What say ye on the Green's latest pie-in-the-sky idea....

stealthyspeeder

Im no tree hugging hippie, but I use Maxols E5, its all I will put in my car while in the republic as Matt Simis mentioned its got a 99 octane rating!

Why get your knickers in a twist on a motors forum about using higher octane fuel?? How about map your car for it and enjoy the performance benefits!

I hate the green party with a passion like most others on this forum but as a few have already said this is good thing. E5 is much better fuel than the crap 95ron we are feeding our cars day in day out. It is also very good news for people who have performance cars which are mapped for higher octane fuel as now it will be much easier to get higher octane fuel.

I know its impossible to get anything other than 95ron in Galway even maxol don't sell E5 in Galway so you cannot run a car that needs good fuel without a re-mapping it for 95ron, which takes away from the cars performance straight away.

no1beemerfan

Did anyone hear Gormless on Matt Cooper's Last Word last week?


Going on about how we must use public transport....

Matt .... "So how'd you get here this evening?"

Gormless.... "I'd to take the car as there wasn't a bus avaliable"


Fcuking twat. I know more people would take public transport.... IF there was a reliable and efficient one to take.

Mailman

Matt Simis wrote: »

we have far more farmland than food demand, if they grow part of the fuel here and support our local economy, its win win.

Farmland isn't a homogenous resource which can be diverted to multiple uses.
Our farmland is pasture and mostly unsuitable or at best ill-suited to the growth of vegetables and grain. The rolling fields of barley in the Irish southwest are not typical of the rest of Ireland. Ireland specialises in Beef and Dairy for a reason.
We can grow grass until the cows come home but good quality soil suitable for tillage is a relatively scarce resource in this country.
The type of soil a farm has been blessed with determines what produce a farmer grows.
A farmer might till a pasture field every few years and put a crop in it as that is good husbandry and improves the soil but that doesn't turn the field in to a good field for producing grain or beet.
In short it's not a win win and as a nation we don't have a competitive advantage in the growing of biofuel.

JHMEG

Matt can speak for himself but I think the point he was making is that bio-fuel production is not going to displace food production in Ireland any time soon, and if we used some of the vast amounts of unproductive land for growing bio-fuel crops it'd be a win-win.

Mailman

Our competitive advantage is in the area of Beef and Dairy. If unproductive land is to be diverted anywhere, it should be diverted to Beef and Dairy.
Plain simple economics.

Matt Simis

Mailman wrote: »

Farmland isn't a homogenous resource which can be diverted to multiple uses.
Our farmland is pasture and mostly unsuitable or at best ill-suited to the growth of vegetables and grain. The rolling fields of barley in the Irish southwest are not typical of the rest of Ireland. Ireland specialises in Beef and Dairy for a reason.
snipped
In short it's not a win win and as a nation we don't have a competitive advantage in the growing of biofuel.

Im not in a position to be able to identify the best uses for various land masses. But from moving out of sub-urban crawl into the midlands, 3 things have become apparent:

- There are massive amounts of unused land up for sale
- 5 Cows put onto a rent field to "do something" cannot be its best use
- From talk to farmers, they say there are less and less people in farming, its a dieing profession.


Regardless, the Ethanol in question could come from the plant in Cork, apparently they could produce far more than they do but they are hitting an EU cap in place to stop over production of some other product (the Ethanol is a by product).

Bitten & Hisses

Matt Simis wrote: »

Our Ethanol is from waste product in Cork.

Incorrect. It is produced by fermenting lactose, which is extracted from whey, which is a by-product of cheese or casein production. This lactose would end up being dried into powder for some food application if it were not used in fermentation. Yes, it is a by-product of a by-product, but certainly not derived from waste.

Mailman

Matt Simis wrote: »

Im not in a position to be able to identify the best uses for various land masses. But from moving out of sub-urban crawl into the midlands, 3 things have become apparent:

- There are massive amounts of unused land up for sale
- 5 Cows put onto a rent field to "do something" cannot be its best use
- From talk to farmers, they say there are less and less people in farming, its a dieing profession.


Regardless, the Ethanol in question could come from the plant in Cork, apparently they could produce far more than they do but they are hitting an EU cap in place to stop over production of some other product (the Ethanol is a by product).

Well I can tell you that ethanol and bio-diesel aren't the best uses of Irish land.
All you need to do is go to the Teagasc website and see the yield per hectare for various foods and then look for the price per tonne for these products. The figures don't stack up even before you start adding in the cost of fertiliser and weedkiller which need a lot of fossil fuels input in their input. Those figures are for the land already planted and suitable for tillage, not marginal land which will yield maybe only 50% of what the good land will yield.
Local agriculture industry may be finding it difficult to find a new role for itself in the new open world economy especially with CAP being phased out in the next 4 to 5 years but production of bio-fuels in a Country which doesn't have a natural competitive advantage there isn't a solution.

I remember my Uncle talking about yields on poor land. Whenever he moved his milking cattle on to the reclaimed land the yield went down between 10 and 20%. Bad land doesn't become Good land overnight and he was looking at land which had been reclaimed decades before.

The only biofuel you'll get out of our land will be a by-product from the dairy and meat rendering industries where it is a by-product that is being taken for free.
Growth of grain, beet and rapeseed are all poor uses of our land.

Matt Simis

Bitten & Hisses wrote: »

Incorrect. It is produced by fermenting lactose, which is extracted from whey, which is a by-product of cheese or casein production. This lactose would end up being dried into powder for some food application if it were not used in fermentation. Yes, it is a by-product of a by-product, but certainly not derived from waste.

Yep, I mistyped, I meant by product, not waste product.

Mailman wrote: »

I remember my Uncle talking about yields on poor land. Whenever he moved his milking cattle on to the reclaimed land the yield went down between 10 and 20%. Bad land doesn't become Good land overnight and he was looking at land which had been reclaimed decades before.
The only biofuel you'll get out of our land will be a by-product from the dairy and meat rendering industries where it is a by-product that is being taken for free.
Growth of grain, beet and rapeseed are all poor uses of our land.

I dunno the background to the Greens "thought process", perhaps they are only looking at CO2 figures in isolation again and/or planning to import the ethanol. I trust the farmers know what is the most profitable use of their land, I genuinely dont know enough about the real business of farming to try to make a strong case either way.

JHMEG

Mailman wrote: »

Well I can tell you that ethanol and bio-diesel aren't the best uses of Irish land.

I understand what you are saying. However I don't agree that leaving land idle is better than growing any form of bio crop. Some are less suitable than others to poor land, true.