Also rumors of a project "Bobcat" using such a system....
Posted on 02/12/2009 5:13:15 PM PST by Kaslin
Edited on 02/12/2009 7:26:30 PM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
Energy: A fortune was spent on ethanol development last year when gas prices were in the stratosphere. Now a lesson has been learned: Worshiping the false god of ethanol carries a high price.
As the New York Times reported this week, ethanol, "just recently a savior" as the Times headline put it, has been found sorely lacking in its much-touted miraculous powers to heal America's energy woes.
Corn ethanol plants "are shutting down virtually every week." An alternative energy trade group says at least 10 of the nation's 150 ethanol firms have closed some 24 plants in three months, with a dozen other companies in distress.
Little more than a year after the Democratic Congress passed legislation launching a massive national effort to convert farm crops and agricultural wastes into auto fuel, it's become clear that the production deadlines aimed at greenifying your local gas station can't and won't be met.
The many investors who were tripping all over themselves to finance biofuel plants last year are finding that going green can mean losing lots of green.
Congress had a grand plan: It would double corn ethanol use by 2015. And by 2022, 21 billion gallons of ethanol and biofuels would be made from formerly useless stuff, ranging from corn stubble to switchgrass to municipal waste.
But reality has hit like a ton of corn stalks. The inescapable facts are that corn prices remain at a market-set high, and converting the corn alternative cellulose into liquid fuel is prohibitively expensive.
Let this be a lesson for America — ethanol is for drinking, not driving.
“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 drumroll please.....
(snip of above below)
“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.”
Yep, and coming crop failures due to the cold are going to keep the prices there. Florida crop lost was about 40% to the last two cold snaps we have had.
I love it!
Eliminate the subsidies and bankrupt all od them!!
True automobiles run on gasoline not garbage or electricity.
And, as we have pointed out for years, the doggling of the ethanol boon has completely displaced effective development of energy independence by the federal government, which has been astonishingly inept and ineffective in every branch and in both parties.
OMG - will we finally get good gasoline back? I sure fvcking hope so, we’ve been having to use the 10% ethanol crap for years.
See, there is a silver lining. Of course the ethanol industry should go under because it’s been artificially created and sustained by government.
You can’t even find real gasoline here. Ten percent Ethanol is forced on us. There is a reason it is subsidized and made the only choice at the pumps. It makes some people rich. We don’t want ethanol, but we got it! But of course they’re still from the government and they’re still here to help us!
you know, I’m gonna be contrarian on this and state ethanol is going to play a chief role as one of the few actually accessible future fuel sources (although I’m thinking it will also be a replacement for heating fuel in addition to being primarily a gasoline supplement).
Already, the corn by-product produced by ethanol refiners is being repackaged as a high-protein wet-feed for cows, so the corn is not eliminated from the food chain at all; it is turned into a higher-cost (profit) product than raw corn. Think ‘double harvest’ of one product.
The biggest obstacle and cost to fly-over-land ethanol plants is transportation to refineries. The ethanol plants that are located on tanker-accessible waterways, or near railroad feed lines directly to refineries, will survive and profit nicely, whether by selling domestically or to foreign markets.
http://www.ethanolrfa.org/resource/facts/trade/
(compiled info:)
In 2007, 6.5 billion gallons of ethanol were produced in the USA from 2.3 billion bushels of corn. World fuel ethanol production was more than 13 billion gallons in 2007. In 2007, the ethanol industry provided employment for 238,000 workers in all sectors of the U.S. economy, added $47.6 billion to the nation’s GDP.
Captain Obvious strikes again.
We need more nukes, and fewer kooky energy schemes.
Also rumors of a project "Bobcat" using such a system....
Of course the ethanol industry should go under because it’s been artificially created and sustained by government.”
Correction:
Of course, NObama should go under because he has been artificially created and sustained by government.
What about rush limbaugh?
He’s been created by corpulent inept left leaning bureaucrats too.
Jury’s in - lawyers are dumb-asses.
Aside from the fact that ethanol has been proven to be worse for the environment than fossil fuels, it isn’t the pot of gold we were assured it was.
Frankly, I’m of the opinion that God had all of this figured out eons ago and gave us oil as a means of producing energy. He had it all figured out.
The only ones who can’t figure something this simple out are the environazis and they’re pretty much liberal atheists.
So, why are we paying any attention to them???
True, LOL
Good! We should be using corn as food, not fuel. Too bad the present crew in Washington will not allow more Off Shore Drilling or Build Nuke Plants.
While ethanol and biomass energy have gained on hydroelectric as major providers of renewable energy, wind and solar still reach less than two percent of the total. ENERGY....
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