Fuel Ethanol, Friend or Foe?

400 bushels of corn to make a gallon of ethanol? Now that is completely idiotic lol. Corn is at $8 a bushel and that would make only the raw product to make a gallon of ethanol cost $3200, which is about 1000 times what it currently costs whole sale. Then there is the processing that was left out. Where do these fools get that stuff? Good Grief!

Actually, making ethanol is a better use for corn syrup than use for human consumption, because it is so bad for us. But corn is pretty inefficient, and there are grasses out there that can yield about 10 times the production of ethanol per acre that you can get with corn.

Ethanol is a good help in combination with other alternative fuels. There are soy beans and other products that can be used for diesel fuel. Electrical generation is a key, and with nuke plants we can make that electrical power extremely efficiently, cleanly, and very cheap.

We also need to drill to get us out of the pit in the near term. Contrary to what the lying idiots in congress are saying, we can be in some of the oil within a year, and the oil we need to explore in deeper water a couple of years.

Think about it, 10 years to hit oil? How long does it take to drill? Months, and how long does it take to set up distribution to tankers from then? Weeks not years. 1 year is a conservative estimate. We could have anwar crude flowing in 8 months to 2 years, and there is a lot of oil there.

There are people who really don't want our country to be industrial and rich, like those special interests who have the democrats by the short hairs right now. Don't believe any of the garbage you see until you check facts for yourself.

Foe. Putting ethanol into our gas was not the wisest decision. Not only is it like adding water to fuel, reducing performance and gas mileage, but it's CORN. It takes approximately 400 bushels of corn to make one gallon of ethanol. That's not even remotely worth it, especially considering it does not help the gas prices. It only drove up food costs too.

I'd still like to be able to afford groceries next year, stop the ethanol production.

Ethanol is made from 'feed' corn, not the corn humans consume. They say that it is about the same as petroleum fuel as far as performance is concerned, but the problem is that with any commodity, prices are not guaranteed to remain at any fixed level.

My personal problem with it is that although we are not taking consumable corn out of the mouths of people, we are devoting millions of acres to its production that could be otherwise used for consumable crops. Also, it only takes one natural disaster, like the flooding in Iowa, to wipe out an entire year's yield.

I don't think it is a reliable source of energy. However, Brazil is almost completely fueled by ethanol, and seem to be quite satisfied with it.

Maybe I didn't make myself clear - it does take land away from consumable crops, thus raising food prices.

It is not cheap.

I am not in favor of ethanol.

Foe.It is utter nonsense.http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=energy+non+c...

the only thing ethonal did was double my food cost