This is mostly accurate.well, it's from plant and animal matter (carbon-based life) compressed over millions of years, so there will be some dinosaurs in some deposits. remember Sinclair gasoline?
"To add oxygen to the fuel. Cleaner emissions." Supposedly. After requiring the use of oxygenated fuels in the USA the EPA later dropped it, after little to no evidence that it actually reduced emissions. Refineries continued using ethanol as an as adjunct anyway since the distilleries were in place and the govt subsidies for corn based ethanol made it a cheaper fuel to produce in the end.
"Today's ethanol plants produce roughly 5 times as much energy as they take to produce it."
The EPA requires ethanol be blended into the fuel via the RFS mandate.
It still wouldn't be true. And ethanol isn't refined at all. It is produced.
At this point, there is not really a battle of food vs fuel. Corn yield has increased so much that the net corn yield after ethanol production has increased dramatically. Moreover, only the starch portion of the corn kernel is converted to sugar and then to ethanol. The rest is used to make high-protein feed supplements, which are actually more nutritious than ground corn. We could actually develop biotechnology to make petroleum, by the way. An organism has been discovered which actually makes petroleum. It was found near oil wells and was able to make petroleum in a laboratory setting. The problem is that the natural organism did so very slowly. But microbiologists are very good at modifying organisms to make them do what they do much faster. But they need funding for that, and no one seems to want to fund such research.
I am sure it was not all from dead dinosaurs. But they were around for more than 100 million years, amounting to trillions of tons of dead dinosaur mass, and we have been using petroleum for less than 200 years. I don't think we could have used all that up. In any case, we know that petroleum is still being made by natural microorganisms.
great idea, let's bio engineer another organism and turn it loose on the world.
The organism already exists. It would be sped up, not a totally new organism.
People are trying to do that. But plants produce biomass quite cheaply, so it is not clear that there would be an economic advantage. Biomass can be converted to many different organic products, including fuel, with current technology. The best hope for that is near high-CO2 emission sources, such as power plants. Atmospheric CO2 is too dilute to be practical, IMHO.
You can only feed cattle so much distillers as it causes issues with sulfur and phosphorus and starch is very beneficial for fattening cattle.
I refer you to these sources of data. It is hard to make a case that ethanol has actually increased food prices. In fact, a great deal of our corn in exported, which is more likely to impact food prices. https://www.macrotrends.net/2532/corn-prices-historical-chart-data https://www.indexmundi.com/agriculture/?country=us&commodity=corn&graph=production
I do not know, but impression in first photo is steel gas tank/ piping rust; I have seen plenty of bad from ethanol, but nothing ever looked like that? I have found white crystals, white paste, had corrosion to aluminum bowl and had a bright, shiny new brass float turn black and sink after 90-days from a teaspoon of acidic water/ fuel remaining in a float bowl.
If you don't mind disclosing it, who do you work for? It is possible I have consulted to them, as I have consulted to several ethanol producers.
No, it doesn't. The energy locked up in ethanol ultimately comes from the sun. The current processes use many technologies to avoid losses. Some of these include mechanical vapor recompression, pressure swing absorption, vapor scavenging, etc. Do some research.
Well, if you dare, you can buy such solvents as toluene, acetone and MEK in relatively pure form at your local Lowe's store. They will dissolve the goo. But they will probably also dissolve all your gaskets and O-rings.
I get all that, but supply and demand is a thing. Wether the corn is exported or not matters little. Corn is a globally traded commodity like oil.
