Tech Stuff: Ethanol Promises. Farm-raising our own energy independence: Could it happen?

Car And Driver ^ | July 2006 | PATRICK BEDARD

[thackney]

You can narrowly define what fuel use you are talking about to make the numbers look good. But only 7.7% of the vehicles in Brazil are Flex Fuel. Airplanes do not run a diesel. Large ships typically use fuel oil. Commercial vehicles like trucks and buses are a large part of the fuel consumed and I don't understand excluding them.

Brazil gained their energy independence primarily by increasing their oil production. Their ethanol use does not come close to the increase in petroleum production over the last couple decades. Ethanolby volume is about 8% of the petroleum produced in Brazil. It certainly helps, but Brazil got energy independence the same way we should, by producing their natural resources.

[TKDietz]

This Pimentel guy is just full of B.S. He says we can only get 7110 pounds of corn from an acre, so he's putting production at less than 130 56 pound bushels per acre. He says we can only produce 328 gallons of ethanol from this 127 bushels of corn per acre, which comes out to less than 2.6 gallons per bushel, when in fact now we are able to produce 2.8 gallons per bushel. He says it takes as many as three distillation steps to distill the alcohol. That may be true with an old fashioned pot still but not with modern stills that only require one run to distill it as pure as it's going to get.

He also says it takes more energy to produce ethanol than you get from the final product, which is false. Ethanol has a positive energy balance. It does take a lot of energy to produce ethanol, but in the end we end up with more energy than we had to expend to get it, not counting the energy from the sun rain water, and nutrients naturally occurring the soil of course.

He talks about all the irrigation required for corn, when in fact little or no irrigation is required in the main corn producing states. Rain is sufficient in several states to grow corn without irrigation except for in times of drought. He says a car traveling 10,000 miles a year on pure ethanol (not a gasoline-ethanol mix), would need about 852 gallons of the corn-based fuel, and that it would take 11 acres to produce this much ethanol. So I suppose he thinks we are all going to be driving huge gas guzzling vehicles that only get 11.74 miles to the gallon. Even though you get fewer miles per gallon on ethanol than you do with gasoline you can do a lot better than that with a decent fuel efficient car. Just checking fueleconomy.gov there isn't a single 2007 car listed yet that gets gas mileage that low on ethanol. Only two 2006 vehicles, the Dodge Durango and the Nissan Titan got mileage on ethanol of 12 mpg or worse. Most E85 compatible vehicles here appear to be big trucks and other not so fuel efficient large vehicles, but there are fuel efficient vehicles that can get 20 miles to the gallon and better on pure ethanol are available in the world and the trend is for all cars to become more fuel efficient. A small E85 compatible car that can get 30 miles to the gallon on gasoline is going to get better than 20 miles per gallon on E85. Depending on how well the engine is optimized to handle ethanol it could get a lot better than 20 miles per gallon.

Moreover, his calculation is way off. Even if we ignore the fact that farmers are able to get more than 127 bushels of corn per acre now, and ignore the fact that ethanol producers are now able to get 2.8 gallons per bushel, and if we ignore the fact that he is using as an example a vehicle that gets ridiculously low mpg, even if we take as fact all the other B.S. he's written, it wouldn't take eleven acres to produce 852 gallons of ethanol. He erroneously claims that we can only produce 328 gallons per acre, but even producing only that it would take less than three acres to produce 852 gallons. And if we plugged in all the real numbers it's only going to take less than two acres to supply the average person all the ethanol they would need to drive 10,000 miles a year.

The big kicker though is his final bullet where he talks about how much land it would take to power every single automobile in the country on pure ethanol. Aside from the fact that all his other numbers have been wrong and his calculation is no doubt incorrect, no one is suggesting that we replace gasoline with ethanol in the first place. Even with new cellulosic technology coming on line it is highly unlikely that we could ever fulfill all of our automotive fuel needs with ethanol. We're still going to use plenty of gasoline, mostly gasoline by a wide margin in fact. The idea is to supplement our dwindling fuel supply with alternative fuels. The days of finding oil just bubbling out of the ground are gone. It's getting harder and more expensive to find, get it out of the ground, and get it refined. Most of the world's reserves that are relatively easy to get at appear to be in the hands of rather unsavory types. Whatever alternative fuels we can produce here keeps money here and out of the hands of these others. Also, the more alternative fuels are produced throughout the world, the longer we'll be able to stretch out our oil supply by supplementing it with these alternative fuels. Ethanol isn't the solution to our energy problems by a long shot, but it can be part of the solution at least for the time being, as can biodiesel, bio-butanol, possibly fuels produced through thermal conversion or thermal depolymerization if that technology works out, fuel from oil shale and tar sands, new wells drilled in this country, and so on. I don't have a dig in this hunt except that I and my family are fuel consumers, but I'd like to see us diversify into other fuels because I know that we aren't going to be able to pump oil out of the ground at current levels forever and I worry about having all of our eggs in one basket with a fuel produced largely by countries run by crazy Arabs and dictators.

[from occupied ga]

He also says it takes more energy to produce ethanol than you get from the final product, which is false. Ethanol has a positive energy balance. It does take a lot of energy to produce ethanol, but in the end we end up with more energy than we had to expend to get it, not counting the energy from the sun rain water, and nutrients naturally occurring the soil of course.

I remember reading something similar to Pimental in Science 30 years ago. This isn't new, and the thermodynamics dosen't change. It still requires x amount of energy to distill ethanol, etc. From the Car and driver article, "small changes in your assumptions" make the difference between negative and positive energy balance, but even at the most optimistic, you don't get much energy back. It would make a lot more sense to spend the money that's being flushed on ethanol and use it to develop economical ways to mine tar shales and tar sands - we have huge reserves of these. There was also a coal synfuel program that died a long time ago that showed promise

[TKDietz]

I don't have a problem with doing more drilling for our own oil, but our oil reserves are not going to last forever. Not only that, but it's going to become harder and harder to find new reserves, harder and more expensive to get at these reserves, harder and more costly to refine the crude. The crude that's easy to come by and easy to refine is getting used up. As time goes on gasoline production cost are going to go up as will the price of crude. It makes sense to me to start supplementing our fuel supply with alternative fuels.

[thackney]

I agree any economically way of supplimenting our fuel needs is something we need to do. Ethanol is one of those ways.

But as to our long term future for transportation energy needs, I believe oil sands, oil shale and methane hydrates will be the major source of our fuel.

[TKDietz]

A lot has changed in thirty years. We have engineered better varieties of corn for ethanol production, along with better enzymes and yeasts for converting starches into sugars and sugar into alcohol. We are able to get more bushels per acre and produce more ethanol per bushel. Ethanol plants have become much more efficient as well, bringing down costs and reducing the energy required to produce ethanol. Things will get better from here too. New advances in cellulosic ethanol production are making it such that we're be able to produce ethanol from corn stalks and other biomass and the cost of doing this just keeps coming down.

I'm all for coming up with more economical means for producing gasoline from tar sands and oil shale. I'm all for working with coal liquification. I just think ethanol is an important part of the alternative fuel equation too. All of these technologies are expensive. None have a positive energy balance anywhere close to that of gasoline made from crude oil pumped out of the ground. The problem is that there is only a limited amount of crude oil left in the ground and what is left is in most cases harder to get at and harder to refine than that we used so much of in the last century. Eventually we won't have any oil left to pump out of the ground, and from now till then we'll see existing supplies dwindle and the need for alternative fuels grow. All of these fuels are relatively expensive and none have the positive energy balance of gasoline made from crude pumped from the ground, and it looks quite likely to me that there won't be a single alternative fuel that will replace gasoline for internal combustion engines, at least not for a long time. We have a lot of oil shale reserves, for instance. Cost of producing fuel from them is decreasing, but it's still expensive, still requires a lot of energy, and still causes significant environmental problems. It may be a long time before we get all those problems working out, and we may never get it all worked out such that we can fulfill all our gasoline needs without causing massive environmental problems. I look for fuel production to increase from oil shale but not on a massive scale for quite some time.


Money isn't just being spent on ethanol. It's being spent on all these technologies and a few others, and most all of the money being invested is coming from private industry, as it should. One good thing about ethanol is that it is a here and now technology. All cars will work with at least 10% ethanol, and in reality most all of them will work with 20% or more ethanol without causing damage. They've been using 24% ethanol in all cars in Brazil for a long time now, and in recent years they've developed FlexPower cars that will work on 100% ethanol, 100% gasoline, or any combination of the two. About 85% of the new cars sold in Brazil today have that capability. The cost involved in manufacturing vehicles compatible with ethanol is not significant. It only costs a couple of hundred dollars more for a manufacturer to build cars that can run on E85 as well as straight gasoline. It's not legal, but for about $700 you can order a kit to convert just about any vehicle so that it will be ethanol compatible. This is technology that is feasible now, not decades in the future like hydrogen fueled vehicles. Ethanol is relatively cheap to produce, considering today's high gasoline prices, and I just don't see any reason why it should not be used to fulfill a small portion of our automitive fuel needs along with biodiesel, bio-butanol, liquified coal, fuel from shale oil, whatever.

Another fact worth considering is that ethanol is here and there is not much we can do about it. You may not like it, but there is considerable support for it and a great deal of demand for it, as is evidenced by current high ethanol prices. Of course the problem of high demand in relation to supply is in large part government created, but the high prices for ethanol is spurning a lot of new investment in the industry by oil companies and others looking to protect their interests or make a profit. This industry is going to grow leaps and bounds over the next few years. Some people are going to get rich and a lot of jobs will be created. It won't be all bad.

[TKDietz]

You may very well be right about all of that. It will be interesting to see how things unfold in he coming decades.

[spintreebob]

ethanol has been in gasoline in the cornbelt for 20+ years and has always been more expensive than gasoline.

Part of that extra cost is that it is inherently more expensive. Part of the extra cost is that welfare queens like the D'Andreas family have been given a mercantilist monoopoly by the government. In short, the government program that allegedly has good intentions ends up just being good for the welfare queens.

[Arthur Wildfire! March]

Your post nailed it on the Brazil ‘energy independence’ debate.

I heard Clack Howard repeating leftist lies today, singing the praises of Brazil’s energy program. Heck, I was hoping that he was right. But [sigh] it looks like he should have looked up his data by adding freerepublic.com to a google search before making a fool of himself. A nice guy, but he’s got a few blind spots I guess.

Thank you for the post, thackney. — FRegards ....

[thackney]

That's quite an old thread you are waking up there, but still a true point today.

http://www.investors.com/editorial/editorialcontent.asp?id=246842180355425&secid=1501&status=article

[Arthur Wildfire! March]

Old threads are often the most important. Don’t forget that Clark Howard revived the debate on national radio. Thank you again.