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The Feds Say Cutting Fuel With Ethanol Will Bring Down Gas Prices. We're Not Buying It
(www.thedrive.com)
this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2026
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If we converted all of the existing cornfields currently making ethenol to solar farms, ...
edit; fixed link (Technology Connections rant about renewable energy)
Fun point: many farmers are switching from corn and wheat this year to growing soybeans, because soybeans need less fertilizer. Now you can get biofuel from soybeans, but you need to crush and process them first, and it's more expensive and time consuming than corn-based ethanol.
For clarity, if you're growing soybeans for biofuel most efficiently, you'd use it as biodiesel. You get much more energy out of it that way. Yes, you could instead take those soybeans crush, process, and ferment them into ethanol, but you get far less energy out only yielding about 25% more energy than it takes to grow the soybeans to begin with, far lower than using soybeans as diesel fuel.
if you crush out the oil, the biodiesel, you’re still left with a significant mass of protein and carbs, the carbs are what you would want for making ethanol.
The protein? Uh, not really useful for fuel. like maybe there is some specialized microorganism that could metabolize that to make ethanol or something? Probably it would just get tossed after the starches were fermented out of the solids. Normally it’d just get fed to animals, but the reason we’re even talking about alternative uses for soy is because the foreign animal feed market has collapsed because of an idiot old mans atavistic urges.
I was just wondering, wasn't the US exporting the soybeans to China until China said to shove it recently after another one of the tariff tantrums (and switched to buying from Argentina iirc).
So... we can get transportation power from soybeans, which is worse than from corn, which is worse than from hydrogen, which is worse than from batteries. All I getting that right?
Props for linking the full version instead of the abridged one.