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Myths abound about ethanol production and use - and as with myths, the truth is often very different than the accepted myth.
Common Myths
Myth: It takes just as much energy to make ethanol as you get out of it.
Fact: The most exhaustive (and least-cited) study on the energy balance, by Isaias de Carvalho Macedo of Brazil, shows an alcohol energy return of more than eight units of output for every unit of input—and this study accounts for everything right down to smelting the ore to make the steel for tractors.
Public discussion of this issue has been dominated by the American Petroleum Institute’s aggressive distribution of the work of Cornell professor David Pimentel and his numerous studies. Other researchers have shown conclusively that Pimentel distorts key calculations, and cite his unfamiliarity with farming in general, his ignoring of studies from Brazil that disagree with him, and his poor understanding of the value of co-products and their contribution to an accurate portrayal of energy accounting in the ethanol manufacturing process. In fact, he stands virtually alone in portraying alcohol as having an energy return on energy invested (EROEI) that is negative—producing less energy than is used in its production.
Myth: Renewable fuel will cost us jobs.
Fact: A conversion of the nation’s transportation system to ethanol would mean millions of new jobs and full employment.
Alcohol can be produced safely and sustainably from the backyard to large-scale commercial operations. It can utilize many high-energy crops, and co-products from the micro-distillery can be used to support raising many valuable crops and/or livestock, each of which provides revenue streams and the associated new jobs. Ethanol opens up new industrial job opportunities, new market opportunities, new agricultural opportunities, and creates no toxic by-products in production or fuel use.
Myth: If we use all our corn to produce fuel, we won't have enough food.
Fact: The ability of the US to expand into combined fuel/food/product crops is enormous due to the huge amount of farmland we have. We need to revisit what we define as farmland and energy feedstocks. There is no question we can grow enough food and fuel. The root of the food problem is poverty and lack of social systems to ensure that people without money can get access to food.
Alcohol Can Be A Gas! describes at least 30 crops, most of which are more viable for ethanol production than corn, and many of which do not compete with food production. In fact, some of the most significant feedstocks for ethanol production are plants that are not food crops at all. Examples are cattails, buffalo gourd (an arid climate crop), mesquite (which grows all over the arid southwest), and even ocean kelp.
Alcohol Can Be A Gas! makes it clear that by using just the example feedstocks listed here, we can easily produce enough ethanol to eliminate our Mid-East oil imports and probably replace all our US automotive consumption with ethanol without having any impact on our food supply. And that's not to mention the many high energy fuel crops that can be grown in rotation with currently grown crops. With the information provided in Alcohol Can Be A Gas!, farmers can learn of crops they can raise in rotation with corn that produce 2-3 times the amount of ethanol corn produces and still produce a huge surplus of by-products for use as animal feed. Examples are fodder beets, Jerusalem artichokes, and sweet sorghum, to name a few. It is necessary for farmers to rotate their crops.
One of the main problems arising with the current industrial corn-soybean rotation is that the constant monocultures lead to significant buildup of pests. Diversity is the key to reducing pests and the information provided in Alcohol Can Be A Gas! points a clear way to creating a healthier and more profitable farming model - not to mention the value of the many co-products that can be produced from the 'waste' streams leaving the micro-distillery described in Alcohol Can Be A Gas!.
Even if corn continues to be the feedstock of choice, only 7.5 % of US prime cropland is used for growing corn, and less than 15% of U.S. cornstarch is used for human consumption. But when petroleum propagandists say things like it would take all the cornstarch in the US to replace 15% of our gasoline, that's right. But so what? With corn taking such a small part of our farmland one should be impressed that so little land can produce so much fuel with a low yield alcohol crop like corn.
Our agricultural potential is huge and the reason why we do not produce more food is that we have no way to market it profitably. Sure more people in the world could use food we grow but they can't pay for it and that's the sad fact. Although we typically grow 70 million acres of corn, we grow 30 million acres of lawn (which is not on agricultural land). We use more fertilizer on lawn than we do on the corn crop, and lawn is the largest irrigated crop in the US. The small, integrated, local energy/food farms described in Alcohol Can Be A Gas! provides a simple, easy to implement solution to the food vs. fuel issue. Most importantly this micro-distillery model has huge advantages over corporate agribusiness and could lead us out of the monoculture wasteland that passes for agriculture today
Myth: Cars burn hotter on ethanol and that is bad for my engine.
Fact: Car engines actually burn cooler, cleaner and with less vibration on straight ethanol and this generally triples the life of the engine. Car engines routinely last up to 500,000 miles burning ethanol.
Myth: It would cost too much to build all the ethanol production facilities needed to offset the U.S. consumer's thirst for petroleum.
Fact: It takes about a dollar per annual gallon of alcohol production capacity to build alcohol plants. With the money we have spent in Iraq we could have built enough ethanol plants worldwide to permanently solve the fuel issue for every single person in the world renewably, and increased the food supply to in theory feed everyone - not to mention reversed global warming in the process.
We have spent 500 billion dollars in Iraq trying to secure that county’s oil reserves. The current administration wants to spend 250 billion more in the next two years. The world uses 500 billion gallons of fuel annually. We could have done it in the same amount of time we misspent the money in Iraq. If the leaders won't lead then the people have to lead them. All around the world countries are committing to biofuels. China apparently has committed 300 billion, or enough to make them fuel self sufficient. It would be crazy but possible that the US might be the last country to realize that solar based alcohol is an answer that can be accomplished with moderate amount of capital and in a time frame that would mean minimum suffering from peak oil.
Myth: Ethanol is more polluting than gasoline.
Fact: Alcohol fuel has been added to gasoline to reduce virtually every class of pollution. Adding as little as 5–10% alcohol can reduce carbon monoxide (CO) from gasoline exhaust dramatically. When using pure alcohol, the reductions in all three of the major pollutants—carbon monoxide, nitrous oxides (NOx), and hydrocarbons (HC)—are so great that, in many cases, the remaining emissions are immeasurably small.
Reductions of more than 90% over gasoline emissions in all categories have been routinely documented for straight alcohol fuel. Alcohol carries none of the heavy metals and sulfuric acid that gasoline and diesel exhausts do. And straight ethanol’s evaporative emissions are dramatically lower than gasoline’s, and are not any more toxic than what you’d find in the air of your local bar.
Myth: It would be too expensive to retool all the cars on the road to run on an alcohol fuel mix.
Fact: Generally fuel injected cars (the predominant engine produced since 1980) can run on a 50% blend of alcohol and gas with no modification. There are a variety of ways to convert virtually any car to run on 85-100% alcohol for a few hundred dollars.
Current flexible fueled vehicles made by US Automakers can run on both fuels and the additional cost is less than $100 on the assembly line.
Myth: Ethanol production is an ecological nightmare.
Fact: Raising ethanol feedstocks using an organic-style crop rotation will cut energy use on farms by a third by eliminating petroleum-based herbicides, pesticides, and chemical fertilizers. Fertilizer needs can be met either by applying the byproducts left over from the alcohol manufacturing process directly to the soil, or by first running the byproducts through animals as feed. In the latter case, manure is run through a methane digester producing methane that can be used as a fuel source in the distillery; the resulting liquid is then sprayed back on the land that the crop came from— via an inexpensive pipeline, or by using trucks, or by making compost for later application.
Ecological damage from ethanol production is a result of the annual planting of mono-crops and the associated livestock confinement system utilized by industrial agriculture. Industrial agriculture is not a means of feeding more people, but a way to produce food with the least amount of human labor for maximum profit. In this system food is a commodity rather than a human necessity.
The major crop used for alcohol fuel in the world is sugarcane. Unlike corn, which is an annual crop that must be planted each year, sugarcane is perennial, planted only once every five to ten years, and it can be harvested continually. Since Brazilian and Indian alcohol plants return most of the byproducts of sugarcane alcohol production to the fields, little fertilizer is needed and soil builds in fertility rather than loses vigor. In Brazil, sugarcane is planted on carefully laid-out contours to prevent soil loss. (The same can be done with corn and is in some areas, but where corn is not contour-planted, there is soil loss.)
Mono-crop corn production requires significant application of pesticides and herbicides. The effect that these estrogenic chemicals are having on our species is perhaps the most devastating ecological disaster. Sometimes the most damaging effects occur when the dose is so small that the body doesn’t recognize the substance as dangerous, and does not mount a response to eliminate it. Instead, the body reacts to the chemical as if it is the hormone estrogen. Studies have shown that this can lead to birth defects.
You’d be hard-pressed to find another route that so elegantly ties the solutions to the ecological problems of industrial agriculture as does growing our own energy using the integrated model described in the Alcohol Can Be A Gas! workshop. Far from destroying the land and ecology, a permaculture based ethanol solution will vastly improve soil fertility each year.
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