Corn Oil as Alternative Fuel Source

Considerations

• Worldwide, ethanol is the most used liquid bio-fuel. In the United States, most ethanol is made from corn.

Time Frame

• In 1980, only 175 million gallons of ethanol were produced in the United States. By 2007, that had increased to 6,500 million gallons.

Warning

• Three issues with the use of ethanol are the higher costs of food, the amount of fuel required to process corn into ethanol, and the destruction of habitat as more land is farmed with corn.

Solution

• A partial solution to the issues with ethanol is to make the production more efficient. Some by-products of ethanol production are corn gluten meal, gluten feed and corn oil. Technology has been developed to extract the corn oil from the dried grain. This corn oil can be sold as oil or converted into a bio-fuel, such as biodiesel.

Benefits

• Generally, ethanol producers convert a bushel of corn into 2.75 gallons of ethanol. By extracting the corn oil, an additional 0.25 gallons of fuel will be created.