*british *eco

Adding video to channels (British, Eco) - requested by Skeeve.

Where is the science?

Two problems with Ethanol.

1. For the cost and energy input you don't get much additional energy output. (Lookup Ethanol fuel energy balance)

2. It competes with creating food and drives up food prices.

Lately I'm wondering why we don't use more geothermal energy. We have the technology to use it and from what I've seen we could create tons of hydrogen at massive power plants without much if any pollution. The plants also wouldn't take up miles of land like solar plants do.

Batteries and/or hydrogen are definitely the future, ethanol is a waste of time and resources that raise food prices for the gain of a few large farmers and the detriment of most of the poor nations.

@visionep I come from a farm family in Kansas, so I'm a bit biased, but I tend to disagree with you on a few things. So upvote for your comment starting the discussion but here's my rebuttal --

1. "Not much" has the potential to be pretty good, considering that sources of ethanol are much more renewable than oil. Plus, a lot of the energy balance reviews of ethanol that I've seen or heard of talk about the input cost to produce the first gallon of fuel, ie. they include construction, fermentation tanks, etc. etc. That is fair, but it is worth noting that over the long term those startup input costs become less and less of a factor because the infrastructure already exists. The cost to refine the first gallon of crude oil into gasoline was higher than the bazillionth, also.

2. Some of the food production competition will remain long-term, and some is temporary. Right now in the US, we mostly use corn (field corn) to produce ethanol. Field corn can be ground into corn flour, but at least where I come from the majority of it went to feed lots to be used as food for beef cows prior to introduction of ethanol plants. Now, the produced corn is split between going to beef production or into ethanol.

Competition between beef vs. ethanol industries raised the price of corn some (both industries want that corn) which makes farmers happy. That in turn raised the price of beef a bit, but it didn't do much to prices for human-consumption food other than that, because field corn isn't used for that very much.

The reason that we use corn for ethanol now is that corn is plentiful; it is the major crop in my neck of the woods with wheat being the second but lagging far behind. Ethanol producers need something that ferments, corn fits the bill and is available. Minor crops like milo work basically just as well as corn, so if some weather event damages a corn field and it can be replanted with milo later in the season that is great for farmers because they now have a buyer that is willing to take milo.

In the future, we could use non-food cellulose crops like switchgrass for ethanol production, and the processing will only be slightly different. Switchgrass could be grown and harvested on land that is unsuitable for corn (corn does best with a lot of water), but there isn't a large supply of it right now because there hasn't been any demand for it historically.

So yes, there will always be some competition between what crop people decide to produce on a given piece of farmland, and that can affect food prices. But I think that over the long term, ethanol production could provide useful fuel that has positive benefits that outweigh impacts from potentially slightly higher food prices. Maybe. But then again, I am a biased source!

I agree completely with visionep. Milkmans points are just not true or avoidable.

Theres also the point of engines not being able to run Ethanol at all. Vintage cars for example.

In the end this bio ethanol is just another farce to make money, at a very high cost to... as always... the poor.

What this guy says in the video is just not true. Even with only E10, a higher priced gasoline will still give you better mileage (up to 10%). This is happening in Germany right now. Nobody is buying this ethanol crap because it simply isnt worth it. Not to mention because of the detrimental effects on people and cars.

>> ^coolhund:

I agree completely with visionep. Milkmans points are just not true or avoidable.
Theres also the point of engines not being able to run Ethanol at all. Vintage cars for example.
In the end this bio ethanol is just another farce to make money, at a very high cost to... as always... the poor.
What this guy says in the video is just not true. Even with only E10, a higher priced gasoline will still give you better mileage (up to 10%). This is happening in Germany right now. Nobody is buying this ethanol crap because it simply isnt worth it. Not to mention because of the detrimental effects on people and cars.


Yes, some older cars do not run well with an ethanol blend, and some might take that to a point where they wouldn't run at all.

You say bio ethanol is a farce to make money (aren't all businesses?) and the cost targets the poor. That makes a good soundtext-bite but I don't see how ethanol production is particularly detrimental to the poor, at least not in any way that isn't heavily outweighed by other competitors. Care to elaborate?

About mileage: yes, any blend of ethanol will give lower gas mileage than pure gasoline. The point that I would suggest is that when you burn that gallon of gasoline, it isn't coming back. At least not for a few million years. We can/will keep on burning through oil for a while, but as we do so the prices will go up.

Right now, today, the market settles out so that in Brazil the cost per unit of distance traveled may actually favor gasoline; car owners "vote" at the pump. But I'm talking about the long term, in the future. Corn, or better yet switchgrass, grows back. Not in millions of years, *next* year. We're just a few years down the line from the initial introduction of ethanol and ethanol blends as a fuel. And yet already it is making a bit of competition with big oil.

If better alternative fuels come along (hydrogen fuel cells or whatever), I'll be open to them. But at this point ethanol seems like one that actually works, and has been working, in spite of the fact that it doesn't have a fully stable infrastructure yet.

There have been no long term studies about effects on cars yet. None at all. Some did it a few years, but thats simply not enough. Here in Germany manufacturers actually didnt release proper lists which cars work with it and which wont until right after E10 was introduced, and even now they are changing those lists regularly. Sure, in other countries they have been running that stuff your years and years, but those countries also have no studies about it. As long as there is such a srisk (and we all know ethanol attacks aluminum and some plastics, that are in fuel pumps and fuel lines and injectors, etc, there is no way to tell how safe it is. Because the manufacturer only care about sales. If engines break sooner, thats just ok, especially since it was forced by the government, so "they are not to blame".

Its detrimental because it drives up the price of food. Have you checked the course of it lately? Also gasline becomes even more expensive because of it, to make people buy it. Very well visible when Germany added E10. From one day to another the prices jumped by 8 cent. Rich dont care about such increases in cost. But poor are hurt a lot by it.
Just look at Indonesia and the palm oil desaster. Many people are actually starving because farmers stopped producing food and instead make palm oil now. And even that palm oil isnt meant for the domestic market, its going straight to foreign countries. In South America the rain forrest is burned down every day to make place for bio fuel plantages. You should Google about soy, corn and Monsanto while were at it. Theres a good documentary about that too, that will open your eyes.

We dont even know how much oil we have left or exactly how it was created. I dont know the English word for it, but theres the "Erdölkonstante" that shows that since people found oil they always thought it will be depleted in a few years and those years are nowadays actually at the highest point ever and has been at this for several decades without decreasing. As long as we still have enough, there is no need to raise prices and develop stuff that hurts people and cars. Yes, the raise is artificial. To get the rich even richer.
There has not been "oil peak" yet, instead oil production is still increasing a lot, and many countries could raise it by a lot more if they wanted to. But they dont want to because the prices would fall drastically.

Bio fuels are a desaster for humanity. They hurt so many people, its not funny anymore. Also they are not better than gasoline for the environment. All taken together, they are actually much worse. To call bio fuels good for our planet is a farce, and if you really believe that its good and even an alternative to consider, youre just a sock puppet for the corrupt rich. Sorry.