Jeesh, the ignorance is rampant here, but at least people are being somewhat civil, which is quite a change for the forum!
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Originally Posted by Jewish Lawyer
You could burn food in a boiler, create steam, spin a turbine, and generate electricity. So, you are wrong again!
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Some foods, but it is far more efficient to eat the food and turn the waste into fuel. That is what happens with ethanol from sugarcane in Brazil. They can extract the best sugar, process and sell it. That leaves lots of sugar for alcohol still. Then there is the waste which can be burned for heat and electricity to run the processing and stills. They get triple from one crops and it is perennial so it grows year round rather than one or two crops a year like corn.
OTOH, you have to process the corn, though it is field corn, not edible corn. Field corn is either fed to animals or broken down to make processed foods like Twinkies and your corn syrup in Coke and such. You can process the corn to make alcohol and have the protein from the corn left, but it is then wet and it has to be used immediately and locally or dried to make feed that can be shipped. Also, corn ethanol processors usually don't use the stalks and chaff for heat and electricity so it is far less efficient than they way they use sugar cane in Brazil.
There were big surplusses of corn so the lobbys figured out that we could add ethanol to gas. Same for biodiesel from soybeans, but it has 30% more energy per gallon than gas while ethanol has about 30% less energy.
Ethanol powers some classes of dragsters and is a fine fuel, but it does absorb water and can be run in the same engines as gas, but needs way different jetting. Also, it is corrosive so you need seals and hoses that will stand up to it. No biggie, but US manufacturers (and some others) didn't use these until 2000 or later. The jetting is the big deal though. Too lean fuel in a gas motor and Iyou can burn it up or it won't run.
Biodiesel is a whole different story. The LeMans winning Audi's run on it at 200+mph for 24 hours at a stretch. It too will eat up hoses and seals, but it will also clean and lubricate a fuel system.
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Originally Posted by gnadfly
Corn is an annual crop dull knife/dim bulb.
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I think he mean sugar cane is perennial. Even if it isn't it is equatrorial and grows year round while corn grows in a much more temperate climate (even in the mountains of Mexico where it originated) and tends to be seasonal.
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Originally Posted by farmstud60
Amazing how people have been so totally brainwashed by the oil companies.
Oh BTW, everything we have done in the Middle East has been about Oil.
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Yes, isn't it. Also, lots of intervention in African for oil. My favorite Marine, Smedley Butler wrote "War is a Racket" in the 1920's after serving for 50 years making the world safe for US business. Interesting read -
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html
I wanted to start a biodiesel business around 2006 and did tons of research so anything anybody else wants to know, I can probably answer.
It is the lobbyists and lobbies that make us have ethanol in our gas and biodiesel in our diesel. It isn't a bad thing and the biodiesel is probably way better than the ethanol, but both have their downsides as well.
The reason we are using gas and diesel is that there isn't a good alternative to liquid fuels yet and may never be. Public transportation, trains and ships can be used a lot more and probably liquid fuels can be close to 100% green in the next 20 to 50 years if we want, but we likely will use liquid fuels to some extent for a century or more if not pretty much forever.
