Will the Reality of Biofuels Catch Up With the Hype?

read

Someone once stated, "A civilization who burns it's food supply cannot long survive." ... or something to that effect ...

Message to OPEC, screw us on oil prices and we’ll burn your food!

...“since September 2006, the market price of corn and soybeans has climbed significantly,...

That's OK since auto fuel prices have dropped significantly...Wait! Fuel prices are still going up. What are they doing with all of the corn and soybeans? Someone must be getting fat on tortillas and tofu.

Since nobody studies science any more, especially the MSM and the politicians, some basic concepts escape people in this debate.

The bottom line is this:
Until you develop a substance or fuel that will take up as little space as a suitcase, will propel 3000 pounds of metal and people 300 miles at 65 MPH, can be stored safely for a very long time, and can be replenished in several minutes at facilities all over the world, even the remotest corners, nothing will displace the gasoline engine-driven car.

You can dream all you want about your battery cars and fuel cells, but the old-fashioned gasoline powered car will be around a long, long time.

-
1 energy unit of fossil fuel is consumed in producing 1.35 energy units of corn-ethanol.

As I point out on as many of these threads as possible: the price of food is going up because the price of diesel fuel is going up.

The ethanol market for corn is a side-issue, and has little carry-through into other markets aside from possibly eggs.

The diesel fuel issue, however, cannot be underestimated, but it is consistently ignored by these “analysts” that figure they know something about the ag sector. Since 2001, the price of off-road diesel has more than tripled. The US Farmer uses about 8% of all diesel fuel in the US consumption. Then there’s trucking costs that get added onto the farm inputs (fertilizer, seed, equipment shipping, etc) and onto shipping harvested crops. Wha-la: food inflation.

When you went to grandma’s house for Thanksgiving dinner, you probably got there by the grace of gasoline.

The turkey got there by the grace of diesel fuel.

The nerve of you...bringing cold hard facts into an ethanol thread!

/s

“1 energy unit of fossil fuel is consumed in producing 1.35 energy units of corn-ethanol.”

Can you throw up a link that we can all read?

Experts are warning that mandating use of bio-fuel energy (such as ethanol) by companies is increasing inflation.

This is its intent. Raise the price of everything via higher gasoline costs, also raise the cost of food and fuel, then invoke the anti-inflation god via the familiar "excluding volatile food and energy prices" chant, and abra cadabra!: a higher proportion of actual inflation is waved away than would have been.

“Since nobody studies science any more, especially the MSM and the politicians, some basic concepts escape people in this debate.

The bottom line is this:
Until you develop a substance or fuel that will take up as little space as a suitcase, will propel 3000 pounds of metal and people 300 miles at 65 MPH, can be stored safely for a very long time, and can be replenished in several minutes at facilities all over the world, even the remotest corners, nothing will displace the gasoline engine-driven car.

You can dream all you want about your battery cars and fuel cells, but the old-fashioned gasoline powered car will be around a long, long time.”

People forget the economics of it too. Factor in how much money we’re spending each day in Iraq...to “protect our national interests” (oil) as George H.W. Bush said in the early 90’s. The cost of gasoline is considerably more than what we pay at the pump.

ethanol cuts the ragheads out of the deal.

one unit of liquid energy (petroleum),
yields ten units of liquid energy in the firm of ethanol.

the ten to one number, includes the lower volumetric energy
density of ethanol

Corn is no longer seriously considered as a source to make ethanol for fuel. They are considering waste biomass and grasses, however my analysis was that this is not practical at the scale needed and will not be competitive with the use of oil sands or shale. Initially I was the minor opinion, but in the past year the majority of decision makers where I work have adopted my view.

—as I have been known to comment, what makes our world work is the combination of copper, petroleum and three-phase electricity-—

“The bottom line is this:
Until you develop a substance or fuel that will take up as little space as a suitcase, will propel 3000 pounds of metal and people 300 miles at 65 MPH, can be stored safely for a very long time, and can be replenished in several minutes at facilities all over the world, even the remotest corners, nothing will displace the gasoline engine-driven car.”

Something like this:

“Brazilians are driving “flexible fuel” cars that run on either ethanol or gasoline and allow the consumer to fill up with whichever option is cheaper – often ethanol.”

“Instead of reaching for the gasoline, he spent $29 to fill up his car on ethanol made from sugar cane, an option that’s available at 29,000 gas stations from Rio to the Amazon. A comparable tank of gasoline would have cost him $36. “It’s cheaper and it’s made here in Brazil,” Mr. Ferreira says of ethanol. If the price of oil stays at current levels, he can expect to save about $350 a year.”

http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=6817

1 energy unit of fossil fuel is consumed in producing 1.35 energy units of corn-ethanol.

Energy from sources other than fossil fuel is used to produce ethanol. (electricity from other sources)

Although there are several conflicting studies concerning the production and energy requirements for ethanol, the US Department of Energy shows that more total energy is used to produce ethanol than ethanol contains.

Go to:
http://www1.eere.energy.gov/vehiclesandfuels/pdfs/program/ethanol_brochure_color.pdf

Look at page 3 and this chart.

Now look at the legend. The yellow section measures how much energy is required to produce the fuel.

Look back at the chart under TOTAL ENERGY and not a selected subset of the energy required.

Here is the energy required to produce ethanol.

one unit of liquid energy (petroleum),
yields ten units of liquid energy in the firm of ethanol.

It takes a lot more than petroleum to produce ethanol. See post #17

Can you throw up a link that we can all read?

http://www1.eere.energy.gov/biomass/net_energy_balance.html

On the "energy balance" of ethanol:

http://www.dogpile.com/dogpile/ws/results/Web/!22energy%20balance!22%20ethanol/1/417/TopNavigation/Relevance/iq=true/zoom=off/_iceUrlFlag=7?_IceUrl=true

What really pisses me off is that none of these “analysts” who blovates about ethanol is a farmer. I am, and when I look at why I’m having to raise my prices, I can pull up Quicken and just look at my books for the last five+ years and see what is going up:

Diesel fuel, gasoline, oils, lubes, greases, tires (when you can get them — big ag tires are getting hard to obtain), wire (both copper and aluminum), anything made of steel, fertilizer, ag chemicals (with the exception of generic roundup, which dropped the price of glyphosate considerably), seed (because it is produced by other farmers getting hit the same way).

I’ll tell you a little story which brings home the mental disconnect people have about the impact of diesel:

Three years ago, we had grown some grain hay. Grain hay isn’t high value feed - it’s good hay, but it doesn’t have the protein of alfalfa, nor is it desired by the big-bucks horse folks. It usually is “feed” hay, fed to beef cows.

I had a few hundred tons of the stuff, priced to move at $80/ton.

So this rancher stops by and asks about taking all of it - at $65/ton. I tell him “Uh, no, I don’t think so” and he responds by launching into a complaint about the price of diesel.

I’m standin’ there, slack jawed, and when he finished, I decided I was gonna put a stop to this. I asked him “Do you see any clydesdales or other draft horses on this outfit?”

“No.”

“Is that hay in nice, little square bricks?”

“Yea... what’s your point?”

“Look around, man. I don’t put this hay up with draft horses, so it is costing me more in diesel to put this hay up. Unless and until I see your cows drinking diesel fuel instead of water, my sympathy for your complaint about diesel prices is limited, at best.”

Well, he gets a mad on and leaves, telling me that “come next spring, you’ll wish you took the $65.”

It shipped the next year, and not for $65/ton — for $75 to $80 per ton, just as I had been asking.

Three years later, just this past month, I shipped equal quality hay for $140/ton. And ranchers were not arguing one word; they were happy to have any hay at all, because they know that as diesel prices go up, some small, marginal hay producers simply stop growing hay, the supply goes down, and there is no surplus hay in the market. If you don’t buy your hay by October, come February when it is sub-zero and your cows simply must have 40+ lbs of feed per day, there will be no hay available - at any price, because some of the smaller producers look at the cost of diesel and say “Screw it. I don’t have the capital to buy the diesel, I don’t think I’m going to cover my expenses, so I’m not farming this year. I’ll get a job at the mines.”

All thanks to diesel prices.

Corn prices don’t mean a thing to hay prices here. We can’t grow corn, so there’s none of this “hay acres ripped up to plant corn.” Just ain’t happening in the intermountain west aside from perhaps some producers in Idaho.

Increased hay prices here mean increased milk prices in California. Increased milk prices mean increased soybean prices, because dairy herds use a lot of soybean meal in addition to hay; as hay goes up, up, up, the dairy man will start to substitute some more soybean meal for less hay.

But both the hay and the bean meal have to be trucked in there, and what used to be (for me) a $40/ton haul into California is a now $75/ton haul into the exact same market this year; figure a truck carries about 25 to 27 tons of hay per load. The dairyman is paying that increased haul price; and as much as possible, he’s passing it through to the consumer.

The biofuels thing is using up surpluses, but there’s simply no hiding the impact of diesel prices now. We farmers simply cannot absorb a tripling in the price of diesel for more than one year at best. I believe the days of $0.80/gal off-road diesel are gone forever now and from here on out, until diesel prices stabilize, the consumer is going to see food prices go up. When diesel prices stabilize, food prices will probably do likewise within 12 to 18 months.