Green Trust
Well, I'm no Cornell professor, but I'm wondering what he knows that the industrial world doesn't, and by industrial world I mean folks like:
Amoco Oil Research and Development (RIP) , a company which I ran a bioethanol pilot plant for in the early 90s, and
Iogen Corporation, a Canadian company with massive funding by such investors as Dutch Shell and PetroCanada, both huge petroleum companies.
Call me naiive, but one would think if bioethanol was such a dumb idea, the petroleum companies wouldn't be acting like a pack of dogs on a three legged cat...
I think the Cornell prof just wants to present a contrary position.
Fair enough.
Personally, the efficiency is irrelevant to me. What do I know that Amoco, Logen, Monsanto and other coporations involved in biomass? That when corporations plant anything, it poisons the soil and depletes the water. The crops are generally GMO, and chemical fertilizers and pesticides are used. This is not sustainable. Agriculture is not sustainable in this country. Period. Not to mention biomass is just anothet tech fix for a deeper problem. We need to check our consumption or the combination of every alternative fuel available is not going to amount to squat.
It baffles me why anyone would see biomass as sustainable, unless they expect the country plans to go organic overnight. That said, I convert cars to WVO, which is used oil technically, not really waste because renderers use it for cattle feed. I understand that not even WVO is sustainable because it is limited, and diverting it from the renderers means they have to grow more crops to meet their needs, and then...
The sources of oil we collect from are not selling to renderers, they are landfilling it. It is waste until we recycle it. Many crops can provide a combination food and fuel without pesticides and chemical fertilizers. We have very few other options, we need biomass.
http://journeytoforever.org/
biof...ofuel_food.html
how can a regular old citizen like me get ahold of quality ethanol for a real reasonable price? thanks
try http://www.biodieselwarehouse.com
Ethanol is certainly a looser but from the same biomass sources, there may be a way to get net energy from a carbon-neutral process using no fossil fuels. It would take the combination of two processes neither of which were concieved of with the other in mind and neither of which are out of the laboratory yet. I am hoping competant chem engineers can weigh in on the feasibility of these schemes as Pimental has on ethanol: a total cost and total energy analysis is the least we should do before we or our govmnt toss money at ways to get the petroleum monkey off our backs.
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