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Posted on 07/23/2008 7:25:11 PM PDT by neverdem
The ethanol industry, until recently a golden child that got favorable treatment from Washington, is facing a critical decision on its future.
Gov. Rick Perry of Texas is asking the Environmental Protection Agency to temporarily waive regulations requiring the oil industry to blend ever-increasing amounts of ethanol into gasoline. A decision is expected in the next few weeks.
Mr. Perry says the billions of bushels of corn being used to produce all that mandated ethanol would be better suited as livestock feed than as fuel.
Feed prices have soared in the last two years as fuel has begun competing with food for cropland.
“When you find yourself in a hole, you have to quit digging,” Mr. Perry said in an interview. “And we are in a hole.”
His request for an emergency waiver cutting the ethanol mandate to 4.5 billion gallons, from the 9 billion gallons required this year and the 10.5 billion required in 2009, is backed by a coalition of food, livestock and environmental groups.
Farmers and ethanol and other biofuel producers are lobbying to keep the existing mandates.
“This is a critically important decision that will determine the future of biofuels in this country,” said Brent Erickson, a lobbyist at the Biotechnology Industry Organization, which supports the ethanol mandates. “There will be a dramatic reaction from whoever loses.”
The E.P.A. received 15,000 public comments on the Texas proposal, roughly split between those in favor and those against...
--snip--
Senator Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, accused the Grocery Manufacturers Association, the group leading the public relations fight against ethanol, of “treasonous” acts...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The only one committing treason is Senator Grassley and his handlers at ADM.
ethanol ping
Senator Grassley has an odd concept of "treasonous". When improving the lot of American consumers -- that is, American consumers of both food and fuel -- becomes a "treasonous" act, one should carefully examine exactly where one stands.
Otherwise, one is liable to get one's ass thrown out of one's cushy Senatorial seat.
What idiot burns food?
“The ethanol mandates that have been foisted on American taxpayers are not just fiscal insanity, they are immoral. Congress has created a system of subsidies and mandates that requires the U.S. to burn food to make motor fuel, at a time when there is a global shortage of food and no global shortage of motor fuel.”
....and drumroll please.....
(snip of above below)
“So, where did the claim that ethanol is more energy efficient originate? I believe it originates with researchers from Argonne National Laboratory, who developed a model (GREET) that is used to determine the energy inputs to turn crude oil into products (4). Since it will take some amount of energy to refine a barrel of crude oil, by definition the efficiency is less than 100% in the way they measured it. For example, if I have 1 BTU of energy, but it took .2 BTUs to turn it into a useable form, then the efficiency is 80%. This is the kind of calculation people use to show that the gasoline efficiency is less than 100%. However, ethanol is not measured in the same way. Look again at the example from the USDA paper, and lets do the equivalent calculation for ethanol. In that case, we got 98,333 BTUs out of the process, but we had to input 77,228 to get it out. In this case, comparing apples to apples, the efficiency of producing ethanol is just 21%. Again, gasoline is about 4 times higher.
OK, so Argonne originated the calculation. But are they really at fault here? Yes, they are. Not only did they promote the efficiency calculation for petroleum products with their GREET model, but they have proceeded to make apples and oranges comparisons in order to show ethanol in a positive light. They have themselves muddied the waters. Michael Wang, from Argonne, (and author of the GREET model) made a remarkable claim last September at The 15th Annual Symposium on Alcohol Fuels in San Diego (5). On his 4th slide , he claimed that it takes 0.74 MMBTU to make 1 MMBTU of ethanol, but 1.23 MMBTU to make 1 MMBTU of gasoline. That simply can’t be correct, as the calculations in the preceding paragraphs have shown.
Not only is his claim incorrect, but it is terribly irresponsible for someone from a government agency to make such a claim. I don’t know whether he is being intentionally misleading, but it certainly looks that way. Wang is also the co-author of the earlier USDA studies that I have critiqued and shown to be full of errors and misleading arguments. These people are publishing articles that bypass the peer review process designed to ferret out these kinds of blatant errors. I suspect a politically driven agenda in which they are putting out intentionally misleading information.
One of the reasons I haven’t written this up already, is that 2 weeks ago I sent an e-mail to Wang bringing this error to his attention. I immediately got an auto-reply saying that he was out of the office until March 31st. I have given him a week to reply and explain himself, but he has not done so. Therefore, at this time I must conclude that he knows the calculation is in error, but does not wish to address it. In the interim, ethanol proponents everywhere are pushing this false information in an effort to boost support for ethanol.
Look at the Minnesota Department of Agriculture claim again: "the energy yield of ethanol is (1.34/0.74) or 81 percent greater than the comparable yield for gasoline". If the energy balance was really this good for ethanol and that bad for gasoline, why would anyone ever make gasoline? Where would the economics be? Why would ethanol need subsidies to compete? It should be clear that the proponents in this case are promoting false information.”
Ah, ah, ah Brent. Let's not let the hyperbole get out of hand now.
I think you meant to say, "This is a critically important decision that will determine the future of ethanol as fuel in this country".
Or...did you mean to be disingenuous?
C'mon Perry, ask to get rid of it entirely. The EPA is likely going to overrule you on this anyway, bunch of unelected bureaucrats who got fricking more power than Congress.
I really don’t think this is going to be much of an issue. As soon as the price of fuel drops, the price of food is going to drop too. By the time they get the ethanol mandate relaxed, the fuel bubble will already be collapsed.
Perry stopped shilling for illegals and tollways to say something he really should know something about.
If one of the two (ethanol or gasoline) uses waste heat from a powerplant to do their processing, then the numbers are all wrong and unfair again. Utilizing waste heat is almost free energy input.
Also, here’s another way to look at it. Lets say we are burning coal to produce ethanol for automotive fuel. You can say that it is stupid because making gasoline consumes far fewer units of energy. This is true, but we can’t burn coal in our cars. But we do have lots and lots of coal in this country. So even if the process is inefficient, it still makes sense in a short term crisis situation to have the capability to produce ethanol from coal and grain.
We have the ability to convert excess grain and coal into automotive fuel. Do our enemies in the middle east have the capability to convert excess oil into food? No. Therefore, we have a bit of an advantage in the event of an all out world war.
Here’s another aspect no one is thinking about. Pure ethanol as automotive fuel is superior to gasoline IF THE INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINE IS DESIGNED SPECIFICALLY FOR ETHANOL. Currently, flex fuel vehicles are optimized for gasoline with the ability to utilized ethanol if desired. They are not optimized for ethanol. Ethanol burning IC engines can withstand much higher compression ratios and thereby realize much higher efficiencies. Also, ethanol contains oxygen, which lowers the demand for oxygen during combustion and also lowers the pollutants out the exhaust pipe. The drawback to an IC engine optimized for ethanol is that it can never go back to using gasoline even temporarily. gasoline will not tollerate the high compression ratios.
Comparing energy inputs required to produce a unit of ethanol vs a unit of gasoline is not as straight forward as you think. There are complicated aspects not easily accounted for and not easily predicted.
After reading more about ethanol, I’ve changed my opinion from “it’s a stupid idea that should be banned”, to “it may have some merit in certain situations, let’s let them continue to develop and refine the process just in case, but let’s not get too carried away with implementing it just yet”.
Oh, one last thing. I think a higher demand for cropland is a good thing. It helps to slow the urban spawl. Also, a world wide increased demand for cropland is a good thing for the US because we have more of it than most everyone else.
easy solution - defy their mandate
What idiot burns food?
Senator Charles Grassley
Ban ethanol except as a drink!!!
Ethanol is only sutible for fuel in race cars where cost and mileage isn’t a concern.
Oil man?... ;)
I’d rather put food in my car, than send even one more dollar to terrorists.
Fact: Just because we have extra corn does not obligate us to feed the same starving world regions that were starving 40 or 50 years ago.
Fact: People were starving long before ethanol became popular.
Fact: Oil imports have required billions of dollars of subsidy in the form of military protection of foreign oil fields and tanker escorts. Subsidies given to farmers who supply corn to the ethanol industry, in comparison, are a small fraction of what the military protection of foreign oil supplies has cost.
Fact: Oil imports send ONE TRILLION DOLLARS A MONTH out of America. All ethanol products and the money paid to farmers stays in America, keeping money in the local economy.
Fact: Ethanol can be locally produced and does not require the expenditure of energy during transportation and distribution that imported oil requires.
Fact: Out of every bushel of corn used to produce ethanol, there is approximately 30 pounds of distillers grain as a secondary byproduct. Distillers grain is high in protein and perfect for livestock feed. There is plenty of surplus grain to go around for livestock feed and human consumption.
Much of the cost increases in livestock feed are directly related to the energy costs of transportation.
Fact: The refining, transportation and distribution cost of petroleum products has to be subtracted from the overall BTU energy output and efficiency ratings
“”he claimed that it takes 0.74 MMBTU to make 1 MMBTU of ethanol, but 1.23 MMBTU to make 1 MMBTU of gasoline””.
Those numbers account not only for the cost of refining, but the initial cost of drilling, pumping, transporting oil, refining process, and the end distribution. Since 70% of America’s oil is now imported, transportation costs of the raw material are significant. Compared to ethanol, most raw material for the numerous ethanol plants comes from within a 30 mile radius. And the finished ethanol is utilized within the same general region.
Ethanol may not be the final solution for our energy problems. But until sensible politics open up oil field development domestically, and politicians quit finger pointing about who to blame and oil companies making profits because demand outstrips supply, we will continue to send a $Trillion dollars a month to Jihad Oil company.
Besides, American farmers deserve some reward for feeding the world of ungratefuls, and adding value to their bumper crops by producing ethanol. Those who complain about us burning food really arent hungry. They are jealous because we have the ability to make money and evil capitalists just don’t fit into a socialist utopia.
That's an outright lie!!
Having used it and nitromethane for years racing there is nothing superior about it unless you eliminate cost and efficiency as being immaterial.
I heard it’s possible to run a standard, no mods gas car on up to 40% alcohol mix.
The writer who was talking on the subject, suggested skeptics try this experiment. Next time you’re in the gas station, if you’ve got an E-85 tank available.
Add one gallon of E-85 to your car. Then continue your gas fill-up.
Next time, try two.
Evidently, Henry Ford built the Model T, to run on alcohol.
It was only prohibition, the writer claimed, which forced Ford to switch the auto engines to gas.
The writer claimed ... Rockefeller funded prohibition, and it wasn’t a social movement, rather it eliminated alcohol as competition to Standard Oil...
Can’t speak to the truth of that claim, though it rings true to this poster.
If alcohol was what Henry Ford had in mind to begin with...
Let’s go back to it.
And stop supporting terrorists.
(currently looking for ways, to convert a factory gas car, to E-85 flex-fuel)
revolt against corn ethanol
The Bum Rap on Biofuels
American Thinker | 5-13-08 | Herbert Meyer
Posted on 05/14/2008 3:59:06 AM PDT by Renfield
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2015711/posts
Campaign to vilify ethanol revealed
ethanol producer Magazine | May 16, 2008 | By Kris Bevill
Posted on 05/17/2008 9:22:13 AM PDT by Kevin J waldroup
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2017389/posts
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