Posted on 07/24/2010 4:59:23 PM PDT by neverdem
WHEN WASHINGTON starts handing out cash, it can be hard to stop. See, for example, the decades of subsidies the government has showered on the corn ethanol industry. The fuel was supposed to free America from its dependence on foreign oil and produce fewer carbon emissions in the process. It's doing some of the former and little of the latter. But corn ethanol certainly doesn't need the level of taxpayer support it's been getting. Lawmakers are considering whether to renew these expensive subsidies; they shouldn't.
The feds give companies that combine corn ethanol with gasoline a 45-cent tax subsidy for every gallon of corn ethanol added to gasoline. That's on top of a tariff on imported sugar cane ethanol from Brazil and federal mandates requiring that steadily increasing amounts of these biofuels be produced. The Congressional Budget Office this month estimated that, all told, the costs to taxpayers of replacing a gallon of gasoline with one of corn ethanol add up to $1.78. The tax incentives alone cost the Treasury $6 billion in 2009.
How about the environmental benefits? The CBO calculates that it costs a huge $750 to reduce annual carbon dioxide emissions by one ton using corn ethanol. And that figure relies on assumptions extremely favorable to the industry.
Not only are these subsidies expensive, but they are redundant...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
AND, gasahol is BAD GAS!
Ask any boat or gas motor home owner what gasahol does to their fuel systems!
If I had my way, I’d outlaw gasahol! Took me three years to figure out what was causing my motor home to run so crappy!
STA-BIL for ethanol (blue) is the answer, BTW.
But...but....we have such a huge oil shortage here in the U.S.. /s
Everyone but a politician or a corn farmer recognizes the truth.
If American liberal jerks WANT ethanol so much, they should make it out of ethane gas and ozone, from smog! If amyone does not understand the chemistry, just PM me!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denatured_alcohol
Denaturing alcohol does not chemically alter the ethanol molecule. Rather, the ethanol is mixed with other chemicals to form an undrinkable mixture.
Different additives are used to make it difficult to use distillation or other simple processes to reverse the denaturation. Methanol is commonly used both because of its boiling point being close to that of ethanol and because it is toxic.
Denatured alcohol and its manufacture are a public policy compromise. The supply and demand for denatured alcohol arises from the fact that normal alcohol (which in everyday language refers specifically to ethanol, suitable for human consumption as a drink) is usually very expensive compared to similar chemicals, being highly taxed for revenue and public health policy purposes (see sin tax). As a result, if pure ethanol were made cheaply available as a fuel or solvent, people would drink it.
Denatured alcohol provides a solution to permit legitimate use and manufacture of ethanol, whereby cheap ethanol can be made available for non-consumption use without the risk of it being converted for consumption.
Near term contracts on the CME are tradinging a about $3.71 per bushel, about half what they were two years ago.
Whats a six pack cost? I have not bought beer in this century
For more than 50 years we've had mountians, and moutains, and mountains of surplus corn.
I've asked this question probably 5 dozen times, would you be so kind as to be the first to answer?
What shall be done with these mountains of surplus?
see my tagline, 2010 crop looks like it could dwarf all prior surpluses.
Farm and commercial welfare is every bit as harmful to the economy as individual welfare, and for precisely the same reasons.
If turning corn into ethanol is a good idea, then have at it! But let the marketplace decide the economics — not the government.
Applies to solar power, wind power, biodiesel, biomass methane, wave power, geothermal, and all the rest too. They’re all good ideas in theory — if they can stand up to free market pressures, all the best to them! But no damn subsidies!
Ask an engineer and ye shall receive:
http://www.aventinerei.com/pdfs/fuel_grade_spec.pdf
If the methanol doesn’t make you go blind, the corrosion inhibitors and gasoline added (min 2%) will get you but good.
Really. Don’t mess with it as drinkin’ likker. Get some copper pipe and build a still instead.
Oh, and if you want the deep and dirty info, you need to order your own copy of ASTM D4806:
http://www.astm.org/Standards/D4806.htm
It will tell you, literally, everything you never wanted to know about what is going into your gas tank with ethanol.
OK...so, denatured alcohol, wood alcohol, is naturally toxic... and you are saying that ethanol manufacturers add toxic compounds to fuel-grade ethanol so it cannot be utillized in the process of making distilled adult beverages.
We used to burn methanol in our 2-cycle go-cart engines in the 1960’s...sure did smell good.
Um, no it doesn’t. You’re operating off an analysis by Pimmental, which has been debunked forever. He includes the energy required to melt the steel to make the tractors and tillage implements in his energy balance spreadsheet, which is patently silly.
Ethanol’s energy balance depends mostly on whether the resulting distillers’ grains are dried, or used wet. When wet DG’s are used as cattle feed, the energy balance is actually pretty good.
Yes, same here.
People have burned surplus grain as fuel for a long, long time. Corn compares favorably with pellet wood stove fuel in terms of BTU/lb, and if you want you can burn corn directly in a stove. Many people in the midwest now have corn burning stoves.
The resulting cost of heating a house is a lot cheaper than propane or natural gas. You get about 7,000 BTU/lb of corn, and there are 56lbs in a test weight bushel of corn. Corn is running under $4.00/bushel.
That’s 7,000 BTU * 56 lbs/bu = 392,000 BTU for about $4.00. That’s pretty cheap, as alternative fuels go. You can do better right now with natural gas, IF you have it, and if your utility isn’t boosting the tariffed cost of NG too much above $5 to $6 per decatherm.
Many places in the rural midwest do not have natural gas service. They have to rely on propane, and propane prices shoot up in the winter. You can keep propane costs low if you have a big tank (like 2,000 gallons) and you fill up about now in the year.
And, I would add, if the price of corn had just been held constant for inflation since August of 1973 (when we left the gold standard and inflation started in the US in earnest), corn would be over $12/bu today.
It isn’t. Never has gotten close, either.
Don’t forget, get rid of the subsidies for High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS). Encourage the use of cane sugar over HFCS !
An obvious Commie plot! There has to be a way to get at the good stuff before they taint it...
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