Maizium, id frumenti genus appellant wrote the cleric Peter Martyr d’Angheira to his patron Cardinal Sforza in May 1493 upon the return of Christopher Columbus from the Islands of the Arawaks in the lesser Antilles. Loosely, Peter said: “Hey check out this new kind of wheat!” Corn was introduced to Europe. The Arawaks also had popcorn but no movie shows. As you may recall from your early history lessons, Columbus never landed in America and he called the natives “Indians” because that was where he intend to arrive on this world-changing journey.
Corn is a-mais-ing. It is one of the few vegetables that has all 23 amino acids, and the surviving Arawaks can digest them all unlike most Americans who can only digest two or three of them. For the natives, it was the perfect fuel. Now we are making it a less-than-perfect fuel replacement. Corn is used in just about every food product one can image. It feeds cattle, chickens, and hogs and is used in syrup, soft drinks, corn starch, corn oil and alcoholic drinks. Now add to this list, ethanol.
Ethanol is the alcohol in our beer that we enjoy at a ball game, a party or after a long day at work. In this author’s opinion that’s where it belongs. Using food products as a source of energy other than intended for our personal combustion is simply not a good idea.
Corn is the principle vegetable used in making the fuel, ethanol. Corn is also one of the most central food products there is. When it comes to processed foods, corn is in just about everything. That is where it should stay! If we start using food products in fuel, we will open a Pandora’s box of future problems. The amount of water needed to process a gallon of ethanol is three gallons. Did you know that the sheer volume of the corn fields in the United States actually affects the weather in this country and the jet stream? Stay tuned when I cover global warming.
Enter Politics
The environmental argument for ethanol was that the carbon produced by the burning of ethanol is offset by the volume of carbon dioxide consumed by the corn crop itself. A credit that cannot be attributed to oil or gas. Enter the ethanol lobby. Today 40 percent of the corn produced in the U.S. is used for ethanol. The RFS — or Renewable Fuels Standard — arm of the EPA is the legal medium that gives the ethanol lobby the support for the refineries that supply the mandated gasoline refineries to use ethanol. This is how the ethanol mandates got in.
The full effects of ethanol were not included; they include: the production of ozone at twice the level, the depletion of nitrogen sources for fertilizer and the extensive use of water to grow and process ethanol. The RFS does not weigh in on one of the more critical environmental effects of growing corn and that is the weather. Also ethanol is heavily subsidized — taxpayer money not only supports the 51-cents-a-gallon tax credit but it also subsidizes the refineries material supplies to the tune of $1 billion a year.
Does ethanol even makes sense?
It takes the energy of one gallon of ethanol to produce 1.4 gallons of usable ethanol. How is this effective? Compare this to gasoline which requires less than 10 ounces of the equivalent energy of ethanol to produce 1.4 gallons of gasoline.
The other issue is the heat value of a gallon of ethanol is only approximately 70 percent when compared to a gallon of gasoline. The use of fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides in making this energy is another compromise of the manufacture of ethanol. Ethanol is anhydrous — that means it attracts water. This is one of the reasons it is bad for gasoline engines. It has caused many problems including dissolving the seals in older engines.
In a world where the population is increasing by the rate of 85 million a year it hardly makes sense to farm food to convert to fuel for mechanical devices. Water, land use and fertilizer are rapidly becoming concerns as the world’s population increases. Ethanol isn’t necessarily environmentally friendly when burned either because it produces twice the ozone that gasoline produces.
In conclusion: Ethanol is not the best way to go for energy. We cannot afford to jeopardize the food supply for fuel. To do so would be just plain corny!

Alternate energy has this one major flaw. It is very weather dependent. It depends so much on whether the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. If either reduces in intensity or stops so does its respective energy output.
Since this form of energy conversion has an element of randomness it needs a backup system. Like harvest days of old, you had to store your grain if you were to get through the winter. So while the sun shines and the wind is blowing, these key alternate energy devices must make hay, metaphorically speaking. To make the most of the sun or wind, the unused energy must be converted and stored. To date the best means of storage is over 100 years old, the lead acid battery.
Permit me, s’il vous plait, and divert for a moment to point out that there are many other forms of storage. For example, there is electrolysis that can produce hydrogen; there is water storage where power plants during their idling time, pump water into a reservoir, which in turn runs a turbine during peak times; and heat storage in salt beds where thermal mass is needed, for example, to heat a space at night. These means are less productive and not used on a grand scale.
As for batteries the diversity is just too numerous and complex for this article. I would not even scratch the surface in the space here. Battery research is omnipresent; some new material or chemistry comes out nearly everyday. However, I would like to ask you to keep graphene in mind. I believe it will be the ubiquitous atomic structure of the future. Even though it’s “just” another form of carbon, it will be these technologies that will someday make electrical energy storage fast, lightweight, and sustainable both in structure and output.
The most readily used means of electrical energy storage today is the battery. There are many types of batteries. In general the main problem with these storage systems is their lack of capacity. Additionally, battery systems are very bulky, they need maintenance and they can be a fire hazard. They also require a relatively long time to charge. The Carter administration proposed multifuel vehicles, this when Elon Musk was in grade school. One of these multifuels considered were batteries.
However, politics got in the way of advancing battery technology. Ronald Reagan stopped the funding for Carter’s energy projects and increased funding for fossil fuel and nuclear research. If it weren’t for Elon Musk and the advent of portable devices in proliferation today, battery advancement would still be stuck where it was 10 years ago. It should be noted that Edison’s iron nickel battery is still the most durable design to date. Some of his batteries are still in use today, 100 years later. I am considering them for my own solar power backup. However they are quite expensive. Lead acid batteries are by far the safest, most affordable, and most reliable electrical energy storage system to date. This technology’s origins are arguably over 200 years old. Batteries were discovered in Baghdad, possibly as far back as 2,000 years. It is believed they were used for electroplating. How they came into being is yet to be discovered. Even more mysterious is why did they disappear?
So what does the future hold? The efficiency, charging time and charging capacities are being improved all the time. The speed at which these advancements are being made will expedite understanding of precisely how electrical energy is stored coupled and with the development of the supporting materials tells us that a major break-through is not far away.
PROCEED WITH CAUTION:
With these advancement we must also design a system of control. Any highly concentrated source of energy has its usurping consequences.