Death comes to us all. Life's but a walking shadow | One of the major criticisms of corn ethanol is the fossil fuel used to grow and convert corn into ethanol. I've been studying this topic within my limited time and resources. It seems that the fuel cost to grow, process & transport the corn is fairly modest at most 5-8% of the total. The biggest share of fossil fuel use to produce fuel ethanol is the natural gas to distill the ethanol and the electricity to dehydrate it. The electricity needed to run an ethanol plant can be offset simply by using co-generation. I don't know how many ethanol plants generate their own electicity but would guess it is common. And natural gas is currently quite inexpensive here especially for large institutional comsumers but that still leaves the greenhouse gas component to consider.
It seems like an obvious step but if you generate your process steam and electicity with biomass, wood waste, corn stover or even trash you could eliminate the major of the fossil fuel content of ethanol. I know that somebody will argue that the corn stover is important for the soil but it seems like a big complaint from corn farmers is the yield drag of too much corn trash. If you used the corn trash from 1/3 or 1/2 the fields every other year you would still have more than enough organic matter. Here in the East the one thing we have that has virtually no market value is low quality timber and wood waste. As for the air pollution arguments against trash burning the Europeans burn all their trash to generate electricity (even pay well for the trash & ship it hundreds of miles) and they are a lot more fussy about air pollution than we are.
Am I missing something here or is this just too easy?
Edited by 1234 11/24/2013 05:44
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Just a comment on Ethanol energy balance.
