O.T : gas prices in AMERICAS COUNTY

Then, like that old Johnny Horton song from the 50's says, go "North, To Alaska."

Robert

Robert

We aren"t going to get anyone to lower gas prices. The Chinese are buying huge quantities and the whole world market is a sellers market now. If it really bothers you to pay what you do then get one of those 50mpg diesels, burn wood, and lobby for some new Nuke power plants to be built. Try to get the moratoriums on off shore drilling lifted. Get some new refineries built in the USA. Lobby for new coal fired power plants. Talk some of the greenies into allowing wind plants, tidal generators and solar collectors to be built. (It kills me that the greenies don"t want solar collectors in the desert because it might cool the desert down) I don"t care if every man, woman and child joined the "tea party". It wouldn"t make a bit of difference. It will change someday down the road, but do you really think the hydrogen car, or elecetric for your battery car is going to be the equivalent of $.25 gas? Not if there"s any expectation of profit, and what business keeps going without profit?

• Fuel's gold - Turning corn into ethanol may not be worth it

Actually, in a "thermodynamic" respect they are correct. If you take into account everything, you will ALWAYS end up with a negative energy balance (2nd law of Thermodynamics, but if you were to look at it closely, you would find that the production of gas is much less efficient than the production of any bio-fuel. In other works it takes more gas to produce one gallon of gas from oil than to produce one gallon of ethanol from corn.

I do not grow corn, and have NOTHING to benefit from BIO-fuels (other than hopefully cheaper gas prices). I was just amazed that the government would give an average 30% subsidy to EVERY process in the production of ethanol, just to allow everyone to break even on fuel costs. This doesn't account for machinery purchase/upkeep, land costs, employee's wages, and God forbid, any profit for farmer/fertilizer manufacturer/ethanol plant/truck driver.

What happened here were a couple of scientists went out looking for a reason to discredit bio-fuels. They worked up theoretical numbers, and published them.

We should ask them how many tests they have run to confirm/deny their theories.

Andy

Seems to me that there is the possibility of a positive energy balance because of the solar energy input, but there are a lot of energy costs as well. I was susprised at the amount of natural gas that is used to make fertilizer.

One of the other items in that article that caught my eye though was the claim that if all of the US corn crop was converted to ethanol, it would only replace 12% of the gasoline that is used. I'll have to look up an estimate of how many bushels are harvested to check that.

I'm not suggesting they are out right lieing. They are just not telling the whole story. It is sort of like these "six sigma" courses my company keeps sending me to. All they teach you to do is twist the numbers enough to make cost reductions look larger. I'm not sure, but in a couple years I think the engineering department will be a profit center on paper :).

Patzek's background:
- He is a previous Shell employee
- He has served as an expert witness for Shell and Chevron
- He is an on-going consultant with Shell and Chevron
- He established the UC Oil Consortium in 1994

Pimentel’s background:
- SOME of his research is funded by the petrolium industry (on this topic)
- He has published several papers about the damage corn (as a plant, not being process) has on the environment. He claims that corn pollen is toxic to several endaged plants.

I don't know. I'm definately not smart enough to complete a full blown study, but their findings don't make sense.

Finally, if you treat the nuclear fision in the sun as the main energy source for 99.99999% of everything that is on the earth, corn is a much more efficient fuel than oil. Corn and oil are just capacitors to store the solar energy until we use it in a way we see fit.

2 billion gallons of gas consumed per month (that's about 6 1/2 gallons per capita per month - seems reasonable - maybe a bit low)

800 million bushels of corn/month (annualized), yields

1500 million gallons of ethanol (gas equivalent)/month

estimate 30% efficiency on ethanol production (probably generous) equals 500 million gallons of gas equivalent delivered to the pump.

that would replace about 25% of gasoline consumption (500/
2000).

Of course this wouldn't account for the sudden shortage of high fructose corn syrup and livestock feed...

I don't really know how many planes are in the air at any one time, but it pales in comparison to the number of cars and trucks on the road. As long as folks keep flying, though, we'll keep building them. (I work for the company that makes most of the airliners that are now flying)

Rod