Say Anything Blog

I’m a bit confused here…

1) If you are producing 125% of the energy required to generate it, you are over the break even.  Only an idiot would assume you would stick with coal or other fossil fuels to produce the ethanol.  You could either use ethanol or even better biodiesel, which can be burned in conventional diesel engines, and which has a production efficiency of around 250%. 

2) Ever look at how much energy it takes to produce gasoline from oil?  Your energy return is around 80% with that.  Don’t see anybody hatching a cow over that one.

3) According the Energy Department, we produced & consumed nearly 5 billion gallons of ethanol last year (compared to 100 billion gallons of gasoline).  That’s already 5%.  And the theoretical limit is 6%????? 

4) This “max limit” also assumes we don’t advance in technology beyond the 1930s technology used currently and start using the corn waste products (the “stover") to produce ethanol, or other cellusitic sources of ethnaol. 

5) Ethanol produces CO2 and water during combustion.  Gasoline produces a host of hazardous biproducts that significantly degrade health in urban regions.  We can argue E10 later if we want, but the statement being debunked is “ Ethanol reduces air pollution.” Duh.  Of course it does.

6) The statement “Ethanol is economically competitive now.” is a strawman.  Nobody claims that it is economically competitive without subsidies.

What a bunch of goofy nonsense.

Carrick, I saw the article and posted it without checking the details just to see how people would respond.  I do think that the final analysis on how much the nation is benefiting from ethanol in the gasoline supply has yet to be written.  Obviously there are people on both sides that have an agenda of promoting or debunking ethanol.  And I do agree that it will be a long time (probably never) before ethanol replaces foreign oil.

You don’t have to be a moron to be a liberal Democrat but it sure helps.

There’s a lot of good arguements here for both sides.  The $2.53 to produce ethanol is on it’s way down, whereas gasoline is slated to continue to increase in price.  Enzyme technology can help to reduce the input energy required to produce ethanol.

Many solutions need to be considered for displacement of gasoline, and ethonol happens to be farther along and more versatile than most.  I’d prefer that farmers get their income from higher corn prices due to ethanol consumption than from subsidies.

The whole renewable vs. nonrenewable depends on where your heat source & electricity come from.

EN, I would agree there are a lot of arguments on both sides.  From my perspective, many of arguments used by the anti-ethanol crowd aren’t “good arguments.”

To me, they resemble grasping at straws, like the 6% cap on ethanol production.  This is just playing with numbers, without asking what they really mean, or whether they make any sense.  Like a student in a class I TA’d once, who calculated that on the Moon a person who weighed 200 pounds on the Earth, would weigh nearly 1,000,000 pounds.

But you make a good point… we also need to address where our heat and electricity source comes from.  While not technically renewable, natural gas and coal are extremely abundant on the Earth, and would take literally thousands of years to deplete.

Hopefully by then, with all its subsidies, we’ll finally get nuclear fusion reactors working.  That’s the real long-term energy source, though it will deplete all the Universe’s hydrogen, given enough time.

Hopefully by then, with all its subsidies, we’ll finally get nuclear fusion reactors working.  That’s the real long-term energy source, though it will deplete all the

No argument there but how do we get that past the environnazi dems?  I believe the biggest problem as articulated by nix is the energy tradeoffs as it takes energy to make energy.  Sci-fi solve this by having fusion reactors sized to fit the need and requirements.  The ultimate answer?

You don’t have to be a moron to be a liberal Democrat but it sure helps.

Docdave, I suspect that we won’t ever have small nuclear fusion reactors.  There are engineering scaling arguments that set a lower limit on their size.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be an alternative method (perhaps something involving matter-antimatter using black holes) that would work equally as well.

For example, it is understood both theoretically and confirmed experimentally that energy can be extracted from a charged, rotating black hole. Here’s a couple of references:

Extracting Energy from Black Hole through Transition Region

New Energy Source “Wrings” Power from Black Hole Spin

Actually the only truly “renewable” energy source is one that gets its energy from a black hole, because matter is being continuously created as the Universe expands, and since you are basically “fueling” the black hole by accreting matter (anything would work, including dirty left socks and kitchen garbage) into it.  As long as you don’t put more fuel into the black hole than is being created by the Universe, you’ll never run out of fuel.

It turns out energy is not conserved by General Relativity. Not only is it not conserved, energy is being continuously created as the Universe continues to expand (due to the nonzero cosmological constant).  This is backed up by the observation that not only does the Universe continue to expand, but is expanding at any ever increasing rate.

A little less blue sky—many of our problems can be solved by simply increasing our use of nuclear fission power plants.  Once you have a relatively green energy source for the grid, you can use that to transfer energy to a non-polluting fuel like ethanol or hydrogen.  It doesn’t matter too much at that point, even if the energy transfer only has a 50% efficiency in the conversion rate, at that point.  That would raise the cost of the operation of the vehicle, not shift whether you are relying on fossil fuel or not.

Great post, Carrick.  Fission, fusion, black holes, whatever - containment and storage are the prime problems with all new energy technologies.  Anything signigicant coming out of anti-gravity studies?

I know that general relativity rules are different from Newtons.  I wasn’t aware that the general science world had accepted that Newton does not apply universe expansion [which I guess includes all the time since the Big Bang].  If energy is not being conserved, than it must be continuously created as the univese expands.  Any thoughts on this.

You don’t have to be a moron to be a liberal Democrat but it sure helps.

Geez folks, here’s something that’ll freak you out.  Nikola Telsa, the brilliant Serb scientist who was Edison’s contemporary and who gave us Alternating Current (wall plug power) over Edison’s Direct Current (or battery-type power) had developed a way of harnessing energy from the Earth and transmitting it without wires, kinda like a cellphone receives a signal.  It was based on the principal of Standing Wave Resonance.  J. P. Morgan, who was his backer in this endeavour, was unimpressed by Tesla’s working demonstration of the prototype.  His answer was “where do I put the meter?” If he couldn’t sell his product, he wasn’t going to back it.  As understandable as that may be, that technology was available at the turn of the century. 

It is said that upon his death in 1943, Government agents went to his flat and seized his notes.  While some were returned to his nephew and eventually stored in the Tesla National Museam in Belgrade, Serbia, many of those notes remain classified to this day.

With regard to fusion, look to the Farnsworth Fusor and even this interesting item.

Also, so of you might have noticed Bush’s interest in return to the moon, joined by competitors from Russia and Red China.  More likely than not, they are after the rich deposits of Helium-3, the best fusion source thus far.

...for great justice

Nice post, zig.  Tesla is one of those brilliant controversial people heavily adorned with myth.  His competition with Edison and others is probably what kept his inventions off the market.  Technology was quite different too which made it much more expense to model and produce new devices.  Since this is an energy article, you might want to read his work on so-called free energy. You’ll get more than a million hits if you google tesla free energy.

Farnsworths work seems to tie into Carricks previous comments on fusion.  Wonder what he thinks.

You don’t have to be a moron to be a liberal Democrat but it sure helps.