Fastest Way To Do The Most Damage To The Environment Is With Alternative Fuel Solutions –Bad Solution Gone Worse

Home | Finance


Fastest Way To Do The Most Damage To The Environment Is With Alternative Fuel Solutions –Bad Solution Gone Worse

By: GARKO

The potential disaster facing us is not actually global warming but human stupidity and shortsightedness in implementing false and destructive solutions of which there are many.
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. It takes some talent to be such a good spin master that you can put the American farmer growing corn as “the top of the spear on the war against terrorism as a former CIA director (James Woolsey) did but he did it! So, if you love America, how can you not love ethanol?
Well, I love America but I sure as heck don’t love ethanol! There are many fundamental problems with Ethanol as a substitute for gasoline: 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.
Besides, ethanol is tremendously variable as regards the energy production achievable from different sources of Ethanol. 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, some people living in River Bend Farm, a suburb of Alabama which is in the vicinity of a biodiesel plant, noticed a black yucky goo that was fouling the Black Warrior River. The crud was four hundred and fifty times higher than regulations for black yuck goo of this nature allow and the stuff had traveled two miles from its source.
It was a cocktail of oil and glycerin, emissions of biodiesel production. They deplete oxygen in waters very quickly, leaving dead fish behind. And the slime is just as poisonous to birds as Exxon's Valdeez spill in Alaska. Alabama isn't alone in this problem. In January a Missouri businessman was charged for a leakage that left 25,000 fish dead and wiped out the population of fat pocketbook mussels, which is on the endangered species list. Can you say... "OOOPS"???
More recently, a study from the University of British Columbia predicted that in increase in corn production for fuel will worsen what is known as the "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico, the dead zone is a location with so little oxygen that sea life actually can't breathe and dies. And today's "Des Moines Register" stated that Cargill, Inc., has been levied a $100,000 environmental fine--the highest amount ever charged an Iowa biofuels plant--for multiple environmental misdeeds involving harmful 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.
Still, biofuels are, at best, a huge gamble. They may help cushion the fall when cheap oil vanishes, but if we rely on ethanol to save the day, we could soon find ourselves forced to make a choice between feeding our SUVs and feeding children in the Third World. And we all know how that decision will go.
Sorry, people, if I have upset or alarmed you. It is all about confronting the truth so that effective action can be taken. And I do have good news!
WATER4GAS is providing information at a low price which consumers can use at home to put together a small gizmo which infuses hydrogen into the gasoline/air mixture that their vehicle runs on.
The process makes smaller particles out of the particles that the engine burns as fuel. Therefore it gets to use considerably more of the fuel.
By doing this you can reasonably expect to lower your fuel usage by 30-50% or even more. Those particles must have been pretty darn huge in some systems before. But with W4G they are made consumable so you can lower your fuel usage.
It also helps make emissions significantly cleaner.
This information has been purchased by over 9000 people already and happy members number about 99%! So how about you?

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

Ozzie Freedom, Water4Gas founder, is a "computer geek" and anything that he knows about automobiless is from actually digging into the engine of his own car and doing things rather than "schooling". Discover one of the best things that you can do to save on gas

Please Rate this Article

 

Not yet Rated

Click the XML Icon Above to Receive Finance Articles Via RSS!
Additional Articles From - Home | Finance
Sign Up for a free account or learn more.
 
Submit Articles
Member Login
Top Authors
Most Popular Articles
Submission Guidelines
Article RSS Feeds
Blog
Contact Us
Privacy Policy
Terms of Service
Adsense Websites
Bankruptcy Help
Chocolate Recipes
Ebay Selling
Mortgages
Payday Loans
Video Ipods
Weight Loss

Best Health Articles
Find Affiliate Advice
Find SEO Advice
RSS Feed Directory
Currency Trading Guide
Link Directory

Powered by Article Dashboard