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Gold/Mining/Energy : Big Dog's Boom Boom Room -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: elmatador who wrote (49943)	9/26/2005 2:28:18 PM
From: hilligas	Respond to of 206093

Ethenol sucks! Costs too much energy to make. Only for midwest political bafoons!

To: elmatador who wrote (49943)	9/26/2005 6:20:26 PM
From: MIRU	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 206093

Re ethanol - interesting that world sugar is tracking oil very closely, and sugar is a better "feedstock" than corn. But what the hell - there was a 70 cent to a dollar subsidy on corn ethanol, and now gasoline is up a dollar. What doesn't pencil out at $30 oil looks OK at $60.

To: elmatador who wrote (49943)	9/27/2005 1:00:07 AM
From: schrodingers_cat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 206093

I'm neutral on ethanol, but I think the arguments that it takes more energy to produce than it yields are totally misleading. Those arguments sound persuasive, but the value of energy varies wildly depending on the form it is in. Power plants dump huge quantities of energy into the environment in the form of worthless low temperature cooling water. The energy in the coal is worth more, but not nearly as much as the energy in natural gas or liquid transportation fuels. It's like saying that we shouldn't bother with electricity generation because you have to put three units of energy in to get one unit out. The proper way to evaluate ethanol or anything else is in terms of dollars and cents. I think the production cost of ethanol, before subsidy, used to be about $1.40 /gal. That will go up some with higher NG prices, unless they use power plant waste heat, which should be an option as I think it is a low temperature process. The bottom line is that ethanol is probably profitable without the subsidy right now and they are getting rich with the subsidy. Of course, government shouldn't be handing out subsidies in the first place. I don't know if ethanol has a good future or not. It probably does if the peak oil people are right, especially if they can improve the technology.