Mr. Grumpy asked: I’ve heard that by the time they transport it and produce it, it isn’t very environmentally friendly. I’ve also heard that
ethanol or
e85 fueled vehicles get way worse
fuel economy. I’m an environmentalist, so i would like to know what to tell
people when they start arguing about ethanol.
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Depends on the source. Corn is not a good source for ethanol. The process is inefficient as your question describes. Corn ethanol also increases the price of corn which is resulted in massive food inflation in places like Mexico (where corn is a staple).
Brazil on the other hand uses sugar cane, which grows very well there and is efficient to produce.
efficient to produce means that the resultant energy stored in some quantity of ethanol is less than that required to derive the ethanol from whatever natural resource.
It’s difficult to find a concrete answer, since there are so many variables associated with every gallon of ethanol out there (Where was it grown? Is it made from corn, sugar, or something else? How did they process it? Did they need to cut down trees to grow it? What kind of chemicals did they use?) etc…
Just the fact that it is even open to debate though means it is too close for comfort in my book, and we should search for something better. There are some forms of ethanol that are much more promising than corn and sugar (one of which can be grown in desert climates and yields much more ethanol per plant than corn, though I always forget the name.)
The main reason ethanol has become popular has nothing to do with the environment, but much more to do with the corn growing lobbyists and the influence Iowa has in presidential elections. High oil prices are also another big factor. But as you can see, billing it as “carbon neutral” is very far from the truth.
Read these papers
Pretty much. Ethanol is very much in the financial interest of Big Agriculture, the Bush Administration and his USDA. Here’s what they say about ethanol. (contrast to biodiesel).
The way corn is grown is a disaster. It came out of an effort to feed the world’s hungry, ironically called the “green revolution”. Ha! GMO hybrid corn has much higher yields, so India stopped starving – but it’s so hungry for nutrients that the only way to grow it is to bomb the fields with massive amounts of nitrate fertilizer – which comes from, guess where? Petroleum. That’s right, the energy in our food comes from oil. (read the first part of section 1 of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” for more on this.)
Second, to make ethanol you have to distill. You take “mead” that’s 10-15% ethanol, you boil it all, to get to 100% ethanol. It takes a LOT of energy to do this. They are building new coal plants in the midwest to power the ethanol distilleries. It also uses a lot of water and makes a lot of waste. And jobs! And money! So ethanol is not remotely green, Bush promotes it for other reasons.
Biodiesel is a better deal by far, as the numbers show. (better still if you choose crops that don’t need so much fertilizer.)
A “gallon” is not a useful measure for comparison of fuels, because each type of fuel has different energy content. A gallon of ethanol has only 75% of the energy content of a gallon of gas, and biodiesel has 110% of the energy. Fossil diesel has 115%, which is why diesel is a bargain even at 10% more.