Want To Replace Fossil Fuel With Ethanol? When Did You Start Hating The Environment? More Info

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Want To Replace Fossil Fuel With Ethanol? When Did You Start Hating The Environment? More Info

By: GARKO

The real hazard confronting humanity as we move further into the new millennium is that we could convulsely grasp for solutions in our hysteria about global warming which will muck things up even worse than they are right now.
Like believing we can replace gasoline with ethanol, the much-hyped biofuel that we make from corn.
Ethanol doesn't burn cleaner than gasoline, nor is it cheaper. Our current ethanol production represents only 3.5 percent of our gasoline consumption -- yet it consumes twenty percent of the entire U.S. corn crop, causing the price of corn to double in the last two years and raising the threat of hunger in the Third World. And the increasing acreage devoted to corn for ethanol means less land for other staple crops, giving farmers in South America an incentive to carve fields out of tropical forests that help to cool the planet and stave off global warming.
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. Interestingly enough, the primaries started in Iowa so all the candidates except one or two that have integrity suddenly became huge fans of Ethanol! .
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: You need to burn more of it in order to get the same amount of fuel. It also has a nasty tendency to absorb water, so it can't be transported in existing pipelines 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 today's "New York Times" reports, residents of River Bend Farm, a suburb of Alabama lying near a biodiesel plant, noticed a black yucky goo that was drifting in the Black Warrior River. The junk was four hundred and fifty times higher than permit levels allow and that it had drifted two miles from its source.
It was a unholy mix of oil and glycerin, emissions of biodiesel production. The gunk depletes oxygen in waters very rapidly, leaving dead fish behind. And it is just as deadly to birds as the Valdez spill. Alabama isn't the only place dealing with this problem. In January a businessman in Missouri was indicted by a grand jury for a leakage that left 25,000 fish dead and commited genocide on 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 a boost 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 suffocates. And today's "Des Moines Register" stated that Cargill, Inc., will pay a $100,000 penalty--the biggest ever charged an Iowa biofuels plant--for multiple violations surrounding toxic 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 build a small device which instills hydrogen into the fuel/air mixture that their automobile runs on.
The process makes smaller particles out of the ones that the system uses as fuel. Therefore it gets to use considerably more of the gas.
With WATER4GAS you can minimumly expect to reduce your gasoline usage by 30-50% or even more. Those molecules must have been pretty "blankin'" huge in some systems before. But with W4G they are made consumable so you can reduce your gasoline usage.
It also helps to lower emissions significantly.
This information has been purchased by over NINE THOUSAND people already and happy members number about 99%! So how about you?

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

Entrepreneur, songwriter, activist and consumer advocate, GARKO, shows you increase your mpg and save gas and how to lower gas consumption through hydrogen generation which is the best of the inexpensive ways to save gas For a list of current gasoline prices in your neighborhood email garko@startlingdiscoveries.info

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