How many acres for ethanol?

[Wild Cobra]

I was just reading some different sources on Global Warming and found an interesting reference. If this is true, I'd like the ethanol advocates to really consider their position. From an article led BOOK DISCUSSION ON UNSTOPPABLE GLOBAL WARMING: EVERY 1500 YEARS by S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery. This part caught my eye:

We currently burn 134 billion gallons of gasoline per year, and corn ethanol will net us – net, net – 50 gallons worth of gasoline per acre per year. How many million acres of forest are we willing to sacrifice to get small amounts of another low-grade auto fuel, when Canada has more oil than Saudi Arabia in the Athabasca tar sands, that are now being produced by steam injection at less than $20 a barrel?

I consider the ethanol mandate the greatest danger to the environment in the First World.

Consider now the implications. Some legislators want to mandate a 10% ethanol or higher mix in fuels. That would require 418,750 square miles of farmland devoted to ethanol, and how much water to irrigate it? If this was one square piece of land, the sides of the square would be 647 miles long!

Now this 50 gallons net per acre sounds reasonable for me. I'm sure more can be produces, but that is if you use traditional energy sources for the distillation process. To use ethanol and burn it to heat the distillation process, the 50 gallons is reasonable. If you really look at the energy required to make ethanol, consider the CO2 impact, then the CO2 when ethanol is burned, it is a greater impact of CO2 emissions than gasoline!

I think the way to go for ethanol might be a parabolic reflector to capture the suns heat for the distillation process. Water could be used and either heated to steam, or just below boiling since ethanol boils at 176 F for distillation. It would shade much of the growing area, but at least it's a green method. Going by memory, it takes 7 units of energy to put into ethanol for every 10 we get out. Using the sun could approximately triple the yield of ethanol per acre. The primary advantage would be using less water for irrigation. The acreage I don't think would change much if it did with all the solar collectors required.

One more think struck me. To make ethanol, an alcoholic brew is made. It couldn't be efficient at more than a 10% ferment. The how much of an environmental impact would more than a trillion gallons of water being boiled off have? Especially since water vapor is the primary greenhouse gas.

Wouldn't it be funny if the small amount man-made greenhouse gasses that do cause warming was from the ethanol making processes already done in brazil and other countries?

[PixelPusher]

Food >>> Ethanol.

[Nbadan]

Water and Food >>> Ethanol


Interestingly though, we are putting better feed in some of our cars than we are feeding to our food livestock. Shale extraction also releases CO2 in abundance into the atmosphere.