What would I do? (part 3)
March 27th, 2007 |Dump ethanol.
It’s inefficient to produce. The energy required to go from pumping crude from the ground to getting gasoline into your vehicles tank is about 6% of the energy in gasoline itself. The energy required for the production of ethanol is 75%, over 12 times worse than gasoline.
We can’t grow enough corn to make a real dent in our energy supply. Unless you want to see the rain forests of the world continue to be stripped down in order to plant corn fields, ethanol will never be suitable as a real energy source. Last year ethanol required 12% of the U.S. corn harvest but replaced only 2.8% of U.S. gasoline consumption.
It serves as an unnecessary subsidy for the farm and fuel industries. Corn growers are subsidized to grow the crop and tax credits are provided for ethanol producers. This is great for agriculture states and the fuel industry lobby but it is not a good investment in regards to energy efficiency.
We can get there other ways. If we were to adopt automobile fuel efficiency standards to increase efficiency by 20 percent, that would contribute as much as converting the entire U.S. grain harvest into ethanol.
