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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: gg cox who wrote (4375)	2/17/2006 6:58:43 PM
From: Crabbe	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 218633

"Are you overlooking the fact that biomass as above must be gathered and transported and processed mostly using gasoline which consumes almost twice the BTU's per gallon you get back from methanol?All inputs into production of methanol must be considered including production costs and transportation costs of chemicals to breakdown biomass to ""About 6% of contiguous United States land area.."means to me "marginal lands" close by and connected to existing farmland but further away from infrastructure ...so more costly for transportation costs." Utilizing one source alone will go far towards making the US energy in dependant. Corn Stover, IE stalks and cobs. Be it grain or sweet corn, gathering of the cobs is automatic, in fact the cobs are a byproduct that must be disposed of as they are automatically gathered when the grain or sweet corn is stripped from the cob at a granary or cannery. The process of picking the ears involves running the stalk through rollers with to small of a space to allow the ear to pass through too. This machine could be easily modified to route the ear to one truck and the stalk to another truck, modifying the process slightly but giving the farmer an additional crop to sell. Should the price be $30 per ton, that would constitute a nice little profit for the farmer as compared to leaving it on the ground. Seems logical to me that we already have collection systems in place for municipal solid and liquid waste. Be it just plain garbage, or recyclable pickup. Just up I-5 from where I live is a municipal waste disposal site, garbage is trucked in from as far away as Eastern Washington (3-400 miles), it is burned with natural gas to insure complete burning, the heat from burning produces electricity. Now wouldn't it be nice if that same garbage were converted to ethanol. The cost of disposal pays for the transportation, and the burning plant, owned by Marion County collects a per ton fee for disposing of the garbage. An ethanol plant near any city could probably get the feed fuel at negative cost. Finally why do you need to use gasoline to collect the fuel feed, why not ethanol? Actually the BTU ration of gasoline to ethanol is 1 to .8. Methanol is 1 to .66. r