Drive On The Road To Disaster Powered By Ethanol

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Drive On The Road To Disaster Powered By Ethanol

By: GARKO

The great danger of confronting peak oil and global warming isn't that we will sit on our collective asses and do nothing while civilization collapses, but that we will plunge after "solutions" that will make our problems even worse.
One of these dead end solutions is corn-derived Ethanol which is the favorite of politicians, corporations and media.
Ethanol, of course, is nothing new. American refiners will produce nearly 6 billion gallons of corn ethanol this year, mostly for use as a gasoline additive to make engines burn cleaner. But in June 2007, the Senate all but announced that America's future is going to be powered by biofuels, mandating the production of 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2022. If you listen to Ethanol people then this is part of a revolution to replace oil addiction (with Ethanol addiction I suppose) . It is a nice utopian fantasy with happy farmers, clean air, a cool clean planet and emancipation of the US from oil addiction. As the king of ethanol hype, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, put it recently, "Everything about ethanol is good, good, good."
Three factors are driving the ethanol hype. The first is panic: Many energy experts believe that the world's oil supplies have already peaked or will peak within the next decade. The second is election-year politics. With the first vote to be held in Iowa, the largest corn-producing state in the nation, former skeptics like Sens. Hillary Clinton and John McCain now pay tribute to the wonders of ethanol. Earlier this year, Sen. Barack Obama pleased his agricultural backers in Illinois by co-authoring legislation to raise production of biofuels to 60 billion gallons by 2030. A few weeks later, rival Democrat John Edwards, who was staking his campaign on a victory in the Iowa caucus, upped the ante to 65 billion gallons by 2025.
The third factor stoking the ethanol frenzy is the war in Iraq, which has made energy independence a universal political slogan. Unlike coal, another heavily subsidized energy source, ethanol has the added political benefit of elevating the American farmer to national hero. As former CIA director James Woolsey, an outspoken ethanol evangelist, puts it, "American farmers, by making the commitment to grow more corn for ethanol, are at the top of the spear on the war against terrorism." So, if you love America, how can you not love ethanol?
Well, I will tell you, I love America but that doesn’t equate to loving Ethanol at all! As a gasoline substitute, ethanol has big problems: Its energy density is one-third less than gasoline, which means you have to burn more of it to get the same amount of power. It also has properties that make it impossible to use the existing pipeline infrastructure to transport the Ethanol and it must be distributed by truck or rail, which majorly adds to the costs involved.
Nor is all ethanol created equal. In Brazil, ethanol made from sugar cane has an energy balance of 8-to-1 -- that is, when you add up the fossil fuels used to irrigate, fertilize, grow, transport and refine sugar cane into ethanol, the energy output is eight times higher than the energy inputs. That's a better deal than gasoline, which has an energy balance of 5-to-1. In contrast, the energy balance of corn ethanol is only 1.3-to-1 - making it practically worthless as an energy source. "Corn ethanol is essentially a way of recycling natural gas," says Robert Rapier, an oil-industry engineer who runs the R-Squared Energy Blog.
But as seen in an article in today's New York Times, residents of River Bend Farm, a suburb of Alabama which is in the vicinity of a biodiesel plant, observed a black viscuous goo that was fouling the Black Warrior River. The crud was four hundred and fifty times more than regulations for black yuck goo of this nature allow and that it had traveled two miles from its source.
It was a unholy mix of oil and glycerin, waste from biodiesel production. The muck and mire depletes oxygen in waters very rapidly, leaving dead fish behind. And the slime is equally deadly to birds as Exxon's Valdeez spill in Alaska. Alabama isn't the only state facing this environmental hazard. In January a businessman in Missouri was indicted by a grand jury for a discharge that left 25,000 fish dead and wiped out the population of fat pocketbook mussels, an endangered species. Can you say... "OOOPS"???
More recently, a study from the University of British Columbia predicted that a boost in growing corn for ethanol will worsen what is known as the "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico, the dead zone is a location with such a small amount of oxygen that sea life literally can't breathe and dies. And today's "Des Moines Register" stated that Cargill, Inc., has been levied a $100,000 environmental fine--the biggest an Iowa biofuels plant has ever been fined--for multiple environmental misdeeds surrounding illegal discharges.
Despite the serious drawbacks of ethanol, some technological visionaries believe that the fuel can be done right. "Corn ethanol is just a platform, the first step in a much larger transition we are undergoing from a hydrocarbon-based economy to a carbohydrate-based economy," says Vinod Khosla, a pioneering venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. Next-generation corn- ethanol plants, he argues, will be much more efficient and environmentally friendly. He points to a company called E3 BioFuels that just opened an ethanol plant in Mead, Nebraska. The facility runs largely on biogas made from cow manure, and feeds leftover grain back to the cows, making it a "closed-loop system" -- one that requires very few fossil fuels to create ethanol.
In the end, the ethanol boom is another manifestation of America's blind faith that technology will solve all our problems. Thirty years ago, nuclear power was the answer. Then it was hydrogen. Biofuels may work out better, especially if mandates are coupled with tough caps on greenhouse-gas emissions.
Ok folks, sorry if I depressed you. But I am just trying to wake you up to the truth. Further on along those lines I do have good news!
WATER4GAS is providing information for a nominal fee which car owners can use at home to build a small gizmo which infuses hydrogen into the fuel/air mixture that their vehicle runs on.
What this does is make bite sized particles out of the particles that the system burns as fuel. So it is able to use much more of it.
By doing this you can reasonably expect to reduce your gasoline usage by thirty to fifty percent or significantly more. Those goblets must have been pretty darn big in some systems before. But with WATER4GAS they are made consumable so you can reduce your gasoline usage.
It also helps make emissions substantially cleaner.
This information has been purchased by over NINE THOUSAND car owners already and happy members number about 99%! So how about you?

Article Source: http://www.find-investment-advice.com

Activist, consumer advocate, entrepreneur and activist, GARKO, does not know how to get your car to run on water like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang! That is a misconception. :) But he can show you one of the best ways to save on gas which is to get your car to run using water for gas For a list of current gasoline prices in your neighborhood email garko@startlingdiscoveries.info

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