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The problem with a pro and con question is that in almost every instance there is a third and fourth possibility, which never sees the light of day. The process is called the Hegelarian dialectic, which is commonly used by the proponents of two party politics and two only issue discussions. This is the case with Ethanol (alcohol) as a fuel additive for gasoline. Sure it's a renewable resource, but the cost is prohibitive and is heavily subsidized by our taxes. The people behind this effort are huge agribusinesses who as producers of corn and primary still operators have the most financial gain. The losers are the taxpayers that yet again wind up subsidizing agribusiness rather than family farms. On the other side we are slowly going broke due to our voracious appetite from petrochemical products, primarily gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. So what is the third alternative?
During WWII the Germans after they lost Africa ran out of fuel. Their source for fuel became inaccessible. They developed a process called coal liquefaction from which they produced, gasoline, diesel fuel, virtually all petroleum based by-products and even butter. It succeeded in keeping their war machine smoothly operating until the battle of the Bulge when they began to run out of fuel, for the primary reason that delivery possibilities with allied bombing of highways and rail roads made delivery to the front lines impossible. During South Africa's difficult times when the world blockaded South Africa from petrol fuels they decided to build coal liquidation plants. At the time my company was a prime machinery supplier to the petro-chemical industry so we became aware that the South Africans were purchasing many of our machines for maintenance of their plants. All together the RSA built seven pants that still run today they called them Sasol plants. North America has the largest known reserves of anthracite coal in the world. In fact we have so much of it that using coal liquefaction we could continue operating all our petroleum based machinery into the next millennium. The South African up dated German technology could be purchased from RSA at a modest cost and plants could be built close to the coal deposits. All this could be done by the present petroleum industry with a little help from Uncle Sam in the form of tax breaks for a five year start up time. This is one-third way that is certainly a better solution than ethanol. Dr. Adrian Krieg; Author Inventor and past CEO. Dr. Krieg was active as a supplier of machine tools to the nuclear, petro-chemical and electric generation industry for 37 years. He holds over 25 machine tool and other patents. Reach him on www.a2zPublications.com |