True, but we're a long way from that, assuming the investment money is there. Look at situations like China and Brazil these days. Brazil's agro business is booming and expanding like crazy due to higher demand from China (a lot of business that American farmers used to get but I guess we're busy growing corn-for-ethanol instead nowadays). I have read that Brazil can still double its area under cultivation, and without clearing more rainforest. It just needs the investment money to do that, including building roads, railroads, ports, etc. to support all that additional capacity. (Actually, in fairness, most of that crop in Brazil bound for China is for animal feed because of their increasing ability to pay for meat, so the increased production there isn't really feeding more people.)

Who knows, one day we'll probably plow under Yosemite and Yellowstone if food prices got high enough. (Actually, I guess the pot growers are already ahead of the game in that department...)

I work for a contractor to the railroads, and spend a lot of time around trains and train yards. There is a steady stream of loaded trains heading for American ports all day, every day. They wait in line to be unloaded into huge ships that can take FIVE TRAINLOADS [sic] of corn and other grains to be shipped around the world.

Somewhere around 85% of the corn grown in the U.S. is feed corn. Most of the feed goes to feedlot cattle and hogs (and cheap dog/cat food). Corn isn't a natural diet for cattle and it causes digestive problems. Some bright person discovered that post-production corn ethanol waste was actually a higher-protein and more easily digestible diet for the cattle. The only part of the corn that is distilled into ethanol is the sugar and the starch, all the other nutrients are left behind as 'waste'.

One bushel of corn weighs about 56 pounds. Out of that single bushel, you can produce almost three gallons of ethanol and about 17 pounds of a high-protein livestock feed (aka 'waste').

Certain parties with vested interests would have people believe that the corn from ethanol is taking food from the mouths of American children, and that is simply not the case. Corn has been America's #1 crop for many years (it's also the #1 nutrient hog, but I am digressing), so much so that they have spent a lot of money trying to find other things to make from it.

Sue

I should've been more explicit. The lost US business is primarily in soybeans, which is a huge cash crop in the US and primarily goes to animal feed. A lot of soybean farmers--and probably other kinds of farmers--have switched to growing corn-for-ethanol instead because when you include all the various subsidies and tax incentives as well as the current high price for corn, it's more lucrative than growing soybeans. Of course, I'm sure there are pretty hefty costs to switching crops, but I guess it's worth it.

The Chinese are mostly getting their soybeans for animal feed from Brazil now and have invested heavily in setting them up.

Interestingly, we now export quite a bit of corn for ethanol use overseas, but basically ban imports of foreign-made ethanol, like ethanol from--you guessed it--Brazil! Funny how all this stuff is interlinked.

I am having a hard time putting my comment into a concise point, so I apologize if this doesn't come out well.

I think something that also needs to be considered is that food shortages are also caused not by lack of food and but the lack of safe delivery of it. Many 3rd world countries that have rampant starvation do not lack for food coming into to help them but the food is taken by the government or warlords, stolen or destroyed in transportation before it gets to the regions that depend on it for survival.

On that same token, in 3rd world countries, people are more beholden to tribal/historical lands and would never leave it regardless of starvation or drought, even knowing that if they moved from their village to the city they could get the food and water they need.

It's my 2 cents.

Didn't realize until today that the corn-ethanol subsidies were voted away last week by the Senate. That's a surprise since they voted earlier in the year to extend those same subsidies.

From the Economist magazine:

Actually, that may be a good thing.

The only reason we make ethanol from corn is because we grow so much of it. Corn isn't really a good source of ethanol because it's on the low end of how much you can make from it. It's also expensive to grow, due to the heavy fertilization required. I think the round figure for corn-sourced ethanol is about 600 gallons per acre. There are other plants that don't require the high growing costs of corn, yet produce more ethanol: sugar beets, forage beets, wild cattails, mesquite pods, etc. Cattails, growing wild, produce twice the amount of ethanol that corn does with heavy fertilization/herbicides/pesticides; if liquid effluent from city sewage systems were used to feed a series of cattail marshes (in rotation), the cattails cleanse the water and the amount of ethanol produced jumps from the basic 1200 or so gallons to around 10,000 gallons per surface acre.

Using corn for ethanol is silly and expensive. Why use prime farmland for something like that? Use marginal land for ethanol and good farmland for actual food production.

Sue

So true.


Switchgrass is a robust native North American prairie grass.

Monster grain companies step aside; we are already building new switchgrass (and woodchip) ethanol plants........ I use ethanol on my long distance trips in my Chevy Impala in temperatures from +105F to -20F and I am very happy with it's power and mileage performance. In farm country it costs 90 per gallon less than gasoline and pollutes less.

For those who worship at the altar of the man-made global warming religion, switchgrass roots bind up 94% of the carbon it produces, and "delivers 540% of the energy used to produce it, compared with just roughly 25% energy returned by corn-based ethanol according to the most optimistic studies" ...Scientific American mag


Even if subsidies dry up, I will buy ethanol, and my fuel money will stay in North America. When, in the future, I can identify cellulosic ethanol I will buy that instead of corn ethanol. Seeing mile after mile of waving perennial prairie grasses has got to be a good thing for almost everyone.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=grass-makes-better-ethanol-than-corn

Approximately 95% of the ethanol being produced in the U.S. is currently being made from feed corn, on prime food-production land, heavily fertilized and treated with pesticides and herbicides. This is just plain stupid.

Make ethanol from grass on marginal prairie land, mesquite pods in the Southwest, cattails in the wet Northwest, sugar cane waste in Hawaii -- whatever grows best with the least water and fewest additional nutrients (or use local sewage), and sell it locally. Make it from hemp and kenaf. Make it from corn stover.

Southerners can make ethanol with a plant that currently makes over seven million acres of land in the south totally useless, and doesn't require any fertilization or irrigation; it grows a foot a day, 60 feet per season, and can be harvested twice a year. KUDZU!

Then, run the distilleries with the product they're producing, not petroleum. And don't say a WORD about using ethanol made on the same property not being as efficient as purchased/imported/delivered petroleum. If that's what you're thinking, you need to look up the definition of "efficient".

Use good farmland for food production and keep it that way.

Sue

As usual the chemistry, engineering, and infrastructure is a bit more difficult than someone just shouting "Make it so!". There's already an infrastructure in place for corn. We have the equipment already in place to grow it, harvest it, ship it, ferment it, and distill it. Turning switchgrass into alcohol will be great, but first someone needs to figure out a cost-effective way to break down switchgrass's cellulose into sugars that yeast can convert to ethanol. People have been trying for years to do this with little luck.

Mesquite pods? Okay, assuming someone comes up with a good, effecient way to harvest them we'd still have to turn over a whole lot of land to mesquite trees (thereby messing up the environments of those areas), followed by figuring out how to process and ferment the pods. Keep in mind the machines that could process mesquite pods would have to be designed and built from the ground up and wouldn't likely be able to be used for any other plants. Sidenote: mesquite trees suck up all the water around them, killing all the other plants and laying waste to the soil.

Kudzu? it'd be nice if the vines could be fermented, but they have the same cellulose problem as switchgrass. Kudzu tubers are high is starch and chemically can be treated just like a potato for making ethanol. However, the amount of tubers they make is much smaller than potato plants make based on a plant-mass to plant-mass comparison. In other words, to get the starch equivelent from kudzu tubers that you do from potatoes would require many, many more acres of kudzu vines than potato vines. Sidenote: harvesting kudzu tubers is a real pain in the @%%. A whole new type of harvesting equipment would need to be invented for that.

People just don't realize what a powerful, compact, easy to handle energy source oil and natural gas are. Nothing else comes close to it. A tremendous amount of worth is being done to replace it, but we still have a long, long way to go. Like I said at the begining, just saying something should be done does not magically make it possible. Perhaps a few science classes would help you better understand how things work.

-Blast

You left out the really important quote from that article:
But yields from a grass that only needs to be planted once would deliver an average of 13.1 megajoules of energy as ethanol for every megajoule of petroleum consumed—in the form of nitrogen fertilizers or diesel for tractors—growing them. "It's a prediction because right now there are no biorefineries built that handle cellulosic material" like that which switchgrass provides, Vogel notes. "We're pretty confident the ethanol yield is pretty close." This means that switchgrass ethanol delivers 540 percent of the energy used to produce it, compared with just roughly 25 percent more energy returned by corn-based ethanol according to the most optimistic studies.

That switchgrass article itself states it's calculations are all theoretical.Yeast can't break cellulose down into alcohol. The cellulose must first be broken down into it's component sugars, which is something mankind has yet to master.
-Blast

p.s. FYI, when the trick of breaking cellulose down into yeast-friendly sugars is discovered you won't have to worry trying to find cellulose-based ethanol over corn-based ethanol. It will ALL be cellulose-based.