flynn23 wrote:

The greens, hawks, and farmers helped convince the Senate to add an ethanol provision to the energy bill—now awaiting action by a House-Senate conference committee—that would require refiners to more than double their use of ethanol to 8 billion gallons per year by 2012. The provision is the latest installment of the ethanol subsidy, a handout that has cost American taxpayers billions of dollars during the last three decades, with little to show for it. It also shovels yet more federal cash on the single most subsidized crop in America, corn.

I'm pretty certain that the anti-ethanol article that I meme'd here is being generated as a salvo targeting these groups and probably aiming squarely at ADM, the nation's largest corn producer. I'm all for battling it out from a market perspective, but with so much at stake, is it really worthwhile to battle ideologies?

Of course, it really gets thick when you see this:

The two scientists calculated all the fuel inputs for ethanol production—from the diesel fuel for the tractor planting the corn, to the fertilizer put in the field, to the energy needed at the processing plant—and found that ethanol is a net energy-loser. According to their calculations, ethanol contains about 76,000 BTUs per gallon, but producing that ethanol from corn takes about 98,000 BTUs. For comparison, a gallon of gasoline contains about 116,000 BTUs per gallon. But making that gallon of gas—from drilling the well, to transportation, through refining—requires around 22,000 BTUs.

Now don't make me whip out my economist hat and tear that to pieces. There's no fucking way that gasoline is nearly 1/5 the energy cost to produce than ethanol. Not unless you are not factoring in things like economies of scale, depreciation, and existing plant.

Having lived in Iowa for quite a while (I'm not sure what the actual state plant it, but it may as well be corn) and not too far from a huge ADM plant, ethanol was first pushed really heavily there about 20 years ago. The bottom line on my experience with it is, your milage goes down, and it scours every bit of gunk out of the injectors and everything else, meaning if you've been running on non-ethanol and get a tank full, when it's gone, you need to get an oil change. That's all at a personal level.

As far as at a national level, it's a loser, if you're running everything on a gas/corn blend. It might pay off if the tractors ran on alcohol, but they don't. All it does it give the farmers a place to sell all the extra corn they're growing. It's not especially green because of all the gas burned to make the stuff in the first place, and because of the side effects (lower milage, everyone needs an oil change).

Where there may be a better route would be things like plant based plastics. That would allow a greater percentage of those non renewable fossil fuels to be used as just that, fuel, and decrease the amount used by taking it out of that area of production. That part is just a thought.

RE: The ethanol subsidy is worse than you can imagine.