Jim:
Regarding the following snippet in Odds ‘n Sods:
As quoted by our friend Bill Bonner at The Daily Reckoning: writing in Fortune magazine, Lester Brown notes that ethanol is not only a waste of money, if taken up widely, it would actually mean starvation for many of the world’s poor people. “The grain required to fill a 25-gallon tank (with ethanol) would feed one person for a year,” Brown writes.
I was under this impression too. Don’t get me wrong I think its a waste of time and resources, but ethanol doesn’t have to be [derived from] the grain. Ethanol can be made from the stalks and leavings AFTER grain harvesting. I don’t have any resource to direct you to as I can’t remember where I read it. Sorry 🙁 I do remember also….to compensate for the oil from ONE refinery, you would need an area a little bigger than Texas committed to growing said ethanol crops. So if you do the math every field in America would be needed almost committed to said
function for [the replacement of the output of] all the oil refineries that we have. – Cruzan
Mr Rawles:
Making ethanol from corn uses the starch of the grain but leaves the oil and the protein, so “starvation” isn’t really as much of an issue as some make it out to be. Regards, – Jim K.
#1 Son Replies: There is some interesting research going on, using enzymes produced by microbes living in the digestive system of termites to turn cellulose (wood, straw, etc.) into sugars that could be used for making ethanol. See this article in Wired News.