Scott Benson

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    • Wed Apr 16th 10:28 AM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      VeraSun Energy and the Ethanol Debate
      Corn ethanol will never displace any real quantities of oil -- 15% at best. There just aren't enough BTUs in the whole American corn crop. What happens if we need it to replace 50% of U.S. oil if oil becomes unavailable/unaffordab... Corn ethanol ain't gonna work. Neither is Brazilian sugarcane ethanol (they make less eth than the U.S. does.) And, no one has managed to make a dime yet off of cellulosic ethanol. We are just going to have to "live" less.
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    • Tue Apr 15th 12:55 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Cheaper Ethanol from Brazil Could Cripple U.S. Producers
      I think this isn't adding up. The U.S. produced 7 billion gallons of ethanol in 2007, and Brazil only produces 4.5 billion gallons of ethanol per year, even with their "record sugarcane crop." Add them together and you still don't have any real displacement of vehicle fuels (210 million gallons of gasoline and diesel per year in the U.S.) They can ship all they want but it isn't going to matter.
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    • Wed Apr 2nd 14:07 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Corn Ethanol Can Never Replace Meaningful Quantities of Motor Fuel
      As I said above, Brazil has proven nothing, except that they can exploit a workforce as well as any country. :)
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    • Thu Mar 27th 16:37 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Corn Ethanol Can Never Replace Meaningful Quantities of Motor Fuel
      All the future predictions are all well and good, but as for today, dreams of grandeur aren't going to help us in a world of constrained cheap oil production for which we are running out of time to find substitutions. So far, no one has corrected any of the 1 for 1 BTU calculations that I lay out (gasoline/diesel versus corn). Corn just can't carry the team right now.
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    • Thu Mar 27th 12:23 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Corn Ethanol Can Never Replace Meaningful Quantities of Motor Fuel
      I have considered sugarcane/sugarbeet ethanol, which is almost all sugarcane ethanol, which is made primarily in Brazil and is prevented from coming here by a high tariff. Brazil only produces 4 billion gallons of ethanol per year, so even if we imported all of it, it still comes nowhere close to our transportation needs. Brazil being independent of oil is also a fallacy. 90% of their transportation needs are supplied by oil; 10% by ethanol. Cellulosic ethanol is another component of the argument, but no one has figured out how to make a dime off of it yet (make it at a profit). I hope they do figure it out, cause the 36 billion gallon Federal ethanol law in 2007 can't be accomplished without cellulosic. Corn just doesn't have enough energy per acre.
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    • Fri Feb 22nd 12:49 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Time for an Oil Change: Think American Alternative Energy
      This gentleman is pushing solutions that have no real chance of being solutions anytime soon. Hydrogen? Infrastructure already in place? Do your research.
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    • Tue Dec 18th 15:59 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      The Case Against Peak Oil
      "ExxonMobil (XOM) alone, writes Cassidy, has invested more than $60 billion into exploration and development over the past four years." This doesn't mena they found anything. Most of the oil companies have invested a lot of money in finding new oil and the results have been disappointing. Not all peak oil people are nutcases. I hope there is another Prudhoe Bay or North Sea out there to save us again, but it isn't looking promising. All the new stuff costs a lot of money to extract.
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