Ethanol was a "Mistake" says Al Gore

Well, he has apparently become a little more honest than a lot of the politicians.

This project was simply pimping for the farmers and large companies involved in this business.

It is a bit misleading to say that the technology to make alcohol involves extracting sugar from corn or wood or grass...Misleading but not totally incorrect. Cellulose and starch can be broken down to sugars and those can easily be fermented. You can take cellulose from a pine tree and hydrolyze it to sugars which can then be fermented.

But this is just semantics.

Below the double line, this was a double "pork" project.

Alcohol can be a great fuel for engines set up for it. But this was pokum hokum from the beginning.

I think the key phrase is this: "The energy conversion ratios are at best very small." That right there is why ethanol subsidies are bad policy. If that were NOT the case, then they would make sense.

nate

No he's not. he's in for himself and there is no reason for him not to throw the corn farmers under the bus now. He likely wants to start looking more reasonable to protect his potentional billions in profits from the carbon credits fraud.

N8N wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@y30g2000prb.googlegroups.com:

If that were NOT the case, you wouldn't need subsidies in the first place; we'd have been burning ethanol since the '20s.

Owl Gourdhead IS a Mistake. cuhulin

Check who the biggest investor in the Chicago Carbon Exchange is...er, was...

Check who the biggest investor in the Chicago Carbon Exchange is...er, was...

Check who the biggest investor in the Chicago Carbon Exchange is...er, was...

you got that dead right - and carbon credits are indeed a fraud.

stoke food prices indeed. with the agri-commodity industry, oil industries [and of course speculators], behind it every step of the way.

it's the only thing that makes any sense. but notice how little agri-commodity and speculator interest there is in a scheme where they have no market presence, and for which the raw materials are pretty much unlimited and thus non-profitable.

bottom line - cellulosic ethanol will quietly die a death. the burning of food, with all the fuel, fertilizer, machinery, tax subsidy and speculation potential that it entails, will continue to receive political backing.

indeed.

I reckon Brazil is doing quite well with their vehicles which run on alcohol. cuhulin

YEP, and they also don't have the regulations and bureaucratic crap to deal with.... Oh and consider that they have absolutely no where near the numbers of vehicles running on it, they run a LOT of diesel vehicles there.

They got serious about this years ago because they didnt have enough petroleum in country. I was there a couple of years ago, and the taxi I took from Rio de Janeiro airport was a tri fuel model.. Could run on LNG, alcohol, or gasoline, IIRC.

They no longer have a shortage of fuel, due to new petroleum finds but also due to being agressive about alternate fuel.

Brazil uses sugar cane to make ethanol and that is an entirely different ballgame than corn. Unlike corn, the sugar cane plant material itself fuels the conversion process. This alone makes the energy balance better and since sugar isn't a vital food product such as grains like corn using doesn't result in starving people (so long as it isn't displacing food crops of course).

That is exactly right. .Sugar cane requires no fertilizer and produces a lot of fermentable carbohydrates. Mandioca is also a crop of interest.

We dont want to displace the cachac,a of course.

On the web, The Diesel fuel trees in Brazil

There is a guy in Hawaii who is growing some of those trees.Or so I once read about, a few years ago. cuhulin

Other studies suggest that using ethanol can slow global warming.

LOL