ethanol

A conversation with energy guru Amory Lovins

If politicians think in sound bites and intellectuals think in sentences, Amory Lovins thinks in white papers. His speech is studded with pregnant pauses — you can almost hear the whirs and clicks as an enormous mass of statistics, analyses, and aphorisms is trimmed and edited into a manageable length. I’ve talked to experts who […]

Hillary pays tribute to Iowa politics

This is (bitterly) funny: As Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton climbed onto a makeshift stage at the Iowa State Fairgrounds and embraced motor fuel from corn as a key to America’s future, she completed a turnabout from being an ethanol opponent, a position she held only two years ago. … Political observers view her about-face as […]

My product rules!

So, I’m reading this incredibly weak defense of corn ethanol, and I’m thinking, "who the hell would put their name on this swill?" Then I get to the bottom: Robert Gallant is president and chief executive officer of GreenField Ethanol, Canada’s largest ethanol producer. Ah.

Thanks in part to that ‘green’ fuel, corn-based ethanol

U.S. farmers planted 92.9 million acres of corn this spring, a 15 percent-plus jump from last year. If you lumped all that land together — not too hard to imagine, given that corn ag is highly concentrated in the Midwest — you’d have a monocropped land mass nearly equal in size to the state of […]

Using molten salt to store solar energy

We've gone round and round on various ways to store energy from intermittent suppliers like solar and wind before ...

The always excellent Robert Rapier has this interesting squib on using molten salt to store thermal energy from solar in his R-Squared Energy Blog.*

(While you're there you should check out his terrific posts on ethanol and biodiesel. He is in the interesting position of being a real advocate who can't ignore how oversold they are.)

Japan experiments with seaweed as biofuel

As birthplace of the Kyoto Protocol, Japan is one of the pioneering countries in climate change policy and research. In 1990, Japan pledged to reduce carbon emissions by 6 percent by 2012. One of their proposed stratagems for meeting this goal is to replace the 132 million gallons of gasoline that Japan car drivers use with a biofuel option.

Predicts rabbit out of hat in three years, too

Here's a film clip of Al Gore making a firm prediction that "next generation ethanol" not dependent on corn or food crops will move out of the lab in "three years."

He discusses the energy balance question, fails to question the use of coal for process heat, and suggests that there is some sort of "distribution network" that's going to be built.

Sad.

Ethanol: the drunkard’s scourge

OK, ethanol, come on! You effed up the tortillas, you effed up the beer … now you’re effing up the tequila? Is nothing sacred?

Arguments supporting government subsidies of agrofuels are getting polished

This is my formal rebuttal to David Morris's "case for corn-based fuel." I'm using my access to the bully pulpit to pull it out of the comments field.

How did the use of ethanol end up alongside tyranny and torture as an evil to be conquered?

That's easy. A whole lot of real smart people have been giving corn ethanol a lot of thought and have found that "an evil to be conquered" isn't a bad description. In smaller quantities, it does smaller amounts of damage, but as quantities increase, so does the damage. I mean, what's not to like about a fuel that milks billions from taxpayers, increases the cost of food all around the world, exacerbates the Gulf of Mexico dead zone, and returns no more energy than it produces?