Diary of a Mad Scientist

The following came from deep in the comments section of Lyle’s blog. John Osterhout is a thoughtful engineer from western Washington who makes small-scale biodiesel, and knows farming, and generally does a good job on research. Here’s a good one for the ethanol naysayers:

JohnO Says:
June 23rd, 2008 at 2:29 pm

When I last checked, 45% of US corn was being grown for cattle feed. That obviously takes food out of the mouths of people. Only 19% of corn was grown for people food (not counting HFCS). Roughly an equal % was then being used for Ethanol, but there’s one important point to understand - unlike other uses, a third of the mass used to make ethanol is returned to the cattle food chain as high-value added high protein food. Another third is sold as CO2 (carbonation). The high market price for corn has finally allowed the Gov’t to reduce the subsidy to the lowest level ever! Less acreage is currently used to grow corn than during the American Civil War! (but yields are higher).

Here’re 5 things you can do to free-up corn from fuel to food:
1) don’t eat beef
2) ask the corn farmer to plant sweet corn (for people) instead of field corn (for cows), and pay him a decent amount for the corn.
3) Don’t drink soda pop (to reduce demand for HFCS and CO2)
4) Don’t sell subsidized corn to Mexico - they grew less corn because it was cheaper to buy ours, except for subsistance farmers, who were wiped out by their drought.
5) Don’t drive a gasoline powered car - Ethanol is used to boost the octane of low-grade gasoline.

There, that was easy now, wasn’t it? It wasn’t?, Hmmm, maybe we need to rethink our lifestyles.

There’s plenty of corn, but there’s a shortage of CHEAP corn. The folks who are starving aren’t able to afford to eat, despite a world market that surrounds us all with plenty of food.

About three weeks ago I got my life back thanks to my new immune system drugs. I’m crossing my fingers that I’m one of the 50% for whom they seem to work for Lyme issues. I’ve had an insanely busy life since then, started a new (unpaid, but 3/4 or full-time time) job last week that makes me insanely happy, went on a mini-tour in May, went to California, taught some more classes, built some more biodiesel system, went through a bit more of the ongoing divorce hell, went to Chicago and did an insane number of hours of welding on a co-op’s system there, ran back to North Carolina in time to teach my ‘benefit’ classes for the internship program.

One of these days I should change the name of ‘diary of a mad scientist’ to ‘van blog’.

The van had performed stellarly (??) on the long trip. I’d got back to NC the night before the class, happy that I’d gotten across West Virginia without having to break down and rent anything (the thought crossed my mind). I ran my supermarket/drinks/ice sorts of errands that morning in Greensboro and set out on 421 for the final 45 minutes to Pittsboro. The van suddenly lurched and the engine died. I got out to see a puddle of diesel dripping from somewhere. I called Greg, who was on his way to a dump run in that direction anyway, to come get me and the class supplies, and made the requisite calls to a tow yard to rescue the van, and was delving deep into leak-finding when they showed up to remove the beast. Class went off OK despite overheating a few people on the first day in the heat wave and barn setting.

The following week was the beginning of the new version of the internship, which we were doing quite differently than the way it’d been run in the previous semesters here. I threw myself into a 35 hour work week, something I hadn’t had the energy to do in months. It was fun, and crazy, and we had several interns show up, look at the Piedmont Biofuels co-op facility, and freak out. we actually lost three of them to this routine- they turned around and ran home. Oops. This lost us our college connection- we have to have a minimum of 5 people to be sponsored by the college- and Bob and I decided on the spot that we’d rather work unpaid than deal with the pressure of having to find people at the last moment to fill their places.

I called the tow yard to talk van. The first guy I got was the owner, whose thick accent informed me that he thought I’d lost ‘the ignition pump’. It’s a long-running joke in diesel circles that the gasoline mechanic ‘can’t find the spark plugs’, which is basically what this guy was telling me. I thanked him for his diagnosis and told him I’d come get it and fix it myself. It’s almost worth an injection pump, if that’s what’s actually wrong, for the priceless comedy of hearing that I have an ‘ignition’ anything on my diesel.

I didn’t have a breather coming till Thursday morning, and tried to arrange a ride for the van so I didn’t have to spend any time going to get it. I called them back to see what they’d charge me themselves to tow me to Moncure- they’re a tow shop, after all- and there was a good low price quoted. A few hours later they called me back to say that the owner was in the hospital and that things were in disarray and that he’d said I should find another service to tow myself to Moncure.

Hmm, not good. I set that up, and on Thursday we were hitching up my friend Scott’s enormous equipment-hauling trailer when I gave the van tow yard another call to see if they could get the van drug out and ready for our rescue attempt.

And it turned out that the tow company owner had passed away the night before.

So, the van still sits in the tow yard.

So far Van Blog has consisted of:

-van gets hit by old Buddhist lady coming out of church who backs into it’s open door while my mechanic friend worked on it. In the process, the old lady narrowly misses killing my friend, who was hanging out of the van working on the fuse box or something at the time it got hit.

Buddhists try to get it fixed using ’someone we know’, which leads to many fiascoes when it comes back with the door all crumpled - they’d just bent it back- rather than actually repaired. Buddhists get the other side of the van heavily dented while taking it to the ’someone we know’ garage. Buddhists eventually get it right with another shop months later that fixes both sides.

-van goes to Chatham Alignment for minor vacuum pump work that I didn’t feel like doing myself. Chatham Alignment burns down, with van narrowly escaping certain death when some passing heroes decided to save ‘the customer with the out of state plates’ instead of Kevin’s expensive wrecker truck.

-van gets towed for fuel leak. Owner of tow truck dies unexpectedly.

I’m starting to worry a bit about what will happen when I start doing my own work on this thing again.