You May Be Misinformed About Ethanol - Here Are The Facts

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You May Be Misinformed About Ethanol - Here Are The Facts

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! There are many fundamental problems with Ethanol as a substitute for gasoline: You need to burn more of it in order to get the same amount of fuel. 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.
But as today's "New York Times" reports, residents of River Bend Farm, a suburb of Alabama which is in the vicinity of a biodiesel plant, noticed a black viscuous goo that was polluting the Black Warrior River. The slime was four hundred and fifty times higher than permit levels allow and that it had drifted two miles downstream.
It was a cocktail of oil and glycerin, waste from biodiesel production. They deplete oxygen in waters very rapidly, killing fish. And it 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 leakage that murdered 25,000 fish and commited genocide on the population of fat pocketbook mussels, which is on the endangered species list. Can you say... "OOOPS"???
Only a day ago, a study from the University of British Columbia predicted that in increase in growing corn for ethanol will worsen the so-called "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico, an area with such a small amount of oxygen that sea life actually can't breathe and dies. And today's "Des Moines Register" stated that Cargill, Inc., is being hit with a $100,000 penalty--the largest an Iowa biofuels plant has ever been hit--for multiple violations 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.
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 offering information at a low price which people can use at home to create a small device which instills hydrogen into the gasoline/air mixture that their car or truck runs on.
The process makes smaller particles out of the particles that the system uses as fuel. So it gets to use considerably more of it.
With WATER4GAS you can minimumly expect to improve your fuel economy by thirty to fifty percent or significantly more. Those goblets "musta" been pretty "blankin'" huge in some systems before. But with W4G they are made consumable so you can improve your fuel economy.
It also helps to lower emissions significantly.
This information has been purchased by over NINE THOUSAND individuals 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, shows you tips on how to lower gas consumption and that a water powered car is now reality and is one of the best ways to improve gas mileage For a list of current gasoline prices in your neighborhood email garko@startlingdiscoveries.info

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