Posted on 06/28/2006 6:43:54 PM PDT by saganite
No Blood for Ethanol!
The future in alcohol fuel is butanol, not ethanol.
Has anyone had any emissions problems with the ethanol-enriched gasoline? Since they started it, about, at a certain gas station my car alerts me that the emissions are out of range.
I'll be in Iowa, Illinois and Indiana all next week so I'll be seeing a lot of corn.
Just read up on it a little on Wikipedia and I agree. It's much more cost/resource-effective.
It will be interesting to see how the seals stand up to the corn syrup.
Saturday, June 17, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
"Be like Brazil" have never been words to live by except perhaps in soccer or samba. But suddenly Americans are being told we should imitate Brazil in its expensive devotion to driving cars that run on ethanol. VeraSun Energy, the second-largest U.S. ethanol producer, was the talk of Wall Street this week with its IPO. Wal-Mart wants to install pumps to cater to cars that run on a largely ethanol blend. Even Rudy Giuliani was plumping for the stuff this week, a sign that an Iowa campaign stop may be in his future.
We'd say the world had gone mad, except that this is a fairly typical case study in how political meddling distorts energy markets. Weary of high gas prices, drivers can be forgiven for desiring a "miracle" fuel that is allegedly cheap and clean. But the corn farmers, ethanol producers, politicians and environmentalists who have promoted the new ethanol mania have no excuse for peddling misinformation.
We have nothing against corn-based ethanol per se, assuming it competes in the market on the same basis as other fuels. Ethanol's problem is that it is expensive to make and provides far fewer miles per gallon than gasoline. So its supporters have worked the political system to subsidize ethanol, and more recently to force Americans to buy it.
U.S. taxpayers today pay twice for ethanol: once in crop subsidies to corn farmers and again in a 51-cent subsidy for every gallon of ethanol. Without such a subsidy, ethanol simply wouldn't be cost competitive with gasoline. Then last year, Congress went further and passed a new ethanol mandate, requiring drivers to use at least 7.5 billion gallons annually by 2012. The immediate consequence of this new mandate was higher gasoline prices this spring, since the ethanol industry was ill-equipped to meet the new demand. Ethanol must also be carried by truck or rail, rather than through pipelines, and it requires special blending facilities. All this has both raised prices and created gas shortages around the country. But rather than blame their new mandate for the higher prices, the Members of Congress blamed, of course, Big Oil.
Ah, but what about the other alleged virtues of ethanol? One favorite is that every gallon of ethanol will supplant a gallon of gasoline imported from tyrannical Mideast oil regimes. Thus, a la Brazil, ethanol can help the U.S. achieve the miracle of "energy independence."
Sorry. The most widely cited research on this subject comes from Cornell's David Pimental and Berkeley's Ted Patzek. They've found that it takes more than a gallon of fossil fuel to make one gallon of ethanol--29% more. That's because it takes enormous amounts of fossil-fuel energy to grow corn (using fertilizer and irrigation), to transport the crops and then to turn that corn into ethanol. The Saudis ought to love the stuff.
As for Brazil, few in ethanol's cheering section admit that the country's ethanol infrastructure required huge taxpayer subsidies over decades. And the U.S. already produces more ethanol than Brazil because the American automobile market is about 23 times larger. To produce enough ethanol for the entire U.S. car market would mean planting over much more of the country than Iowa.
Ethanol is also said to be vital for reducing smog. This fiction is even written into the Clean Air Act, which mandates the use of "oxygenates"--of which ethanol is the leading type. But studies from the National Academy of Sciences and the Environmental Protection Agency's own Blue Ribbon Panel have shown that oxygenates don't do much to clear up hazy air. That's especially the case now with ever more clean-burning engines.
Alas, none of these facts seem to count for much in the current U.S. energy debate. Ethanol has powerful promoters in the farm states especially, and its lobbyists have skillfully marketed their product as the answer to dirty air, global warming and even military deployments in the Middle East. The share price of America's largest ethanol producer, Archer Daniels Midland, has climbed by 80% in the last year alone, though you won't find anyone in Washington lamenting that windfall profit. Meanwhile, Congress is discussing the prospect of ginning up a subsidy for sugarcane ethanol as part of its next farm bill--as if U.S. sugar growers need more aid and protection from the government. President Bush, for his part, has been promoting research in "cellulosic" ethanol, produced from things like switch grass or wood chips. A scientific breakthrough is said to be just around the corner, which may or may not be true but is the kind of thing we've been hearing since Jimmy Carter's day.
Perhaps all of this will prove to be the political investment of the century. Perhaps the subsidies and mandates will lead to new private investments, which will lead to new scientific breakthroughs, which will let us produce vast amounts of ethanol cheaply and cleanly from homegrown blades of grass. Perhaps the House of Saud can then go back to the camel trade.
We certainly hope so, given how much all of us are spending in search of the great ethanol grail. But in our experience this isn't how such things usually turn out. In the movie fantasy "Field of Dreams," Shoeless Joe Jackson returns to a baseball diamond cut from a corn field and asks, "Is this heaven?" No, was the reply, "it's Iowa."
Beware BIG ETHANOL :-)
You called it. Butanol can be shipped by existing pipeline, can be blended at the refinery and is higher octane, higher btu and can be used in existing cars in virtually up to 100 percent with no modification.
Ethanol must be shipped by barge, blended at the terminal-not at the refinery, has lower btu's and cannot be used in existing vehicles in much more than today's 10 percent.
Butanol can be made from much of the basic feedstocks such as corn and biomass.
And Dupont is involved in Butanol distillation. Others are looking to get into butanol and its just a matter of time till it pulls ahead of the others.
Like I said many times before; Forget oil, ethanol, vegetable fuel etc etc! Atomics is the answer! We need to put little tiny atomic reactors in cars! So what if there is a crash and an atomic meltdown, there are too many people driving anyway!
The only downside I've come up with is butyric acid. When butanol oxidizes, it turns into butyric acid.....which smells like rancid butter ....only much, much worse.
Why can't ethanol be transported through pipelines? We're getting a plant down the road, and one of the comments made in selling it to the community , was existing railroad, grain storage, and pipeline infrastructure
Why? Not enough of those: "plants being built down the road".
Once there are enough of "those: PBBDTR" then it will be
buck feasible to connect the pipelines to the existing
network system. The future will be interesting!
You wouldn't want to keep the stuff around in a gas can all winter, I'll bet. I remember that smell from the days they used to make esters in HS chem lab.
Half the world's plant life lives in saltwater. Petroleum originates from the remains of saltwater algae. The ocean farmland is unlimited and free. The water is unlimited and free. The sunshine is unlimited and free. Shipping to market can be done on boats. I can't believe the total obvious is never mentioned.
Been using the 10% mix from Speedway..which is owned by Marathon for the last 12 years. No problems/warnings on 3 vehicles. Vehicles are Mopar's.
No Blood for CORN!!!!
Stinko.
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