Posted on 01/27/2007 4:44:37 AM PST by libstripper
President Bush made a big push for alternative fuels in his State of the Union speech Tuesday night, calling on Americans to reduce gasoline consumption by 20% over 10 years. And as soon as the sun rose on Wednesday, he set out to tour a DuPont facility in Delaware to tout the virtues of "cellulosic ethanol" and propose $2 billion in loans to promote the stuff. For a man who famously hasn't taken a drink for 20 years, that's a considerable intake of alcohol.
A bit of sobriety would go a long way in discussing this moonshine of the energy world, however. Cellulosic ethanol--which is derived from plants like switchgrass--will require a big technological breakthrough to have any impact on the fuel supply. That leaves corn- and sugar-based ethanol, which have been around long enough to understand their significant limitations. What we have here is a classic political stampede rooted more in hope and self-interest than science or logic.
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
Unfortunately it may be too late to stop the train from leaving the station. We're on our way to another useless boondoggle and taxpayer ripoff.
This would be a quantum leap over the present corn squeezin's. It would get fuel from the stripped cobs, the stems... any plant matter. Corn per se would be relegated to an extremely minor player.
The WSJ does another good job of carrying water for Big Oil. They like the current set-up with the US being dependent on its enemies for 58% of its oil, as long as Big Oil is getting fatter profits every year out of our wallets.
The country will be amazed at this obstructionism two decades from now, when ethanol will be a large part of our energy use in this country. The guys in the "gimme caps" will make this work, just as they feed you and 80% of the world.
This "can't do" attitude is foolish and non-productive. It smacks of the nay-sayers telling the Wright brothers, "If God wanted man to fly, He'd have given him wings."
And stop breathing.
Biofuels are not a solution. Just this year, it's production will drive up the cost of a lot of our foodstuffs. Sure, plant more corn, but still, it's not as if we are only planting 5% of the growing lands. we really can't add a significant portion of growing fields to meet the demand.
What's your beef with the big oil companies? They make a lot of money because they are big, and sell a lot of oil. They do, however do so with a pretty low margin. they make a 10% profit margin, after HUGE expenses both in production and research etc. If you want to go after gougers, take a look at jewelers, who typically bring in a %500 to 5,000 percent marfin. I don't see women freaking out on them. Hypocrisy, I say!
ping
If environ-mental freaks wanted to really help the planet, they'd kill themselves.
>>>If carbon dioxide were really an issue, the environmentalists would be demanding that we build a thousand new nuclear power plants.
Oh no. They have their fingers in a new market. Carbon credits.
Not themselves, us.
I always thought "wood alcohol" or Methanol, was derived from cellulose, from trees/wood.
You don't get it. It takes almost as much energy to produce it as you get out of it. Take away the 6 billion dollar price supports and it costs more than gasoline.
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The scientific literature is also divided about whether the energy inputs required to produce ethanol actually exceed its energy output. It takes fertilizer to grow the corn, and fuel to ship and process it, and so forth. Even the most optimistic estimate says ethanol's net energy output is a marginal improvement of only 1.3 to one. For purposes of comparison, energy outputs from gasoline exceed inputs by an estimated 10 to one.
Total gasoline production per year: 126 Billion gallons. Ethanol would require 50 Billion Bushels of Corn from 315 Million AcresFrom here.
Seeing as how we only have 60 million acres of farmland growing corn how does ethanol replace oil? Unless you are willing to devote every single acre of farmland to corn and making ethanol (forget using it for food) how does corn replace oil?
And yet, incredibly, the Wright brothers managed to fly without a massive government subsidy to help their research. If "ethanol will be a large part of our energy use", let free market mechanisms bring that about.
How long will it take for people to understand that government intervention merely distorts and natural workings of the free market, thus hampering progress?
Weight reduction is a side benefit.
BUMP
As much as I hate government intervention, I would support a guaranteed price level for domestically produced oil.
Everytime oil reaches a price where it is feasiable to use the oil sands & shale, the Saud's can just turn up production until the price drops so it is no longer and economic option.
Someone said here on FR recently the break even point was $35 $40 a barrel. We are at $50-$55 a barrel right now and gas is about $2.00 a gallon. I can live with $2.00 a gallon gas if we are serious about cutting the amount of imported oil.
New Yorkers just resent every penny that goes to farm states. Behind almost every energy story is a defense of the regional players invested in the status quo and threatened by proposals that shift economic clout to the West. Exxon/ Rockefeller dominates NY and NJ. Heck, they still heat their homes with oil. Nothing else will do.
Cellulosic ethanol move us a lot further down the road. Very few people -- there are some -- think cellulosic ethanol can fully displace oil, but it can clearly provide a third or more of our current needs. That's very significant. Prices are set at the margins. That gives us a big counterweight to ME price gouging.
All this is contingent on several things: the price of oil staying high enough for alternative fuels to compete (there are others besides ethanol in the hunt as well); the technology on cellulosic ethanol coming along (probably sooner than you think); and the big imponderable, improvements in feedstocks from genetic engineering and utilization of new sources. The plant scientists are just beginning to work on this. When you look at what they have done in other areas of plant genetics, I am cautiously optimistic that we will see very significant gains in ethanol yields. In addition, corn may very well be supplanted as the feedstock of choice.
The point is, the trend lines on conventional oil point to higher prices in the future, especially as India and China get on wheels. The trend lines on ethanol, assuming cellulosic, are down. At some point the lines cross. Some argue that we are there already for corn-based ethanol vs. $50 oil. Right now the ethanol subsidy remains a big, warm security blanket for an industry that is building out very fast. At some point it can and should be phased out.
Make that a price floor for domestically produced fuel and I tend to agree. The Saudi's have twice sandbagged alternative fuels producers by flipping the switch. One of the big uncertainties in fuel markets is whether they have the capacity to do it again. The Saudis treat all this as a state secret. One school of thought is that Saudi production is peaking, in which cases we could be off to the races price-wise at any time.
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