X-Message-Number: 29292 From: "Mark Plus" <> Subject: Speaking of "alternatives" to oil Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2007 07:13:10 -0800 http://www.smartmoney.com/invisiblehand/index.cfm?story=20070309 There Are Big Problems With Ethanol, Namely Corn Supply By Igor Greenwald Published: March 9, 2007 [The high points:] . . . The reality is that it's costly and incredibly inefficient to unlock energy stored inside plant cells, relative to the effort needed to distill comparable volumes of fuel from crude, even crude as expensive as it is today. The reality is that making biofuels from Brazilian sugar cane is much easier, cheaper and kinder to the environment than using Midwestern grain. The reality is that we care about all those principles so much as to impose a stiff tariff on Brazilian ethanol, lest it displace our homebrew. The end result is that corn, traditionally America's most abundant natural resource, has turned into the focus of a scarcity scare, with futures prices nearly doubling, in just eight months. So taxpayers end up subsidizing this folly thrice: Once in federal payments to corn producers that totaled almost $9 billion last year, again in a tax credit of 51 cents per gallon for ethanol producers and a third time in the supermarket checkout line. According to U.S. inflation data, consumer prices for the food consumed at home rose 1.2% in January, more than in the previous 11 months combined. Whether that's a blip or not remains to be seen. But poultry and pork producers are already squealing about the increases in feed costs. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Agriculture expects ethanol's claim on the corn crop to increase by 50% this year, sucking up more than a quarter of the national output. Legislation passed in 2005 requires the use of "renewable fuels" to rise by more than 50% from current levels by 2012. But that's nothing next to the presidential State of the Union pledge to boost renewable fuel use eightfold from current levels by 2017, by which time Bush will presumably be growing switch grasses and other combustible fodder in Crawford, Texas. . . To cut our reliance on Saudi crude, the president and Congress have committed us to buy costlier ethanol from Archer Daniels Midland and other domestic producers for the next decade. The tax subsidy technically expires in 2010, but good luck getting rid of it over the objections of the powerful Midwest farm lobby and the vitally interested ethanol distillers. Meanwhile, the 54-cents-a-gallon tariff on Brazilian ethanol will have to be renewed in 2008, and Juday thinks it may need to come down earlier if only so the politicians can "save face" by showing that their zeal for renewable fuel does not depend on the fuel's point of origin. Just don't expect Brazilian ethanol to end our reliance on crude: Brazil exports barely 10% of its output and doesn't even fully take advantage of a trade-law loophole that allows for duty-free ethanol imports as long as the stuff is shipped through a port in Central America or the Caribbean. . . Grander plans for burning switch grasses on a vast scale will need infrastructure to match the hype. "The real thing to me as an economist, as a market guy, is the commercial side of it," says Juday. "We've been growing corn in the United States for a long time and there's commercial infrastructure that's built up around it. How long is it going to take to replicate that for switch grass? And, if you take the president's latest proposal, to make it twice as big as what corn ethanol is? Who's going to plant the switch grass? What tractor company today sells a switch-grass planter, harvester? Where do you store it? You're talking about eight times the volume of corn kernels that are neatly, compactly put in the back of a trailer. Where are the trucks, the trailers, the railroad cars, elevators? All that commercial stuff will take at least a decade to sort out if the technology breakthrough came tomorrow." [Mark resumes] Which goes to show that our civilization doesn't have anything resembling a realistic plan for dealing with declining oil supplies. This will begin to interfere with cryonicists' mobility in a few years. Mark Plus _________________________________________________________________ Get a FREE Web site, company branded e-mail and more from Microsoft Office Live! http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/mcrssaub0050001411mrt/direct/01/ Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=29292