The EPA is going in the wrong direction. Brasil can grow the cane to efficiently get the ethanol for fuel. We can’t in this climate. We have to do something, but not ethanol from corn. It does raise food costs and create some internal car problems.
We have to go toward electric cars, hybrids running on something, or something no one has yet thought of.
I think ethanol can be useful “on the margins” by turning waste/spoilage into fuel. (I.E. run your diesel on french-fry grease; run your gasser on ethanol from the potato peelings.) There isn’t enough waste to fuel the Nation’s fleet, but it’s useful on the margins.
Also, cellulosic ethanol has the ability to make fuel out of a variety of waste products. Again, not enough to fuel a Nation, but useful on the margins. (Anytime you recycle something into a MORE valuable product, you’re “bucking the trend.”)
I’m not sold on the environmental benefits of coal (oops!) electric cars, but they DO source domestic energy (as does ethanol: while it takes (nearly) as much energy to produce a gallon of hooch as it contains in energy, most of that energy is domestically-sourced, as opposed to the gasoline it replaces.)
Corn-based ethanol is at present thoroughly pointless -- last I had heard it took about 2 gallons of fossil fuels to make a gallon of ethanol. We have E10 here in Iowa, 89 octane, which costs less than the 87 but that is strictly due to taxes being poured in, otherwise it'd be quite costly.
E15? Pointless and stupid. If they insist on not supplying straight gasoline, then supply E85 for those vehicles that can tolerate it and E10 for the rest. E10 has little enough ethanol that it does not provide the usual ethanol problems; E85 will cause problems on vehicles not prepared to accept it, but the only change on E85 vehicles is a materials change in the fuel pump and computer calibration to detect E85 and run right on it... so more and more cars support E85 now bone stock.I wasn’t making a political statement. That’s just how it works.
Our politicians play shell games to keep us confused. Ethanol blends seem to be just another shell game. Electric cars will certainly be coal burning cars but the environmentalist constituencies aren’t supposed to recognize that, But the ethanol blends are a political scheme, not an environmental breakthrough. Ethanol allows petroleum based fuels to remain at the top and the barrel price of crude to remain high. If coal were to be liquified at $50 a barrel the price of crude would immediately drop to $48 and stay there until the coal liquifiers were bankrupted and the the price would cllimb back to $80+.
$14/4 = $3.50 each at Lowes.
Electric cars will certainly be coal burning cars but the environmentalist constituencies aren’t supposed to recognize that…
You act like this is some dirty little secret, but it isn’t. We get energy from many sources other than coal, although I admit we get much (or most) of it from coal. The important thing to remember, though, is an electric car charged by electricity from a coal power plant will still produce less emissions than burning fossil fuel under the hood. Coal power plants are pretty good at efficiently extracting as much energy as possible from each pound of coal. There is less energy wasted in the process.
Now that we have (and are using) differential absorption lidar (Please google it if you don’t know what it is.), we have a way to measure most of the individual components of smokestack emissions. This will go a long way towards enabling us to do something about the most harmful emissions without banning coal all together.