Muck’s Minute #1

SEEDS OF DISASTER BEING SOWN (AGAIN?)

A long and detailed article in my local rag sheet (what passes for a local newspaper) caught my attention this morning and echos sounded down the years.

It was a fairly detailed article on the bogus market the U.S. Government has encouraged for growing corn to be converted to ethanol, in turn to be mixed with gasoline as a “green” solution to reduce vehicle CO2 emissions.

For years now, the Feds, having passed laws and approved vast incentives (i.e. bribes for farmers and gasoline refiners) at great cost and for very little results in the reduction of vehicle emissions. In fact, when you moved from 100% gasoline to a 90/10% mix of gasoline/ethanol, the first thing you notice is a two MPG loss in gas milage. Why is that? Ethanol does not have as much energy stored in it as gasoline so it essentially reduces the octane of the fuel you are using to power your vehicle, causing more fuel to be burned to achieve the same distance travelled (which, of course increases CO2 emissions from using extra fuel! Brilliant, no?).

Now, however, after a number of years of this stupidity, the methanol program has spun off great numbers of unintended consequences that could easily have been predicted if anyone has the brains to think about the entire loop from growing the corn to the costs of using less efficient ethanol in fuel.

Things are beginning to get out of hand. In the last 2 years, over one million (1,000,000) acres of tall grass prairie in south Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Kansas and chunks of other states have been added to the numbers of acres plowed under for the sole reason of growing corn. This expansion of acreage devoted only to corn is expected and projected to double and double again as once started a government subsidy program is impossible to stop. And this needs to stop.

Echos again. Back in 1920, there was a recession in the aftermath of WWI. Farmers were in poor shape economically and so three things happened. Government subsidies and price supports for grains were put into place, banks were encouraged to loan farmers money at extremely low rates and thanks’ to technology advances pushed by WWI, farmers borrowed money to purchases newly available mechanized farm equipment which multiplied the amount of land they could plow, plant and harvest 300 times over. Instead of 40 acres and a mule, now a farmer could profitably handle 1000 acres and a tractor!

Right into the first years of the 30’s, almost all of the deep rooted prairie grasses were uprooted and grain and other water dependent crops were planted.

Only one fly in the ointment. Our mid-West plains country is, at best, semi-arid and requires the deep roots of tall grass to hold the soil in place between rains which can be intermittent at best. The mid-West plains are “high grass” country, most suitable for open range grazing of livestock.

Now, however, great areas of huge swatches of this grassy plain is being plowed under – more every year – for a mono-culture crop of corn which will go almost exclusively into methanol production.

In addition to driving up food prices, especially for pigs, cattle and their products because it is more profitable to sell the corn to methanol producers than feed livestock with it, the uses of fertilizers (made from natural gas) will explode because the ground itself throughout that middle third of America is not particularly good for much except growing grass.

We are now planting the seeds (pun intended) of another ecological disaster that just cries out to be remembered: The Dust Bowl of the 30’s when all that grass was plowed under, an unexpected (but not uncommon) two year drought left dry tilled fields to blow away in the winds that frequent those areas of the mid-West and destroyed a whole generation of farmers who simply abandoned the land as everything fell to pieces around them.

Can the same thing happen now, a short future away as we, yet once again, destroy the grasses of the great plains and sacrifice the ecology of almost one quarter of our county for the making of methanol? You bet your sweet ass it can.

END

Author: MuckAbout

Retired Engineer and Scientist (electronic, optics, mechanical) lives in a pleasant retirement community in Central Florida. He is interested in almost everything and comments on most of it. A pragmatic libertarian at heart he welcomes comments on all that he writes.

21
Leave a Reply

avatar
  Subscribe  
Notify of
porter
porter

Muck.
A quick look at wikipedia tells me that ethanol is produced from corn or sugarcane whereas methanol may be made from natural gas or wood biomass, hence it’s other name- wood alcohol.

I get the feeling you might have been using methanol above where ethanol would have been more suitable?

taxSlave
taxSlave

Nice rant. Fucked up government intervention into life.

AWD

Thanks for that Muck.

There isn’t a problem on this planet that the government can’t make worse, much worse, catastrophically worse. Good case in point, nice to see you writing again, keep it up.

comment image
comment image

Stucky

If I could run my car on wood, I’d be able to drive for years.

Nice, but sad, article.

There was an ethanlol plant near South Bend. Gigantic trucks filled with corn would be lined up 50 deep to dump their corn (the smell from the plant was nasty). I used to shake my head thinking “how many people and/or animals could be fed with that? What a fucking waste.”. (Yes, I curse even in my thoughts.)

Calamity

“If I could run my car on wood, I’d be able to drive for years.”

Already been patented. There is a place in Alabama that have been able to take cellulose (tree bark, cotton, wood, palm) turn it into glucose (sugar), ferment it, and turn it into a new fuel. Tah Dah!

Administrator

Calamity

I think Stuck meant a different type of wood.

Big Tom
Big Tom

wood gas vehicles were in use in europe in WW2. I think it was a Mother Earth project in the 70’s where they drove a truck coast to coast on basically twigs found along the way

juan
juan

Stucky says:

“(Yes, I curse even in my thoughts.)”

larry sears said that we all rehearse in our mind what we are going to say, or at least we ought to.
at this point, i also swear in my mind, usually it sounds like, ‘fucking bitch, oh you horrible woman, you’re a fucking asshole, (or when i find a public toilet full of trash) fucking limp wristed faggot can’t even make a 2 pointer into the trash can.

KaD
KaD

Trains used to run on wood. It was called a steam engine. We may see them in the future.

Tim
Tim

Trucks CAN run on gas. Check out wood gas or was gasifier on youtube.

AKAnon
AKAnon

Nice piece, but a couple technical nit-picks:

Porter is correct-the corn/gov’t subsidy debacle is ethanol, not methanol.

Ethanol does not lower octane. There are two definitions (actually 3 and a half) of octane-the first being the hydrocarbon molecule with 8 carbon atoms and 18 hydrogens. And the octane rating we see advertised at the pump, which is a measure of a fuel’s resistance to pre-ignition or detonation. Hi octane gasoline allows a higher compression ratio, without pre-ignition or detonation, therefore greater efficiency and horsepower. (There are two different methods of measuring octane rating, Motor and Research. If you read the fine print at your local gas station, you will probably see that the reported octane for a given grade of gasoline is the average of the two, R+M/2).

Alcohols, including ethanol, contain no molecular octane, but they have a relatively high octane rating. This has allowed midwest hot rodders to build “street” race engines specifically to run on 90% or greater ethanol, essentially race gas octane at a pump gas price. One downside is that while the octane rating is high (on the order of 110, far better than even the highest octane ordinary pump gas at 93), it contains less energy per gallon, and per pound.

Hydrocarbons contain roughly the same energy per pound, regardless of the size molecule. Whether liquid propane (4#/gallon), gasoline (6#/gallon) or diesel (almost 8#/gallon), pound for pound, they have about the same energy. This is why small scale miners sometimes buy a tanker of bunker C (the heaviest distillate-denser than water)-more horsepower from a diesel engine with mechanical fuel injection. Alcohols, on the other hand, simply do not contain as much energy as petroleum products, either by weight or by volume. Hence Muck’s accurate statement that mileage necessarily suffers.

flash
flash

Blowback . it’s what’s for dinner…

glort
glort

AKAnon….who down arrowed this guy for being 100% correct?

having built a race engine or 30 that runs ethanol, when they detonate, it is scary as hell
you can barely see the flames and it rapidly engulfs the car
and the engines gobble fuel at a ferocious rate
raced formula 3 and formula V for years thru the eighties
driver got pretty burned up in ohio at a track there when the clutch exploded and severed the fuel line
car burned to bare metal in about a minute and a half

Calamity

Admin,

I don’t think that would be very cost effective. I am sure Viagra prices are set to rise with the costs of Obamacare.

TPC
TPC

It was a pretty simple mistake, he obviously meant Ethanol.

I believe Cellulosics are going to be one facet of our answer to the global energy problem, however it is downright irresponsible to convert food into gas.

The government wants to see more ethanol getting produced, and thus made it better for farmers to produce more corn, and industrialists to put up plants to produce it.

The problem is that this is not really supporting research into the field. Instead we have a whole lot of people jumping on the bandwagon of easy government money while lying their asses off about their productivity.

In the last years chemists have seen the industry shift dramatically; in production, they want things greener; in research, they want to look at systems not molecules.

The former, due to public awareness, the latter due to computers and the obvious failures of the past.

Good article Muck, thanks for sharing.

AKAnon
AKAnon

glort-you will find that if you post enough, especially if you occasionally flame a dumbass, that you will get someone who automatically thumbs you down. I have one of those folks now, and I’m pretty sure I know who it is. It’s kind of cute, in a way, like a lost puppy following you home. I’m just waiting for a dark alley I can kick him into. Seriously, as entertaining as the flame wars have been, that’s really not my style. But once in a while someone’s stupidity over-rides my natural self control and I can’t help myself.

Either that, or someone erroneously took my post as an attack on Muck’s OP-nothing could be further from the truth. I hold Muck, his work and this OP in high esteem-just trying to clarify a few of the details for the sake of technical accuracy

xvideos

Actually, film pirating is so prevalent that our friends at TorrentFreak chronicle the happenings via a weekly high 10 listing of probably the most-pirated movies on the Web.

projectfreetv

Get much more worth with the new NOW TV Box and watch over 1,000 films on your TELEVISION.

One-off cost.

Ghost

I read this here and cited some of your data to a Bootheel Farmer friend whose family cultivates thousands of acres of Mississippi river basin cropland. Mostly corn.

He is adamant about GMO corn, insisting it FEEDS people.

Muck, I don’t know how you are doing and I don’t know if you are able to stand with us in the fight any longer, but I wanted you to know I started reading your stuff here early in the game, in 2013 when I was just moved here, watching Mennonites raise my log home.

Thanks for your contributions, Muck

This one helped me shut that guy up for at least a minute or two.

Gato
Gato

Well they have to use if for fuel. It isn’t healthy to eat. KETO.

Discover more from The Burning Platform

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading