Alternative Energy

Is Ethanol The Answer to Our Fuel Problems?

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Have you ever driven across the midwest? While farmers seem very proud of their “heartland” and they exude patriotism while overlooking their “amber waves of grain”, others see is a vast wasteland, where pesticides have replaced the oxygen giving trees and forests that used to blanket entire states.

This might be acceptable if the amber waves of pesticides are feeding thousands of starving people, but now it seems that massive government subsidies are in place to promote ethanol which takes more fuel to create than it produces in the end. Is ethanol an environmental nightmare?

Author: Sandra Case

What is Ethanol?
Ethanol is a colorless, volatile, flammable liquid that is the intoxicating agent in liquors and is also used as a fuel or solvent. Ethanol is also called ethyl alcohol or grain alcohol. Ethanol is the most important member of a large group of organic compounds that are called alcohol. Alcohol is an organic compound that has one or more hydroxyl (OH) groups attached to a carbon atom. Alcohol is shown as: C-O-H or C-OH.

Ethanol is a product of fermentation. Fermentation is a sequence of reactions which release energy from organic molecules in the absence of oxygen. In this application of fermentation, energy is obtained when sugar is changed to ethanol and carbon dioxide. All beverage ethanol and more than half of industrial ethanol is made by this process.

Pros of Ethanol:

1. Adding ethanol to gasoline improves combustion and reduces toxic emissions
2. Ethanol helps keep fuel injectors clean and improves engine performance
3. Ethanol revives local economies with high paying jobs (thanks to the subsidies)

*source Iowacorn.org

Cons of Ethanol

1. Ethanol increases prices at the pump due to increased complexity of production
2. Ethanol requires more energy to create than the final product contains
3. Ethanol is simply converting massive amounts of energy into another form
4. Ethanol cannot be shipped via normal pipelines substantially increasing costs
5. Ethanol contains 2/3 less energy than gasoline so the same priced tank will not take you as far
6. Billions of tax dollars are being spent on ethanol subsidies
7. Corn production depletes underwater aquifers
8. Corn production causes massive soil erosion
9. Negative environmental impact of 10 million acres of corn that could be returned to forest

source: Slate.com, Igreens.org

How Ethanol is Made:
Converting corn into ethanol by fermentation takes many steps. Starch in corn must be broken down into simple sugars before fermentation can occur. In earlier times, this was done by chewing the corn. This allowed the salivary enzymes to naturally break down the starch. Today, this is achieved by cooking the corn and adding the enzymes alpha amylase and gluco amylase. These enzymes function as catalysts to speed up the chemical changes. Changing the starch in kernels of corn to sugar and changing sugar to ethanol is a complex process and requires a mix of technologies that include microbiology, chemistry and engineering.

Once a simple sugar is obtained, yeast is added. Yeast is a single-celled fungi which feeds on the sugar and causes the fermentation. As the fungi feeds on the sugar, it produces alcohol (ethanol) and carbon dioxide. In fermentation, the ethanol retains much of the energy that was originally in the sugar, and explains why ethanol is used as a fuel. Most of the ethanol production in the United States is made in 50 production facilities in 20 different states. Most of these plants are located in the Midwest.

Bottom line:
Why on earth are we going to spend billions of dollars to chemically infest 10 million acres of previously forested land that could be used to grow food for human beings but instead is used to make an incredibly inefficient fuel that is so expensive that the farmers themselves cannot use it to fuel their own ethanol production and it does nothing to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

Better alternatives? Public transportation, solar cells, electric vehicles, hybrids, bicycles, scooters and yes, your own two feet.

About the author:
This article has been written by Sandra Case, who is Vice President of Commodity Research for Absolute Futures Commodity Brokerage. For further information regarding this article or information on other commodities or trading of the commodity markets please contact Sandra Case 800-935-6494. http://www.absolute-futures.com

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