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Non-Tech : Farming
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To: Snowshoe who wrote (1410)6/20/2008 1:01:20 AM
From: Elroy Jetson  Read Replies (1) of 4448
 
That's exactly the case. The infrastructure change-over to ethanol was paid for with government subsidies in Brazil, which made sense because they were trying to achieve energy independence with something they could make cheaply.

In the US we truck ethanol to gasoline blending terminals, just as we previously trucked tetra ethyl lead to the same terminals - nothing has really changed, its the way gasoline has always been made and distributed.

But E85 and other bizarre uneconomic blends, as you have pointed out, exist only to be a farm subsidy which raises both fuel and food costs for Americans.

If there were no subsidies or tariffs, gasoline might use 5.6% ethanol from Brazil or the Philippines, but would more likely contain a similar percentage of any of a number of ethers which can be produced in a refinery or trucked in from nearby domestic producers.

Ultimately farm ethanol producers can work for some countries like Brazil but their capacity is limited, and their costs will rise as the productivity of their new fields decline.

The solution already on line for nations like the US are rechargeable hybrids which double the efficiency of fuel use combined with coal and other sources of generation of electricity. Oil remains the liquid fuel of choice for these nations due to cost and existing infrastructure, but the usage is far less.
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