3 ms·

Unfortunately corn is far from best crop for ethanol production. Hemp is twice as good, and if it wasn't for this stupid war on drugs, ethanol may have done us

Unfortunately corn is far from best crop for ethanol production. Hemp is twice as good, and if it wasn't for this stupid war on drugs, ethanol may have done us a lot of good. Of course, they promised us switchgrass ethanol with is something like 10x more efficient, but never delivered -- probably b/c from the get go it was all about getting subsidies and only pretending to actually do something about our addiction to oil.

hga 12y ago
Depends on which efficiencies are important. Aren't you taking about sun etc. -> biomass? Whereas biomass -> ethanol appears to be a lot more important, and starting from simpler sugars and starch is a lot easier than cellulose, wherever the latter comes from. That also has a lot to do with the upfront capital costs you decry.
- tormeh 12y ago
  manHours*land -> biomass is a good one. So it has to be grow densely, grow everywhere, grow without supervision and be easy to harvest, preferably as many times per year as possible.
randomdata 12y ago
I have a slightly different perspective: I grow wheat and beans for human consumption. But growing those crops over and over again leads to lasting disease and eventually terrible yields. Because of that, I also grow corn. Corn rounds out the rotation to provide enough bio-diversity over many years to help with disease problems. It is possible that switchgrass or hemp would fill the same role just fine, however, they require an entirely different infrastructure to grow, harvest, and deliver. Corn has the advantage of being able to use the exact same tools I already have for growing food for humans. I do not farm in the US and am not able to take advantage of the corn subsidies everyone is always taking about, but despite that, we still end up growing corn at a loss sometimes because it is cheaper than growing nothing at all, which is the only realistic alternative. I remember the 2006 crop of corn was so large, and the price was so terrible (naturally), that a large amount of corn was just left out to rot. This is what put the pressure on the creation of the 2007 ethanol subsidy program. Compared to letting the crop rot away, corn ethanol is the better option of the two in my mind. If it was simply a matter of growing corn for ethanol, I think we can agree that other crops are better suited to it. However, the real world is quite a bit more complicated.

hga 12y ago

Depends on which efficiencies are important. Aren't you taking about sun etc. -> biomass? Whereas biomass -> ethanol appears to be a lot more important, and starting from simpler sugars and starch is a lot easier than cellulose, wherever the latter comes from. That also has a lot to do with the upfront capital costs you decry.

tormeh 12y ago
manHours*land -> biomass is a good one. So it has to be grow densely, grow everywhere, grow without supervision and be easy to harvest, preferably as many times per year as possible.

randomdata 12y ago

I have a slightly different perspective: I grow wheat and beans for human consumption. But growing those crops over and over again leads to lasting disease and eventually terrible yields. Because of that, I also grow corn. Corn rounds out the rotation to provide enough bio-diversity over many years to help with disease problems. It is possible that switchgrass or hemp would fill the same role just fine, however, they require an entirely different infrastructure to grow, harvest, and deliver. Corn has the advantage of being able to use the exact same tools I already have for growing food for humans. I do not farm in the US and am not able to take advantage of the corn subsidies everyone is always taking about, but despite that, we still end up growing corn at a loss sometimes because it is cheaper than growing nothing at all, which is the only realistic alternative. I remember the 2006 crop of corn was so large, and the price was so terrible (naturally), that a large amount of corn was just left out to rot. This is what put the pressure on the creation of the 2007 ethanol subsidy program. Compared to letting the crop rot away, corn ethanol is the better option of the two in my mind. If it was simply a matter of growing corn for ethanol, I think we can agree that other crops are better suited to it. However, the real world is quite a bit more complicated.