Why Ethanol Would Lead To Environmental Disaster – More Info

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Why Ethanol Would Lead To Environmental Disaster – More Info

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 has been around for quite some time and nearly six billion gallons were produced in the past year just for purposes of making gasoline additives. 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. According to ethanol boosters, this is the beginning of a much larger revolution that could entirely replace our 21-million-barrel-a-day oil addiction. 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. 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. 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! 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.
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! Even if ethanol producers manage to hit the mandate of 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2022, that will replace a paltry 1.5 million barrels of oil per day -- only seven percent of current oil needs. Even if the entire U.S. corn crop were used to make ethanol, the fuel would replace only twelve percent of current gasoline use.
Another misconception is that ethanol is green. In fact, corn production depends on huge amounts of fossil fuel -- not just the diesel needed to plow fields and transport crops, but also the vast quantities of natural gas used to produce fertilizers. Runoff from industrial-scale cornfields also silts up the Mississippi River and creates a vast dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico every summer. 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.
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 offering information at a low price which consumers can use at home to create a small gizmo which instills hydrogen into the gasoline/air mixture that their vehicle runs on.
What this does is make bite sized particles out of the particles that the engine uses as fuel. So the engine gets to use a lot more of it.
With WATER4GAS you can minimumly expect to improve your fuel performance by 30-50% or even more. Those molecules must have been pretty "blankin'" big in some engines before. But with WATER4GAS they are made consumable so you can improve your fuel performance.
It also helps reduce emissions significantly.
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

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