ETHANOL SCAM

"Producing enough ethanol to replace America’s imported oil alone would require putting nearly 900 million acres under cultivation—or roughly 95 percent of the active farmland in the country. Once we’ve turned our farms into filling stations, where will the food come from?"

As I've posted in the past, although it is being promoted vigorously and car companies just love to show ads with their product in a corn field, ethanol is not the answer. The hype is that ethanol will enable the US to be less dependent on foreign oil, burns cleaner, and will be cheaper than gasoline because we grow so much corn already! The problem is, that's just not true. Costing more to produce than gasoline, using gasoline in the production process and generating less energy than it takes to make, ethanol is a dead end. However, the Democratic controlled congress loves the stuff and keeps pushing it. Why?

The first reason is probably because they think it is the answer. Congressmen tend not to actually study the areas they pontificate and vote on, let alone the actual bills in question. They hear something, get a few letters, talk to lobbyists and figure they know enough to make monumental decisions with each voter's money.

Another reason is a bit less innocent. At Popular Mechanics, James Meigs explains:

There’s a simple reason that ethanol is popular with politicians: money. Substituting corn ethanol for a large fraction of the gasoline we burn will mean sluicing gushers of cash from more populated states to politically powerful farm states. And a lot of that cash will wind up in the pockets of the big agribusinesses, like Archer Daniels Midland, that dominate ethanol processing—and whose fat checkbooks wield enormous influence in Washington.

Money, and lots of it. It's no secret that when the government likes something, it gets dumptruck loads of money a day, and ethanol is the new darling of the Democrat congress. While they are reducing spending increases on sciences (a move I happen to agree with), they are spending more on ethanol production and research. This kind of subsidy would seem to be needless if the product was all it is hyped to be, but there you have it. Popular Mechanics readers responded (all anonymous save one):

The second largest owners of American farmland is the Saudis. They're going to get our money one way or another.


Good article. You don't even mention that by using our corn, includig exports, to make domestic fuel, we drive up food prices both here and around the world. Witness the corn tortilla riots last summer. Big boondoggle!


Algae for oil. One of the best solutions out there. Grown anywhere there's an abundance of sunlight from the desert to next to industrial C02 exhaust vents. I just do not understand why they continue to ride the ethanol train.


You call it an ethanol glut but I call it a shortage of distribution infrastructure that is being corrected as we speak to bring more ethanol to more gas stations. In your list of alternatives to ethanol, you list high mileage diesel. Diesel gets better mileage because diesel engines have high compression ratios ranging from 14:1 to 20:1. Back in the 1970s when unleaded gasoline was mandated, the octane rating of gasoline dropped and the compression ratio of engines designed for unleaded dropped to 8:1. Adding ethanol to gasoline raises the octane rating making it possible to run in a higher compression engine. E10 is 95 octane. You could probably raise the compression ratio to 10:1 or 11:1 if 10% ethanol was the standard American motor fuel. Detroit could probably meet the new CAFE standards easily with the same mix of cars and trucks they sell now just by increasing the compression ratio if 95 octane E10 was available at every gas station.


Ethanol is not a zero sum, either/or, equation. You can take the ethanol out of the grain and it is still a quality feed stock. That is why ethanol is being produced for far less than predicted. No serious corn farmer believes corn ethanol will replace oil, but it might just fuel their needs. As my brother said during the last oil crisis, "Let them eat their oil!"


Corn ethanol as it now stands is a complete waste of time. It essentially takes a gallon of fuel (ethanol or gas) to make gallon of fuel ethanol. You never really net anything from it. Depending on who does the analysis, you end up a little ahead or a little behind but you need to be far ahead for it to be economically viable. The other big issue is assuming you do get a net gain, where is all of this farmland going to come from? You don't get a lot of ethanol from an acre of land. Transforming all the farmland into ethanol production has many negative side effects.


As mentioned, ethanol is a lot about politics. Meanwhile, all of the car companies are pursuing hydrogen cars and they will be ready beginning around 2012. Both Hyundai and GM have said this. And Toyota started their in-house hydrogen fuel cell program back in 1992, so they are almost certainly even further ahead. Beginning in 2008, GM will be testing 100 hydrogen cars in New York, Washington D.C., and Los Angeles and Honda will be testing up to 100 hydrogen cars in Los Angeles with the general public. And yet, there was no mention of hydrogen in the press conference to announce the signing of the energy bill yesterday. But people are slowly starting to realize that hydrogen from wind, nuclear, hydro, and solar power is the future. For a list of hydrogen myths, please visit: [website]
-by Greg Blencoe, CEO Hydrogen Discoveries, Inc.

Hydrogen, by the way, is another false answer. It takes more energy to produce than it generates as well - energy coming from gasoline in many cases. Yes, hydrogen cars are less polluting (although they put out water vapor, the #1 greenhouse gas in the world, one that Al Gore and the ecoreich ignore) and use no gasoline, but they are not saving any energy and are very expensive.

At present there is no replacement for gasoline. I believe there will be and hope it comes soon, but all we're doing is shuffling around things while each company tries to be the next ethanol to cash in on the green craze and high gas prices.

The biggest problem with ethanol is that there's only so much room to produce corn in America (the biggest corn producer on earth) and the use of corn for ethanol - which pays well - is booming, the other production of corn is dropping. Look at ten products at random from the supermarket. Count how many take corn syrup alone. Imagine what happens when corn syrup continues to be more rare and difficult to get - it's already caused price increases. While cows can eat the byproduct of ethanol production we can't.

This is the kind of thing that congressmen get excited about without thinking through, and lobbyists love because it's big money for their clients (and thus, themselves). Yet it is the consumers that feel the pinch. Gas prices being high already causes increases in food, but when you double up that price increase with ethanol, everyone suffers for a solution that is not the answer it promises to be.

Let's keep looking for a solution... but let's keep congress out of the picture, OK?

Ethanol, Congress, Energy