Dirty Biodeisel

I do not believe the government should be involved in subsidizing ethanol and many other things. The current way we are making ethanol just does not work and would not be happening without the government making it possible for private business to make money doing it. I have been following ethanol for a few years and thought it was a good idea until it was revealed that the cost to the consumer, even with subsidies, costs more than gasoline. With the pump price at about the same price per gallon as gasoline, it still costs more because the miles per gallon drop by 1/4 to 1/3. There have been some promise of adjusting engines to do better, but probably only if straight gasoline were eliminated. I am unwilling to pay the extra for ethanol at the current prices. There are also numerous sources that report that as much energy is used to make it as is obtained from it. These reports show anywhere from -10% to +30% energy derived from making ethanol. Now, we have increased our own food costs from burning some of our own food sources. And, we are only producing a very small part of what is needed. The ethanol process also uses a huge amount of water and increases water pollution from the large amount of fertilizer required to grow corn. So, we are not reducing our oil consumption and we are not lower costs. A source revealed it would take every acer of land in the US to produce enough ethanol to replace our oil use and would leave no space to grow our food! Now, I am not completely opposed to ethanol, just making it from our food supply. There have been promising alternative sources to make it, anywhere from corn stalks and swithchgrass to algae. Maybe the federal dollars would be much better spent on researching other forms to produce ethanol?

I just read in Pop Mechanics new mag about GM teaming with a high tech firm who has a bacteria that eats carbon and makes ethanol for about a $1 a gallon. With their process you can use anything tires, trees and corn.

Well you can if you have some scam going on. Subsidy whatever.

The government should stop wasting money on bullshit like ethanol and look into promising alternative fuels like biodiesel made from algae.

I used to work for a biodiesel plant in Nevada, I was the Sr. Site Manager, and was laid of due to rising production costs. Since the plant I worked at was forced to shut down due to this, and the new facility being built seems to be put on hold halfway through the build. The cost of Crude Soybean oil, a major item needed to may ASTM standard meeting biodiesel, tripled the first of 2008. When you consume 2 rail cars a week at, lets say $60K each, and then the cost triples now its $180k apiece how do you ever expect this industry to grow. Sure we used other feedstocks, we were one of the few multi-feedstock facilities in the U.S. (Which means we used anything from used cooking oil, sunflower seed oil, and even pig fat. We used different amounts of soy oil depending on the free fatty acid content of these feedstocks to keep production possible) Do to the increase in demand the cost shot up, so plants all over the U.S. are going under. The government needs to regulate this in some way if they ever want this market to succeed. I also do not understand why plants would dump grease illegally when this is not needed, something the company I worked for never did. "135,000 gallons of GREASE is going to choke a river, no matter if it’s biodegradable." Almost all by products of production are reusable, the main one being Glycerin. This gives the good plants a really bad rap, and also the think the way it was worded, the wrong name completely, was messed up in the article. Pure used grease, unrefined, is usually feed to pigs or some other animal, hence the name FEEDSTOCK. This always has some type of value for this and would never be dumped in a river, I think they had the name wrong, and possibly confused it with some other by product from Biodiesel production. Popular Science please look into this and correct it, I can tell you from experience this is very inaccurate and wrong.