This is an old thread, I was looking into the reason why an engine with 8.5:1 compression would need 91 octane fuel and found this thread. Bob
wrote:
Bob, the problem with growing corn to make ethanol is that if you look at the energy that goes into it, and ignore the sun's energy so it's best case;
it's a wash. Most of the energy used to make ethanol is from the natural gas used to create the nitrogen fertilizer to grow the corn. Then all the
fuel to till, plant, harvest and dry the corn. Then the energy to mash the corn and distill the ethanol. So that's the first problem with ethanol.
Basically we're exchanging various forms of energy; Natural gas, diesel, electricity (coal) to create ethanol on roughly a 1:1 btu basis when we could
save all those steps and just use the original energy as-is.
But there's another cost that's rarely discussed. There's a virtually non-renewable resource that's being used up at a rapid rate in order to grow
the corn to make the ethanol and that's the water in the Ogallala aquifer. It's virtually non-renewable b/c as we deplete it, the soil compacts and
becomes less permeable, and we're using it at a rate that is far exceeding the recharge rate. To replenish it would take something on the order of
100 years if we stopped pumping today, which of course we won't.
I'm glad to hear that things are so good in Iowa but this ethanol BS is pure disgusting politics. Shoved down our throats by a radical activist EPA
(the same EPA that shuttered the last lead factory in the country) and greased into law by the politics of Iowa. Ethanol in fuel is anything but
green, it's actually the opposite of green energy and anyone that thinks ethanol gas is somehow helping the planet is an idiot b/c they've probably
never even heard of the Ogallala
--
Todd Snyder, Buffalo NY
1976 Eleganza II
wrote:
Bob, the problem with growing corn to make ethanol is that if you look at the energy that goes into it, and ignore the sun's energy so it's best case;
it's a wash. Most of the energy used to make ethanol is from the natural gas used to create the nitrogen fertilizer to grow the corn. Then all the
fuel to till, plant, harvest and dry the corn. Then the energy to mash the corn and distill the ethanol. So that's the first problem with ethanol.
Basically we're exchanging various forms of energy; Natural gas, diesel, electricity (coal) to create ethanol on roughly a 1:1 btu basis when we could
save all those steps and just use the original energy as-is.
But there's another cost that's rarely discussed. There's a virtually non-renewable resource that's being used up at a rapid rate in order to grow
the corn to make the ethanol and that's the water in the Ogallala aquifer. It's virtually non-renewable b/c as we deplete it, the soil compacts and
becomes less permeable, and we're using it at a rate that is far exceeding the recharge rate. To replenish it would take something on the order of
100 years if we stopped pumping today, which of course we won't.
I'm glad to hear that things are so good in Iowa but this ethanol BS is pure disgusting politics. Shoved down our throats by a radical activist EPA
(the same EPA that shuttered the last lead factory in the country) and greased into law by the politics of Iowa. Ethanol in fuel is anything but
green, it's actually the opposite of green energy and anyone that thinks ethanol gas is somehow helping the planet is an idiot b/c they've probably
never even heard of the Ogallala
--
Todd Snyder, Buffalo NY
1976 Eleganza II
