Henry Ford on Ethanol

[mhsprecher]

I am reading Wheels for the World by Douglas Brinkley. I have read a number of other books on Ford that I have enjoyed and I am loving this one, too.

As we all know, Henry Ford was an experimenter and, according to Brinkley, was an early proponent of ethanol.

"Throughout World War I Henry Ford, while settling into Fair Lane, caused eyebrows to be raised as he searched for a substitute for gasoline. Conducting agricultural experiments in Dearborn ...he began his quest to have Model Ts and Fordson tractors run on denatured alcohol....Ford believed that mashed cornstalks or squeezed German potatoes could get 15 percent more power than petroleum. 'Gasoline is going-alcohol is coming,' he told a reporter for the Detroit News in 1916. 'It is coming to stay, too for it's in unlimited supply. And we might as well get ready for it now. All the world is waiting for a substitute for gasoline. When that is gone, there will be no more gasoline, and long before that time, the prices of gasoline will have risen to a point where it will be too expensive to burn as a motor fuel. The day is not far distant when, for every one of those barrels of gasoline, a barrel of alcohol must be substituted.' " ... "If only Model Ts could run on grains for vegetable substances, he reasoned, the farmers could profit instead of Standard Oil."

Wheels for the World by Douglas Brinkley pp 220-221.

[Mike V. Florida]

He envisioned the use of waste as in the line "Ford believed that mashed cornstalks" I don't think he ever figured that farm land would be used for fuel instead at the expense of food as it is now.

[mhsprecher]

German potatoes certainly are food - at least for some.

He also looked into raising sugar cane and using sugar mills to make alcohol. Distilling alcohol from wood chips was another avenue of experimentation. Some certainly was waste material, but not all of it was.

[Joe K]

So far South America and sugarcane is the only economy that has made a go of alcohol fuel.

Interesting take by Wikipedia..http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel#Fuel_economy

Energy Balance

All biomass goes through at least some of these steps: it needs to be grown, collected, dried, fermented, and burned. All of these steps require resources and an infrastructure. The total amount of energy input into the process compared to the energy released by burning the resulting ethanol fuel is known as the energy balance (or "energy returned on energy invested"). Figures compiled in a 2007 by National Geographic Magazine[61] point to modest results for corn ethanol produced in the US: one unit of fossil-fuel energy is required to create 1.3 energy units from the resulting ethanol. The energy balance for sugarcane ethanol produced in Brazil is more favorable, with one unit of fossil-fuel energy required to create 8 from the ethanol. Energy balance estimates are not easily produced, thus numerous such reports have been generated that are contradictory. For instance, a separate survey reports that production of ethanol from sugarcane, which requires a tropical climate to grow productively, returns from 8 to 9 units of energy for each unit expended, as compared to corn, which only returns about 1.34 units of fuel energy for each unit of energy expended.[67] A 2006 University of California Berkeley study, after analyzing six separate studies, concluded that producing ethanol from corn uses much less petroleum than producing gasoline.[68]

Bolding (Items that seem credible) and Italics (Items that seem specious and a warning to consider the source) mine.

Perhaps the trend for economy to "move south" will encourage energy production from sugarcane? As I sit here at work in Louisiana, I'm surrounded by refineries and rice paddies.

Joe K

[Charlville]

Not to mention Fordlandia!!

The book on this subject by Greg Grandin is a long, but good read.

[Ray in La Mesa]

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Ethanol research was promoted by Ford and George Washington Carver in the early 30's and documented in the book "The Green Vision of Henry Ford and George Washing Carver"