With gas prices going up and up and showing no signs of slowing down anytime soon, it seems like more and more concerned citizens are discussing the use of corn-based ethanol as an alternative to fuelling our vehicles.
But while some believe that filling up our cars with corn-based ethanol will actually decrease greenhouse-gas emissions, others have stated that corn-based ethanol may in fact not only be more harmful for the environment, but harmful to your wallet as well.
The idea of using corn-based ethanol in cars first sprang up nearly a decade ago, but since then farmers have been driving up the prices of corn so they have more than doubled between 2001 and 2011. Not only that, apparently it takes approximately 450 bushels of corn to produce enough ethanol to fill up one tank of gas, yet it takes 450 bushels of corn to feed a person for an entire year. Therefore, if we were to produce enough corn to stop using foreign oil to fill up our cars altogether, it would mean we have to use 482 million acres of cropland to produce enough corn-based ethanol, but we only have about 434 million acres of cropland for food production in the U.S.
Furthermore, experts are saying that ethanol is no better than gasoline because there is not nearly as much energy in ethanol than gasoline, and that creating an energy source from food crops will only “deplete” the land which is currently being used to harvest crops.
Not only that, grocery manufacturers have been stating that the “diversion” of corn into ethanol will only increase the food price inflation thanks to federal tax credits, and auto manufactures believe that the use of ethanol in gas will actually harm car engines as well.
Regardless of the critics, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who is the chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, has recently introduced the Biofuels Market Expansion Act of 2011 which calls for 90% of all vehicles to be FFV (AKA flexible-fuel vehicles which use alternative fuels such as gasoline blended with ethanol), by the year 2016.
Whether corn-based ethanol is going to be the new norm in how we fill up our cars with gas or not, something certainly needs to be done in order for us to reduce our reliance on expensive gas that is extremely harmful for the environment.
Bio: Aside from school and working part-time as an Assistant Chef, Bridget Sandorford is the resident Culinary Schools blogger where recently she’s been researching culinary colleges in South Carolina as well as culinary colleges in California. Her passion for food is only met with her passion for writing. She lives outside of Charleston, South Carolina.
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Filed under: Ethanol
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