'I don’t buy your 3-4% food value, sorry.' - so what percentage of the maize plant is in your opinion comprised by the grains that are used for food and/or making alcohol - four and a half per cent, five per cent, six? ... i might have guessed higher, but have seen the figure of three per cent somewhere, i suppose it would depend on the variety and the crop year and all, also might depend on whether you weighed the whole plant including roots for the calculation, which scientist types might do even though harvesting past the stump would be impractical and probably damaging ... in any case, i grow eating 'corn' here in the garden, and know that of the whole biomass involved, the few mouthfuls of grains are a tiny fraction
Alcohol fuel would be a great product from spoiled grain, that would make sense, if it had no food or feed value to it ... but i hear there is less spoiled grain around nowadays, with better storage and handling, there is only some that comes from weather damage ... this Permolex outfit sounds like it may have a good idea, using byproducts to make ethanol, of course ethanol production throws off byproducts of its own
Cellulosic ethanol sounds like a great idea, if it works, but i haven't heard of anybody who has a process that works ... it's not my field, but you'd think that if somebody did it would be noticed widely, so i tend to think nobody has yet bred up enough of the right little bugs to eat the cellulose and shit out sugars, which is what you need to do that, as we've got fermentation and distillation down pat through long practice ... somewhere i read recently that there were people working on genetic manipulation of bugs to do this, even outright fabrication as they were crossing stuff over from other species, but were shut down for a while as ethical questions arose ... safety questions too, no doubt - what happens if you make a bug that does this really well, and it gets away and goes wild on you, breeding like crazy and finding its own cellulose
Most of what i've read on ethanol was on the US situation, where it's an energy-losing process that is made economic by a combination of subsidies and tariff walls against cane ethanol from Brasil, where they have an energy-gaining process ... they can't even import sugar down there, without stiff penalties
It cannot be politically wise to let insane energy policies crank up the cost of food, doing so is not going to help farmers for long ... but if you can make fuel from byproducts or bugkill wood or something like that, in a process from which you get out more energy than you have to put in, and it solved more problems than it caused, then it would make sense to me, sure ... making fuel alcohol out of food and losing energy in the process, no that makes no sense at all |
