Hi Guest!
Hey - did you know if you click on the title of a thread it will take you to the first unread post since you last visited that thread?
but were afraid to ask: 
STOP!! Never post your email address in open forums. Bots can "harvest" your email! If you must share your email use a Private Message or use the 
smilie in place of the real @
Pretty Please - add it to our Events forum(s) and add to the calendar! >> 
foxtrapper
Jedi Trainee
Offline
All forms of energy take more energy to create than they give. That's basic thermodynamics and entropy and such.
Currently, the energy loss is greater in ethanol production than gasoline production. US based corn ethanol vs us based gasoline. It does not hold true for all forms of ethanol production or all locations. With technology changes, this will improve. How far it will improve is the great variable. There is also the matter of how you chose to look at things. Diesel fuel to run farm tractors is counted against ethanol production by the detractors. While the fuel to deliver the crude oil via ships and sometimes even the trucks delivering gasoline is frequently ignored. So watch your base units.
The pollution from ethanol production is tremendous. That is well known to the regulatory community. But political pressures and corporate spin doctors keep it from the public eye. News medias are starting to sniff around the subject though. Probably in a year or two you will start hearing special reports unearthing that ethanol is not the environmental wonder the ethanol producers claim it to be.
Domestic ruminant animals are tremendous sources of methane, and a few other VOCs. No effective means of capturing that methane has been developed. It's not just [censored], a lot of it is burps as well. New Zealand has focused on reducing the methane production by playing with the feeds. The US is doing this as well, but much more lackadaisically. Though some of the western regions of the US are taking it very seriously. Methane from concentrated animal lagoons and such have been developed and in use for decades in some cases. But there is a tremendous resistance to these operations by the public.
Much lack of progress on things is a NIMBY issue, not a regulatory issue. In my state we need additional power plants, can make a fortune by installing a natural gas terminal, need to get rid of our trash, etc. The Not In My Back yard crowd have successfully blocked them almost completely. NIMBY exists everywhere. It's understandable, but the new powerplants people want have to go somewhere.
Don't pity oil companies for a lack of refineries in the US either. There used to be lots of them. The oil companies themselves shut them down specifically to reduce capacity and thereby drive up prices. They weren't subtle or secretive about it. People routinely ignore this, and just bash the regulatory community for not giving oil companies a free ride to open up new refineries without any controls on emissions. Not that the regulatory community has stopped a single refinery project in the US. It's been the NIMBY crowd, every time. All the regulatory community does is say the refinery can't be a mess. The NIMBY crowd says you can't build it here, regardless.
Currently, the energy loss is greater in ethanol production than gasoline production. US based corn ethanol vs us based gasoline. It does not hold true for all forms of ethanol production or all locations. With technology changes, this will improve. How far it will improve is the great variable. There is also the matter of how you chose to look at things. Diesel fuel to run farm tractors is counted against ethanol production by the detractors. While the fuel to deliver the crude oil via ships and sometimes even the trucks delivering gasoline is frequently ignored. So watch your base units.
The pollution from ethanol production is tremendous. That is well known to the regulatory community. But political pressures and corporate spin doctors keep it from the public eye. News medias are starting to sniff around the subject though. Probably in a year or two you will start hearing special reports unearthing that ethanol is not the environmental wonder the ethanol producers claim it to be.
Domestic ruminant animals are tremendous sources of methane, and a few other VOCs. No effective means of capturing that methane has been developed. It's not just [censored], a lot of it is burps as well. New Zealand has focused on reducing the methane production by playing with the feeds. The US is doing this as well, but much more lackadaisically. Though some of the western regions of the US are taking it very seriously. Methane from concentrated animal lagoons and such have been developed and in use for decades in some cases. But there is a tremendous resistance to these operations by the public.
Much lack of progress on things is a NIMBY issue, not a regulatory issue. In my state we need additional power plants, can make a fortune by installing a natural gas terminal, need to get rid of our trash, etc. The Not In My Back yard crowd have successfully blocked them almost completely. NIMBY exists everywhere. It's understandable, but the new powerplants people want have to go somewhere.
Don't pity oil companies for a lack of refineries in the US either. There used to be lots of them. The oil companies themselves shut them down specifically to reduce capacity and thereby drive up prices. They weren't subtle or secretive about it. People routinely ignore this, and just bash the regulatory community for not giving oil companies a free ride to open up new refineries without any controls on emissions. Not that the regulatory community has stopped a single refinery project in the US. It's been the NIMBY crowd, every time. All the regulatory community does is say the refinery can't be a mess. The NIMBY crowd says you can't build it here, regardless.
