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4 Comments on this article:

Report as: spam offensive Anonymous on 1/23/08 at 8am

This is a great article! It informed me of many things that I didn't consider about the use of ethanol and actually changed my mind about the use of ethanol.

Report as: spam offensive Nick on 1/23/08 at 5pm

Continued development of plug-in hybrids, and all-electric vehicles (once batteries get good enough) are the future. We have more than enough energy from the sun (through solar, wind, hydro, and ocean power) to renewably provide all the energy we need in the future, both for stationary uses, and for transportation.
The amount of ethanol we could create by using all of our agricultural land (in the U.S.) would meet only about a tenth of the U.S.'s transportation energy needs, while leaving us with no food.
Ethanol cannot provide the energy we need, and certainly not in a clean, green, sustainable way. Electricity from renewable energy resources can.

Report as: spam offensive Jon on 1/23/08 at 7pm

Ethanol is definitely far from a solution to our energy problems. In certain (relatively small) volumes, it doesn't hurt and can be a small piece of the puzzle. But we need to think bigger about the long term, something which all forms of biomass combined can only provide for in limited amounts.
(By the way, one correction to the article: ethanol and other forms of biomass are significantly better than gasoline in terms of CO2 emissions as long as you are regrowing plants in place of the consumed ones. Those new plants absorb, and thus offset, much of the CO2 emitted from using the biomass for energy needs.)
As for a potentially large piece of the puzzle to our energy problems: in less than an hour, enough sunlight hits the Earth's surface to provide for all of humanity's current energy needs for an entire year! Even accounting for realistic conversion efficiencies, only a small fraction of Nevada would need to be covered with solar cells to provide for all domestic energy needs. Now if we can only get politicians in this country to think for a moment about the long term...

Report as: spam offensive Sol Shapiro on 1/24/08 at 12pm

If the reason for alternative transportation fuel is energy independence and we want to get there on a path using known technology, I'm afraid we have to take a serious look at coal-to-liquid based on the 80+ year old Fischer-Tropsch process. Biomass has technology and capacity issues and plug-ins are dependent on technical and economic viability of battery development - a very uncertain approach as to time frame.
The issue of added CO2 from coal-to-liquid is an issue to consider; but since I don't have faith that the world will change its energy base before disaster - we will have to go to a geoengineering solution to put climate change on hold anyway and the 1/2% added CO2 per million barrels a day from coal will be lost in the mud.
I don't want my grandkids to have to fight another war in the Middle East!!




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