Alcohol as a fuel

Don Stauffer wrote:
>
> Lucila wrote:
> >
> > There was a small scale distillation tower built by the crew at the Mother
> > Earth News magazine back when it was a real magazine in the '70's. They got
> > all the heat they needed for the distillation process by burning the dry
> > corn cobs. I don't remember if they used organic fertilizer, i.e. manure,
> > or not. Seems to me that this could be done on a larger scale. Of course,
> > you can't get away from the energy required to harvest, transport, grind and
> > shell the corn. And yes, the leftover mash was found to be a good animal
> > feed. I've got that issue down in the basement somewhere, and might dig it
> > out.
> >
> > Garrett Fulton
> >
> >
>
> I wonder how many grams of CO2 are given off per thousand BTU in burning
> corn cobs. We need to come up with a way to make biofuels that not only
> is cost effective, it needs to be environment friendly, and CO2 is not
> friendly.

You do realize that almost all the carbon that is in a corn
cob was originally tied up in CO2 in the atmosphere, so at
worst, the CO2 you create when you burn a corn cob is just
returning the same amount of CO2 to the atmosphere? And CO2
is certainly friendly, at least if you are a plant.

Ed