Ideas to Save the World - Growing food not Fuel

I like math. I use it everyday. I measure and quantify many aspects of my life and apply things called equations to them to evaluate them. Now here is a number for you

425 million

That is the number of arable acres of land that exist on a planet called Earth, that can be used to produce food. Now if every single crop was made into corn and that corn was created into a fuel called ethanol, there still wouldn't be enough land to produce enough corn to produce enough fuel to power the world's automobiles by a number time ten to the 6 or so power. There wouldn't be enough that could be grown to sustain energy demands in the U.S. on an annual basis.

So here is what bugs me, Ethanol or as it is known, bio-diesel is suppose to be more environmentally friendly then regular octane. And I suppose that it is, the carbon dioxides that come out of the tailpipe a car using ethanol is less then one that uses gas. Okay I can accept that. But hers is my fist of many issues with this fuel...

First it comes down to potential energy. The amount of energy that is released from combusting ethanol is less then that of octane, by, if memory serves about 70%. This means to get an equivalent amount of power out of your car you have to consume about 142% more fuel. So it is a worse fuel and you have to use more of it for the same drive.

My next issue is a social one. Without going into detail about issues with food production and distribution it simply doesn't make any sense to me to decrease food production in a world where not everyone can eat to fuel cars with a worse fuel. Why is this happening? Stateside farmers have been committing crops to fuel versus food, and the reason why is they can get paid for it. When selling crops for food they may make less money and are more exposed to dips in the market. When selling for fuel the prices are more stable and are worth more. The worst thing though is this isn't the only way to make ethanol, but the fact that it is being used has limited how much money to research for a better method is being given. That is an issue for my next blog however.

That technology is called cellous ethanol, and what it is is bacteria that basically eat a garbage soup and sweat out ethanol fuel. This idea is truly a stroke of genius. Instead of wasting resources, it uses waste resources and processes them down into something usable. How great is that? And instead of cooking and distilling corn it is way more energy efficient, all the soup needs to do is stay warm and eventually separate the layer of fuel. Way better then having the waste go to landfills

Apart from the waste, the lack of combustible energy, and the lack of responsibility by using food crops, there is another issue. Ethanol is a reactive sort of substance and when it is used in cars it can corrode fuel pumps, injectors, piston rings and more rapidly rust out fuel tanks. It also rusts the equipment at the pumps, storage tanks and transport vehicles.

But don't despair there is a solution. Butanol! Unlike Ethanol where it is an alcohol made from two carbon atoms, Butanol is made from four. It has more then 90% comparable energy to octane, and no it doesn't corrode your engine. And that is the beauty of it you can practically fill up with it and not have to convert any parts from a regular gas. And it can be produced using the cellous method. The only problem is farmers aren't going to like it and in the midwest states, I can assure you that there will be Senators trying to block this tech however they can. In the interest of there constituents and not the greater good.

In the next five years, expect to see butanol to eventually arrive at the pumps and hopefully the phasing out of ethonal based bio-diesels.