Jim Felder wrote:

> I am all for paying farmers for fuel rather than mid-east royal > families, but I've seen studies--don't know if they're legit or > not--that show that the energy benefit from the ethanol is less than > the energy used to produce it. > Comparing only ENERGY benefits and costs is inappropriate when looking at ethanol production. Ethanol is not the only product produced. For every bushel of corn that you process to make ethanol, you get 2.5 gallons of 190 proof ethanol. (I'm not even getting into the fact that you CAN'T use 190 proof ethanol in gasoline; it has to be 200 proof and that's a whole 'nother process.) If you were to total up the energy used to produce that 2.5 gallons of fuel, you would find that, yes, it took more energy to produce it than you get from burning it. HOWEVER, when you process the corn, you break down the complex starches into sugar, then the yeast eats the sugar and produces ethanol and CO2. Obviously you remove and sell the ethanol, but you can do the same with the CO2 and use it for any number of things from making dry ice to growing plants. Big fat hairy deal, right? But wait, there's more. When you run the beer (fermented mash) through the distillation column, you get 190 proof ethanol off the top and the rest comes out the bottom and is called, appropriately enough, "bottoms". The bottoms is a high protein feed that is much easier for cattle to digest than straight corn. You have thus added value to the feedstock that you started with and that can be sold, as feed, for more than the cost of the original bushel of corn.

There are other ways that you can create synergistic relationships between farmers and ethanol producers as well. At the plant that I ran in Madison, VA, we were located on a farm where the farmer raised beef cattle and had a custom lime-hauling business. Being as our plant was close to the feed lot, we built a system wherein the farmer would clean off the feed lot and shovel the manure into a mixing tank that we had buried in the ground. We would add waste liquids from the distillation process, mix that in with the manure and then pump it into another underground tank. In that tank, an anaerobic environment, the manure was broken down over a 22-day period and gave off methane gas. The gas initially had a high CO2 content, 40 %, and would not burn, so we ran the gas through a device that we built (my idea) filled with lime water (lime from the lime-hauling business). The lime water stripped out the CO2 (remember that experiment in high school chemistry class?), and brought it down to 5%. As a test, we brought out one of the burners from our steam boiler and hooked up a line from the methane digester. We fired it up at sunset one night and had the most beautiful 10 foot blue flame coming out of there! We re-installed the burner and burned the methane to make steam to cook the corn. The residual material coming out of the second underground tank was a high nitrogen fertilizer, in liquid state, that could be sprayed on fields with the farmer's liquid spraying equipment. We thereby took a fairly unusable waste product (in its existing form) and created energy to process the corn (and other materials) and reduced our energy costs considerably as well as creating a new product, high-nitrogen fertilizer, that could be sold in the local market.

It's also possible to use feedstock materials other than corn to reduce the costs of production. At various times we were using Brewex, liquid waste from the Anheuser-Busch plant in Williamsburg, and government stocks of milo that had gone bad and were no longer usable as food, to produce ethanol.

> Vegetable diesel might do better. Besides, the carbon load it puts into > the air came from last year's crop, so there's no net co2 gain unlike > petro fuel which loads the atmosphere with carbon from long ago that > otherwise wouldn't be there. > > Jim > Regarding the carbon cycle, there's no net gain to the atmospheric carbon cycle, but the carbon in the entire system remains constant. It is true, however, that the carbons in petroleum would likely remain locked up in the ground if we weren't burning it and it wouldn't be filling the air with greenhouse gases. The more important questions might revolve around the form that the carbon takes once the fuel is burned. Is it released as carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide? What is the impact that these have on the environment? How easily can our ecosystems handle the excess material that we're putting into the environment and so on. There are so many questions regarding these types of impacts and we have so limited an understanding of the actual effects that they have, both in the short-term and in the long-term, that it's really difficult to predict what the outcomes might be of burning one type of fuel over another. Given that this is the only planet that we have to live on at this point in time, it would seem that we should be way more cautious and respectful in how we treat it. It is our home, after all.

Well, I guess I couldn't stay off my soapbox after all. My apologies to those who are not interested in all this only-tangentially-Vanagon-related material. Marc Perdue