I live in the corn belt and can assure you that sugarcane does not grow here
that sugar does not grow there does not change the fact that corn is very inefficient for biofuel
Field corn can also be made into cornmeal, which we can eat. Which is exactly why we subsidize corn growers.
We don’t grow corn specifically to make ethanol, we grow corn because we can eat it if we lose all food imports. I’d much rather eat cornmeal for years than sugar beets.
Turning excess corn into ethanol happens to be better than burying it or throwing it away.
Corn and most ag subsidies are using taxpayer money for corporate welfare for mostly mega farming consortia with a smattering of medium and smaller farmers, who also can't exist in the rigged market without welfare. 5% of all US land, not just arable land, ALL land is used for mostly cow corn. It's absolute insanity. And then there's the federal US sugar cartel keeping prices artificially (no pun intended) high.
Unfortunately farmers everywhere get subsidies: A lot of European farming would collapse and be replaced by farming done in the southern hemisphere if there weren't subsidies. As for too much corn, it's a purely economical plan: There's rotation with soybeans in most of the midwest because corn-corn-sobeans is more profitable and treats the land better. Your typical farmer would change to anything else that makes mor…
Not nearly as energy dense. Useful for some applicatons but liquid chemical fuels deliver more energy when space or weight are factors - despite the inefficiency.
What use cases in agriculture are you referring to? I do not see space or weight being issues. Just see what happens to corn and ethanol.
>Where the carbon comes from matters. Your underlying assumption is carbon is required. We could use the same land for solar panels. 40 million acres are used to grow corn for ethanol subsidies (out of 93m total). If we use these 40m acres for solar, Annual Energy Production (in watt-hours): 52,272 terawatt-hours (TWh) To put that in context: The total electricity consumption of the U.S. is about 4,000 TWh/year. The…
Just one question: can you eat photovoltaic cells? Corn is edible, and I’d be more than happy to eat cornmeal for years in the event of a global war that stopped food imports/exports. This is precisely the reason for agricultural subsidies, to ensure our nation can feed itself if all agricultural trade is cut off. We’d grind up field corn and eat cornmeal instead of starving to death with plenty of electricity but no…
If a global war can stop food imports/exports, you are very close to a civilization collapse if dependent on fossil fuels. Once the oil supply is cut off (which happens long before food), everything stops. You'd be better off relying on solar panels and having energy security, which is the most critical thing to have. Fossil fuel-based power plants can be bombed, but solar panels all over the country can never be bombed. And, there is already an overabundance of food production, specifically corn, soybeans, and milk, in the US.
Please reread tbe comment you replied to and address its points. It has already countered the "but it's replacing fossil fuels!" point.
> Please reread tbe comment you replied to and address its points. It has already countered the "but it's replacing fossil fuels!" point. It doesn't counter it. At best, it plays on a fallacy that burying the lead only leaves the red herring as argument. But corn-based biofuel is a red herring. Try to understand it. Your blend of argument is the same type of strategy used to denigrate electric cars, where complaining…
I dont have a dog in the fight. I literally have no idea or opinion if biofuel is better environmentally and to what extent. Just wanted to learn from the points.
>Where the carbon comes from matters. Your underlying assumption is carbon is required. We could use the same land for solar panels. 40 million acres are used to grow corn for ethanol subsidies (out of 93m total). If we use these 40m acres for solar, Annual Energy Production (in watt-hours): 52,272 terawatt-hours (TWh) To put that in context: The total electricity consumption of the U.S. is about 4,000 TWh/year. The…
Just one question: can you eat photovoltaic cells? Corn is edible, and I’d be more than happy to eat cornmeal for years in the event of a global war that stopped food imports/exports. This is precisely the reason for agricultural subsidies, to ensure our nation can feed itself if all agricultural trade is cut off. We’d grind up field corn and eat cornmeal instead of starving to death with plenty of electricity but no…
Ethanol corn is not the food corn, to be clear. It is bred to have as little sugar and as much starch as possible. It's inedible, unless you're a pig that likes corn byproduct or drinking corn oil. And, in the event of global war, I think we could end our enormous agriculture exports and be more concerned with a nuclear war than if we can eat corn for every meal.
If this was about that, we would grow something else. This is about agricultural lobbiests bribing congress to steal unfathomable sums of wealth from the public through subsidy.
E-Fuels. Specifically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyl_ether for agricultural engines in California because with no C-C bonds it is a soot free diesel fuel.
Not that it can't work, but that looks like oil companies trying to kill what we have today with a promise of something better in the future so they can keep selling oil.
EVs make sense for passenger cars, not so much for heavy vehicles. People might still want to be driving classic cars in the future too. Hydrogen for any kind of vehicle looks dead in the water, though green hydrogen looks essential for chemical manufacturing. (Funny, as with carbon capture, some of the best economics are in the oil business; there is a huge hydrodesulfurization plant in Saudia Arabia that lower its Scope I carbon footprint significantly by using hydrogen from PV)
Battery storage looks practical to smooth out diurnal variation in power supply and demand but doesn't look so practical to smooth out seasonal variations, some kind of chemical storage could be the way.
That being said, growing corn for fuel ethanol is stupid. Other crops are more efficient (Unless we find a way of turning the whole plant into fuel)
The trouble with corn is that its yield band is huge. Get a good growing year and suddenly you have twice as much as you need — and more than you can store, leaving it out to rot. Recapturing that energy as fuel instead of disappearing waste heat is a win and what corn-based ethanol was introduced for. The trouble with humans is that they aren't very good at moderation. As soon as they see a little opportunity to do…
The other problem is that the equipment to turn corn into ethanol isn't free, either to buy or to maintain. It's not economical to leave it idle during poor yield years.
Should we set nuclear facilities all over the country?
You mean like an SMR? Yes, if they can be secured. If we went for full size nuclear reactors, though, I doubt we would need more than half a dozen more in the UK.
Who would pay for that? Should agriculture receive even more subsidies on top of the subsidies that nuclear power plants already receive?
It is my understanding that environmentalists never pushed for biofuels at scale. Biofuels make sense at a very limited scale where you use waste to produce fuel, eg pressing sawdust into wood pellets, or making biogas from manure.
Yes of course biofuels make sense on a limited scale in certain applications. Pellet stoves are a good example. But I don't think I've seen many Environmentalist(TM) proposals that were anything less than a wholesale replacement of "fossil fuels" (and other "extractive industries") for all things everywhere. I miss the good old days when they just wanted to save the whales, before they came to believe they were savin…
Interesting. In my bubble the only proposals for replacing fossil fuels were hydrogen (now the clear loser) and batteries.