This week’s episode has been put together with chewing gum and bailing wire. On Monday I interviewed Bianca Lutchen, pictured at left with Mathias Bell, our show’s producer. She’s a senior at…
Locally Grown (LoGro) Northfield Posts
For the past several years (maybe longer?), a large number of twenty-somethings of Northfield who’ve gone off to other locales (jobs, college, life) return to town the night before Thanksgiving…
Although many people believe that Northfield should try to build on existing assets, such as the two colleges, the emerging medical campus, or our authentic downtown, there are a few…
Grezzo (gallery, framing, studios) held a “Fine Craft Collective” artists’ reception last night at their new location on Bridge Square. Left: Grezzo co-owner, framer, and artist Stephen Delwiche with Cathy…
As you know from recent blogs by both Tracy and me, Northfield is looking at Low Impact Development. There are a number of emerging technologies that can help protect our…
A group of hearty souls slept out in plastic bag tents last night in Riverside Park, part of National Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week. Each year, one week before Thanksgiving,…
I still don’t know how last week’s presentation by Advanced Bioenergy et al was received by anyone who attended, but thanks to comments by Carol Overland, Sean Hayford O’Leary and a few others I received verbally, I found some resources to help consider the pros and cons of locating a bizillion-gallon ethanol plant in the greater Northfield area.
First, I’d like to quote extensively from the Slate.com article referenced by O’Leary in his comment on my previous blog post:
David Pimentel, a professor of ecology at Cornell University who has been studying grain alcohol for 20 years, and Tad Patzek, an engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, co-wrote a recent report that estimates that making ethanol from corn requires 29 percent more fossil energy than the ethanol fuel itself actually contains.
The two scientists calculated all the fuel inputs for ethanol production—from the diesel fuel for the tractor planting the corn, to the fertilizer put in the field, to the energy needed at the processing plant—and found that ethanol is a net energy-loser. According to their calculations, ethanol contains about 76,000 BTUs per gallon, but producing that ethanol from corn takes about 98,000 BTUs. For comparison, a gallon of gasoline contains about 116,000 BTUs per gallon. But making that gallon of gas—from drilling the well, to transportation, through refining—requires around 22,000 BTUs.
In addition to their findings on corn, they determined that making ethanol from switch grass requires 50 percent more fossil energy than the ethanol yields, wood biomass 57 percent more, and sunflowers 118 percent more. The best yield comes from soybeans, but they, too, are a net loser, requiring 27 percent more fossil energy than the biodiesel fuel produced. In other words, more ethanol production will increase America’s total energy consumption, not decrease it.
But (SURPRISE!) the National Corn Growers Association disputes these findings and hints that the researchers were in the back pockets of petroleum industry interests.
At the risk of getting off on a tangent, and being accused of more Tracy-Bashing, I have to say that it was ironic that at last night’s Planning Commission meeting,…
In today’s (Wednesday, November 15th) Strib, the editorials include one called “Appliance efficiency gets overdue boost”. The words certainly have a bit of editorializing to them, “after six years of…