Alternate Energy

The United States is one of the world's top producers of corn. Think about it. Corn is in everything. Why not run our automobiles on corn oil as well. Well, I have your answer right here. We use diesel to seed the fields, we manufacture fertilizer from oil to fertilize the fields, we manufacture herbicides and insecticides to spray on the fields, we use diesel to harvest the fields, we use diesel to deliver just the corn kernels to market, we use energy to crush the oil from the kernels or brew the ethanol from the starches. It takes the energy equivalent of 1. 6 gallons of gasoline to produce a 1 gallon gasoline equivalent in ethanol and it's not much better with bio-diesel. The whole bio-fuel from corn nonsense simply consumes even more fossil fuel. Bio-fuels in general are inefficient as photosynthesis has a maximum theoretical limit of 6. 6% efficiency. Most plants are less than 1% efficient, even algae is less than 1% efficient. With most plants only the food portion of the plant can be used for ethanol or bio-diesel production by traditional means. Bio-mass fuels can be more efficient in that the whole plant can be gasified (burned in a low oxygen environment), a mixture of H2 and CO gases called syngas can be made which can be used directly as natural gas and indeed was what we used to light our streets and houses before natural gas was widely available, we used to call it town gas, coal gas, or wood gas. We now call it syngas because ever since the 1920s we use it to synthesize linear hydrocarbons including gasoline and diesel. Indeed we are meeting the federal ultra low sulfur diesel requirement by mixing our high sulfur diesel with synthetic diesel made by gasification of natural gas (Shell's GTL plant). In theory anything that burns from switch grass, trash, old tires to dried sewage could be gasified and turned into gasoline and diesel and indeed modern "nrgy" trash facilities gasify trash and use the resulting syngas in gas turbines to produce electricity. It would be far more efficient to simply synthesize gasoline and diesel directly from biomass including trash and dried sewage instead of producing ethanol or bio-diesel just from the kernels of corn produced however this process is still limited by the 1% efficiency of photosynthesis. The University of Delaware has achieved 42. 8% efficiency with photo-voltaics and Sandia National Labs has used a thermal solar furnace to produce syngas from H2O and CO2. This means that we can directly use solar energy to synthesize gasoline and diesel directly from H2O and CO2 that's already in our environment thereby avoiding the global complications of releasing carbon and hydrogen stored for millions of years in fossil fuels. You wouldn't even have to replace a single vehicle with a brand new EV to switch to a solar based economy. Of course this isn't going to happen because people want the economic growth and jobs created by selling new cars even though it's at the detrhyment to the environment to produce allegedly "green" cars.

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