So far, about 20% of the US corn crop is going for ethanol production. With new plants being built as we speak, that should rise to 30% of the US corn crop. It’s already cutting into the export market, with more to come…
Meanwhile down south of the border, Mexico has to import much of it’s food staple from the US. Now inflation is beginning to rear it’s ugly head over those folks who have little in the way of discretionary income to absorb increases in food costs.
What do you think will happen in the near future? Demonstrations, riots, socialist upheavel, more Hugo Chavez types obtaining power, more blame being put on the US for the world’s problems…
[V]
Meanwhile, we have all this coal in the ground that can be converted to transportation fuels cheaper than what it costs to produce ethanol from corn, but since coal is “dirty” and CO2 regs are apparently coming to the fore, it is becoming less likely that we’ll be able to develop these resources in a price neutral manner. Ditto for our undeveloped petroleum resources…
For what it’s worth, since ethanol is one of those so-called renewables being pushed by environmentalists, can we this time please connect the dots and chalk this one up to yet another case of the unseen cost of environmentalism?
Just saw a bit on TV about the new trend in ethanol production - which uses everything from the corn plant EXCEPT the edible kernels. Not many people are likely to complain that we aren’t selling them our cornstalks, husks and chaff!
IMHO, the reason for so many people blaming the U. S. for all their problems is that for too many years we’ve been working so hard to try to solve everybody’s problems. Now we catch the devil when the U. S. doesn’t jump right in to pull somebody’s chestnuts out of the fire - especially when we didn’t put them there in the first place. [soapbox]
There are a lot of agricultural products which make good feed stock for ethanol production, and lots of people can get into it with very little investment. All of the moonshiners are small scale ethanol producers - except that they drink it instead of running IC engines with it.
They’re in the middle of a Tortilla Crisis down there – prices have tripled since last summer. Here in Chicago, prices are up 40 percent in the last two weeks. Oy!
Interesting, as the Doha round of trade talks foundered because the US and Europe would not eliminate Farm subsidies. The poor nations said they couldn’t compete. now the price of food goes up, where is the low cost competition. The Ethanol boom has taken the US corn production out of the world’s food supply and suddenly the Third world countries can’t make up the difference?
Guess we’ll have to get the farmers to convert to 400bu./acre corn. (It’s been done, read an article on it a few years ago) Last year my dad got almost 200bu./acre, which is considered good, and it was a wet year.
The proper way to use corn is for Bio-fuels and for poultry feed. Shift the use of corn from being just a food filler to being a more valuable product.
Corn must no longer be a filler ingredient for cat food and dog food. Cats and dogs are always much healthier eating food with vegetables like sweet potatoes and peas. Poultry should be among the main ingredients in cat and dog foods, not corn.
Poultry is the only livestock that can properly digest corn.
Four legged herbivores have a much healthier digestive system when they eat grasses and green vegetables. The corn allows bacteria that are harmful to humans to build up in their digestive system. The cattle need to ingest grasses to clear the harmful bacteria, like e-coli.
Fast food producers can also reduce their reliance on corn products. Corn syrup variations do not need to be in so many food products. People can survive without a deluge of High Fructose Corn Syrup in their bodies. People who have developed conditions like diabetes can not have all that Corn Syrup in their system.
The price the for corn is increasing as more is being used for Ethanol and Bio-diesel production.
The land where crops have been grown is now being developed or is proposed for development. Corn supplies are limited by many factors and having less land does not help increase the supply.
Mammals do not need so much corn in their diets.
Bio-fuels made from corn are needed for autos and trucks.
The demands of new transportation fuels must be met with decisive action.
Mexico and most of South America already have two big cash crops…cannabis and poppies… and a fairly large market north of the border, if the DEA figures are correct.
I heard that if you remove all the subsidies from ethanol, and remove all the taxes from gasoline, ethanol would be over $3.00 per gallon, and gasoline would be under $1.00 per gallon.
Add to that, the fact that ethanol has less B.T.U.s per gallon than gasoline, so ethanol yields considerably less miles per gallon than gasoline.
I like how we are always treated to news coverage of people filling their tanks with ethanol while they brag about how much money they are saving.
Of course, I think people are kind of discounting how technology will overcome the issues raised in the article with two different methods.
The first is extracting ethanol from plant cellulose, which essentially means using the entire plant to make the fuel. Thanks to recent breakthroughs in using certain types of bacteria to break down plant cellulose into a form that can be refined into ethanol, that means we can process all that plant waste into ethanol, essentially increasing ethanol output by 150% or more.
The second is using the dry “waste” from oil-laden algae processed into biodiesel fuel to convert into ethanol. A company called GreenFuel Technologies is working on this idea, and that could drastically increase ethanol production to a huge scale.
Corn is a grass. The type of corn used for livestock feed is planted densely, generates few ears – less than one per plant – and is generally harvested prior to the ears even ripening. No one raises corn to feed livestock because of the corn kernels. It is a C-4 grass that generates substantial carbohydrate biomass compared to other temperate zone grasses or, in particular, alfalfa. Makes a good silage which cows and hogs like to eat.
An interesting thought - use GMO corn for ethanol production. Isn’t it the GMO stuff that gets the high yields? And none of those corn importing nations want our GMO corn anyway!