Posted by RodInNS on November 26, 2013 at 15:23:01 from (216.118.158.123):
In Reply to: Re: Beat to death posted by Paul on November 26, 2013 at 10:15:49:
I don't have a big problem with ethanol as a product aside from the fact that it makes a lot of misery with carbs on small engines. While the fact that it's driven the cost of corn up is a big negative to the livestock sector... and I don't care what you believe... there is no way you can spin that in a positive manner to me... that part bothers me... but at the same time I am happy to see the rest of you making money for a change because I know very well that most of you have gone for fairly extensive periods of time where you didn't make much. I guess overall I view it as a positive for agriculture... My issue is it's efficiency. If it was 50% efficient then I would look at it as a viable thing. When it gets down to 20-30% it's getting pretty poor. When it gets down to 10% the dog is just chasing his tail... and then mabey the truth is that it's a net loss in energy?
I view the efficiency of gasoline/diesel/LPG/CNG as irrelevant to this discussion. The production of corn and most other ag commodities ~is~ petroleum based. That's just a plain simple fact of the time we live in. Personally I don't have a problem with that. When you're producing food... I accept that as a cost we bear. Our society is sustained on petroleum today and if that didn't exist there'd be a lot less of us.... So the question to me is this... if you follow this on an energy basis rather than an economic basis... which is what we should be discussing... and you look at all the inputs... then look at the energy you get out in ethanol... do you gain 30% more energy? 20%? 10%? Nothing? What if you lose 20%? What are we doing as a society if we expend all of these petrol resources to grow the crop and get back 20% less than we put in? I'm not saying these are real numbers.... I'm just throwing the number out as an example. MY concern then is that if we get less out of it than we put in... we've simply gone backwards. What does gasoline efficiency have to do with ethanol when you use more energy to make the ethanol than you get back? That brings us to DDG's... at what point do you run out of market for this stuff? The amount of ethanol produced today is small in comparison to the actual amount of fuel required. If you produced a much larger percentage of the fuel as ethanol... you'd be swimming in DDG's. While I don't know the numbers... I'd gestimate that it's a hell of a lot more than all of the cows on the planet are going to eat. You can only dump some much concentrated protein in front of a cow...The largest part of their diet for most of their lives is still going to come from forage... so I say again... if you saturate the market for DDG's you're going to do so firstly at the expense of bean meal... and secondly... when there simple remains no use for it... then it's a waste product. Then the economic applecart for ethanol is upset... As it is... I don't think there's any serious argument to be made that the energy gain is more than miniscule if at all when you include DDG's.... never mind when you remove that from the equation. I wish more folks would separate their economic arguments from the energy equation in this debate as well... It brings us back to the law of conservation of mass and energy... energy is neither created or destroyed. It only changes form... and with every change in form there is a loss due to friction, etc. inefficiency in the conversion process. So do you harness enough sunlight to still get ahead after you pay off the system losses? I know one thing... there'd be damn little corn grown if the work had to be done with horses in the absence of chemical fertilizer... and modern herbicide... so to me that pretty well answers the question. Most of the output of the system would be consumed by the horses and the slaves... so there wouldn't be much left to go to the plant.
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