since part of the process of making ethanol is making corn syrup, which converts a lot of the partially digested starches to sugars, yes, actually, the whole process is likely more effecient to burn then to eat. also, corn is already in just about everything we eat. we grow more corn than we and our livestock can eat. especially the high yeild gm corn that isnt allowed to be sold to people at the moment.
seriously, its not a cureall, but why be down on ethanol? (especially with the photosynthetic yeast programs that will massively drop the costs. ) On 1/19/07, Jed Rothwell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
The lead story in today's Yomiuri newspaper (in Japanese) says that Bush will announce new steps to address global warming in his State of the Union speech on Jan. 23. He will emphasize "ethanol and other alternative fuels." Sigh . . . Well, at least there has been some anti-ethanol press lately. I saw articles in Sci. Am., Consumer Reports, and the Atlanta Journal calling into question the use of ethanol. One of them reported a horrifying statistic: filling up a 25 gallon tank with ethanol fuel uses up as much potential nutrition from corn as a human being consumes in a year. That seems over the top but . . . Yikes, it is as bad as that. Ethanol has 89 MJ/gallon. 25 gallons * 89 MJ = 2,225 MJ. That converts to 531,788 kilocalories. Divide by 2,000 recommended daily allowance and you get 266 days. (I am ignoring fossil fuel and electric power input, which are ~1.7 times the total energy output of the ethanol.) Perhaps the ethanol factories extract more energy per kilogram of corn that human digestion does, but I doubt it. - Jed
-- That which yields isn't always weak.
