Posted by
baseballdoc on Friday, November 02, 2007 6:04:31 PM
The Farmers grow the corn - the consumers get the shaft.
.....An acre of U.S. corn yields about 7,110 pounds of corn for processing into 328 gallons of ethanol ...but planting, growing and harvesting that much corn requires about 140 gallons of fossil fuels and costs $347 per acre. ...Thus, even before corn is converted to ethanol, the feedstock costs $1.05 per gallon of ethanol ...
.....The energy economics get worse at the processing plants, where the grain is crushed and fermented ...As many as three distillation steps are needed to separate the 8 percent ethanol from the 92 percent water ...Additional treatment and energy are required to produce the 99.8 percent pure ethanol for mixing with gasoline ...Adding up the energy costs of corn production and its conversion to ethanol, 131,000 BTUs are needed to make 1 gallon of ethanol ...One gallon of ethanol has an energy value of only 77,000BTU ...so about 70 percent more energy is required to produce ethanol than the energy that actually is in ethanol ...Every time 1 gallon of ethanol is made ...there is a net energy loss of 54,000 BTU ...
.....Ethanol from corn cost about $1.74 per gallon to produce, compared with about 95 cents to produce a gallon of gasoline ...That helps explain why fossil fuels, (not ethanol), are used to produce ethanol ...The growers and processors can't afford to burn ethanol to produce ethanol and U.S. drivers couldn't afford it either, if it weren't for government subsidies to artificially lower the price ...
.....Most economic analyses of corn-to-ethanol production overlook the costs of environmental damages, which should add another 23 cents per gallon ...Corn production in the U.S. erodes soil about 12 times faster than the soil can be reformed, and irrigating corn mines groundwater 25 percent faster than the natural recharge rate of ground water ...The environmental system in which corn is being produced is being rapidly degraded ...Corn should not be considered a renewal resource for ethanol energy production, especially when food for humans is being converted into ethanol ...
.....The approximately $ 1 billion a year in current federal and state subsidies, (mainly to large corporations), for ethanol production are not only costs to consumers but ...Subsidized corn results in higher prices for meat, milk and eggs because about 70 percent of corn grain is fed to livestock and poultry in the United States ...Increasing ethanol production would further inflate corn prices ...In addition to paying tax dollars for ethanol subsidies ...consumers would be paying significantly higher food prices in the marketplace ...
.....If all the automobiles in the United States were fueled with 100 percent ethanol ...a total of about 97 percent of land area would be needed to grow corn feedstock ...Corn would cover nearly the total land area of the United States.
.....Not too long ago the Democrats and the RINOs in Congress voted not to recover our oil resources in Anwar ...these are the same braindead morons who keep telling us we must wean ourselves off Mideast oil and who keep pushing for ethanol as a replacement fuel ...all this while we are sitting on top of an oil shale formation in the Green River Basin ...most of which is in Colorado ...covering more than a thousand square miles ...with a potential to recover a billion barrels of oil a square mile ...the recovery costs of this oil is economically feasible at $30 dollars a barrel ...oil is presently selling for over $90 a barrel ...so why don't the energy companies recover it ...because as soon as they try the Sierra Club and the enviro-nuts along with the EPA file law suits that would delay production for years ...so the energy companies look for their oil overseas ...
,,,,,Instead of subsidizing farmers to grow corn that will never be eaten ...we should be subsidizing the technology we need to recover the oil we already possess in one of the largest fossil fuel deposits in the world ...ethanol is a boondoggle that creates more problems than it solves ...it is impossible to believe that the President and our leaders in Congress do not know these facts ...but they have sold us out to the Special Interests ...the farmers, big Chemical, Agri business, The sierra Club and the enviro-wackos ...and they have given us an energy policy that is a combination of sheer stupidity and suicidal insanity .....COLOSSUS