CurtAdams@aol.com wrote:...
> The yield of the process is 100%: you need a lot of energy to make
> the ethanol but the energy consumed needn't have been from ethanol.
> So the yield is 2.9E16 BTU, with a requirement for 1.7E16 input.
Ja, I intentionally calculated it closed loop style, so a gallon of ethanol
per bushel is a pretty good estimate methinks. I shoulda converted it
into realistic units for the rest of the world. Hell, *I* dont even know
how much a bushel is. But we could go to liters and hectares, since
a hectare is (I think) a square 100 meters on a side, so theres about
256 hectares to the square mile and 640 acres to the square mile
(Im doing this all from memory so do be kind if I blow the conversion)
so we figured about 150 gallons per acre year, so
150 gal/acre * 3.87 liters / gal * 640 acres / 256 hectare ~ 1450
liters/hectare.
> However, we could probably do better. From the site you reference,
> http://www.stinker.com/ethanol/corn.html
>
> Plants produce a lot of cellulose, so yields could be far higher than
> for corn *if* we pay more for the ethanol (the site doesn't say
> *how* much more) or if we develop cost-effective fermentation.
>
> That said, we'd still need an awful lot of land...
Ja, but we have it. We are sitting here on a big empty country and
we throw countless zettaliters of fresh water into the sea every day.
We really should stop doing that. And we can GM the corn to
make more fuel.
That being said, the same land could be used to set up windmills
too. Windmills and cornfields should cohabitate nicely. spike
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 02 2000 - 17:35:43 MDT