not a small country by any measure, having about the same area and half the population of the USA. Ford and GM are the two largest producers of flex fuel vehicles in Brazil, a country that meets the vast majority of it's energy needs from ethanol. These cars can run on straight ethanol, straight gasoline, or any mixture of the two fuels without any reduction in performance.
Brazil obtains about 45% of it's energy from renewable sources. Very impressive, but hardly a "vast majority" and in fact, a significant amount of that is hydroelectric energy to power 85% of their electrical grid. The predominance of ethanol in Brazil is due to price fixing since the 1980's and government subsidies of ethanol burning vehicles paid for by the taxation of gasoline prices. As a side note, the predominance of corn ethanol in Brazil has caused the traditional soybean farmers to switch to corn, in turn causing vast sections of the Amazon basin to be clearcut to grow soybeans as the export of soybeans is a very large percentage of Brazil's economy.
SO, why isn't ethanol jumping to the forefront? Follow the $$$$$. Big oil received HUGE subsidies by our government to import oil. If we instead taxed the import of oil, and subsidized sawgrass farmers and ethanol distillers, things would change. Why won't they change any time soon? Because the politicians that make these subsidy laws get huge contributions from big oil.
This statement is WAY off. Right now, gasoline subsidies work out to about $0.003/gallon. That's 3/10ths of a penny. The average gallon of ethanol carries a subsidy ranging from $1.08 to $1.55. Oh, and that's before Bush's new $0.45/gallon additional subsidy will kick in. If we're following the handout $$$$, it's strongly in favor of ethanol.
Finally, the pollution produced by burning fossil fuels is carbon based which adds to the greenhouse effect and global warming on top of this planets natural cycle of warming and cooling, while the by-product of burning ethanol is Nitrous Oxide, otherwise known as laughing gas. :rotflol: This can only help to reduce the road rage that is running prevalent today.
False. The byproducts of burning ethanol are CO2, water, and algehydes, or dehydrogenated alcohols. Gasoline's CO2 equivalent for GWP purposes is 2.44 and ethanol's is 1.94, based on kg/l production. This is about a 20% inprovement over gasoline, but hardly "clean burning". It also does not take the relative inefficiency of ethanol out of the mix. No matter how good we get at making ethanol engines or how we work with compression ratios, etc., there is no way around the limitations of the fuel itself. Ethanol produces 84,000 BTUs/gal (using English measures because...well, because I'm in the USA and we do stuff like that.
). Gasoline produces 125,000 BTUs/gal.
I'm no fan of big oil, but let's make sure we're discussing facts here. If they find a viable way to make ethanol out of cellulose, I'll be the biggest fan of sawgrass ethanol. Until then, there's one thing to consider: Current
goals (approx 8 billion barrels up from 4.5 today) for ethanol use by 2012 would replace less than half a percentage point of the estimated oil consumption in that same year. The entire corn crop of the US would create enough ethanol to replace less than 12% of our current gasoline consumption. In order to replace just US consumption of gasoline entirely, we would have to convert every single agricultural field in the country to corn production and still look for 20% more agricultural space than we have.
