The Oil Drum

In the basement, chopping some old cherry wood, which led thoughts of Kirschwasser - a fine source of ethanol, which then led not so naturally to a few other not quite minor BTU lowering aspects of ethanol. For example, that much delivery and production uses tank truck or rail, and not the more efficient existing pipeline infrastructure. Or that this road distribution leads to the importance of maintaining the road network, in a tight tautology - we need to drive, which means roads, and to have ethanol delivered, we need roads for ethanol delivery, otherwise we can't keep driving. Perfect logic in today's America, it seems. And then the idea that grain and oil prices on are the same track - amazing. We will simply switch, since no pain, no gain is the sort of slogan which sounds so early 1980s.

Basically, ethanol is an attempt to keep that dynamic American economy rolling, from industrial agriculture to exurban mortgage owners driving large vehicles to jobs involving the housing industry, to supporting global scale corporate enterprises, such as ADM - if you grow up around DC, the ADM ads are as omnipresent as those of the defense contractors.

And that attempt includes creating a new 'industry,' built at the peak of the era of the internal combustion engine, instead of creating the infrastructure required to adapt to a world where the current concept of wheeled mobility will not be applicable.

It is easy to be cynical about corn ethanol as a biofuel, a term which seems to be increasingly common in these discussions, which serves more to swirl different concepts into an acceptable way to keep the American Dream alive. Farmers growing an oil crop, such as rapeseed, which is then locally pressed and possibly 'refined' certainly allows agriculture to continue with the benefits of mechanization - what it doesn't allow is tax revenues for fuel purchases (even if farm use is less heavily taxed), it doesn't require much in the way of new infrastructure (diesels will run on plant oil in a pinch if it is above freezing, or the fuel system has been adapted), and it pretty much removes the importance of large corporate organizations in planting and reaping a harvest.

But such a 'biofuel' future is more along European lines - and the Europeans, at least the Dutch and Germans, seem to understand that biofuels are going to a major long term problem unless the market is carefully monitored. This is why it is so fascinating to read about palm oil plantations - OPEC member Indonesia, or oil producer Malaysia for example, planted massive amounts of palm oil plantations for the global food industry over the last 2 decades, but then came a wave of bad press - and now, reading about biofuels, deforestation related to those plantations is suddenly all about biodiesel, not junk food - palms don't start creating harvestable yields in under 4-5 years, according to an informative link at http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/duke_energy/Elaeis_guineensis.html#Ha... - in comparison, ethanol in the American heartland can be sold in the American media as environmentally friendly and as a step in the goal of attaining 'energy independence.' And this won't require anyone in North America to buy a diesel, which the North American car industry really doesn't manufacture anyways And the money stays where it should - in the pockets of the rich and powerful of the current system, the one about to hit the shore of reality - though just on the horizon, I'm sure there is a flood of oil waiting to crest higher than we can extrapolate from today's data - just believe in it, and it will come, because otherwise, Americans will have to start leading different lives.

That ethanol from sugarcane or another crop may offer a decent silver BB to keep some essentially gasoline fueled vehicles/equipment running until something better is available is one thing Thinking that essentially strip mining a large swatch of North American topsoil is an adequate solution to peak oil is just the sort of avoidance to what is happening which seems to mark America since the early 1980s. Which not so coincidentally, is also the last time the dream of an ethanol powered future died out (along with a massive wave of farmers going bankrupt - not exactly entwined), when the clear constraints and costs of ethanol production were no longer possible to hide using tax dollars and a major marketing budget.

Basically, the case against corn ethanol does not have to prove itself - the case for it, however, has a large (likely insurmountable with today's current understanding) burden of proof. Simply because feeding animals or people seems less necessary than driving into the sunset doesn't actually make it so.

And yes, if Ghawar is in decline, these are no longer theoretical questions - we will see just how much human life weighs against the need for Americans to keep driving. Welcome to the reality of suburbia. It's all good, or something equally banal - after all, if growing population is a problem, maybe every American driver using ethanol instead of gasoline can sleep soundly, knowing they are helping heal the Earth. Now that sounds like an American Dream.