Car walking with alcohol

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#21

The market is saturated. They can’t expand manufacturing. That is why everyone was pissed that Trump kept giving REC hardship exceptions to his buddies that had billion dollars in profits already. Last I knew from a couple of years ago ethanol was competitive with ~70/barrel oil. It makes more sense to use ethanol, keep corn prices slightly higher, and not import oil. West Texas Intermediate is currently at 72.

It really does help keep oil prices in check. EVs also keep oil prices in check. The market competition is good.

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#22

Trump really wasn’t the problem. It was Scott Pruitt the fourteenth Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Trump finally managed to force him to resign a few months ago. So now, about two years late, we are getting 15% ethanol fuel.
Rindert

#23

The wholesale price of fuel grade ethanol is $1.28 /gallon. Why are we, consumers, paying close to $3.00 /gallon for fuel?
Rindert
https://www.nasdaq.com/markets/ethanol.aspx

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#24

I didn’t realize ethanol was at a 10 year low. Usually distributors mix in whatever is cheapest for the 1% leeway. Some states don’t have oxygenate laws, so they can mix in 1-2% anyway and call it pure gasoline.

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#25

The whole system of production for ethanol is quickly becoming more efficient. Farmers are using new varieties of corn that are specially adapted for ethanol production, and getting higher yields. Ethanol production plants are using new strains of yeast that work faster, use a higher percentage of the available carbohyrate, and are more resistant to temperature shocks, pesticides and other snafus that are just going to happen in real life. The actual distilation equipment has become lower cost, easier to maintain and more energy efficient.
I get this from reading articles on this website over several years. http://www.biofuelsdigest.com/bdigest/
Rindert

#26

The gap to bridge is so huge, that I can only see optimism on this topic as unsupportable.

The IEA did a study regarding a European plan to replace 5% of their fuel needs with biofuel. They figured this would require 20% of European crop land. They were also factoring more efficient biodiesel.

The grain required to produce 25 gallons of ethanol would feed a person for a year.

40% of the US corn crop is devoted to ethanol production, offsetting maybe 10% of domestic gasoline consumption. This does not significantly offset total fuel consumption due to the significant use of diesel and jet fuel. Let alone the huge amounts of petroleum needed for chemical processes. 38.1 million of 391.5 million arable acres is currently devoted to corn production.

Far greater gains could be gotten by bringing in meaningful fuel economy / curb weight passenger vehicle standards. Years ago it was estimated that America would need no foreign oil if passenger vehicles made 35mpg average. That would be a reasonable, easy goal. Practically a gift to the American people, government, and the world.

The ethanol program could be called a “burning food program”. To understand why it occurs, agricultural subsidies, and corporate feedlot interests have to be taken into account. Given that it takes roughly 10 calories of fossil fuel energy to provide one calorie of human food through modern farming, it’s doubtful whether ethanol produces net energy at all. I have yet to see a corn farm run all on ethanol, a distillery run on alcohol, and the tanker truck system.

Sugar beet production would likely easily beat corn for ethanol, highlighting the perverse subsidy nature. No crop will significantly offset petroleum use without taking all the productive land, or even then.

But the most precarious effect has to be the promotion of global food scarcity. People without adequate food are apt to political instability. And the laws of the marketplace will not correct this, only public policy can. George Monbiot summed it up:

“The market responds to money, not need. People who own cars have more money than people at risk of starvation. In a contest between their demand for fuel and poor people’s demand for food, the car owners win every time.”

We already had a bout of this in 2008, when many poor populations suddenly found their take home pay wouldn’t feed their families, and then began overthrowing their governments.

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#27

The US has trade bans or restrictions against all of it’s cereal grain exports to 180 countries. Saying there is a global food issue might be true, but countries have banned it, limited imports and imposed high tariffs on it. It isn’t a US problem nor one that we should feel obligated to pay for which we were doing by buying grain at a subsidy price and then dumping it in countries with starving people who weren’t going to buy it because of trade limitations. We spent billions to feed the world, and the conservatives all complained about the billions in subsidies or fallowing programs. The side effect is it depressed the price of corn fields since you couldn’t make any money farming.

Since they bumped up the efficiency of ethanol production, it got cheaper and it is now slightly carbon negative. That isn’t even comparing it to the fuel that you are replacing.

The protein that is left from the ethanol manufacturing process is sold as a processed feed product that gets around the trade limitations. Most of the anti-ethanol group is from the EU, where their large farms are like 200 acres. They could eliminate their trade limitations.

The other issue in the US is that we were using MTBE which was produced in Qatar as a fuel additive (oxygenate). MTBE has environmental issues, but they also jacked around with the price of it, when oil prices dropped they jacked up the price of MTBE. Ethanol is very similar to MTBE in oxygenate function and energy density.

In otherwords, instead of costing the government for subsidies, and paying for an oxygenate, we actually make our own which costs us far less money.

Beet sugar is subsidized in the US. You can’t produce it cheap enough to compete with cane sugar. I like the taste of it better as well but it helps keep sugar producers in business.

The real wild card in ethanol is cellulosic ethanol, which if they can chase the price down, we don’t have to use good farmland, it can be grown on marginal farmland.

The fuel standards were set exceptionally high to reduce oil imports, and that is why we restarted the vehicle electrification program.

It creates competition to the oil industry they can’t really stop. E85 is sold at 1% of the gas stations in the US as it is blocked by distributors who won’t distribute it and offer discounts for being the sole supplier. If it was offered at all gas stations, it would be a far more viable solution. We already have an electric infrastructure, so piggybacking vehicles on it, isn’t that big of a deal. The secondary reason for vehicle electrification is we needed to lower the price of battery manufacturing for grid/home storage as well as mobile electronic needs. The industry hadn’t developed much in the last 30 years on it’s own.

I do agree, that ethanol especially from corn won’t solve the oil problem but it does put a dent in it, and it actually us costs less money, but that isn’t true globally.

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#28

Actually it seems the figures on beet sugar put it ahead of any other source, which is why there has been a dramatic expansion in beet acres in the US. Manitoba used to have a vibrant sugar industry, apparently producing the cheapest sugar in the world, without subsidy. The industry is completely gone now, a victim of political pressure, and US and Brazilian subsidies. Their equipment was sold cheap into the US.

I question the 180 country trade barrier figure. There are many countries around the world that will not have their territories contaminated with genetically modified crops, or accept dairy products laced with bovine growth hormone, or accepting of corporate inspection and quality assurance.

The oxygenate claim makes sense, but the percentage needed in that role is likely small. But as an emissions reduction strategy, I will take industry claims with a big grain of salt.

I do not claim to know the US ag system, but it seems to any causal observer there are huge subsidies at all levels of production, loan schemes, tax concessions, many kinds of support, and I expect that extends to the ethanol industry also.

Many countries have also felt it a priority to maintain protected markets for their local farmers, as they knew that head on competition with subsidized super power agriculture would wipe them out in short order. Mexico bowed to this pressure, even rewriting the constitition to privatize all the “Ejido”, community owned lease land. And opened the floodgates to subsidized corn and beans. The net effect was 5 million acreage lease farmers, and their dependants pushed into cities. At least before though poor, they always ate.

So really, in some cases, higher food prices is a road to greater local food security. Also because extensive farmers tend to farm for export, so if that means canola, flax, coffee or cotton, that is not human food, that will be the priority.

I addressed cellulosic ethanol a while ago. If all the crop residue of western Canada was efficiently processed, it would offset 10% of the nation’s fuel needs. You can’t process half that much and maintain healthy soil, and besides it’s not a practical proposition, but if lucky it might produce enough fuel to farm the same land.

Price and cost can get very tricky in subsidized environments. I would say price isn’t a good measure of efficiency in such an environment. What I would like to see is calories in to a system, compared to calories out. And considering that about half of petroleum energy is spent before reaching the tank, and nitrogen fertilizer consumes a massive amount of natural gas, etc, etc.

Avoiding the 10 calories in, to one out isn’t a fact to ignore. Let’s say the food processing and distribution, plus end waste amounts for half. So we are only 5 times deeper in the hole, but then ferment, distill, and distribute. When I see a distillery so productive that they fire their boilers on ethanol, then I will believe it. They fire their boilers on subsidies.

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#29

I don’t know. I know the US sugar industry got wiped by the caribbean islands way back in the '50s so we put tariffs on it. There was a resurgence in the US for ethanol production specifically in the Dakota’s. But I don’t know if that ended up to be cheaper then corn or not.

It is protectionist and has existed for decades, long before GMA’s or growth hormones existed, or were widespread in use. Most of the information was to support higher tariffs to protect local farmers.

It is about 10% the same as MTBE.

Most of it revolves around price support to keep farmers in profitable. Without those measures in place, a bumper crop drops the price to zero and send farmers bankrupt. The subsidies were essentially moved from paying a minimum price then the government had to either literally dump it in the garbage to take it off the market, or spend 3x as much to ship it somewhere where it wouldn’t affect the market. The price support subsidies were moved to biofuels, which creates a market for the products as well as expands the market. There is another program that pays a farmer not to grow crops on their fields. The only two other major programs are low-interest loans for buying property, and crop insurance which was expanded to include more then just corn, wheat, soys and potatos.

Correct. You want to maintain healthy soil. I think you can take like 1/2 of it safely and maintain the soil. However, I was actually referencing marginal soil, that you can’t grow food crops on. Switchgrass is drought resistant, and a perennial that can grow on that land, and it grows fast.

Some of them fire on subsidized NG. Some of them can fire on crop residue as well. The oil industry is subsidized pretty heavily so until you remove those subsidies, you can’t compete fairly. It is partly how they were blocking any alternative fuel vehicles.

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#30

I thank the participants of this chapter on alcohol as fuel, the exchange of points of view cordial, where I discover many facets of the issue that it raises production, thank you again for his comments and I invite you to further develop.

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