Bio Fuels.

Bio fuels. Sounds exciting, right? It's not, but, it's important. Well, I'll let you decide on that.

Amid concerns on importing oil from the Middle East and all of the hubbub on "Global Warming", bio fuels are a hot topic. When my brother sent me this article, I figured I'd post on it. Good story? I thought so.

Back on point. The topic of the story is corn ethanol and it's benefits. I'll summarize if you're too lazy to read the article(I JOKE!). Many factors come in to play when we discuss using corn ethanol as an alternative fuel. I believe in a past post I might have touched on at least one of them.

First of a few, the efficiency of the process itself. In other words, how much of the energy in the corn ethanol would be necessary to produce the ethanol, likewise with gasoline or any other fuels used. For gasoline, the process only takes about 6% of the total energy in the gasoline produced. Well corn ethanol has GOT to be better than that, right? Well, it's not. Not really close, at this point. After you factor in all of the energy required in the production/transportation process you only have about 25% of the ethanol left. So for gas, you had about 94% left.

That doesn't really sound that cool to me. Granted, corn ethanol has better CO2 emissions than gasoline, but that's a whole other story. A story in which I will quickly enlighten you. Guess what was the number one source of greenhouse causing gasses in the atmosphere? Cows. That's right. Methane from cows flatulence is worse for the environment than all our cars and trucks and planes combined! Good news Sean! You can stop paying websites because you have a SUV, just go kill a few cows! But, I digress.

We're back at corn ethanol. We already covered how efficient it is at this point to produce the fuel. The next thing is what I had previously touched on, so I'll be brief. Mexicans can't eat enchiladas without tortillas. Otherwise it's just a pile of crap on a plate. The price of tortillas in Mexico has risen drastically due to the increases in corn consumption for fuel. Since farmers are going to try and plant whatever is the most profitable, they are going to go to the white corn, which is used for the ethanol. The production of the yellow corn, which is used in the tortillas, decreases, causing increases in the price. Also, keep in mind, if yellow corn prices go up because farmers are finding it more profitable to go with the ethanol production, then other things like soybeans and wheat and even cotton could see skyrocketing prices! Think of the chaos. Children will jump for joy at never having to eat soy meat burgers because their parents don't want to hurt the cows, the nation will be constipated because no one can afford to have enough wheat products in their diets and we'll all have to wear polyester!

If that made sense to anyone and I don't have it all wrong, then you just got yourselves a free basic economics lesson. Don't worry, this one's on me.

Alright, this is starting to go longer than I expected. I'll let you guys read the article. The gist of this is that it seems we need to look at making cars more efficient using gas, while at the same time exploring alternative fuels, like hydrogen. All we need is to come up with is warp engines and we're set. Dammit, where's Scottie when you need him?