Ward's Auto reports Panda Ethanol Inc. is planning to build a new plant in Muleshoe, Texas. They plan to process 38m bushels of feedstock-grade corn per year, producing an estimated 115m gallons of ethanol. What makes this plant different from other ethanol plants? Yup. The energy source used to generate the steam in the refining process ain't gonna be electricity or natural gas. The Muleshoe plant will use gassified manure– a projected one billion pounds of cow shit per year, to be exact. The company estimates the b.s. will save the plant a thousand barrels of oil per day. If Panda (Panda?) could find a way to transport bullshit directly from Washington D.C. to Muleshoe, they could more than double production.
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After the article on the F-bomb comes an article entitled E85 is Bullshit. Well at least it’s truth.
Technically, E85 is powered by bullshit.
But I think the headline is still appropriate, at least until we can convert landfill trash into ethanol inexpensively.
corn ethanol is a joke
whereas with corn we get 1.3 units of energy per unit put in, sugar (as brazil uses) can yield 8 units per input . . . . and lets not even talk about switchgrass or algea.
of course, I’d imagine the corn lobby is a bit stronger than the algea lobby in Washington.
Speaking of algae, I love these ideas to seed the ocean with minerals to encourage explosive algae growth so we can harvest it for fuel.
Like nothing bad ever happens when you f*ck with nature.
I managed to get a good laugh at a party a few days ago by observing that 20 years from now people will stand around bitching about Big Corn like many do about Big Oil today. I think my 20 year time horizon was a bit too long …..
I tell people to watch out for Mighty Wind. The basic idea is good, but in execution they seem to pick the most environmentally-damaging sites for the giant turbines.
Does anyone know the energy costs of producing Saudi or West Texas sweet light and refining it into gas and diesel? How about the same numbers for a harder to find/extract/refine petroleum feedstock? I think the 1.3 to 1 number for corn-o-hol is B.S. even if its properly derived. Who derived it and is there a link to some hard data?
There is nothing damaging about the site for Cape Wind, in the sound between Cape Cod, Martha’s Vinyard, and Nantucket. The turbines would be about five miles from the nearest land, and each would take up about as mch of the view as your fingernails when your arm is stretched out to the max. The Audubon approves. If only Ted Kennedy would get out of the way. If only we could harness his wind.
Given our government’s affinity with acronyms, The E85 generation process is hereby known by its new name:
Corn
Revenue
Acquisition
Program
You do the math…:)
I saw a train derailment on TV in which a tank car containing ethanol was afire — The “ADM” logo was painted on the side.
I’m reasonably sure that the tank car used to carry corn oil, or corn syrup.
This is really going the wrong way…
Go, Vento!
Is anyone using sugar? Seems to me we have lots of sugar acreage around here that hasn’t been planted in over a decade.
Why not skip the ethanol plant and put the manure-derived methane straight into the natural gas lines, then build CNG terminals to fuel cars?
Land that shouldn’t be used to produce irrigated corn won’t be used that way and the animal manure, human waste, garbage, etc., will be utilized rather than flushed into rivers or buried.