Copperhead
Veteran Member
Yeah, it makes my point. Folks will pitch a fit about something and not realize that what they want to use is just as bad as what they are fighting against. With the outrage over water use for ethanol production, we should see rioting in the streets over the newspaper and magazine industry. After all, we don't need print media now that we have the internet, right? That is the type of argument that anti ethanol folks use... we don't need it since we are swimming in crude oil.
It does make my point that folks, when they don't like something, will dream up all kinds of ways to proclaim it is the most terrible thing that has befallen mankind and will lead to the earth's destruction without realizing it is barely a blip on the radar compared to other stuff they dismiss. At least not really any worse than the gasoline they buy. We make about 14 billion gallons of ethanol in this country annually, so that equates to 42 billion gallons of water annually (no schmism, not 100 billion gallons of water). We make about 8.923 million barrels a day of finished gasoline. Roughly 42 gallons per barrel. So each day, at 2 gallons of water per gallon of gasoline, we are using almost 750 million gallons of water per day just to make gasoline, or almost 274 billion gallons of water annually. Kinda of takes the air out of the ballon of the argument that ethanol production is such a water waster.
And what the stats don't show, is that even though it takes about 3 gallons of water to make a gallon of ethanol (actually that is old data as many ethanol operations are approaching a 2.33 gallons of water per gallon of ethanol), a lot of that water is recycled. So it is not as extreme as it might seem.
Good post, Fordman
It does make my point that folks, when they don't like something, will dream up all kinds of ways to proclaim it is the most terrible thing that has befallen mankind and will lead to the earth's destruction without realizing it is barely a blip on the radar compared to other stuff they dismiss. At least not really any worse than the gasoline they buy. We make about 14 billion gallons of ethanol in this country annually, so that equates to 42 billion gallons of water annually (no schmism, not 100 billion gallons of water). We make about 8.923 million barrels a day of finished gasoline. Roughly 42 gallons per barrel. So each day, at 2 gallons of water per gallon of gasoline, we are using almost 750 million gallons of water per day just to make gasoline, or almost 274 billion gallons of water annually. Kinda of takes the air out of the ballon of the argument that ethanol production is such a water waster.
And what the stats don't show, is that even though it takes about 3 gallons of water to make a gallon of ethanol (actually that is old data as many ethanol operations are approaching a 2.33 gallons of water per gallon of ethanol), a lot of that water is recycled. So it is not as extreme as it might seem.
Good post, Fordman
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