What can corn stalks do?

At the turn of autumn and winter, burning corn stalks often pollutes the air. But it should be said that burning is not good and causes pollution, but what's the use of not burning? In the past, the use of straw was mainly livestock feed, household fuel or compost. Nowadays, most rural laborers work outside the home, not only earning money, but also learning to calculate working hours: plowing fields and raking fields to transport grain and grass, and small tractors are better than getting up early to raise cattle; It is much easier to plant chemical fertilizer on the ground than to accumulate farmyard manure; It is more cost-effective to make a fire with coal, which saves the time of firewood work. So there is smog in late autumn and early winter every year. In order to guarantee the Olympic Games this year, nine provinces and cities around Beijing issued a ban on burning, and the situation seems to have improved. Of course there are exceptions. For example, Dongping County, Shandong Province has built two factories using straw as raw materials: a power plant and an ethanol plant. Straw can sell money, of course, it won't smoke on the spot; The conversion of straw into electric energy and fuel ethanol can alleviate the shortage of energy and food, killing two birds with one stone.

With the soaring international oil and food prices, countries are arguing endlessly about who should be responsible for this. The United States accuses developing countries such as China and India of raising oil and food prices. However, the World Bank report points out that the biofuel production in the EU and the US distorts the grain market in three aspects: more than 1/3 of corn in the US is used to produce fuel ethanol, and about half of vegetable oil in the EU is used to produce biodiesel; Encourage farmers to set aside land to produce biofuel crops; Stimulated financial speculation on food, leading to higher and higher food prices. The Russians also said: The United States imports more than three times as much oil as China every year. The United States accounts for less than 5% of the world population, but consumes 25% of the world's oil. But the United States is too powerful to respond to such an analysis. Of course, the United States does not have to go black all the way. As early as the end of last year, the US House of Representatives passed the first energy bill in more than 30 years, requiring the automobile industry to improve the fuel efficiency of automobiles by 40% by 2020. If this is from the perspective of throttling, then the production of biofuels is open source. But America uses so much oil that it affects the whole world. For example, in 2006, the United States used 42 million tons of corn to produce fuel ethanol, equivalent to 654.38+35 million people's rations. It rose to 85 million tons in 2007, and it will certainly be more this year. The United States subsidizes farmers by $5 billion to $7 billion a year. Producing a can of oil is equivalent to a person's food for a year, and hundreds of millions of people around the world are starving. This is the result of expanding biofuels in the United States and Europe. Even so, biofuels account for only 8% of America's energy demand.

The energy-intensive lifestyle of Americans may need to be reviewed, but it seems that people in underdeveloped countries should temporarily put down their "hatred of the rich" complex and think about it. Is our energy consumption low because of high awareness or unaffordable consumption? To be fair, I'm afraid it's mostly the latter. Otherwise, back to the shortage economy period, the energy consumption is the least. Celebrities, bosses, corrupt officials and other rich people who have the conditions to choose high support are scrambling to emigrate or stay abroad. Since it is impossible for Americans to reduce their rising consumption to the same level as ours, and we always hope to catch up with developed countries and live a better life, the demand for energy will continue to grow. It is better to think about how to develop green energy without sequelae to replace the increasingly scarce traditional energy. The increasingly popular wind energy, solar energy and bioenergy are still in their infancy, but at least they are a good sign. When human beings have not solved the problem of eating, it is really extravagant to make fuel ethanol from corn and other foods. However, it is worth learning from the main corn producing areas, including the United States and Europe, that ethanol is made from non-food raw materials such as corn stalks like Dongping. About 7 tons of corn stalk is equivalent to 4 tons of corn raw materials, which can produce ethanol 1 ton, and the cost per ton is lower than that of producing ethanol with grain 1000 yuan. When the annual output of this project is 60,000 tons of ethanol, it can drive farmers to increase their income by 80 million yuan, and the average household income will increase by more than 230 yuan. Shanxi is one of the main corn producing areas. Using the experience of Dongping for reference to produce ethanol from straw can not only avoid the smoke pollution caused by burning straw on the spot, but also be a good project to develop circular economy, alleviate energy shortage and increase farmers' income.

Using corn stalk to produce fuel ethanol has both practical significance and demonstration function. It is precisely because of the limited resources that human beings should make good use of resources by exerting their own intelligence, rather than just relying on power to compete for resources and waste resources. According to this idea, it is better than using straw to produce ethanol.