Sometimes I have to wonder what, or even if people are thinking. Everybody, myself included, decries using foreign oil, but nobody wants to use our own oil. With our economy so dependent on something someone else owns, we’ve set ourselves up for disaster. Yet we refuse to develop our own oil fields for whatever reason. I guess we are saving them for a time when everyone else runs out. Sure, deep water drilling is dangerous. Everything to do with oil is dangerous. We need something new…a new fuel source.
Some run to battery power. Electric cars are the way. If you are looking to reduce damage to the earth, electric cars are far more damaging to the earth than oil. Lithium mining is probably the most damaging to the earth thing that humans do, save maybe nuclear weapons testing. Others will suggest ethanol. Great idea, in that it is renewable, doesn’t damage the earth much, is safe to handle and transport (well, at least as safe as gasoline) and all that. The naysayers cry that it reduces our food supply, drives up feed costs for farmers and causes widespread starvation. That’s assuming that the ethanol has to be made from corn. Still others rightly so say that not all cars can burn ethanol without damage to the engine. This is true, but fixable. Change out the gaskets and a few other parts, and while you’re at it do a ring and valve job and you practically have a new engine. Having to do this is interesting, because every major car company in the world already makes the cars that are ready for ethanol. Have since the 80’s…they sell them in South America. Most of the cars in South America already run either on E85, or pure ethanol. So why haven’t they been doing that here? You can probably figure that out. If not, I will put forth a theory later.
Let’s talk about the food thing for a minute. Using ethanol for fuel would have very little impact on food prices if you make ethanol out of sugar instead of corn. Where would we get the sugar, you ask? Simple…sugar beets. A crop not commonly grown in this country anymore, but would not be hard to get started in most states. What I’m about to tell you is simply information easily gathered from various agricultural websites. I do not profess that it is the absolute truth, nor to I claim to be an expert on any of these matters. I’m just a guy with an idea that if put in practice could help with our dependency on foreign oil, create a few jobs, and actually improve the environment.
Just for discussion purposes, let us assume that a mere 300,000 acres of beets were planted. This number, by the way, is the approximate amount of land wasted on growing tobacco in this country, but that’s a whole different topic. Most of the government and agricultural websites I visited say that you can expect a yield of between 12 and 25 tons of beets per acre per year. They go on to say that a large portion of the beet’s weight is sugar, and that it’s common for the extraction process to recover 10-20% of the total weight in sugar. To make it simple, 100 pounds of beets will give you 10-20 pounds of sugar, which will yield 1 to 1.5 gallons of fuel grade ethanol. Put another way, if we assume a 15 ton per acre (or 30,000 pounds) yield, you can get approximately 3000 pounds of sugar, which in turn would yield 300 gallons of ethanol per acre. Back to our 300,000 acres above, that’s 90,000,000 gallons of fuel.
What impact would this have? A barrel of crude oil (42 gallons) will yield approximately 20 gallons of gasoline or roughly 2 gallons of oil per gallon of gasoline. Our 300,000 acres of beets would save something between 4-4 ½ million barrels of oil. Granted, that’s not a huge contribution, but these numbers are just an example. Added to that, the pulp left over from extracting the sugar and the “tops” as they are called, the green leafy part above the ground are excellent ingredients for animal feeds and organic fertilizer. This could help bring feed costs down and make food more affordable.
It is estimated by some of the naysayers that if all the fallow farmland in the United States were converted to growing various biofuels, that realistically we would only gain 8-14 % of our total energy needs. Ok, so it’s not a magic bullet, but why not do it? What would we have to lose? That would be 8-14% that we didn’t buy from overseas, it would keep our farmers working, keep Americans employed. Nearly any car can handle up to about a 25% gasoline/ethanol blend. Just to make sure, keep the mix at 10-15%, and no one should have a problem with it.
Biofuels like ethanol and bio-diesel are certainly not the be all and end all for our fuel needs. They can provide some relief both environmentally and economically at a time when we desperately need both.
So, why not?
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