Ethanol Info
I confess that I didn’t know much about ethanol until today, when I decided to actually make the effort to do some research on the subject.
What had I known previously? That for several years, gasoline had been mandated to be mixed with 10% ethanol, because it was better for the environment. However, because of the law of unintended consequences, the use of ethanol was driving up the cost of corn (from which it was made), and causing the poorer people of the world even more misery as they were now unable to purchase it as their staple food.
So, today, as I said, I began doing some research.
To begin with, ethanol can be made from several substances. In Brazil – the world’s largest ethanol producing country, they make ethanol out of sugar cane rather than corn. Sugar cane has a 30% greater concentration of sucrose than corn, and is also much easier to extract. In addition, the “bagasse” (the fibrous residue remaining after the stalks are crushed to extract their juice) is then used for a variety of purposes – nothing is wasted or dumped into landfills.
So why does the United States make its ethanol out of corn, I wondered. (One doesn’t really need to research that. Farmers already had corn crops in place, probably, and want to make money out of that, and our politicians want to keep our farmers happy. That’s why the US adds a tariff to ethanol produced outside the United States. Brazil ethanol is much cheaper than that produced in the US, because it does not need to be converted into sucrose – it already is sucrose. (In addition, Brazilian producers don’t have to pay their workers near as much as American farmers have to pay theirs.)
CNN Money reported on August 7, 2007: “The reason we use corn and grains in this country to make ethanol is that’s what we produce best. It’s the easier thing for us to do at the moment,” said Matt Hartwig, spokesman for the Renewable Fuels Association. “The likelihood that cane will become a huge ethanol foodstock isn’t high, though you may see it in the future.”
This despite the fact that ethanol made from sugar cane is: “about six times more economical to produce than corn ethanol and has the potential to help the environment because it requires few chemicals to grow.”
It’s the Corn Lobby in the US government that is producing a shift over to sugar cane…the government simply has too much invested in its corn-into-ethanol programs.
