The following is a paper I wrote for a class. I found the information interesting and wanted to share it with you.

Ethanol is said to be the answer to all of our gasoline needs, it burns cleaner then gas and we wouldn’t be relying on foreign oil. Corn is also an abundant source in the United States and therefore we should be able to make enough ethanol and for everyone to run their cars on and maybe even to export. The problem is that using corn to make ethanol is a huge problem not only are there environmental impacts but there is not enough corn to make ethanol for everyone and still be able to feed the people of the United States and other countries. The energy used to make ethanol is more than oil produced gasoline and it’s only somewhat cleaner. Does that mean that we should not use ethanol, no it does not. It would still reduce our dependency on foreign oil and is still a little better for the environment.

Corn based ethanol is produced by using all the modern farming techniques; they have to grow the corn and use pesticides and other chemicals that are harmful to the environment. They also use more fossil fuels to produce the ethanol. Even after everything is said and done it would take 3 gallons of ethanol to produce 4 gallons for consumer use. That is not a very efficient way to produce anything and using the ethanol would require farmers to buy all new machinery that will run on ethanol.

There is still hope, there are many other products that can be used to produce ethanol. Corn stalks are one of these things, yes it would still require growing corn, but the corn itself would be for food, this would help the price of food made from corn go down and it would help the economy. The stalks would then be sold for ethanol use. Type of non food plant that could be used are poplar trees and switch grass a cheap and easy grass to grow. The last product that I am going to mention is sugar beats. There are many farms that already grow sugar beats for sugar production, these farms could also grow them for ethanol since sugar cane is a better way to produce sugar. All of these non food plants have a cellulose base that can be converted into ethanol.

There are still many difficulties in getting ethanol from these sources. The process is more time consuming.The fermentation process requires more advanced technology and the process is more costly then corn based ethanol. Research is now being done to find a cheaper and better way to take the cellulose out of these non food plants for use in ethanol production. With time and research we should soon be able to produce ethanol with these plants. The benefits of doing it this way are numerous. The main one being that the process is more efficient, it can produce 4 to 6 times the energy used to produce it and it would not take away from our food supply.

Ethanol is not the replacement for foreign oil. When we do get the technology to produce ethanol from non food products we still would only be able to cover 30% of our oil use. Still this is a good number and could help in combination with many other types of renewable energy.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!