Ethanol

That's a huge issue we could win corn farmers over on. Democrats tend to be for renewable energy. Let's talk about the positives and negatives of ethanol too.

Ethanol from corn only produces about 30% more energy than it took to produce the ethanol. It only survives due to the tax credit--and the fact that the first "primary" is the Iowa caucus.
edit" the, not that

I won't pretend it is the be all, but creating ethanol keeps people employed in this country growing corn and processing it into fuel. I say it buys us a better than 30% benefit in the long run, not to mention the decrease in hydrocarbon polution.

One of the problems promoting ethanol production is that early Ethanol producers were not nice neighbors. The plant in St. Paul (I'm from the midwest) was notoriously offensive to its neighbors and has given ethanol production a bad reputation. A plant closer to me in Stanley, Wisconsin was also quite smelly, but we had a fine Attorney General here who fined them for pollution violations and forced them to clean up their emissions. Now everything is fine - no odor. Unfortunately, when ethanol plants are good neighbors, no one talks about them.

Is that it takes more energy to extract it than you get by burning it. I don't see why this is an absolute though. I believe the oil companies have stymied research into cheaper methods.

Is it as costly to produce straight Veg oil as ethanol?

I've seen a number of resources for diesel / SVEG conversions...

practical alternative.

I know that it is utilized by mass transit systems in the Northwest and around the country, and is available commercially.

I even saw a piece recently on the Ga. farm report on RFD TV recently about it.

Some facts:

It costs about 2.50/gallon for pure bio-diesel. There is a tax credit which reduces pure bio-diesel to $1.50/gallon.

Blends with regular diesel are indicated by a number indicating the amount of biodiesel. For instance, B2 is a 2% blend, B20 -20%, and B100 pure biodiesel.

Up to B5 -- requires no change to an existing diesel, increases the lubrication provided, and decreases harmful emmissions by about 10-20%.

B20 -- most commonly used fleet blend. Requires no changes to diesel engines built after 1994, with the above benefits by even more. This ratio (or higher) will provide clean air act EPACT credits as well.

B100 -- although diesel engines will run on this, it has some problems due to the acidity of the oil, and its tendancy to soften and rot rubber sealents over time. Modifications to feul systems (using different materials) allow this to operate with no problems, and a large number of benefits. This ratio does suffer from some issues in cold whether (like diesel #2), but is still very workable in things like generators, automobiles, etc.

For more info, see the National BioDiesel Board

average input vs output gain is 230%. BD definitely has a bright future, there several 100 million gallon per year plants due to come on line in '05.
There were about 5000 people employed in the BD industry in '03, by '08 there is expected to be 180,000.
One interesting recent development is that a 70 million/ga/year BD plant in Montana was sold to a Chinese company.
Guess they know what's promising for the future.