centreforenergy.com
COLUMN: Should the United States pursue ethanol as a new fuel source?
By: Daniel Abasolo & Michael Warren
COLLEGE STATION, Texas, Jun 14, 2006 (The Battalion, U-WIRE via COMTEX) --
For sale in Conroe: 2002 F-250 4x4 with a 6.8 liter Triton V10. This 10-cylinder gasoline powered beast has enough muscle to tear through the stickiest mud and rip up the steepest hills. Rated at 310 horsepower and making 425 ft/lbs of torque, this F-250 could tow even the fattest of horses. The only things missing are a 10-inch lift with 35-inch mud tires and maybe a Ranch Hand bumper for the front and rear. With all these features and an interior as nice as any luxury sedan, one can hardly imagine why anyone would want to sell such a beautiful pick-up.
However, buyers beware, this truck gets about nine miles per gallon. With that kind of fuel economy, the 38 gallon gas tank will soon be empty and the buyer could expect to pay about $114 to fill it up again. Maybe this is why there have been zero bids on this particular eBay auction. This F-250 is not the only gas-guzzling dinosaur for sale on eBay; there are countless others from General Motors Corp. and Dodge as well. The owners of these trucks have come face to face with America's overwhelming need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and make transportation cheaper.
Fortunately, there are some good solutions on the horizon that may, one day, make the internal combustion engine economical again, and free us from some of our dependence on foreign oil. Ethanol is a fuel made from fermenting organic material, and perhaps more than any other alternative, has the potential to make a serious dent in petroleum consumption in this country. Ethanol is used in an internal combustion engine in the same way as petroleum so it will not represent a massive overhaul of our entire transportation fuel system to make the switch. There are other advantages to ethanol as well. It burns cleaner than gasoline and since ethanol is made from organic material, it can help support the American farm worker and rural communities.
Jim Ansley, a Texas A&M professor of rangeland ecology, is currently working on ways to make ethanol that will be good for the Texas environment as well as create jobs in rural communities. Ansley is working on using mesquite trees, which grow in high densities in Texas, to make ethanol. Ansley's research explains that mesquite encroachment on rangelands has hurt the ranching industry because it chokes out grasses in certain areas. "In terms of maximizing diversity for livestock and wildlife, there is a lot of potential for that," Ansley said. "I think it's the kind of thing that a lot of ranch managers would want to do anyway. The added benefit here is that there is an end product to all that effort spent to control brush. Anything you do to manage that brush could be converted to another product, ethanol or biodiesel."
Using mesquite to make ethanol has other advantages, as well. It could create a refining industry in rural Texas, bringing good jobs to the refiners as well as harvesters.
"If the mesquite to ethanol industry was fully developed, you could potentially have about 400 ethanol refineries around the state, each one producing about five million gallons of ethanol per year," Ansley said. "Those refineries probably each need a crew or staff of around 30 people in order to operate. To minimize transport costs you would need to keep the refineries small and near the source of mesquite in rural areas." Thirty new jobs in any small town would be huge for the area. This would create a direct link between the fuels bought at the pump and supporting rural Texans, instead of supporting foreign oil exporters.
Ansley also said that ethanol produced in this way could replace as much as 10 percent of the petroleum used in Texas. This would not be the end of petroleum, but it would be a serious dent in our consumption. Ethanol projects like this are a great way to reduce pollution and they are our best bet to reduce petroleum consumption in this country.
By Michael Warren
With Global Warming's death toll charging toward positive numbers, the nation has been worked into a frenzy about reducing emissions and moving to alternative, cleaner burning fuels. President Bush, Hillary Clinton and even the Ford Motor Co. have called for large-scale production of ethanol and flex-fuel cars. Ethanol is being pushed as the fuel of the future, the savior of planet earth and bane of global warming. E85, an 85 percent ethanol, 15 percent gasoline mix, is celebrated as the ideal alternative to gasoline. Proponents of the fuel point to Brazil as an example of how successfully E85 can be used to replace gas. The fuel, however, is not anything near the clean, abundant energy that pundits portray it to be.
For ethanol to become a realistic solution, it would have to have a positive net energy balance. It doesn't. According to a combined study done by Cornell University and the University of California-Berkeley, producing ethanol from corn consumes 29 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced, and other biomass results in greater net loss. Basically, in order to keep from burning billions of gallons of gasoline, we'll burn billions of gallons of gasoline to make a cleaner burning fuel. This is lunacy. If the United States was to convert all of our automobiles to E85, we would still be reliant on other fuels to make it. In the words of David Pimentel, an ecology professor from Cornell, "There is just no energy benefit to using plant biomass for liquid fuel."
E85 may burn cleaner than gasoline, but it still pollutes. E85 produces 40 to 80 percent less carbon dioxide (CO2) - far from what would be expected from a miracle fuel. Also keep in mind that E85 produces only 70 percent as much heat as gasoline, meaning less power and lower miles per gallon. E85 has less pollutant per gallon, but it won't travel as far, so how applicable is that comparison? The amount of pollution per 100 miles would be a much more revealing statistic and would undoubtedly result in less difference. Fuel of the future? No thanks. The pains of making new cars, new filling stations, and exponentially increasing ethanol production will clearly not be worth the extremely limited benefits.
Enter the hydrogen atom. The technology is available to use hydrogen as fuel to propel our cars, producing only heat and water vapor as exhaust. This technology is still in its infancy and years away from being feasible on a national scale, but it shows great promise and would be a permanent solution to this nation's fossil fuel problem. Combined with the use of nuclear energy to procure the fuel, this technology has endless potential, and would result in zero-emissions driving for the entire nation.
This underachieving atmosphere is disheartening. America should strive to be on the forefront of technology. When we start modeling any aspect of our nation after Brazil, it's time for a reassessment of goals. If we move into flex-fuel technology, how long will the Al Gores of the world be satisfied with the slightly reduced CO2 emissions? Here's a thought, how about we don't waste 50 years and countless billions of dollars converting to what is obviously a temporary technology. |
