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. 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: 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 is tremendously inefficient.
Besides, ethanol is tremendously variable as regards the energy production achievable from different sources of Ethanol. Brazilian ethanol derived from sugar cane produces 8 units of energy compared to one unit of energy utilized for production which is an advantage over petroleum which is in a 5 to 1 ratio. But corn ethanol only outputs 1.3 units for every one unit consumed in the energy production process which makes it pretty much a wash and useless. "Corn ethanol is essentially a way of recycling natural gas," says Robert Rapier, an oil-industry engineer who runs the R-Squared Energy Blog.
Another lie about ethanol is that it will emancipate America from dependence upon foreign oil. Uh uh! If the entire corn crop of the USA as it currently exists were to be allocated to Ethanol production it would only replace less than 1/8th of the current use of fossil fuels.
But the biggest problem with ethanol is that it steals vast swaths of land that might be better used for growing food. In a recent article in Foreign Affairs titled "How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor," University of Minnesota economists C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer point out that filling the gas tank of an SUV with pure ethanol requires more than 450 pounds of corn -- roughly enough calories to feed one person for a year. And in addition to and more basic than all of that, Ethanol is not even clean fuel! It is dirtier than fossil fuel when used as an energy source to power vehicles: E85 reduces carbon dioxide emissions by a modest fifteen percent at best, meanwhile it would result in the destruction of vast regions of forestry.
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.
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 sharing information at a low price which folks can use in their garage or wherever to build a small gizmo which infuses hydrogen into the gas/air mixture that their car or truck runs on.
The process makes bite sized particles out of the particles that the engine uses as fuel. Because of the smaller size the engine is able to use a lot more of it.
By doing this you can reasonably expect to increase your fuel economy by 30-50% or significantly more. Those particles "musta" been pretty darn huge in some engines before. But with W4G they are made consumable so you can increase your fuel economy.
It also helps make emissions substantially cleaner.
This package of info has been purchased by over 9000 car owners already and happy members number about 99%! So how about you?

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

Songwriter, entrepreneur, consumer advocate and activist, GARKO, shows you how to increase power and save gas and how to run a car on hydrogen from water which is the best of the ways to save big on gas For a list of current fuel prices in your neighborhood email garko@startlingdiscoveries.info

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