Quote:
Originally Posted by PhishPhood
Here is another 'order of magnitude' perspective.
Just to cut our usage by 20% we'd need 7000 of these plants at 1000 acres each across the US at a cost of about $7 Trillion.
However there are only about 3500 county or 'county equivalents' in the entire US. That means each and every one of these would have to set aside 2000 acres!! ( NYC, Chicago, LA, Rhode Island, etc ) in order to produce this bio-ethanol. Rots of Ruck.
The technology is promising but it has to be far far more productive, by at least a factor of 10 or 20 or 50.
|
The New Mexico factory is going to produce 1 billion gallons of ethanol. The country uses 144 billion gallons of gasoline per year. In order to replace 20% of the nation's gasoline, we would need 29 of these factories.