According to an article in the Daily Journal of Commerce, siting of biofuel plants is complicated by how they should be treated under state land use law. Currently, Exclusive Farm Use zones may not allow these plants.
According to an article in the Daily Journal of Commerce, siting of biofuel plants is complicated by how they should be treated under state land use law. Currently, Exclusive Farm Use zones may not allow these plants.
14 responses to “Biofuels: Agriculture or Industry?”
If it’s being refined… it’s industrial use, if it’s plants grown for the use of ethanol or whatever it is farm/agrarian use.
I’m not seeing why this is complicated. Once again someone has overcomplicated the issue.
As for the pollution of the processing, which some is bound to occur, then thought needs to be placed on where and how these operations should be run.
The biggest problem I see with it all is the fact it costs and takes so much more effort to get ethanol to market than petro.
Oh well, another one for the taxpayers and market to weather.
Let’s say you’re refining rape seed for biodiesel use. Adron, you would classify that as an industrial activity. But wouldn’t efficiency say that you should do the refining near where you grow it, rather than having to truck raw materials to some industrial zone somewhere? I’m sure a grain elevator is an agricultural use. Couldn’t biodiesel refining be treated the same way?
“The biggest problem I see with it all is the fact it costs and takes so much more effort to get ethanol to market than petro.”
Adron, you are correct. It takes almost one gallon of fuel (diesel or gasoline) to produce a gallon of ethanol from corn and bring it to market. Ethanol is extremely corrosive and can not be delivered through a pipeline. Therefore it must be transported by tanker, either truck or train. Those promoting the product just dismiss and/or tend not to respond to these concerns. The corrosive nature of the product also can do damage and shorten the life of some internal combustion engines.
Although I support the alternative fuels concept and think biodiesel has great potential, producing ethanol corn does not make economic sense, does little to nothing reduce energy consumption and should not be mandated.
Terry –
Once again you have stumbled upon an area where we agree. Surely the end times are near. :-)
– Bob R.
This isn’t really addressing the question but I think biodiesel would be a more appropriate alternative fuel. After all, there are hordes of diesel burning vehicles already in use, and they were purchased with the intent of having great longevity. The lubricity of biodiesel might be an issue, and require an additive. Since biodiesel is already proven to reduce all emissions, getting the fuel into production would require only one new industry. Creating ethanol vehicles requires not just the production of a new fuel but also the transition of automotive engineering to design new engines.
But I would still vote for the electric car, or a diesel electric hybrid. It’s worked for the railroads for decades.
Chris Smith Says:
Let’s say you’re refining rape seed for biodiesel use. Adron, you would classify that as an industrial activity. But wouldn’t efficiency say that you should do the refining near where you grow it, rather than having to truck raw materials to some industrial zone somewhere? I’m sure a grain elevator is an agricultural use. Couldn’t biodiesel refining be treated the same way?
…yeah, it would be industrial. I don’t see why industrial can’t be zoned on or near the zone that is already farm. I mean seriously… it IS an industrial process, refining a material. No reason in making up definitions and changing them just to make another already arbritrary difintion work. The zoning should be specific to it’s purpose. If two zones need to be together, re-zone or zone them together. Whatever it takes.
Bob R. – What do you mean you disagree with Terry?
That Ethanol is corrosive and extremely hard to produce? I’m not sure what you disagree with there… cuz I’ve talked to enough of the scientific community to be pretty confident of what he wrote there.
…as for Biodiesal – that junk is perfect, it’s already produced by the waste of our other processes anyway! Ethanol is just silly unless it’s extremely close, and isn’t moved far to market. Then and ONLY then does it become in any way feasible for the United States. Thus the reason it’s used in “some” mid-states.
Adron, if you zoned it industrial, you could put a chip plant in the middle of a wheat field. I think the better idea would be to change the definition of EFU to allow biodiesel refining.
And I think we are talking about biodiesel, not ethanol.
Well on the note of Biodiesal – sweet!!
…or should I say potatoey! :o
I dread though with all this subsidized mandated Ethanol crap how quick I’ll have to make a point to burn thru my tank of gas. That crap eats up high end quality engines faster than I can say “rust”.
btw Chris… did you know in almost every browser I’ve used, on multitudes of machines (including Linux & OSX) I’ve had to manually refresh after posting to make sure the comment displayed.
Why is this, and is there a way I can fix this?
Adron wrote: “Bob R. – What do you mean you disagree with Terry?”
Please read again, I said that in this case we _agree_. (Regarding the problems of Ethanol)
– Bob R.
Adron – the browser cache issue is not just you… I believe that inserting a cache-control metatag into the HTML the server spits out can force a fresh page load every time a page is viewed, but I don’t know if Chris wants the bit of extra load on his server.
– Bob R.
LCDC and the State need to create the specific land use code for land for bio-diesel and other agriculture based industrial “value-added” uses. I would make it very specific to very defined operations that could use this special designation. Special consideration should be given to areas close to rivers (e.g., The Willamette) so transportation of raw material or finished fuel can use highest efficency transportation methods. Anti-pollution controls are raised to industrial standards (not agricultural standards).
I’ll take a look at the caching issue. I had always assumed this was an issue with the page update not being written to disk fast enough, but I can see how caching might be a more logical explanation.