Yes, I do think what we post up here and what we ask our politicans continually will make a difference. It worked in Iowa. We now have a very pro Ethanol and Soy diesel state government, and that didn't happen without continuously asking our state elected officials WHY NOT ETHANOL AND SOY DIESEL. If it worked in Iowa it can work in every state that isn't owned by Big Oil, and if enough states go pro bio fuels, then the feds will listen regardless of the oil lobby.

It is up to us tho. We must keep up the question WHY NOT ETHANOL AND SOY DIESEL every chance we get to our elected officials. We must not just lay down as Big Oil and guys like Jim H suggest and act like geese in a pen waiting for slaughter.

And you know the next big seller--corn furnaces! That's right, burning corn for heat in your home. Several small mom and pop dealers have start up around me in the past couple of years, and all have backorders. Heating your home with corn is the next option for energy independence. The technology is there. Demand exists, just manufacturing now is lagging.

Don't give up and always ask that question WHY NOT ETHANOL AND SOY DIESEL when you are around an elected official.

 

Yes I do farm, thanks for asking. But certainly not on the midwest scale, not in NE - we run a small beef operation, with some hay and cordwood. It's enough to keep you aware of the real price of farming though - like they say, there's no free lunch. The price of diesel is sky high, higher than gasoline now, fertilizer will likely break $450 a ton this year, ensilage at the bunker is up in price every year, even the cost plastic keep climbing. It's tough to even break even. We've been lucky lately as beef prices have stayed up, but that could drop anytime.

And it's not so much politics, or at least specifically politics - it's breaking away from the status quo in general. It's big business as much as politics, although nowadays the two are pretty much joined at the hip.

Alternative fuels in today's internal combustion engines can ease the pain for a while, but to break free of OPEC and oil in general is going to take some unconventional means, IMHO.

 

The key statement from my previous post was... "what we are willing to pay". Pay includes tax breaks, subsidies, rebates and what we pay at the pump, it all eventually comes out of our pockets, even if we don't see it. Right now, we have not yet hit the pain point that will force us off our addiction. China is working to help us with finding our pain. Petroleum is in high demand in China, and soon India. Prices will only go up.

Until the day comes where the price of petroleum finally really hurts us, and I know it will, we will continue to belly up to the bar for our petroleum fix.

I look forward to a realistic, economically viable fuel alternative and then I would love us to stuff petroleum enemas into OPEC. I think our best hope is better technology to use what we do have now and eventually getting fusion to work. Once we have fusion, we can then create the fuel stocks or electric capacity to replace nasty old petroleum.

The key is "What are we willing to pay?" and we is not just a few of us. It has to be the majority of us. The alternative sources now are being paid for by "true believers" ie those willing to pay the premium. However, you don't see people jumping on the bandwagon for voluntary higher payments for alternate energy sources, look at how many electric customers are opting for green electricty rates, not many. Most of us pay as littel as we can and scream about it.

Someday we will have alternate energy and we should be working on realistic sources now. Pie in the sky stuff that just makes us feel good about ourselves won't solve the problem.

BTW, to really stir the coals, if we were serious about energy, we would go with the current and newer generations of nukes, yes, good old Fission reactors. Much of the developed world uses them. In the US we have legislated them into economic sink holes. With enough nukes we could thumb our noses at OPEC and have electric or fuel cell or hydrogen cars be a viable alternative.

Just my gashog opinion,

Jim Henderson

 

Hey Jim, I'm sorry you feel so powerless. Bio fuels are here and now stuff, not pie in the sky. Fusion is the pie in the sky stuff as far as I'm concerned because I don't have any idea about how to bring that about. We've been waiting fifty years for it and obviously waiting doesn't work. We should all be active in trying to get biofuels on the market in whatever role we can fill. It's big oil that has to feel the pain and this is the only thing that will make it happen in our lifetimes. Looking forward to something is like saying 'I hope somebody does somethig.' We have to do things to bring it about.

 

i am all for the ethanol thing, but are people seriously suggesting mini nuke reactors in cars??????? there are just so many things wrong with that it is not even funny

 

I think the idea was to build more fission reactors to produce electricity, without dependence on fussil fuels, making production of hydrogen for fuel cells more realistic so as not to use more fossil fuel energy in making of hydrogen than is liberated from the hydrogen. That's how I read it anyway.

 

I think the future lays in a fuel cell power vehicle that uses gasoline of methanol to power it to make electricity to run a electric car with much higher efficency than possible with a IC engine as a IC engine wastes a lot of energy. These are still years away though.

 

On the cost of producing ethanol...

If you're interested and didn't catch it, they did a piece on NPR yesterday where they presented two studies on the real cost of producing ethanol from corn. One determined that it was marginally more efficient than just using gasoline, the other determined that it actually used 170% of the energy of the resulting ethanol to produce it. It seemed like it wasn't how they measured it that was the difference, but how many things they included in the measurements, e.g. the study that came up with the 170 number included things like the cost of producing machinery to farm the corn.

So there's two answers, you can pick which ever one suits your opinion going into the issue...

 

The guys in Iowa are putting their money on it. They have done their own research and determined that it's worth producing.

Now if we could get a bill through congress putting a forty year suspension of taxation on veg based fuels, we could impoverish OPEC, which would make me smile.

 

Making someone else poorer doesn't make you richer.

 

Strange logic. They are making us poorer and using their earnings to attack us. It's a political thing.

 

I'd have to agree with that. I have no problem spreading the wealth around a little, but it seems that for the most part the oil producing nations of the middle east (and to some extent elsewhere) have not used their oil wealth to benefit the welfare of their people...

 

I happened to find this page, and the whole site. It shows some interesting stats that blow holes through the statement that ethanol is an energy loser. It all depends what stats you choose to look at. When the ethanol industry was just starting out, sure, they were not very efficient, but like any other industry, as time goes by, they figure out more efficient methods. They even take into consideration the cost of producing the crops in their figures. http://running_on_alcohol.tripod.com/id18.html

 

Good site, thanks for posting that.

Also, other sources, including sugar cane, produce a lot more for less than corn.

 

yes, there definitely are more effective crops than corn, it just happens to be readily available and plentiful at this time. AS better methods and crops are available, they will likely be utilized.