About That “Green” Alcohol Made from Corn Waste . . . .
Well, it turns out it isn’t so “Green” after all.
A peer-reviewed study published in Nature Climate Change recently looked at alcohol produced from corn waste (e.g., cobs, stalks, leaves). These items are normally plowed under and allowed to decompose, thus enriching the soil for upcoming growing seasons, but can also be processed to produce alcohol.
The Federal government paid $500k for the study. And they probably won’t like the results.
Researchers conducting the study found that the corn-waste alcohol produced approximately 7 percent more greenhouse gases over the short-term than simply using gasoline instead. In other words: the so-called “Green” fuel is actually worse for the environment than using gasoline from crude oil.
Given this result, such fuel would not appear to qualify for the current Federal $1 per gallon subsidy necessary to make it price competitive, either.
Predictably, proponents – both industrial and environmentalists – of corn-waste biofuels have attacked the study. Now, what vested interest would make them do that?
Oh, yeah, I remember now why they’d attack the results: money. Your and my tax money, going to them or their pet causes.
Lots of tax money.
Category: Global Warming
That is an excellent start on this subject, Hondo. A lot of companies, farmers and envomentalnuts do have a vested interest as you’ve said. Let’s see more, bro. Hooah.
Meanwhile, all that nat gas is just sitting there underground, waiting to be pumped out. But because it’s a fossil fuel, this administration does nothing but throw up road blocks, the economy be damned.
I’m willing to bet a bottle of good Bourbon that this will get ignored by B. Hussein 0bama & Company while they continue to shove their agenda down our throats while rewarding political cronies and campaign donors with more “green energy”contracts and stymying the Keystone XL Pipeline which would put a big number of Blue Collar Folks to work in good paying jobs, Equipment Operators, Fitters, Welders, Electricians,…
Oh, Proud, they don’t like it at all. It doesn’t fit their ‘meme’, whatever that is.
They ‘know’ more than anyone else about what should and shouldn’t be done.
Remember the ‘nutritious’ macrobiotic diet that was recommended by whatshername for school children, because 10% of them are overweight? Well, a cup of beans is not very nutritious unless there is rice with it to make a complete protein and none of the kids would eat that crap anyway.
The lesson was learned back in the 1950s, when topsoil was blowing away with the winter winds, that if you want to grow nitrogen-hungry plants like corn, you don’t clean up the debris, you plow it back into the ground or end up with fields that have the texture of clay.
Yes, this is all about money and not much else. But money takes precedence over almost everything else right now, doesn’t it?
Good corn squeezins go in my mouth, the rest of the crap goes to the hogs or back in the ground. Proud said it better, meanwhile, this jobs loving President, his words, just nixed about 50K good ones with the stoppage of the Keystone XL Pipeline. I mean good work, high paying jobs too. Halting crafts that need that work in this nation. But what the hell does he care. He got his kickbacks for 2014, plus there’s a big golf game coming up.
Yeah, that, and B. Hussein 0bama couldn’t care less about those who want to work and earn a living, he and his lackeys are too busy buying votes with welfare dollars and phone handouts!!
Once the pipeline gets built, there are permanent jobs in keeping it properly maintained, but like I said earlier, they’re too busy rewarding bribes (*OOPS!*, donations) with wind and solar farm contracts!
Hmmm, so the leftist crusaders are not only full of shit, but do more harm than good by their own standards? Shocked, SHOCKED, I tell you!
Yeah, well, taking food and organic matter out of the food chain never made a bit of sense to some of us. But then, the lefties who foisted this nonsense upon us don’t respond well to logic and real scientific evidence. They prefer to just talk about stuff and develop programs based upon wishful thinking.
It comes from corn, thus those participating in this tax-funded junket are *GASP* taking food from the mouths of children!
off topic but,,is Blackfive having Domain issues?
It is a bad day to be Green…..
Haha. It is always a good day to be “The Green Thumb”. The Green Lantern and the Green Hornet, shiver in your shadow.
No, Green Thumb, it is NOT a bad day to be ‘green’.
It is a bad day to be stupid about it.
Have you got anything planted yet?
Soon.
Started all of my seeds.
From the article, “Still, corn residue is likely to be a big source early on for cellulosic biofuels, which have struggled to reach commercial scale. Last year, for the fifth time, the EPA proposed reducing the amount required by law. It set a target of 17 million gallons for 2014. The law envisioned 1.75 billion gallons being produced this year.” “The study says it will be very hard to make a biofuel that has a better greenhouse gas impact than gasoline using corn residue,” which puts it in the same boat as corn-based ethanol, said David Tilman, a professor at the University of Minnesota who has done research on biofuels’ emissions from the farm to the tailpipe.” Guys, please check the first paragraph. The EPA just proposed reducing the target amount to 17 MILLION gallons for 2014. At a buck a gallon the subsidies will equal $17 million in tax dollars this year. The 2007 law, the one that authorized the subsidies, anticipated that this source would provide 1.7 BILLION gallons — 100 times as much. I’m thinking that this program is not working out and it should be shit-canned before it becomes more institutionalized than it has already. The second quoted paragraph above is also important. “… it will be very hard to make a biofuel that has a better greenhouse gas impact than gasoline using corn residue, which puts it in the same boat as corn-based ethanol.” From a green-house-gas perspective, when you burn gasoline, you get energy, CO2, and water vapor — the energy is good but the CO2 is the issue. Burning alcohol has the same problem — you get energy, CO2, and water vapor. Unless you drink it … but that is another comment altogether. The advantage of alcohol is that it is renewable where oil is not. That only matters if the economics and the chemistry work out — apparently they don’t. Sounds to me like we should stop beating this horse. It is really dead and further beatings will not resurrect it. On a different note, if the law was passed in 2007,… Read more »
Richard: um, as I recall Bush’s party controlled neither the House nor the Senate in 2007. The party controlling each house of Congress controls the legislative agenda for same.
Further, Congress on occasion passes laws without the POTUS’s signature. And sometimes a POTUS signs laws they don’t like because the fight over a veto is either (1) a losing proposition, or (2) isn’t worth the political capital spent.
Bottom line: don’t blame Bush for this one.
I think Bush signed it as a “reach across the aisle” gesture, and it was a mistake.
Corn-based fuels are unsustainable, because so much corn would have to be grown to produce the necessary fuel that land used for food crops would have to be converted to fuel-corn. And that still wouldn’t be enough. There was talk about using currently protected lands, such as prairie and wetlands as well.
The idea of alternate fuels should be pursued, but I think we better get the science nailed down before we attempt to move ahead into production. If the government insists on pushing this forward without listening to what investigators are warning will happen, we will end up with another expensive disaster on our hands — and another dust bowl, to boot.
For those of you who were not around back in them there Olden Times, there was a big push in the 1970s, especially by Mother Earth News, to get people to adopt alternative or ‘green’ fuels like methane (from beef and dairy cow manure) and self-produced ethanol from home distilleries. Methane produced from pig manure was featured as the source of fuel in ‘Mad Max – Thunderdome’.
You could get a license to produce alcohol for fuel for personal use. A lot of self-sufficient people did that, but not in the ‘big’ cities. And methane only required a place to put the manure and let it ferment, then plumb it and pipe the methane to a holding tank.
Is this going on now? No, because most people don’t want to be bothered and/or don’t ‘get’ it, and/or just don’t care.
If my 2001 Escape could run on Flex85 (15% ethanol) with no damage to the engine, I’d buy that because the difference in price is $.80 to $1.00 per gallon at the pump.
This whole ‘green fuel’ shtick is just that – a shtick, a one-trick pony that hits all the right notes and looks good on paper until all of the costs, including damage to land that should NOT be planted to corn or anything else, show up down the road.
And those costs are piling up now, in Iowa and Nebraska and western Illinois and Kansas.
Corn, as I said, is a nitrogen-hungry domesticated grass that has been hybridized and engineered into a commercial product requring massive amounts of nitrogen added to the soil by adding commercial fertilizers and rotating corn with soybeans and alfalfa.
If this headlong drive toward damaging farmland in pursuit of the almighty dollar doesn’t stop, we WILL have another Dust Bowl and other environmental disasters.
Sorry, I got the Flexfuel ratio backwords. It’s 85% ethanol and 15% regular unleaded.
Regardless of how much methane I produce I have never gotten a vehicle to run on it successfully, even if I do a Run to the Border the night before.
I own a 2003 flex fuel pickup, and any time I fill up with E85 my highway mileage dives from around 25 down to 16 or 17 MPG. That, and I have less acceleration power, but it cleans the fuel injectors and burns the carbon off the pistons and cylinder heads according to a gear head friend of mine.
A license to distill alcohol for fuel? I’M IN!! I could use some homemade party fuel!!
I always thought ethanol was to be used as an energy independence thing – i.e. dont need Arabian Oil for gas as we can just use ethanol in case of the next crisis… of course fracking takes precedence there…
The “green energy” scam is just that, a *scam*. A make ‘um feel goodie-goodie two shoes about themselves being fooled into thinking they are somehow “saving the planet” which as some know, ain’t happening.
Wanna control *excess* C02? Pump all the oceans into outerspace and good luck with that. I know nobody here believes their tripe but boy! There some people out there that sit on their laptop’s, buying and trading “carbon credits” for that “feel good” uphoria they get.
Sorta like smoking prime weed, brau.
streetsweeper…It’s called…”sound good solutions to feel good issues”. Makes the hippie, liberal left just squirm in their pants with glee. Doesn’t make sense to anyone? So what, they feel good talking about it over their Starbucks, “15 words to order it”, cup of coffee.
So E15 (15% Ethanol) is worse for the environment AND jacks up your engine? (We’re better off running straight gas and making soju out of the Ethanol like the Koreans do… )
Mmmmm, Soju, my liver still shivers at the very mention of that beverage…
No, it’s 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline.
And I think it went down the tubes in the 1970s because the cost of grain (corn) to produce 100 gallons of usable ethanol for personal use, in addition to the cost of reconfiguring the carburetor and putting a new liner in the gas tank, outweighed the perceived return in savings.
End of rant.
There was also that drive to make home-built wind-driven electricity using 55-gallon oil drums, which was also impractical because rehabbing an old-fashioned windmill was more practical.
Oh, yeah, remember Ted Kennedy’s drive to install wave-motion power turbines off the coast of Massachusetts, or some place? None of that went very far, you see.
It’s not that all this doesn’t work. The costs involved in creating these things outstrip the benefits of practical application. If it’s something done by an individual, the cost is on the individual who does it. However, if it’s done by a corporation, it is ALWAYS with an eye to profit and nothing else, and the cost to produce outstrips the profits every time, but you and I, on the receiving end, pay dearly for it with asinine, poorly-managed companies like Solyndra getting our tax money and going belly-up.
If you should ever wander out in to West & far West Texas, up in to the Panhandle & S/E Colorado, T Boone Pickens had quite a few wind turbine farms that the US taxpayers have been supporting since their inception. Pelousi and hubby signed onto his farms for the money they might make, by the way.