peabody

Ethanol and Burning Corn

What massive infrastructure? Ethanol utlizes existing crop land, is distributed via existing truck, rail and barge transportation systems and is pumped into gasoline engines from gasoline pumps. Other alternative transportation energy sources such as a wholesale change to hydrogen and electric powered vehicles will require much more masssive amounts of costly new infrastructure to get the energy to the consumer. It will also likely cost taxpayers much more than the tax breaks currently going to biofuels. While we're figuring out over the next couple decades how or if other alternatives are going to work, biofuel is at least a partial solution that's here today and works in the existing infrastructure.

Research Shows Bioelectricity Is Better than Biofuel

Biodiversivist,

The footnotes to the research report indicate that "the corn cases use only the kernels", so the researchers did not really even consider a co-production alternative in these type of biofuel facilities. The point is that there is other biomass, namely corn cobs, that can be efficiently and cost effectively harvested from the same acres surrounding these facilities that produce the corn kernels that biofuel producers currently are using. This biomass can be converted to alcohol, electricity or, more importantly, both. This is a much more practical and cost effective approach than assuming that massive amounts of biomass can be conveniently grown around or shipped to existing electric power generation plants. In reality, the scale and location of existing power plants makes accessing meaningful quantities of biomass impractical for all but a few locations. The researchers also admit that the bioelectricity approach would be more costly overall. Sometimes we need to balance idealism with practicality in order to move beyond the theoretical.

Research Shows Bioelectricity Is Better than Biofuel

The two researchers from UC Merced missed one very important point. Bioelectricity and biofuel can both be produced from the same biomass at the same time. Once the alcohol is distilled from crop residue such as corn cobs or other biomass, the residual material (referred to as lignin) can be converted to electricity at the same site that the biofuel is being produced. That energy can be used to power the distillery and any excess energy produced can be sold back into the electric grid. That allows us to more efficiently make inroads in addrressing our domestic needs for both transportation fuel and electricity at the same time. Biofuels and Bioelectricity don't need to be competitive activities. I'm surprised that the researchers couln't see this staring them in the face.

Canadian Energy Dollars

Good article, but the facts that the author is quoting on water usage are very misleading, if not disingenuous. It currently takes about 2.5 gallons of water to refine gasoline, but that doesn't represent the massive amount of water that it takes to extract oil from Canadian tar sands. Meanwhile, it takes 3 gallons of water to produce a gallon of ethanol, unless you count the God-given rainfall that causes corn to grow. Some use water numbers that assume corn farmers irrigate their land, yet only 4% of the US corn crop is irrigated. Ultimately, the simple truth is that water usage for ethanol and gasoline production is very similar.