Posted on 12/26/2008 5:41:01 PM PST by Kaslin
Energy Policy: The heavily subsidized ethanol industry is the latest to seek a federal bailout. If there is any industry that deserves to go bankrupt, it's this one. Time has come to stop putting food in our gas tanks.
Ethanol never made much sense economically or environmentally. It never would have made it to market without congressional mandates and huge subsidies. Having the first presidential contest in the corm state of Iowa didn't hurt either. With oil prices plummeting, it is even less competitive — if it ever was.
The product has benefited from a tax credit paid to gasoline producers to blend gasoline with ethanol; a federal fuel economy standard that sets a minimum amount of ethanol to be blended; and a 54-cents-a-gallon tariff on cheaper imported ethanol made in places like Brazil. Brazilian ethanol is made from sugar, not corn. But corn is grown in Iowa, and Brazilians can't vote.
Recent legislation mandated increased ethanol use as well as a 51-cent-a-gallon tax credit and more corn subsidies. Over the last two decades the ethanol industry has been kept alive with more than $25 billion in federal handouts. Yet it still can't compete.
(Excerpt) Read more at ibdeditorials.com ...
Bailout? I’m getting ready to bail out.
Make ethanol illegal insteas of bailing it out!
Ethanol.
Thank you, John McCain and Tim Pawlenty.
Thank you, very little.
This crapola gets terrible mileage, it’s hard on engines and gaskets, it raises the cost of food, it raises taxes.
There is nothing at all good about the stuff ... which of course, would be why congress critters mandated it — perfectly logical. If it made sense, they wouldn’t have anything to do with it.
One glaring error of the ethanol scam is that they insisted ethanol be made of corn. Ethanol can be made from anything with carbon. A multi-million dollar corn ethanol plant is under construction down the road from me (North Carolina, and I believe gifted to a foreigner). In this sandy soil we have poor corn yields. Around here they should have considered making ethanol out of kudzo. In the southwest they should make it out of cactus. In Florida ethanol should be made from swamp moss. Around Maryland they should make it out of democraps. Ethanol did not even get regional consideration. Just another Homeland Security fraud.
Obviously you don't know anything about cactus -- It grows way way too slow to be a cash crop.
And.....no matter what they choose to make it out of.....the water and petroleum-based energy required to manufacture ethanol outstrips the cost of producing traditional fuels from crude oil.
Ethanol is cheaper at the pump (for now) due to government subsidies (taxes).
Obama would be wise to blame ethanol on Bush, and get out of it as fast as he can. This is the problem with pushing alternative fuels before technology can make them competitive. Global freezing needs to put an end to the global warming fraud, and soon. Obama could make himself out to be a visionary, if he were to come out against global warming environmental and energy policies, saying the science behind global warming is uncertain at best, and foolish at its worst. He should then say that we will need all the cheap energy we can get to weather global cooling. But, he’s part of the global warming con job.
There isn't any Constitutional authority for any bailout;but that won't stop the politicians.
“Archer-Daniels-Midland”
Just thought that I’d reiterate that point.....
Right, you are.
Several universities - and several private companies and joint ventures - are working on producing “green crude” from algae. Since this would be a direct replacement for crude oil from petroleum, it seems to me to be the most likely new feedstock if the cost can be brought down. And it might be the best way to capture sunlight in usable form, as well as a way to recycle CO2 from industrial processes.
I would like to see much more R & D in ths area than on new ethanol feedstocks. All of the petroleum that we have found and extracted so far has been derived from prehistoric algae beds, so this would be just a shortcut to the original source.
And if we really need an ethanol replacement, butanol is a far better oxygenator.
So according to the article, the enviros have decided to cut ethanol loose.
How much cactus do you think we have out here?
Cellulosic ethanol from wood is not yet perfected, but would be a great product. It would provide a market for biomass from thinnings in our overstocked and choked National Forests. This would help to offset the costs the American public is now paying for either fuel reduction or firefighting. I know that more than 200,000 acres burned this past summer in my county alone. Would have been better if it went into our tanks than to have all that carbon released into the air.
Obama’s already committed to this. He must thank his stolen ‘victory’ in Iowa where he manipulated the insane caususes into his commitment to bio. He next took the loser governor Tom Vilsack into his cabinet. Enacted tax credits for ethanol refueling pumps in 2005. Sponsored major biofuel legislation with Harkin. The list is too long and this is ‘change’ wedon’t need.
That is the truth, I needed gas and all the station had was 10% ethanol, my mileage went from 28 to 24 with a tail wind.
The problem is that ethanol is just not a good petroleum substitute. It has less energy by volume, and when mixed with petroleum reduces fuel mileage significantly. It cannot be mixed into either jet fuel or diesel, so its only use is mixed with gasoline. But it tends to absorb water from the air, which makes it difficult to ship by pipeline without contamination. Engines can be built to run efficiently on pure ethanol (the 2008 Indy 500) but dual fuel - and in particular, GM’s Flex-fuel technology - are built to run on gasoline but tolerate ethanol. They will run on any mix up to E85, but lose efficiency as the ethanol content increases.
The “green crude” from algae that I mentioned above is completely equivalent to crude petroleum as a refinery feedstock, and can produce any of the normal refinery products, including jet fuel and diesel. However, it is generally free of sulfur and metals, so is ultra-low emission (I do NOT consider CO2 to be a pollutant!)
Please read about it at: http://www.sapphireenergy.com/ and at other companies and universities.
The Immorality of Ethanol “The ethanol mandates that have been foisted on American taxpayers are not just fiscal insanity, they are immoral. Congress has created a system of subsidies and mandates that requires the U.S. to burn food to make motor fuel, at a time when there is a global shortage of food and no global shortage of motor fuel.”
....and.....
(snip of above linik follows...)
“So, where did the claim that ethanol is more energy efficient originate? I believe it originates with researchers from Argonne National Laboratory, who developed a model (GREET) that is used to determine the energy inputs to turn crude oil into products (4). Since it will take some amount of energy to refine a barrel of crude oil, by definition the efficiency is less than 100% in the way they measured it. For example, if I have 1 BTU of energy, but it took .2 BTUs to turn it into a useable form, then the efficiency is 80%. This is the kind of calculation people use to show that the gasoline efficiency is less than 100%. However, ethanol is not measured in the same way. Look again at the example from the USDA paper, and lets do the equivalent calculation for ethanol. In that case, we got 98,333 BTUs out of the process, but we had to input 77,228 to get it out. In this case, comparing apples to apples, the efficiency of producing ethanol is just 21%. Again, gasoline is about 4 times higher.
OK, so Argonne originated the calculation. But are they really at fault here? Yes, they are. Not only did they promote the efficiency calculation for petroleum products with their GREET model, but they have proceeded to make apples and oranges comparisons in order to show ethanol in a positive light. They have themselves muddied the waters. Michael Wang, from Argonne, (and author of the GREET model) made a remarkable claim last September at The 15th Annual Symposium on Alcohol Fuels in San Diego (5). On his 4th slide , he claimed that it takes 0.74 MMBTU to make 1 MMBTU of ethanol, but 1.23 MMBTU to make 1 MMBTU of gasoline. That simply can’t be correct, as the calculations in the preceding paragraphs have shown.
Not only is his claim incorrect, but it is terribly irresponsible for someone from a government agency to make such a claim. I don’t know whether he is being intentionally misleading, but it certainly looks that way. Wang is also the co-author of the earlier USDA studies that I have critiqued and shown to be full of errors and misleading arguments. These people are publishing articles that bypass the peer review process designed to ferret out these kinds of blatant errors. I suspect a politically driven agenda in which they are putting out intentionally misleading information.
One of the reasons I haven’t written this up already, is that 2 weeks ago I sent an e-mail to Wang bringing this error to his attention. I immediately got an auto-reply saying that he was out of the office until March 31st. I have given him a week to reply and explain himself, but he has not done so. Therefore, at this time I must conclude that he knows the calculation is in error, but does not wish to address it. In the interim, ethanol proponents everywhere are pushing this false information in an effort to boost support for ethanol.
Look at the Minnesota Department of Agriculture claim again: "the energy yield of ethanol is (1.34/0.74) or 81 percent greater than the comparable yield for gasoline". If the energy balance was really this good for ethanol and that bad for gasoline, why would anyone ever make gasoline? Where would the economics be? Why would ethanol need subsidies to compete? It should be clear that the proponents in this case are promoting false information.”
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