“Experts are trying to find a new recipe to turn corn into ethanol and some are turning to cows for help.” – Matthew L. Wald
Credit: Warren Gretz
The New York Times Science Section has a suggestion for our President (and other advocates of ethanol from corn), i.e., Get Closer to the Cow. In “Corn Power Put to the Test” (Tiny URL; NYT Subscription Required), Wald suggests that “Cow Power” could be a source for biogas, replacing the use of natural gas in the energy-intensive, fermentation process.
For every gallon that an ethanol manufacturing plant produces, it uses the equivalent of almost two-fifths of a gallon of fuel (usually natural gas), and that does not count the fuel needed to make fertilizer for the corn, run the farm machinery or truck the ethanol to market.
With the kickoff of the General Motors “Live Green, Go Yellow” ad campaign, there is renewed debate about the value of ethanol from corn as a fuel. See, for example, the commentary* to a recent World Changing article, “In Search of the Flex-Fuel Freeway“.
I was glad to see that, in the brief consideration of whether ethanol is a sustainable fuel, Wald mentioned that ethanol plants have been built using methanol methane produced in a manure digester to supply heat for their distillation columns. Unfortunately, while the New York Times Science article made passing reference to the greater potential value of (even George can say it) cellulosic ethanol, it only focused on production; there was no mention made in the go-yellow journalism of ethanol’s relative energy value.
* Note: In which the author puts in a plug for plug-in, flex fuel hybrids, and, later, mentions the recent UC Berkeley meta study.
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GM seems to be saying, “See How Yellow We are”. GCC reports that not only have they got Shell and VeraSun pumping E85 in Chicago, but they also leveraging OnStar technology in the E85 promotion effort.
That would be methane produced in the digesters, not methanol.
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[...] calcars-news is stepping into it. It being the hybrid controversy. Oh, you thought… Nevermind. True, time is short and the list of environmental, health, and global security problems associated with our unabated petroleum use is depressingly long. But getting from here to there isn’t easy. There’s no single, silver-bullet solution but rather — and refreshingly — an increasingly diverse menu of options: competing technologies, fuels, and vehicle choices. So, why shoot down anything that isn’t Nirvana? I won’t attempt to answer that question, except to note that auto makers — especially American ones — have teased us in the past with “green” solutions, only to pull the plug, as it were, on such technologies — GM’s EV-1 electric car, for example, or Ford’s Think! line of vehicles. Not to mention most car companies’ historically dogged refusal to acknowledge or address energy and climate issues in any strategic, holistic way. So, healthy skepticism is in order. [...]