From the DOE report I linked in post #17
Actually total energy, not just fossil energy, although the report compares both. Refineries use a lot of electricity and in my opinion, Total Energy should be the comparison.
Posted on 12/11/2007 7:36:22 AM PST by bs9021
Thanks for the clarification and information. My bad.
A little side note on this subject. When considering the prices of your food......The price of the beef and other meats will rise dramatically. Hay to feed these animals is going out of site. The result is higher prices for the meat. Hay farmers are planting corn instead of hay. The price of hay in many areas has doubled. In some instances, $20.00 a bale. A horse eats 1 bale a week.
do you understand the difference between
‘energy’ and ‘liquid energy’ ?
(apparently not, so here it is.)
liquid energy —> petroleum
‘energy’ your use —> coal, natural gas, petroleum
most of the energy comes from the US,
only one tenth comes from petroleum
this is from Argonne national lab, I
direct your attention to the right part of the
top graph on page two
http://www.ncga.com/public_policy/PDF/03_28_05ArgonneNatlLabEthanolStudy.pdf
Excellent post. Another thing to ponder is the fact that diesel costs less to refine than gasoline...so why is it so expensive?
I’m actually amazed that the truckers of this country aren’t striking....but alas... now we have messican truckers and their chit-boxes to take the place of US truckers on the highway.
diesel is more expensive per gallon, because it contains more
energy per gallon
I’ve looked into this. Here’s the poop:
Diesel is a minority output of cracking crude into finished products. The typical “crack spread” is “3-2-1” in oil industry lingo - “3 barrels of crude cracks into 2 barrels of gasoline and 1 barrel of diesel.” It isn’t exactly this; there are other products in the mix as well, but you get the idea. The majority of the output is gasoline.
So you see the first part of the problem there.
Second part of the problem is the shifting consumption patterns around the world. In the EU, they’re quickly converting their auto fleet to highly efficient diesel cars that get from 40 to 60 MPG. Their diesel cars now make up more than 40% of their auto fleet, and that proportion is going up rapidly as tax policy and fuel prices make it a no-brainer to own a diesel auto rather than gas auto.
Next is the Chinese consumption of diesel. Much of the PRC’s consumption of diesel is for power generation. Caterpillar has been shipping megawatt+ gensets at a very rapid clip to China for years and years. The ChiComs’ power infrastructure is sloppy and uneven to say the least, so when they have a factory that needs reliable power and they’re under the gun to make quota productions, they buy a diesel genset, hook ‘er up and start generating their own power. Those gensets are all over the place in China and they slurp some ferocious amounts of fuel.
Diesel is a pretty world-wide fungible product, unlike our silly gasoline formulations. Everyone wants #2 diesel.
Then there are other demands on the distillate output: heating oil, Jet-A, standard military fuel, etc.
Everyone with a checkbook and a bottom line runs diesel.
Only the US consumer hasn’t gotten the message that diesel is the fuel of choice.
Since I stated "It takes a lot more than petroleum to produce ethanol." I don't understand why you wrote that.
this is from Argonne national lab
If you will read the link I posted above, it is also from material of the Argonne Lab. They show a positive balance only when considering fossil fuel and not total fuel. I am not sure where the Department of Energy is pulling the data for their column of current corn ethanol production. But the source of the rest of it looks to be from this presentation Michael Wang made at Ethanol Energy Open Forum, sponsored by the National Corn Growers Association at the National Press Club, Washington, D.C. in 2005.
Argonne expert addresses energy, environmental impacts of fuel ethanol
http://www.anl.gov/Media_Center/News/2005/news050823.html
Not your mistake at all. The EERE site has conflicting information. The link I posted is from the same web site. I did email them along with comments and links showing them the conflicting information.
“diesel is more expensive per gallon, because it contains more
energy per gallon”
__________________________________________________________
Yea, right.
Not.
Must be all the plutonium they’ve been adding to it lately.
Geeezzzzzzzzzz it used to be 2/3rds the cost of regular gasoline as recently as 4 years ago.
Maybe they should go back to the old ways and suck a bit of energy out of it.
That’s an appealing explanation, but it really isn’t what is driving the price.
Before the EU started converting all their cars to diesel, and before the PRC started slurping up diesel, I used to pay about $2.30/gal for gasoline, and about $0.80/gal for off-road diesel. Off road diesel used to be the “high sulphur” diesel that wasn’t permitted in on-road uses, even before the “ultra-low sulphur diesel” standard of today.
Besides not meeting on-road emissions standards, off-road diesel was not taxed (federal or state) and here in Nevada, those taxes add up to about $0.53/gal.
The on-road diesel prices used to be, oh, $0.30 to $0.50 less than gasoline, especially in winter, just before Christmas (like right now) because the refineries finished their build of home heating oil, there was usually a slight surplus, not much home heating oil is used around here, so that’s when we’d buy thousands of gallons of diesel at nice, cheap prices.
The demand picture for diesel has changed radically in the last five years, but most especially since Katrina and ultra-low sulphur diesel standards. Diesel went higher than gasoline at all times of the year, sometimes by as much as $0.80/gal, and it has never come back down again.
Thanks for the info re: Diesel.
“Everyone with a checkbook and a bottom line runs diesel.
Only the US consumer hasn’t gotten the message that diesel is the fuel of choice.”
I hear ya. In FFLD county CT commercial electric costs have shot up 80% in under 20 months.... I know of a machine shop that just went off the grid. They just purchased a $12,000.00 Genset and power their whole shop with diesel.
the issue I raise, is ‘trying to reduce dependency
on petroleum.
think of it this way, ethanol, sort of,
converts coal, into a fuel useable in cars.
what is your problem with that?
we got lots of coal in the US
cost of coal, roughly 1 USD per million BTU
cost of petroleum, at least ten times that much.
all energy is not the same
“1 energy unit of fossil fuel is consumed in producing 1.35 energy units of corn-ethanol.”
OK. I think it’s stupid to try and substitute FOOD for fossil fuel. But just for perspective, how many energy units of fossil fuel are consumed to produce fossil fuel?
1 gallon of diesel fuel = 139,000 Btu
1 gallon of gasoline = 124,000 Btu
USING BRITISH THERMAL UNITS (BTU) TO COMPARE ENERGY
http://www.eia.doe.gov/kids/energyfacts/science/energy_calculator.html#unitsexplained
Also in the last couple years, the EPA has mandated additional diesel processing to reduce the Sulfur Content down to below 15 ppm. This required greater processing and expense at the refineries.
National Clean Diesel Campaign
http://www.epa.gov/cleandiesel/
re: coal. I just switched to anthracite coal for home heating.
I love it.
I help those fellow Americans make a hard, but decent living in PA. and I get to screw OPEC at the same time. Plus it pisses off the nutters in the UN.
Win, Win, Win.
No.
No problem at all. If the subsidy for ethanol was applied equally you would see direct coal-to-liquid production in the US. Instead we pay for subsidies to ethanol blenders for a less efficient fuel.
I can understand that the “cleaner” diesel costs more to refine...that makes sense... but the simple fact that it contains more energy, hence should cost more is fishy....
As I mentioned....4-5 years ago it was still making the same energy....right? So why was it almost a buck a gallon cheaper than regular gasoline?
Seems like the second half of your explanation makes much more sense then the first half.
From the DOE report I linked in post #17
Actually total energy, not just fossil energy, although the report compares both. Refineries use a lot of electricity and in my opinion, Total Energy should be the comparison.
The price of corn hit $5.00 per bushel in July of 1996; it closed Friday on the CBOT at $4.00.
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