As promised, a little rant on Ethanol.
I’m all for renewable resources. The latest Senate bill concerning renewable resources has me a little worried. The goal of producing 36 billion gallons of Ethanl by 2022 sounds like a nice idea, but it has some problems.
According to David Pimentel a professor from Cornell (quoted here) it take about an acre to produce 328 gallons of ethanol. Which, after you do the math ends up requiring 170,454 square miles of corn to produce the proposed amount of ethanol. Now, that is roughly the area of Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio put together. I’m not talking about the farmland in those states, I’m talking about the entire state, cities and all. And, of course, that is just to produce corn for ethanol, not feed grain or the wonderful stuff we get in cans.
Looks like the new Slogan for Indiana Beach will have to be, “There’s just Corn in Indiana, find another beach.” But at least the crows will be happy.
I think converting the entirety of those four states into one big farm might be a hoot. Can you imagine the corn maze you could build there for Halloween? And it isn’t like there’s really anything of interest in those states anyway. We could just transplant Chicago to one of the coasts and it would fit right in, no one would even be the wiser, especially if you did it at night. Those city dwellers are used to sleeping through loud noises.
Well, that’s about all from the future Corntopia, tune in tomorrow when Jeff talks about stirling engines and their application for perpetual motion.
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