Posted on 05/18/2026 9:31:58 AM PDT by WhiteHatBobby0701
With current events stirring up global energy prices, corn ethanol is again being dressed up as if it is a domestic energy source and agent of energy security. The truth is that corn ethanol is an energy sump, and that it takes more fossil fuel energy to make a gallon of corn ethanol than a gallon of gasoline. It is time to face this unpleasant truth and the other perverse outcomes achieved by twenty years of misguided policy.
In 2005 and 2007, Congress passed the Energy Policy and Energy Independence and Security Acts that together created the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) program. RFS had three stated objectives: to improve U.S. energy security, to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and to support rural economies and agricultural development. Instead, RFS has increased motor fuel prices, increased food prices, put millions of carbon-sequestering acres of land into intensive cultivation, increased GHG emissions and air pollution, and increased water consumption and pollution. As to energy security, the gallons of U.S. gasoline displaced by federal ethanol blending mandates are being exported to Mexico and other nations. The great success of RFS has been the hand of government transferring wealth from motorists to big ag corporations. It's past time to stop the economic and chemical absurdity of forcing food to be fuel.
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Twenty years ago SAAB developed a 2.3l engine that had 310 bhp running on 85% to 100% ethanol. US gummint rules wouldn’t allow it for “pollution”. Greenies won’t allow corporations.
If we really wanted to do the best thing from an economic perspective would be to buy Ethanol from Brazil.
When they can grow sugar beets much cheaper than we can.
The Brazilians do this because they do not have a lot of petroleum. We do.
In Brazil they run their automobiles on 85% Ethanol 15% gasoline. They do not have the same cold weather cycle that we do. Which creates problems with burning Ethanol.
The issues with Ethanol are mostly in 4 cycle carburated engines. Like old snow blowers, lawn mowers, etc. In a 2 stroke engine the oil also has fuel stabilizer in it.
When the temperature drops below 30F it tends to gel. Those little bits of gel plug up the jets in a carb.
The other major issue is the Ethanol eats away rubber fuel lines.
Ethanol is an okay fuel. That is what Indy race cars burn.
It is a higher octane than the stuff at the regular Shell stations.
“Twenty years ago SAAB developed a 2.3l engine that had 310 bhp running on 85% to 100% ethanol. US gummint rules wouldn’t allow it for “pollution”. Greenies won’t allow corporations.”
That engine didn’t go into production but their similar E85 BIOPOWER engines did.
The corn grown for ethanol is inedible for humans. Cows can eat it and the leftover grain after the ethanol conversion process can be fed to cows.
Oil is actually cleaner running it (experience, 5000 miles of E85 and the oil looks like it did when I poured it in new). I ended up with it in my truck because it was in the vehicle on the lot that had what I wanted, and it was cheap.
Used it maybe once or twice is 10 years just to try it. It was too expensive that whole time. CA made the DOT buy a bunch of them (Flexfuel, E85 vehicles) so of course, EVERYONE who sold it charged out the wazoo for it because the state had to use it.
Well, the vehicles must have cycled out, price dropped. then gasoline spiked hard here during the covid era. I ran it almost throughout that 3-4 years. And now I’m back to it. $2.839/gallon... I can eat a 10-20% mileage loss for a $3+ spread ALL DAY LONG. I’m rolling up on 600,000 miles on original engine too...
Unless unreasonably priced, I wouldn’t buy a gasoline vehicle without the capability to run it now. Between the flexibility with supply/demand price shocks and the fact that in a SHTF scenario you can turn 5 gallons of gasoline into 35 gallons of motive fuel with access to alcohol or the ability to make it it’s a no brainer for me.
I can tell where the University of Iowa and Iowa State University are.
My best field yielded 265 bushels of corn per acre last year; enough to yield 740 gallons of ethanol in addition to nearly 2 1/2 tons of distillers dried grains with soluables (a high quality animal feed). I didn't use the 1st ounce of chemical nitrogen fertilizer.
The government shouldn't mandate what types of fuel folks use, but neither should folks make up stories that aren't true about farming.
Yes, and the state capital. Just like Washington state, Oregon, California, Colorado, et al.
At least be honest.
It’s been known since the 1990s that ethanol has a net positive EROI it is simply turning natural gas heat for distillation into liquids to blend in the fuel pool. Even in 1995 it was positive 1.24:1
https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-details?pubid=40674
In 2026 it’s closer to 2.5:1 as combines have become more efficient with their diesel use per acre it’s under 2 gal total an acre Iowa State has the numbers for a slew of crops and how much fuel is needed to till,seed,harvest ect. An acre is not that big it’s slightly smaller than 209 feet by 209 feet. People mess up imagining it all the time. An acre of corn in the United States produces an average of 450 to 520 gallons of ethanol.
https://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/crops/pdf/a3-27.pdf
So from a diesel view point it’s a huge positive energy balance, Henry Ford himself grew crops for ethanol he designed the model T to run on that first since farmers could grow and fuel their own model T and also his Fordson tractors.
Henry Ford is famous for correctly recognising that a single acre of potatoes not corn will produce enough ethanol to till,plant, and harvest 100 other acres of potatoes that was with early 1900s tech. To this day is is not wrong on that fact. Standard oil was dumping naptha in the streams around their kerosene stills and they thought could we find a use for this waste product. Kerosene was the dominant lamp fuel at the time and saved the whales from extinction as it replaced whale oil in lamps virtually over night.
So Ford adjusted his carburetors to run on standard oil waste naptha under a new trade name gasoline so standard oil could claim a monopoly.
Know your history.
Ethanol in the modern world is a farm welfare program and always was intended to be that.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8931354/
The fact that it makes fuel is entirely secondary to the welfare part of the equation. It also makes for fine cattle feed with the distillers dried grains & solubles again completely secondary to the welfare part of the equation.
If the USA wanted ethanol to actually be a fuel source we would make it with whole biomass grown on marginal lands everywhere then gasified into CO and H2 gas feed that to a Fe/K silica supported catalyst and boom ethanol, butanol and isopropyl alcohols come out at 90+% carbon conversion yields. Everything that grows and all the waste stems, bark, anything can be turned into syngas via a gasifier. FT synthesis is World war II tech we know it works. But that doesn’t line Iowa caucus farmers pockets now does it when bulk biomass is under $50 a tonne no one wants that who’s gonna grift on this?
The other way is use CO2, H2O,and electricity to to output ethanol at 93% Faraday efficiency using Boron doped nano diamonds for those non chemists Faraday is now much of your electrical energy ended up in your electrochemical product. In this case 93%.
1 gallon of pure ethanol contains approximately 79.8 to 89.3 megajoules (MJ) of energy and roughly 22.4 to 24.8 kilowatt-hours (kWh). LHV & HHV respectively.
If we really wanted fuel and not welfare for farmers.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28914470/
Using a nano diamond boron doped electrode (specifically B- and N-co-doped as reported by researchers in Angewandte Chemie), the following conditions apply:Selectivity: These electrodes are highly effective because they suppress the competing hydrogen evolution reaction, achieving over 93% efficiency for ethanol.
Electricity: The process requires a 12-electron transfer per molecule. At a typical potential of -1.0 V vs. RHE, producing 1 gallon would require approximately 22.4 kWh of electricity, assuming a cell voltage of ~3V for the full water-splitting and reduction cycle.
Water: Stoichiometrically, you would need about 3.1 liters (0.82 gallons) of water to provide the necessary hydrogen atoms for the ethanol molecules and to complete the reaction.
The electrochemical synthesis of 1 gallon of ethanol requires 5.71 kg of (CO2).In a real-world scenario, you should account for a slight excess (approx. 5–10% more) to compensate for minor byproducts like formic acid or carbon monoxide often seen with Boron-Doped Diamond (BDD) electrodes.
Industrial CO2 is $60 tonne that’s 1000kg so 6 cents per kg so 34 cents worth per gallon of ethanol.
Wind and solar in Texas routinely go negative but when they are not they set market at $10-20 per MWh or 1-2 cents per kWh. 22.4 to 44.8 cents worth of electricity in the above electrochemical process. All in energy and chemical.resources is under a buck per gallon. Water is fractions of a cent per gallon to industrial users it’s sold in acrefeet volumes 325,850 gallon units for $100 -200 per acre foot so it’s process costs are a rounding error.
Again corn ethanol is nothing but farm welfare to the corn belt who run the Republican party primary caucus. It never was ever ment to be anything else. Once you accept that it am makes sense.
He was a builder and a salesman. When he wants to sell something it becomes the greatest thing ever, of all time!
I don't let his personality bother me. He has a great family and had a life that he easily could have retired to an easy life. Instead he didn't like what was happening to America and decided he was going into the arena to change things.
I'm convinced he is a good man and very competent in making deals. By your opposition you have joined a group of people who are ruthlessly evil. Did you not see theses Congress creeps who refused to stand up for Americans? Do you really want to march among their ranks?
I did an analysis the other day using OTEC at 30 megawatts and using the off gasses from the open cycle condenser turbine as the CO2 source since it’s the cheapest source of bulk CO2 in existence. OTEC is ocean thermal energy conversion.
You pump up near freezing water from 1000 meters deep and also warm water from the surface in the tropics/ sub tropics I chose North Shore Jamaica since it’s right next to the Cayman trench ultra deep ultra cold.
You pull a vacuum on the warm seawater in a chamber using a pump and link that chamber via a turbine to the cold water condenser once the pressure gets low enough the warm water books to vapor rushes through the turbine spinning it and condenses as distilled grade water on your titanium condenser. This last point is important.
The gasses you remove via the vacuum pumps are outgassed from the seawater itself their ratio is Henry’s law. Nitrogen O2 and CO2 are the main gasses. The cold deep water has 180 times the CO2 as air by mass again Henry’s law. The gasses coming out the cold condenser pump are 14% CO2 by mass up from 440ppm in air. It should be obvious why this is the source of the CO2 for fuel synthesis applications. The world Ocean singular is in equilibrium with the atmosphere as defined by Henry’s law. You simply are using the ocean surface as a giant CO2 collection membrane of a planetary scale.
So how much CO2 you ask enough for 10000 gallons per day of FT hydrocarbons not alcohols. I chose Fe/Cu cats which make C5 and under hydrocarbons why? Because you strip off C4 butane, C2 propane directly by pressure at 120psi then send the C2 ethane, C1 methane to a non thermal plasma reactor to convert it into....yup C3 & C4 LGP both are worth more per gallon than light naptha aka unrefined gasoline. LPG is end use ready as is and worth $4 to $6 per gallon retail sales pure butane especially it’s a controlled substance in the USA so it commands a premium. Thank THC vape pens for this fact.
The 30MW OTEC plant also makes 9 million gallons per day of pure fresh water at the bottled water grade. Jamaica water rates are $5-10 per 1000 gal the bulk water alone is $45,000 per day in gross revenue.
You won’t be selling any electricity the FT plant and the plasma reaction eat it all and you need some grid energy too , a PPA with a onshore wind farm makes sense in window North Shore Jamaica PPA can be had for $30 per MWh and using BYD BESS the 14.5MWh sized one’s LCOS is $14 MWh so $44MWh all in.
The water sales alone drive the hydrocarbons outputs negative per gallon breakeven pricing. Taking 10% of that bulk water and bottling it under a brand name highlighting it’s deep water , never seen modern human influences as it’s tens of thousands of years old at that depth. It’s analytically pure high PH water. $8 per gallon in 500ml or 1liter sized bottles in stores it’s purer than Glacier water or Fiji water by far. Bottling 10% is over 7 million per day in high grade bottled water for sale.
That’s just bottling 10% of the bulk water surface condensed. The total amount available in a 30MW OTEC is 103000 cubic meters per day =
27,209,700 us liquid gallons. You choose the split from direct cold seawater contact condensers vs titanium surface condensers. I chose a 1/3 split to keep capex under 75 million.
So for $75 million you get a 10000 gallon of LPG per day synfuel plant that is really a byproduct of a massive fresh water machine that makes water at bottled water grade for far less than a RO plant and it makes energy not consumes it like an RO plant. You could do all surface comdensers and yield 27 million gallons per day of distilled sub 10ppm grade water. Which is what interests me as a hydrogeo. The fact that you can make LPG in the 10000 gal per day range for negative costs is gravy the water sales alone make fiscal sense.
You also have large cold water outflows at 55-59F in the tropics....
Cold Water Outflow Volume:360 to 400m^3/min.
Assuming a highly efficient heat exchanger extracts about 2% to 2.5% of this total sensible heat for the closed distribution loop, the net deliverable cooling capacity to the city is in the range of 170 to 185 MMBTU/hour. This is capable of comfortably providing air conditioning for roughly 2 to 3 million square feet of commercial or residential space.
Cold is worth $5-10 MMBTU or more in equivalent energy costs ,.Jamaica pays 24 cents kWh for electricity..An electricity rate of 24 cents per kWh is equivalent to $70.34 per MMBtu raw and with a COP of 4 for commercial HVAC = $17.58 MMBtu. Pricing at $5 to incentive the cold water pipe hook ups. Think resorts along the Montego resorts belt. District cooling can run up too 50km round trip distances.
At $5 per MMBTU, the net district cooling capacity of 170 to 185MMBTU/hour yields a cold energy value of $850 to $925 per hour and $20,400 to $22,200 per day. Of course capex& opex of the HDPE pipes must be expensed but district cooling is known to be economical UT Austin has a single district plant for all its energy and cooling needs it’s trigen power, cold and heat over a larger area than the resort belt.
It’s all in political will. If I had an extra 75 million laying around I would build this 3/10s of an acre facility.with a 3.5km long 5 meter wide fiberglass pipe right down the island slope to the abyss. Have 10000 gallons per day of LPG at net negative cost in the $50 per gallon range, all the freshwater the whole resort area and residential too could ever use, cool every resort as well and use the overflowing water in a aquaculture race tracks on 20 acres next to it for Caribbean lobster, flounder, and abalone using the nutrient rich sterile waters at now 70F fish first their wastes flow into the seagrass and brown algae tracks to further fertilize them and the lobsters and abalone eat that natively. Yields should be in the 150 metric.tonnes of each per year based on the outflows volume. Hawaii already does this with it’s OTEC demo plant.
Now where to find 75 lets call it $100 million and a visa to stay in Jamaica.
Any tropical or sub tropics island with a steep offshore drop off works for this set up, every Pacific atoll,all of the Hawaiian Islands too.
Trump nearly instantly showed his hand, when he did a rug pull on a crypto he pushed. Robbing people of their investments, and being nearly the only person/family to make a killing. That was very early in his 2nd term. It is all about becoming part of the class of people that are above the law. Like Soros and the Rothschilds. I voted for him 3 times, he is Trump first.
ADM has their grubby little fingers in this.
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