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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jttmab who wrote (201539)	9/6/2006 12:59:30 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Respond to of 281500

"I should have known that was a clue that it was a dead end." The same clue holds for corn ethanol, as currently produced. You get a slight energy gain if you produce and use it locally. You can't send alcohol thru pipelines. California doesn't produce enuf corn, so ours will be shipped in by rail. By the time you bring a trainload of EtOH here from the Midwest, you have a loss of net energy. But, who benefits? ADM, Cargill, probably MON. Cellulosic alcohol, done right, looks more promising... Message 22576676 Message 22734943 I hang out a lot at the Oil Drum theoildrum.com There are lots of industry folks, and a lot of really smart folks. Mostly I just lurk. They start getting into some fairly heavy math. I need my daughter to explain it to me. Really. I struggled to get thru calculus; that was her Mick as a HS senior, and now as a freshman at Cal, she's repeating it (wisely, I think), but is bored and sleeps in class. "Wake me when something interesting happens". She understands differentials; I don't. But I digress. At TOD, we, if I may so rashly include mice elf, (and this means the Pollyanna crowd which thinks we can still maintain personal, non-pedal powered vehicles) seem to be headed in the direction of an electric economy; electric rail, plug in hybrids run on biofuels (using algae, switchgrass, hemp, maybe sugar cane in the south and Hawaii, miscanthus, or some other plant), loops closed by extracting energy from manure, etc. But, can it be done sustainably? I'm seeing a lot of articles about the potential for world starvation while we use our grain to power our cars. Hydrogen...can't find the story, so I'm running off memory. Nova Scotia or New Brunswick has a plan to use H as stored energy. Can't remember if they were using wind or water to generate electricity, but, to store it off-peak, they were planning on converting it to H; but that was with XS energy. One more consideration...(It's my lucky day; TOD has a wandering quote, and I found the one I wanted on my first hit)... "Considering the many productive uses of petroleum, burning it for fuel is like burning a Picasso for heat." —Big Oil Executive