Ethanol Dazzles Wall Street, White House

http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/redir.php?jid=31985f698a1bc7d8&cat=c08dd24cec417021

COON RAPIDS, Iowa (AP) -- A tractor trailer rig rumbles into the Tall Corn Ethanol plant. Corn pours from openings in its belly to bins underground, where conveyor belts and buckets haul it to gleaming steel silos rising 13 stories above the Iowa plains.

The 40-acre distillery turns corn into alcohol in quantities that would make a moonshiner drool. Instead of white lightnin', the brew is converted to ethanol, a fuel that makes money for farmers and is seen as a possible solution to today's high oil and gas prices.

Like the other modern-day stills dotting the Midwestern landscape, the Coon Rapids plant reached capacity soon after opening - within 12 days, to be precise.

Ethanol production in the United States is growing so quickly that for the first time, farmers expect to sell as much corn this year to ethanol plants as they do overseas.




"It's the most stunning development in agricultural markets today - I can't think of anything else quite like this," says Keith Collins, the U.S. Agriculture Department's chief economist.

The amount of corn used for ethanol, estimated at 2.15 billion bushels this year, would amount to about 20 percent of the nation's entire crop, according to department projections.

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This is a resource we can grow ourselves and we don't have to depend on Arabia... this is the way to bring oil prices down....

Of course, the cost to plant and reap the crops requires boozeless oil, right now... the fertilizer is petrochemical based...

It doesn't seem viable.

Not when we can't feed our own. Corn is somewhat useful as a food, too...

Several wild grasses including switch grass which do not require replanting every year are much better choices.

Save the corn for food.

Corn based at this time. They have to make cheaper enymes to break down cellulose into another type of sugar that can be made into ethanol.

But it will be soon.

No pesticides, no fertilizers and it will grow almost anywhere.

Corn ethanol is an energy loser. Cellulose ethanol is,
at best, a slight energy winner.

But if people think we can maintain the easy-motoring lifestyle
on ethanol, they are sadly - tragically - mistaken.

Contradict your claim that corn ethanol is an energy loser.

Looking at the funding of the study....credibility comes down to .... who do you want to believe? farmers or exxon?

Based on them not being evil I'll go with farmers.

Let the small farmer revive in the heartland and profit once and for all. We should advocate passage of a bill that would support small scale farmer or coop owened ethanol plants. This could be a HUGE job generator and bring back the youngsters who see a future at home.

Your method is the way things would work in a Country run for the benefit of it's citizens not just the moneyed few. Which vision do you really think shall prevail, Conagra's or our's?

objects need not bee shiny to fascinate the bushler

:scared:

Besides petroleum diesel for the farm equipment and trucks and trains, the fertilizers and then the cost of distilling the hooch once it's been fermented...it still needs heat to go through the still! A significant portion of that heat is LOST, never recovered, no matter how efficient the stills are.
What is amazing is that Diesel invented his engine to be run on vegetable oils! Some older Mercedes-Benz Diesel models run with absolutely NO modification needed. Other auto engines can run with minor mods.
Sounds great? Not really, as George Monbiot points out, the highest yielding oil crop is palm oil, which he fears will result in tropical farmers ignoring food production for a fickle cash crop that will be a new monoculture. Look at the US South re: cotton and backy and see what that did for us...
It would be great for "waves of shining rape" (that's the actual word for canola, which like prune getting changed into dried plum is just to hide the name of the product in English) to be sea to sea. Everyone growing canola for fun and profit, just like chinchillas! But we need to go a lot more indepth in research into the ramifications on a global scale before deciding on any monoculture as the source of deliverance.
It seems that the Corn Belt is pushing this more than anyone else, even though viable oils can be produced in a greater range of territory than making alcohol from corn. Tennessee and Kentucky are very very good at making alcohol out of corn...

I don't know this topic, but why do these asses insist the corn has to become ethanol, or that they have to grow corn? Does corn not yield enough oil? Does an engine have to run on a specific oil? Can it do a blend?

seed kernels are the most efficient in terms of cost from conversion, cultivating, harvesting, transporting, etc. I'll look it up and find out. Right now it seems that canola is the best option for temperate climates, with palm oil the favored for tropical. Can one not imagine giant fields of sunflowers from the Gulf to Canada where there were not any crops before!?

1 bushel of corn produces 1.55 pounds of corn oil.
between 25-30% of the seed by weight of hemp seed is the product of pressing into oil

Here is a good link. It appears that about 80% of the biodiesel produced right now is rapeseed. I know that corn is quite costly in pesticide costs for commercial crops as is cotton. That is probably why bio producers are leaning towards more pest resistant ground cover type crops such as rape.

http://www.cyberlipid.org/glycer/biodiesel.htm

I reread Monbiot and it seems that the fear re: palm oil production is not merely monoculture, but deforestation combined with monoculture in the Tropics. There are also some studies underway about growing algae as an oil source. This is supposed to thrive in waste water treatment plants and also have about a 50% recovery rate! Wow!

Nobody is saying it will solve ALL our energy needs, but it can HELP.

The bottom line is OIL IS NOT RENEWABLE.

(Not direct linked because the artcle has gone to the Indpeendent's paid archives.) http://forests.org/articles/reader.asp?linkid=56659

The demand for a cheap ingredient found in thousands of products, from shampoo to biscuits, is contributing to the extinction of the orangutan, warn conservationists. One in 10 mass-produced foods on Britain's shelves is estimated to contain palm oil, a bulking agent and preservative, but supermarkets and food manufacturers have been accused of doing too little to ensure their supplies are not threatening forests that are vital to the survival of Asia's only great ape.

An estimated 5,000 orangutans are killed each year in Malaysia and Indonesia by the burning of vast tracts of virgin forest to supply the world's growing demand for palm oil. Building roads to the plantations has made the situation worse, by opening up the jungle for poachers, who kill orangutan mothers and sell their babies as pets to Asian families.

WWF, formerly the World Wildlife Fund, estimates that 80 per cent of orangutan habitat has been lost in the past 20 years. Experts warn that at current rates of deforestation, the orangutan will be extinct in the wild in just 12 years. Its disappearance would set a dismal precedent for the survival of other endangered animals such as the polar bear and the tiger.

"The orangutan is one of the monkeys closest to us. We still have a lot to learn about them," said Mark Attwater of the Orangutan Foundation. (continued at link)

:kick:

is putting in Ethenol plant!!! Small town, to employ up to 350 people. My Son who lives in Iowa, said, in his neighborhood, 8 plants going up. Looks like things are moving up to compete with oil. Also heard that some plants are going to set up procedures that also use grass, wood chips, while utilizing corn now. We can do it ourselves, screw foriegn oil....And BUSH!

This may be useful information if you can't afford fuel or food.

If we are talking about using ethanol to fuel farm economies then it might be a good idea. If we are talking about using ethanol to replace gasoline in our current economy, it won't work. Our economy as currently structured is going to die as the oil runs out. Say goodbye to your car. Ethanol won't save that industry.

Perhaps the gas tank is one of the places Pickles hasn't thought to check.

Insert straw, and he can choke on pretzel or he can crash his bicycle due to wet surfaces during droughts in peace.

:rofl: