Is the ethanol boom about to bust?

Yes

10 of 14

by Dean L. Sinclair

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Ethanol is definitely not America's fuel of the future. It should not be the fad fuel of the present. It is being pushed by people who have no understanding o of the second law of thermodynamics nor of the ramifications of diverting production facilities from food production to energy production for motor vehicle fuels. If people were to stop to think about it , would it seem sensible that ethanol production would be a " renewable energy source" if all of the energy involved in its production, transportation and distribution were to have to come from burning ethanol?

Ethanol plants are popping up in the American Midwest much like Jerusalem artichoke patches did some years ago, and backyard chinchilla raising operations did some years before that. Like those perennial sunflowers and pretty South American rodents, the Ethanol Plant will quite surely, in turn, be relegated, to the category pf fad ideas that didn't work. Already, before some of the plants being built near where I live have even been finished, at least one has shut town. The industry is already over capacity for the current market for ethanol as a motor fuel. Switching to the production of competitors for Everclear or Smirnoff Vodka would certainly not save the industry.

Food prices are going up because of the competition for maize, and there is concern that more corn acreage planted to produce ethanol will put much ore Nitrogen from fertilizer into the Mississippi River to speed up the growth of the ever increasing dead spot in the Gulf of Mexico.

Ethanol production in the USA is automatically in competition on the world market for ethanol produced in Brazil. Yet, even there, where the alcohol is produced under a tropical sun, from sugar cane, with much of the planting and harvesting is done by what amounts to slave labor, the use of ethanol has not freed the country from its dependence on fossil fuels. Ethanol production there would presumably be more energy efficient than here in the USA making Brazil able to produce at a lower cost of energy than here in the US, making economic competition in this area definitely in their favor on the world market. It can be noted that the effects of the continuous degradation of the Amazon forest for ethanol production has disastrous world-wide implications.

While the current enthusiasm for ethanol as an energy source will collapse under the economic reality that there is simply not enough additional energy from the Sun being harvested to compensate for the fossil fuel usage in its production to make it a profitable enterprise, the attention given to it has already distracted efforts and resources from developing much more directly Sun-sourced energy possibilities. When the first plant making equipment to directly harvest sunlight is totally solar powered. we will be started on the right track. The present ethanol boom will soon go flat on purely economic grounds, its too bad it ever was started.
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An aside comment: Alcohol has never been a really good solution for human problems, despite the fact that people have turned to it since time immemorial. One may note that the start of agriculture is claimed by some to have been because people needed a reliable supply of raw materials to brew beer!

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