Hummer Tank can feed a person for a year
Alternate Fuels as an Investment Jim Letourneau ( http://www.thebigpictureguy.com/ ) is a Calgary newsletter publisher on oil and gas energy for Tom Allen's Howe Street Media ( www.howestreet.com). Jim was telling the world to buy Uranium a couple of years ago at $12.00 and it is now over $75.00, so he does not just stick to oil and gas. I asked him about ethanol and he made the statement that you could feed a person for a year with the amount of corn it would take to make enough ethanol to fill a Hummer.. This was his follow-up to that statement. It goes along with my look at 'on board' hydrogen generators for your car, another intersting idea you can see at ( http://www.supplementalhydrogen.net/ or http://www.speedace.info/hydro_gen_hydrogen_gas_generator.htm ) david ingram
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Jim Letourneau, P.Geol. wrote: David:
Thanks again for the fun interview at the Vancouver Cambridge House
show. I couldn't remember Lester Brown as the source of the "feed a
person for a year or fill up a Hummer" anecdote.
http://www.bigpicturespeculatorblog.com/2007/06/lester_brown_po.html
Of course maybe he made that up so I did some quick research:
How much corn is needed to make ethanol?
For every one bushel of corn, approximately 2.7 - 2.8 gallons of
ethanol is produced.
The Hummer HI has a 53 gallon tank which means that 19.27 bushels of
corn are used to fill the tank at 2.75 gallons/bushel.
Corn can weigh anywhere from 45-70+lbs/bushel. Using 56 lb/bushel
(http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/scales/bushels.html) leads to 1079
lbs of corn being used to fill a hummer tank.
An ear of corn weighs anywhere from 5.4-9.6 oz. so if we use an 8oz
ear of corn we get 2158 ears of corn. That would give a corn eater 5.9
ears a day to live on.
There is certainly room for tinkering with these numbers but I think
the numbers make sense.
take care,
Jim
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david ingram replies
I looked up a couple of sites as well because of your comment and found a dozen references with different quotes, most of which seemed to think that a 25 gallon fill up would feed a person for a year.
Try http://www.enviroblog.org/2007/04/feed_the_hummer_forget_the_hun.htm
and http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/07/lester_brown_ethanol.php
and http://www.benking.co.uk/blog/?p=53
and this letter re the Brazil story. The writer suggests that 10% of brazil's actual energy comes from ethanol while CNN's report suggested that 50% came from ethanol and some reports were suggesting 100%.
http://robertrapier.wordpress.com/tag/brazilian-ethanol/
I have been running all our cars on MOHAWK 10% ethanol for four years now.and wonder if that is really the way to go now.
It takes 1.56 litres of ethanol for the power of 1 litre of gas and I notice that my old caddys get 5 km a litre with the ethanol blend and 6 with straight shell gas. HMMMM?!
It is all something to think about.
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