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Why Ethanol Spells Disaster

By: GARKO

The potential disaster facing us is not actually global warming but human stupidity and shortsightedness in implementing false and destructive solutions of which there are many.
Like believing we can replace gasoline with ethanol, the much-hyped biofuel that we make from corn.
Ethanol, of course, is nothing new. American refiners will produce nearly 6 billion gallons of corn ethanol this year, mostly for use as a gasoline additive to make engines burn cleaner. But in the past year, the Senate has plunged America down the toilet by demanding biofuels be the energy source of the future , mandating the production of 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2022. According to ethanol boosters, this is the beginning of a much larger revolution that could entirely replace our 21-million-barrel-a-day oil addiction. It is a nice utopian fantasy with happy farmers, clean air, a cool clean planet and emancipation of the US from oil addiction. As the king of ethanol hype, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, put it recently, "Everything about ethanol is good, good, good."
Three factors are driving the ethanol hype. The first is panic: Many energy experts believe that the world's oil supplies have already peaked or will peak within the next decade. The second is election-year politics. With the first vote to be held in Iowa, the largest corn-producing state in the nation, former skeptics like Sens. Hillary Clinton and John McCain now pay tribute to the wonders of ethanol. Earlier this year, Sen. Barack Obama pleased his agricultural backers in Illinois by co-authoring legislation to raise production of biofuels to 60 billion gallons by 2030. A few weeks later, rival Democrat John Edwards, who was staking his campaign on a victory in the Iowa caucus, upped the ante to 65 billion gallons by 2025.
The third factor stoking the ethanol frenzy is the war in Iraq, which has made energy independence a universal political slogan. Unlike coal, another heavily subsidized energy source, ethanol has the added political benefit of elevating the American farmer to national hero. As former CIA director James Woolsey, an outspoken ethanol evangelist, puts it, "American farmers, by making the commitment to grow more corn for ethanol, are at the top of the spear on the war against terrorism." So, if you love America, how can you not love ethanol?
Well, I will tell you, I love America but that doesn’t equate to loving Ethanol at all! There are many fundamental problems with Ethanol as a substitute for gasoline: Its energy density is one-third less than gasoline, which means you have to burn more of it to get the same amount of power. It also has a nasty tendency to absorb water, so it can't be transported in existing pipelines and it must be distributed by truck or rail, which majorly adds to the costs involved.
Besides, ethanol is tremendously variable as regards the energy production achievable from different sources of Ethanol. Brazilian ethanol derived from sugar cane produces 8 units of energy compared to one unit of energy utilized for production which is an advantage over petroleum which is in a 5 to 1 ratio. But corn ethanol only outputs 1.3 units for every one unit consumed in the energy production process which makes it pretty much a wash and useless. "Corn ethanol is essentially a way of recycling natural gas," says Robert Rapier, an oil-industry engineer who runs the R-Squared Energy Blog.
But as today's "New York Times" reports, residents of River Bend Farm, an Alabama suburb which is in the vicinity of a biodiesel plant, cited a black viscuous goo that was fouling the Black Warrior River. It turns out that the stuff was four hundred and fifty times higher than permit levels allow and that it had drifted two miles from its source.
It was a mixture of oil and glycerin, emissions of biodiesel production. The muck and mire depletes oxygen in waters with rapidity, leaving dead fish behind. And it is equally lethal to birds as the Valdez spill. Alabama isn't the only place dealing with this problem. In January a businessman in Missouri was indicted by a grand jury for a leakage that left 25,000 fish dead and wiped out the population of fat pocketbook mussels, which is on the endangered species list. Can you say... "OOOPS"???
Only a day ago, a study from the University of British Columbia forecasted that a boost in corn production for fuel will worsen the so-called "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico, the dead zone is a location with such a small amount of oxygen that sea life literally suffocates. And today's "Des Moines Register" announced that Cargill, Inc., is being hit with a $100,000 penalty--the highest amount ever fine an Iowa biofuels plant--for multiple violations involving harmful discharges.
Thanks in large part to the ethanol craze, the price of beef, poultry and pork in the United States rose more than three percent during the first five months of this year. In some parts of the country, hog farmers now find it cheaper to fatten their animals on trail mix, french fries and chocolate bars. And since America provides two-thirds of all global corn exports, the impact is being felt around the world. In Mexico, tortilla prices have jumped sixty percent, leading to food riots. In Europe, butter prices have spiked forty percent, and pork prices in China are up twenty percent. By 2025, according to Runge and Senauer, rising food prices caused by the demand for ethanol and other biofuels could cause as many as 600 million more people to go hungry worldwide.
In the end, the ethanol boom is another manifestation of America's blind faith that technology will solve all our problems. Thirty years ago, nuclear power was the answer. Then it was hydrogen. Biofuels may work out better, especially if mandates are coupled with tough caps on greenhouse-gas emissions.
Sorry, people, if I have upset or alarmed you. It is all about confronting the truth so that effective action can be taken. And I do have good news!
WATER4GAS is sharing information for a nominal fee which folks can use in their garage or wherever to create a small device which instills hydrogen into the fuel/air mixture that their automobile runs on.
What this does is make smaller particles out of the particles that the system uses as fuel. Therefore the system is able to use considerably more of it.
By doing this you can minimumly expect to improve your MPG by 30-50% or significantly more. Those molecules "musta" been pretty "blankin'" big in some systems before. But with WATER4GAS they are made usable so you can improve your MPG.
It also helps to lower emissions significantly.
This information has been purchased by over 9000 people already and the percentage of happy customers is about 99%! So how about you?

Article Source: http://www.articlekingpro.com

Songwriter, entrepreneur, consumer advocate and activist, GARKO, is on a mission to save you from having to invent a car that runs on water and has good news that a water powered car is now reality and is one of the best tips on what you can do to save on gas consumption For a list of current gasoline prices in your neighborhood email garko@startlingdiscoveries.info

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