Ethanol: Boon to California?
By jmara
Friday, September 5th, 2008 at 6:39 pm in General.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could find a way to reduce the emissions from gasoline, considering that vehicles are responsible for some 40 percent of California’s greenhouse gases? Somebody decided ethanol would be a great way to do it, and somebody was danged efficient at getting ethanol into California gas. How the whole thing came about is thoroughly explored at Spot.Us, in a stellar example of community funded reporting.
Photo: Hulagway, in the Creative Commons page on flickr.
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September 5th, 2008 at 7:09 pm
More community funded reporting will be coming our way - up next: http://wiki.spot.us/cement
After that… who knows. But would love to work with the Energy Blog and other Contra Costa Times publications.
Our site will be ready soon and news organizations will play an important role.
Best
September 12th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
Ethanol is just another boondoggle for big business and continues the destruction of our earth by global warming. When are we going to learn that the solution to our energy issues is to drive small fuel efficient cars today and small alternative energy hydrogen cars in the future. Ethanol will raise the price of food, force more overuse of farmland and continue raising the carbon footprint
September 21st, 2008 at 8:13 am
Until we are prepared to go to Hydrogen Fuel Cell vehicles, ethanol is clean alternative. I have a flexible fuel vehicle that will run on E85 (85%ethanol and 15%gasoline) but unfortunately, California has a total of 4, count em 4 gas stations all in So Cal that have E85 fuel. If we want to reduce dependence of foreign oil and reduce emmisions, what better way to reduce oil consumption. It takes 6 1/2 fillups of E85 to use one tank of straight gasoline. Cheap ethanol from Brazil is available to import, but we have a tariff to discourage that. We could easily create more jobs and not affect our food prices by using sugar beets and sugar cane for ethanol. MaDiscontinued sugar cane fields in Hawaii coud be revived and produce sugar cane for ehtanol. See this article on the real story of ethanol production..
“Brazil can’t find world market for its ethanol”
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/staff/jack_chang/story/35360.html
October 17th, 2008 at 5:05 am
Completely agree with Big Oil Boon on rising prices of food. Though all of us talking a lot about looking for alternative, renewable energy, we can not ignore the fact that the technology and reliability of renewable energy use on a widespread commercial basis are not yet established nor are expected to be for several decades. Exorbitant cost is another major factor
Oil and Gas are the still the basic source for all our primary energy needs – 65% to be precise. Oil and Gas sector should be more responsible towards the nature. Environmental Engineer, Environmental Geologist and Environmental Scientist for Petroleum etc are the need of the hour.