[quote]Marmadogg wrote:
biltritewave wrote:
all of you spouting off about it taking more energy to amke ethanol than it produces need to check your facts. THat was true years ago. THe most recent studies have shown positive energy production from ethanol. I dont have the link to the study handy but i will try and post it tommorrow
The ChemE that is the head of my firm’s energy sector analysis group laughed when I read him your post.
Even if we could get a positive energy return from ethanol we still do not have enough land to grow corn or sugar cane for that matter to meet all or our energy needs.
Brazil does it because they do not have the number of vehicles per person we have.
There are no alternative fuels that do not use more fossil fuel to be created then they replace.
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I suggest your energy analyst look for a new line of work since he doesnt know what he is talking about.
“Fuel produced from corn via the more traditional approach may yield only marginal renewable energy returns. But the ethanol obtained from cellulose with a developing technology that uses fibrous materials?such as wood chips, switchgrass, or farm residues?as opposed to corn kernels has a clear advantage over gasoline.”
?Unfortunately, there?s no single item that you can pin the differences on, which is one of the reasons why the debate has been so murky,? Hammerschlag says. Widely varying assumptions were made about farming practices. He found a particularly glaring difference in one of the cellulosic studies: The researchers obtained a higher fossil-fuel investment than anyone else because they assumed that coal or natural gas would be used to power the facility converting the cellulose material to a liquid fuel. In practice, though, one of the biggest reasons cellulosic ethanol has a much better energy balance than corn ethanol is that the whole plant can be used, Hammerschlag notes. The cellulose or fermentable component is separated from the lignin or nonfermentable component, which itself has a high energy value. Consequently, the lignin can be burned to power the facility, so no external power source is needed.
Hammerschlag?s results are similar to those of a recent independent publication in Science by a research team led by Alexander Farrell with the University of California, Berkeley. However, the ES&T paper goes further in showing the advantages of cellulosic ethanol over corn ethanol, says Lee Lynd, a biochemical engineer at Dartmouth College. One of Lynd?s own ethanol studies is analyzed in the ES&T paper.
?What you see very clearly from both [the ES&T and Science] studies is that those [ethanol studies] that have found negative returns are decided outliers from a very large and solid set of alternative studies,? says Nathaniel Greene, a senior policy analyst for the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which provided funding for Hammerschlag?s study. ?We need to move on now and start figuring out how we [can] use this technology and advance it to get as much out of it as possible.?
Here is a link to the full paper comparing every ethanol study done in the last 10 years. The above quotes were taken from the link to Overview.
http://www.nrdc.org/air/transportation/ethanol/ethanol.asp
Game, Set, Match…thanks for playing.