ethanol from sugar cane

[Keith]

I was curious about why Hawaii has not been lobbing the white house about ethanol production in the Hawaii Islands. If corn producing states can get subsidized for a very low yielding ethanol crop like corn Hawaii should be able to get on this dole and make the state self sufficient in energy.From what I have read Sugar cane yields pretty good You still get the sugar production as well.


Keith

[JerryCarr]

Keith, you make a good point, and there is a promising initiative underway for Hawaii to produce biodiesel. Unfortunately, so much of the infrastructure for sugar production has been dismantled and so many acres of sugar land have been converted to other use that it is no easy task to restart the sugar industry on any large scale.

Brazil, with its low labor costs, has a very successful ethanol program that has drastically cut oil dependence. If oil prices continue to rise, the cost could make recommissioning Hawaii sugar plantations for ethanol a viable option. My own opinion is that it should be pursued, regardless of current costs, for security and self-sufficiency reasons.

Cheers,
Jerry



Edited by - JerryCarr on 03/13/2007 15:09:08

[Hotzcatz]

Did I see somewhere about how it takes more gasoline to produce the ethanol than gas the ethanol saves? The price of corn and corn products is already rising around the planet, tortillas in Mexico were really expensive and folks weren't able to afford to eat. Cutting back on oil use is good, but starving our neighboring countries is really bad. I think our croplands should be used for food and we should use solar to make electricity to run cars with.

What happens is the richer countries, such as the United States, wants the corn as fuel and can afford to pay more so the price goes up. The poorer countries who want to eat the corn can't afford to eat and if that isn't a recipe for some sort of global disaster, I dunno what is.

[JerryCarr]

Hotzcatz, ethanol from sugar cane is a far more efficient process than ethanol from corn, which is the primary source being used on the US mainland. Big agribusiness corn producers and processors managed to lobby through some subsidy legislation in the past Congress that has enabled them to use methods that are not the most efficient and still be more or less guaranteed a profit. (Imagine that, welfare for agribusiness.)

Brazil, not being as wealthy as the USA, cannot afford to spend more energy making ethanol than the resulting output, which has reduced their gasoline consumption by 40% or more. Also, the very most efficient corn conversion processes do produce slightly more energy than they consume.

My farmer cousin in Texas told me about a co-op planning to fuel their tractors and combines with biodiesel to produce corn for ethanol and more biodiesel. This "looping" of the energy production process has great promise, but the project is so new that there are no hard figures on how it will net out. I will be visiting that area in June and hope to get more information on what they are doing. Somebody producing sugar cane should look into removing the petroleum component from their process. That might produce some amazing results.

If using sugar instead of corn drives up the price of sugar, it would help in two ways. First, people would eat less of the unhealthy stuff. And second, most sugar production in now in poorer countries, so a price hike would improve their economies. (Sorry all you Dublin Doctor Pepper fans.)

We have to try something, don't we?

Cheers,
Jerry



Edited by - JerryCarr on 03/14/2007 19:23:56

[tada]

I thought cane was better fedstock too but this article is confusing:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/...anol_x.htm

Others want to make friends- I just want to make money.
James Cramer

[David D]

And where would the refining facility be located? There would be VERY little support in Hawaii to build and support a large manufacturing and refining facility. Just imagine what an Environmental Impact Study would encompass. That alone would scare most businesses away.

[Keith]

Most of the people I talk to think the whole corn to ethanol thing will last about three years because it's just not efficient. Some growers are backing away already, because the large amounts of fertilizer needed for a corn crop make soy beans more attractive. The ethanol plants will be dumping the processed corn feed after the ethanol conversion. This could be a real mess after it all said and done.

I goggled sugar cane harvesters and it looks like that they have mechanical harvesters. This could mean jobs that pay well, not min. wage jobs.
The sugar is still extracted from the process, is there still a subsidy for sugar?

Keith

[JerryCarr]

Here is a link to an article today about biodiesel in Hawaii.

http://starbulletin.com/2007/03/15/news/story03.html

Cheers,
Jerry

[Nate SC]

There is a small automotive shop in Los Angeles that converts old Mercedes Benz diesels into Bio-fuel running cars. The conversion is rather simple and then the cars just run on plain vegetable oil. The oil can be new or used vegatable oil. They collect the used oil from Macdonalds and other food places that dump the oil from the fry-a-lators. I have also seen them converting larger "bobtail" trucks as well. The kicker to this is that it's so non toxic that you COULD...not saying you WOULD...but you could lick the gas cap. The smell of the exaust coming from these cars smells like cooking french fries and I see no difference in the performance. These cars are older but they are well worth it and I could see hawaii importing vegetable oil instead of crude oil or refined gas. The cars are still diesel so they get great gas mileage but not any of the nasty side effects of fossil fuel combustion.
The F'd up part is now this company is in a fight with the EPA because they are producing modified combustion engines and they may be shut down.

[Carey]

Nate, There are also a lot of VW diesels (in fact, Maui has the green beatles that inspired Willie Nelson to establish "Bio Willie" < http://www.biowillie.com/ > . There are CO2 emissions when any fuel, including bio-diesel & ethanol, are burned. These emissions are greenhouse gas emissions, so are a side effect that is not 'earth friendly'. If fact, one of the big draw backs on ethanol as a fuel is that it has a higher volatility than gasoline, and the vapors are also huge green house gases. there was a thread on ethanol & Hawaii sugar productions months ago, & at that time, the refinery and fueling stations conversions would make the use of ethanol prohibitive in Hawaii, but the studies did show that exporting the cane product to California did have a slight margin. Don't know if the economics have changed with the shifting fuel prices, but search the site for the links on the previous studies.

Edited by - carey on 03/17/2007 09:07:48