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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (282643)	3/31/2006 3:34:53 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1574566

Thank you for the information. I agree with you about ethanol from corn. We might not produce sugar cane as cheaply in the US as they do in Brazil but that doesn't mean we have to get our ethanol from corn. The fact that we use corn is apparently mostly a political thing. The corn lobby is powerful enough to get the subsidies as well as import barriers against competing production from overseas. The bio oil idea might work out better, and there are other ideas as well, many of which haven't made economic sense until recently, and perhaps still don't make economic sense but they will make more and more sense as the technology improves and as oil prices go higher over the years. Tim

To: combjelly who wrote (282643)	4/4/2006 4:36:08 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574566

Personally, I'd prefer if the ethanol isn't made from corn. It is hard to make it cost effective and is fairly marginal as far as energy gained. There are other potential sources, sugar cane is better. Things like switch grass is a lot better. Things like bio-oil can also be useful by displacing fuel oil from petroleum and can also be used as a feedstock. To be cost effective, attention needs to be paid to the whole cycle. That includes using the gasses and char to fuel the process. I think we may have to find a 'crop' like switch grass that is not used for other things to make it work. Sugar cane and corn have to many other uses. Some crop that produces high energy [for plant life] with small amounts of matter and is not demanding in terms of the amount of land it needs for growing. When I saw the statistics for how many days [yes, days] of oil usage the current crop of corn or soybeans would replace through ethanol creation, I realized that ethanol may not be able to play the dominate role in reducing the US's energy dependence on oil and natural gas.