[Gasification] biogas vehicle

[Max Kennedy]

I don't think Roger missed anything.  Corn silage as in the original post is the whole plant ground up.  The mash that results from fermentation, although an excellent animal feed, is not food for people.  The conversion of feed to cow, most common animal conversion route, is about 10% of which only about 65% is edible given current societal norms thus giving a conversion to human food  of only 6.5%.  Pretty poor!  Most feed to animal conversions also result in the production of vast amounts of unrecoverable methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, in the form of flatulance.  The corn itself provides much higher food energy for humans, yes a different variety should be planted but that is a relatively minor change.  The holy trinity mentioned, corn beans and squash, is not practical commercially, if it was don't you think cash strapped farmers would be doing it?  Just try harvesting that with a combine!  That is thus a red herring, doable with manual farming practices but  not
 otherwise.  Ethanol from corn is about the worst of the biofuel routes if one considers net energy gained.  Even looking at cellulosic ethanol there are better options.  By all means if there is grain surplus to food needs do it but it seems an obvious dead end when looked at in detail.

MK

Jeff Davis <jeff0124 at velocity.net> wrote: 
 You can plant other crops with corn like beans and squash? So you can triple the out put. 

Harmon wrote:
>    There is a very, very serious and major error in this calculation.
> When you make the feedstock into ethanol, you have just as much food left, and, in fact, much higher quality, much more digestible food left over, in the form of the spent mash. 

       
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