Ethanol Vehicles Pose Significant Risk To Health, New Study Finds

Ethanol is the biggest scam ever. Does nothing for the environment and takes grain that would othersize be food or feed and distills it. If we took all our arable land and used it to grow corn to make ethanol we still couldn't meet half of our energy demands. It's already driving the price of food up. When you pay seven dollars for a pound chicken this month, remember it's because the cost of feed has gone through the roof.

OK. Compare that with US$1.87 for a litre of unleaded gasoline.

Are those my options, $7.50 per gallon of gas or ethanol?

Ok, so let's forget for a moment that the price of gasoline is less than $3.00 per gallon on average in the states, and that the price of corn, from which ethanol in the states is made, has doubled in the past year, and that we are no where near close to having enough ethanol to make any difference whatsoever.

Also, lets ignore alternatives such as Diesel or hybrid cars. Only gasoline and ethanol are allowed to be considered.

Lets also pretend the story above about Ethanol being bad for the environment is not true.

Then yes, I agree with you, ethanol is better. You've made a very convincing argument, well done.

No-one is arguing.

With local retail prices converted to US$ for illustration it becomes clear why there is a motive driving the substitution of ethanol for petrol in some locations across the globe; Brazil is doing particularly well in this respect and there are others. Further, ethanol can be made from other materials as well as corn, which in itself is not available locally in anything like the quantities it is on the north American continent.

http://www.biodieselfillingstations.co.uk/outlets.htm

http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2006320783,00.html

http://www.maxol.ie/E85/index.html

http://www.carpages.co.uk/saab/saab-biopower-part-1-01-09-05.asp

Of course we're arguing (or debating, or whatever), and I'm glad (I'm bored).

I agree Ethanol is useful in some areas, but it is no solution. Take Brazil. Brazil makes ethanol from sugar cane because its cheaper for them to chop down rainforests and plant sugar than it is for them to import oil. I don't blame them either because what choice do they have? Never the less, it's no better than Saudi Arabia who uses oil buried in their ground.

Yet for some reason ethanol is packaged as a "green" fuel, which it certainly is not. It isn't environmentally friendly in the least. It is no better, and in many ways it's worse than fossil fuels (desertification, removing rainforrests, causes inflation in the material its made from (corn, sugar, beets, etc.)).

Also, the prices in Europe are that high because of taxes. Taxes meant to create a "greener" solution. Ethanol isn't green at all, so that sort of defeats the purpose, doesn't it?

You are correct ethanol is not going to save the planet or make oil redundant as an energy source any time soon. I have not seen anything to suggest health problems but I would not be surprised to find out that there is an added risk factor.

By the by..............it takes almost a gallon of fuel to make a gallon of ethanol. Ethanol is a scam.

Seth

In a large scale plant with efficient distillation etc it take about 20-30% of the product to operate the process. They burn the left over celulose waste for fuel for the distillation portion and use ethanol powered vehicles themselves.

Still, they need to make better use of biomass.

The principle behind ethanol is to substitute the Earth's energy income, instead of its capital, to provide for its expenditure.

As a parallel, it doesn't take a kilo of sugar to make a kilo of sugar. The sugar beet process, highly developed, consumes its own by-products to provide process steam that is used in refining the product, making the process highly intense; almost everything that goes into the plant gets incorporated into the product.

The same concept can be applied here. There are other ways of making ethanol than by using oil fuel; that would be a bit pointless. Ethanol as a petroleum substitute needs to be made from incoming biomass that would otherwise go to waste, so as to be encompassed by the above principle.

Hi Roger Pink. I agree with you, we here in the UK deride the Brazilians for cutting down the Amazon forrest. But then what do we do, we demand that we should all start to use ethanol as a fuel. Then there is the production of rape planted in increasing amounts all over the UK, while in the meantime we bemoan the fact that we cannot grow enough food in the UK to feed our own ever growng population. No, the answer is that people who drive their cars over short distances should use public transport, walk or get on their bikes. I gave up my car in 2000 because I felt guilty of polluting our environment and I have travelled several thousand miles since using public transport, even when going abroard. I know there is a problem with the disabled and rural living people, but they should be given dispensation to use a private vehicle. In this issue our governments are guilty of hypocrasy. Spencer.

Political links to energy consumption are well proven. As far as public transport is concerned, governments' interventions have had a profound influence in the availability of pubic transport in rural areas. Comparing public transport maps of say 1947 and 1997 will reveal a substantial withdrawal of services in favour of personal investment in mobility. Some locations have fared better than others; Switzerland has managed to maintain its routes and provide a first-class service availability at one end (albeit at a significant level of public subsidy), while Eire is an example of an area that has not fared so well.

There is a good correlation between energy-consumed-per-national-inhabitant and gross-national-product-per-inhabitant across the globe.

I think the use of "argument" here is being used to mean the presentation of a debating point, not in the sense of an angry dispute.

So long as parallel, opposing schools of thought can co-exist for the interested reader to make up his/her own mind, then fine.

growing corn is a very expensive way of making of making ethanol. the chaepest methods use various other carbohydrates such as wood, paper potato and other vegitable waste. note teh waste bit. currently hundreds of tones of vegetable matter goes to landfill or is incinerated for no gain. that is where the big benefits are, producing fuel from waste.

have alook at your wood and vegetable waste for the week and compare that to the 10 -15 gallons of fuel you use

Then look at an engine optimised for ethanol, with raised compression, leaner burn etc etc. the exhaust emiisions can be levelled at co2 and h2o after the cat. You will notice that there are very few noxious chemicals as there are very few additives and better combusion quality.

don't forget that petrol as we call it is only used in passenger cars. commercial vehicles use diesel. Biodiesel is also made using alcohol as an ingredient.

personnally i think liquid CO2 powered cars are the go! uses up the CO2 and cools the global warming!!! (just Teasing)

m

I agree. There is already too much linkage between oil and food. Adding the use of food grain as a feed to compete with oil = oil doubles/food doubles, at least corn derived food. Of course, in a market an increase in corn will drag up all other foods.

In fact it should be outlawed.

What can be done is to use biomass that is largely cellulosic should be degraded by tethered enzymes or other means to liberate the assorted sugars that build them. These can then be oxidized by yeast enzyme chains, also captive. Witht eh use f enzyme backbones from extremeophiles you can make enzymes that can survive to 80-100C and they work faster at those speeds because the molecular lashabout places the feed molecule into the correct orientation sooner. In addition, since there is no living thing involved, higher levels of alcohol are produced, which lowers the downstream separation cost. Downstream separation might be a continuous membrane method to at least remove the product to make sure no inhibition due to concentration gradients drives the equilibrium backwards or stall it. This may not be a problem as enzyme reactions often go to completion regardless as the product is expelled from the active site by van der walls forces.

Nobody has mentioned that a bio mass has used up a certain amount of CO2 as it was growing, this CO2 is then re-released into the atmosphere when that bio mass is burnt in some manner. The released CO2 can then be re-used by some other plant material for growing again.

End result, if we all did it (if that were possible), would be that the world CO2 concentration would not increase as it does when fossil fuels are burnt.....

Even if costs are similar for fossil and non-fossil fuels, surely the best use of re-growable energy sources is better for the planet as a whole, when the CO2 is basically recycled.

Maybe I have missed some important relevant topic out, if so, please exscuse my ignorance on this matter.

Sorry Andy you have fallen into the trap of thinking that the carbon equation is equal it is not because the time taken to release the CO2 is only maybe seconds but it takes much longer to re absorb the CO2. It Could as in the case of trees take many years. In the mean time the atmospheric levels increase.

As regards fermentation it to releases a lot of CO2 as a byproduct.

We can not win, what ever we do it has a net cost. Even were we to install treadmill generators in every home the people would simply breath more an exhale all the m,ore CO2. It has also been found that eating and exercising can bring on cancers. This is due to the production of more fee radicals. One has to Bone a idle bean stick of a person to do well. PS to CR4 yet again a whole page of text just wiped its self. No I did not do any thing to make this happen it just did it without my touching a thing.

I did not mention trees as you are dead right, they are just too slow in growing.

Remember, I was speaking generally and in Brazil for example, there are various sorts of beans that grow relatively quickly that give you a BioMass.....the Government even subsidises them....

Surely that is the secret, using a plant that grows fast, has at least one heavy crop a year, to produce your Bio Fuels......

There is no mention in the article about a two-pronged scenario of substitution and reduction of consumption.

Ethanol is just a way of providing farm subsidy to the large farm conglomerates.

Even if we could raise enough corn to provide the amount of ethanol, the use of corn or irritable land will increase the cost of every food stuff that we eat. Corn is vital to many of the everyday products that we use.

As the price of corn goes up the amount of land used to raise lettuce, potatoes, or other things we eat will have to increase or there will be no reason for the farmer to not raise corn.

Ethanol is highly corrosive and hydrophilic (water-attracting) so there is no 100% ethanol for very long.

Ethanol is just todays catch word (look we're doing something) and is bound to be a passing fad.

I meant to say the amount of land avalible for food production will decrease or the price of the other food stuffs will have to increase so that there will be a reason for the farmers to rasise these crops or cattle.

Hmm. So there is a resources constraint? Maybe GWB was right about 'addiction'...

You Wrote: "Ethanol is just todays catch word (look we're doing something) and is bound to be a passing fad."

I hope your right, but I doubt it. I've lost my faith in the common sense of the public. If we can live in a world where there is a debate on Global Warming and Evolution, I don't believe the public can figure out that Ethanol isn't helpful. Not when Midwestern congressmen and congresswomen have so much revenue to gain if Ethanol is subsidized and catches on. They will distort the truth to get that revenue, consequences be damned.

I would like to throw in a little fact. The majority of the raw material used in corn based ethanol is a waste product that is sold for a few cents a bushel less than the cost of the corn they purchased to start with. When the ethanol plant is done with the mash waste it is a better quality feed product than the raw material (unprocessed corn). This can then be fed to livestock. So in reality no crops are taken out of the food chain. It should actually be a benifit to most people raising cattle, hogs, chickens, and in theory it should make them cheaper because the people feeding the animals should not have to grind/process the feed before using it. I just thought I would give everyone something else to bicker about for a while.

Ethanol production is based on starch hydrolysis. It does not use the waset and the use of corn for ethanol has directly increased feed corn and food corn prices.

The ethanol competes for starch and draws from the lower grades, but nontheless impacts the prices of all grades.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=ethanol+%2B%22corn+prices%22

If you get a chance, please read the excerpts below and explain why all this is happening if what you say is true.

Some relevent excerpts (link to story provided below).

"Amid the U.S. corn-based ethanol push, Chicago Board of Trade nearby corn futures shot up to a 10-and-a-half year high of $4.37 a bushel in February. And in response, U.S. farmers say they intend to plant 15.5% more corn this year, a 44-year high of 90.5 million acres. CBOT corn prices dropped their 20-cent daily trading limit in each of the two sessions after the government released this data in late March."

"Previs warns the U.S. needs near-perfect weather to grow the corn it needs to meet food and fuel demand but seeding is starting later than average due to wet and cold weather, which lowers production potential. In contrast, he says sugar cane is grown in the tropics and is relatively easy to cultivate. CBOT corn could jump to $6/bushel to $7/bushel if there is a weather problem in the U.S. this summer, Previs said."

"U.S. farmers plan to switch to corn at the expense of soybeans and cotton, leading to smaller supplies of those commodities. And higher corn prices are having a spillover effect on beef and pork values due to higher feeding costs."

http://www.cattlenetwork.com/content.asp?contentid=122875

The price of corn is going up because ethanol plants in the central states are growing faster than the corn. They are building them too close together and are having to compete to get enough corn to run the plant. Every farmer I know is going to plant as much corn as they can since the price is up and I agree it is going to be hard to find beans, alfalfa, etc.. any other crop that was being raised on potential corn ground. The company that I work for is changing it's strategy because of this.

This is an interesting premise. I read the article and I do have one comment --> It seems that they are claiming that a significant contributor to the increase in health problems with increased use of E85 gasoline stems from an increase in the ozone in the atmosphere. No we all know that using ethanol as a fuel will increase the ozone. That's one of the reasons we are doing it - to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that are causing holes in the ozone, which are supposedly increasing the likelihood of skin cancer. I am not doubting that the increase in ozone has some detrimental health effects (of which I was previously unaware), but they make no mention of the corresponding decrease in skin cancer related illness (which I would hope would be expected). I would think that this would be no more of a stretch than their claim that the beneficially effects of decreases in two carcinogens would be balanced by the detrimental effects of increases of two different carcinogens.

Data--

The high-altitude ozone layer which filters out so much of the harmful ultra-violet rays is mostly independent of the ground-level (comparatively) ozone we associate with pollution and respiratory health. The high-altitude ozone is primarily created by solar radiation on the oxygen at those altitudes and primarily eliminated (at levels which are faster than its creation) by a number of chemicals such as man-made hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFC's). Many people confuse the ground level ozone with the high-altitude ozone and think that an increase in the one can counter balance the decrease in the other.

The computer model that gave the results reported in the study is always subject to many assumptions on which the equations of the model are then based. I suspect that many things can be done to decrease the levels of pollutants (ignoring ozone for a moment) which the study reported to be the cause of some of the increased health effects from an E85 switch. However, I suspect that any computer model is an approximation at best. Projections are less certain than predictions, which are less certain than . . . Lets just take the report for what it is---one possible outcome of a scenario with multiple inputs and multiple possible outcomes---and use it to educate the choices we can make now (particularly those involving design and planning which result in infrastructure and things we have to live with for decades).

jmm