Will the Reality of Biofuels Catch Up With the Hype?

Campus Report ^ | December 11, 2007 | Emmanuel Opati

[riored]

why are you standing up for the
wellbeing of the enemy of the US?

coal cuts the enemy of of the deal

[thackney]

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?

The reports I have read show a very slight reduction in the energy in ULSD (Ultra Low Sulfur Diesel) but almost no difference from the previous.

It cost less before because it cost less to produce. Most Diesel is made through simple distillation of Crude Oil. Most Gasoline takes more processing. Today, additional sulfur treatments are added to the diesel. Also, fewer suppliers of ULSD make the supply and demand curve shift up. We have fewer sources where we can import it from.

[NVDave]

Something that isn’t made clear in the text of that presentation: do those total BTU figures include solar energy or not?

Please see the text on p 1. to see where the confusion arises.

[NVDave]

I’m sorry — page 2:

Here’s the text:

Some confusion arises because a portion of the total (not fossil or petroleum) energy input in the ethanol cycle is the “free” solar energy that ends up in the corn. Since the solar energy is free,
renewable, and environmentally benign, it should not be taken into account in the energy balance calculations.
While the total (includes solar) energy needed to produce a unit of ethanol is more than the total energy needed to produce a unit of gasoline, ethanol is superior when calculating either
(1) the amount of fossil energy needed or
(2) the amount of petroleum energy needed
(see GREET results in Figure 2).

[logic]

Are you as knowledgeable about the farm subsidies? I have some questions I’d really love knowledgeable answers too...

[thackney]

why are you standing up for the wellbeing of the enemy of the US?

Do NOT claim words for me I have not wrote. This country could be energy independent if not for the policies of our government. But selected subsidies decided by politicians are not the way we will achieve energy independence. Look to Brazil. The main stream media wants to talk about their ethanol production. But it was their producing their petroleum resources that was the biggest source of their independence. We could do the same but choose not to do so.

[riored]

cost has little to do with the price that is offered.

[thackney]

Part of the confusion of those charts are that they also use the energy contained in the gasoline as part of the “cost” of the energy. Technically correct but misleading when people associate it with energy that must be spent to produce it.

[NVDave]

I’ll NB that it used to be that our off-road fuel was really high-S stuff - stuff that was segregated out of the on-road market. Didn’t make a big deal to us farmers, because our engines spend most of their time at rated output, and in non-urban areas.

Well, since the ULSD jihad, I’m noticing that the old off-road fuel is no more. Even the off-road fuel is now ULSD, as is evidenced by the old Roosa rotary pumps getting chewed up for lack of fuel lubricity. That old high-sulphur diesel worked great in those old rotary pumps, but now I have to add fuel conditioner on top of every load of off-road fuel because I can’t trust it any more. My fuel jobber has no clue whether the diesel is high, medium or ultra-low sulphur any more, so running older fuel racks is a crapshoot without the fuel additives.

Thank you, EPA and environmentalists. Chewing up an old fuel rack only costs be $1000 to $1500 a throw.

[NVDave]

I’ll NB that it used to be that our off-road fuel was really high-S stuff - stuff that was segregated out of the on-road market. Didn’t make a big deal to us farmers, because our engines spend most of their time at rated output, and in non-urban areas.

Well, since the ULSD jihad, I’m noticing that the old off-road fuel is no more. Even the off-road fuel is now ULSD, as is evidenced by the old Roosa rotary pumps getting chewed up for lack of fuel lubricity. That old high-sulphur diesel worked great in those old rotary pumps, but now I have to add fuel conditioner on top of every load of off-road fuel because I can’t trust it any more. My fuel jobber has no clue whether the diesel is high, medium or ultra-low sulphur any more, so running older fuel racks is a crapshoot without the fuel additives.

Thank you, EPA and environmentalists. Chewing up an old fuel rack only costs me $1000 to $1500 a throw.

[nomorelurker]

Thanks for posting that. I’ve seen these numbers tossed around and it was never clear to me how the solar component was treated. I wonder how the free work the yeast does in fermentation is treated as well?

[riored]

lets be realistic about the numbers.

for a 50 cent/gal subsidy, on ethanol blended into gasoline,

something like 2 dollars is
‘avoided needing to be imported’.
(wholesale gasoline is at 2.25, or so.)

the 50 cents stays in the US, btw

(OK, some ethanol is imported, but not from
the middle east)

[taxed2death]

‘It cost less before because it cost less to produce”

Ok. Thank you.

[azhenfud]

“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?”

---

“In the interim, North Korea would be supplied with 500,000 tons of heavy fuel oil annually, at no cost, to make up for lost energy production.”

500,000 x 2,000
____________
7.3 lbs/gallon

or

136,986,300 gallons of oil freely given annually to North Korea.

---

Pardon me, but I believe this might be part reason we all feel this at the pump.

[mad_as_he$$]

No. Next topic.

[riored]

to post 50.

why is it, when I critisize the Bush administration
for doing things like this,
I get yelled at.

[mad_as_he$$]

Unless something has changed I think it is the other way around. At least to have the corn bio delivered to the pump.

[NVDave]

Right — understood. But I’m still unclear on whether those ethanol “total BTU” charts include solar or not.

Also, NB that almost half of studies on page 3 that show ethanol “below the line” are from one guy - Pimental. He’s well known for his absurdly incorrect energy balance computations, whereby he includes the energy in the food the farmer eats and the energy used to make the steel in his equipment into the “energy balance” for ethanol.

Then there’s Patzak’s studies. He’s funded by the oil industry and he uses Pimental’s methodology in his studies on energy balance.

When I look at ethanol energy balances, I toss out any studies by those two sources, because their methodology is quite simply wrong, and absurdly so. The only way to remove the energy consumed by the farmer would be to kill the farmer, because he’s going to be consuming that food whether he’s raising corn for ethanol or pushing paper in an office. The issue of producing ethanol has no bearing on the farmer’s food as an “energy input.”

Likewise, the steel used in the farm equipment is most often already a sunk cost. The farmer had the equipment a priori; he did not buy the equipment just to grow corn for ethanol. He will use the exact same equipment to grow anything else on the farm; again, this “input cost” should be excluded from the energy balance.

[taxed2death]

Hey,
I do a bunch of on highway driving / towing with my Dodge TD. My truck has about 200,000 miles on it and is still running strong. My fuel sending unit in my tank has been broken since about the 110,000 mile mark, which is no big deal because when I’m running light (not towing) I zero out the odometer at every fill up. I can then run 450 miles before I have to start looking for a fill-up station. I ran the last 90,000 miles using this “system” of measurement without ever running dry. Not any more. With the new ULSD I run dry at 400 miles.

Have you noticed any mileage difference when using ULSD?

[NVDave]

Not by me.

FWIW, and to be completely above-board and fair to the Bush administration, the diesel fuel emissions standards were pretty much already set in place and the plan was in the works at the end of the Clinton administration. The Bush administration did nothing to modify or halt the issue, because the GOP are a bunch of cowards when taking on the environmentalists.

I never lose an argument with environmentalists when I can show the audience the numbers. It becomes a case of a retired engineer (with a bunch of numbers and charts) vs. a liberal arts major making some impassioned plea and appeals to emotion.

It is about as challenging as shooting fish in a 5-gal bucket with a shotgun.

Sadly, the GOP and all these “think tanks” in DC prefer to have our environmental and energy policy pieces written by political science, legal and policy wonks, rather than people who can do real analysis based on the real numbers. The stuff coming out of the Heritage, CATO, and other outfits on energy, environment and ag are just absurd nonsense at times. You can tell within the first paragraph that most of these “analysts” wouldn’t know a cow pie if you splattered one in their faces.