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Posted by Don in Missouri [71.54.209.154] on Thursday, December 08, 2011 at 17:30:36 :
In Reply to: I dunno.... posted by D Sherman [72.47.9.228] on Thursday, December 08, 2011 at 16:22:19 :
The true answers to all those good questions support renewable fuels.
The book was published in 2007. You might say it is dated, but that only means our problem has gotten worse, since we're importing more oil at a greater cost.
The jury is in. And the verdict is that ethanol does return real energy gains. Follow the link below to read one of the USDA reports on this. Or read Zurbin's book. Zubrin addresses the charlatans (Chapter 7) that invented the myth to which you have fallen prey.
The problem with harnessing energy that was stored underground for millions of years (besides running out of it)is that you also release carbon that was stored for hundreds of millions of years. Before we get into the details about why we should be concerend about reversing the Earth's natural process for sequestering carbon, let's be clear about the energy it takes to make renewable fuels.
Fro all those spark ignition engines out there, alcohol is a fine supplement. Of course, I believe oil burners is where it's really at. For every unit of energy put into producing biodiesel, 5.5 units of liquid energy are produced. That actually exceeds the energy produced once you take into account all the energy to used to extract and refine petroleum into diesel fuel. The synthetic fuels you mentioned require even more energy to produce.
We need to leverage our doemstic energy supplies of oil and natural gas to capture solar energy that comes to the panet everyday. Let's take every barrel of domestic crude and turn it into 5.5 barrels of clean, usable fuel. We can put Amercians to work on farms and in factories producing food, fiber, feed, and fuel. We can do that while reducing pollution and political strife compared to imported petroleum.