The folly of E15 anti-hydrocarbon policie
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EPA’s E-15 ethanol plan is bad for our pocketbooks, environment and energy policy
Guest post by Paul Driessen
The Obama Administration’s anti-hydrocarbon ideology and “renewable” energy mythology continues to subsidize crony capitalists and the politicians they help keep in office – on the backs of American taxpayers, ratepayers and motorists. The latest chapter in the sorry ethanol saga is a perfect example.
Bowing to pressure from ADM, Cargill, Growth Energy and other Big Ethanol lobbyists, Lisa Jackson’s Environmental Protection Agency has decided to allow ethanol manufacturers to register as suppliers of E15 gasoline. E15 contains 15% ethanol, rather than currently mandated 10% blends.
The next lobbying effort will focus on getting E15 registered as a fuel in individual states and persuading oil companies to offer it at service stations. But according to the Associated Press and Washington Post, Team Obama already plans to provide taxpayer-financed grants, loans and loan guarantees to “help station owners install 10,000 blender pumps over the next five years” and promote the use of biofuels.
Pummeled by Obama policies that have helped send regular gasoline prices skyrocketing from $1.85 a gallon when he took office to $4.00 today – many motorists will welcome any perceived “bargain gas.” E15 will likely reduce their obvious pump pain by several cents a gallon, thus persuading people to fill up their cars, trucks and maybe even boats, lawnmowers and other equipment with the new blends.
That would be a huge mistake.
E15 gasoline will be cheaper because we already paid for it with decades of taxpayer subsidies that the Congressional Budget Office says cost taxpayers $1.78 every time a gallon of ethanol replaced a gallon of gasoline. Ethanol blends get fewer miles per tank than gasoline. More ethanol means even worse mileage. People may save at the pump, but cost per mile will increase, as will car maintenance and repair costs.
Ethanol collects water, which can cause engine stalls. It corrodes plastic, rubber and soft metal parts. Pre-2001 car engines, parts and systems may not be able to handle E15, which could also increase emissions and adversely affect engine, fuel pump and sensor durability. Older cars and motorcycles mistakenly (or for price or convenience) fueled with E15 could conk out on congested highways or in the middle of nowhere, boat engines could die miles from land or in the face of a thunderstorm, and snowmobiles could sputter to a stop in a frigid wilderness.
Homeowners and yard care professionals have voiced concerns that E15’s corrosive qualities could damage their gasoline-powered equipment. Because it burns hotter than gasoline, high ethanol gasoline engines could burn users or cause lawnmowers, chainsaws, trimmers, blowers and other outdoor power equipment to start inadvertently or catch fire, they worry.
As several trade associations have noted in a lawsuit, the Clean Air Act says EPA may grant a waiver for a new fuel additive or fuel blend only if it has demonstrated that the new fuel will not damage the emissions control devices of “any” engine in the existing inventory. E15 has not yet met this requirement. EPA should not have moved forward on E15 and should not have ignored studies that indicate serious potential problems with this high-ethanol fuel blend.
Largely because of corn-based ethanol, US corn prices shot up from an annual average of $1.96 per bushel in 2005 to $6.01 in 2011. This year we will make ethanol from 5 billion bushels of corn grown on an area the size of Iowa. E15 fuels will worsen the problem, especially if corn crops fall below expectations.
Ethanol mandates mean more revenues and profits for corn growers and ethanol makers. However, skyrocketing corn prices mean beef, pork, poultry, egg and fish producers pay more for corn-based feed; grocery manufacturers pay more for corn, meat, fish and corn syrup; and families see prices soar for almost everything on their dinner table.
Farmers like pork producer Jim A were hammered hard. Over a 20-year period, Jim became a part owner in a Texas operation and planned to buy out the other shareholders. But when corn and ethanol subsidies went into effect, the cost of feed corn shot from $2.80 per bushel in 2005 to “over $7.00” a bushel in 2008. “We went from treading water and making payments, to losing $100,000 a month,” he told me.
His farm was threatened with foreclosure and the ominous prospect of having to make up the difference in a short sale. After “never missing a single payment to anybody” in his life, he almost lost everything. Fortunately, at the eleventh hour, a large pork producer leased the property, the bank refinanced his loans and Jim arranged a five-year lease. But thanks to ethanol he almost lost everything he’d ever worked for.
Even worse, the price of tortillas and tamales also skyrocketed, leaving countless poor Latin American families even more destitute. Soaring corn and wheat prices have also made it far harder for the USAID and World Food Organization to feed the world’s malnourished, destitute children.
Simply put, corn ethanol is wasteful and immoral. And yet E15 advocates want to go even further.
“For 40 years we have been addicted to foreign oil,” says Growth Energy CEO Tom Buis. “Our nation needs E15 to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, keep gas prices down at the pump, and end the extreme fluctuations in gas prices caused by our reliance on fuel from unstable parts of the world.”
That’s nonsense. America is blessed with centuries of untapped petroleum resources that antediluvian Deep Ecologists, ideology-driven politicians and EPA officials, and subsidy-obsessed renewable energy lobbyists seem intent on keeping locked up, regardless of the negative consequences.
These oil and gas deposits cannot be developed overnight. However, 40 years is not overnight. Yet that’s how long America has kept Alaska’s ANWR coastal plain, most of our Outer Continental Shelf, and most of our western states’ public lands and resources off limits to leasing, exploration and drilling.
If we had started the process twenty, ten or even five years ago, we’d have enough oil flowing to slash imports and cut world crude and US pump prices significantly. If President Obama had approved the Keystone XL pipeline, within two years over 800,000 barrels of Canadian, Montana and North Dakota crude would be flowing daily to Texas refineries – with similar effects on imports and prices.
Developing these resources would also generate hundreds of thousands of jobs – and billions of dollars in lease bonuses and rents, production royalties, and corporate and personal taxes.
America’s surging natural gas production has already driven that fuel’s price from $8 to barely $2.00 per thousand cubic feet (or million Btus). That alone will persuade auto makers to build nat-gas-powered cars and trucks (and consumers to buy them), without massive new subsidy programs as advocated by T. Boone Pickens and assorted politicians. Natural gas can even be converted into ethanol (and diesel).
It will happen, unless Congress interferes – or EPA tries to regulate horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) into oblivion, and send natural gas prices back into the stratosphere.
Right now, we are burning our own – and the world’s – food, to fuel cars and trucks. And to grow corn, convert it into 14 billion gallons of ethanol, and ship it by truck or train, we are consuming one-third of America’s entire corn crop – and using millions of pounds of insecticides, billions of pounds of fertilizer, vast amounts of energy (all petroleum-based), and trillions of gallons of water.
Just imagine how those numbers will soar, if E15 is adopted nationwide – or if Big Ethanol’s big dream becomes reality, and motorists begin to burn “cheap” corn-based E85 in flex-fuel vehicles.
Will President Obama, Democrats and extreme environmentalists ever end their hatred of hydrocarbons, and their obsession with biofuels – and start embracing reliable, affordable energy that actually works?
__________
Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.cfact.org) and Congress of Racial Equality, and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power – Black death.
Related articles
- U.S. approves 20 firms to make ethanol for E15 (reuters.com)
- EPA moves closer to approval of 15 pct ethanol gas (kansascity.com)
- EPA gives E15 go-ahead despite objections, approves production applications (green.autoblog.com)
Well, there goes my food costs again. Of course food and ‘energy’ are not part of the CPI, and for very good (and obvious) reasons. Good, at least in the government’s view that is.
We have the most stupid government of all time. It is official.
It never ceases to amaze me that whatever the green lobby is in favor of is exactly 180 degrees off the right course of action to take. You have to give it to them if only for absolute consistency. Simple sounding solutions to complex issues have great appeal to Populists and they are always wrong.
I for one will avoid this like the plague. It cost $500 to repair our lawnmower (multiple trips to the repair shop and its a commercial grade mower) due to gasoline with 10% ethanol fouling the carburetor. Also, maybe some 2001 and forward cars can handle 15%, but some, like mine, are rated only for 10%. After the lawnmower experience, I will steer clear of this.
I don’t say it often enough, but thank you Anthony for all you do. You are my go-to website for all kinds of info and I learn something new everyday.
Not good – my 2011 vehicle warns specifically not to use greater than 10% ethanol fuel.
From the manual:
Gasoline containing alcohol and methanol Gasohol, a mixture of gasoline and ethanol (also known as grain alcohol), and gasoline or gasohol containing methanol (also known as wood alcohol) are being marketed along with or instead of leaded or unleaded gasoline. Do not use gasohol containing more than 10% ethanol, and do not use gasoline or gasohol containing any methanol. Either of these fuels may cause drivability problems and damage to the fuel system.
Discontinue using gasohol of any kind if drivability problems occur.
Vehicle damage or drivability problems may not be covered by the manufacturer’s warranty if they result from the use of:
1. Gasohol containing more than 10% ethanol.
2. Gasoline or gasohol containing methanol.
3. Leaded fuel or leaded gasohol
Wonder where that “2001” date in the warning comes from?
This has some relationship to the Tip I posted about the draft National Sustainable Agriculture Standard. http://www.sustainableagstandard.org/ . Just a quick glance thru this will show that it is a strait jacket for farmers and others in the food chain. Obama made it known that he would push his agenda thru regulatory measures, and he wasn’t kidding.
Stupidty at its finest…
The Obama EPA is going to burn up older cars and kill them on pourpose.. one more move to kill the ability of normal people to survie and be far from the cities. this will force most ameroicans into cites where they will not need personal transportation..
one more noch in the UN Agenda 21 process…
About half of the united States is private land. Even though the Administration restricts
the use of its half, the private sector can get us to 100%, or even to the point of exporting
crude oil, by say 2020. This is because of horizontal drilling and fracking, now really moving
in areas of oil-enriched shale. You know the story on natural gas, the same story. We are
about to export LNG, liquified natural gas. The same story, but 5-7 years earlier.
Oh sure, the EPA needs a LOT of pressure to implement crap like this. /sarc
And it’s not crony capitalism, it’s just plain cronyism. Never ceases to amaze me that capitalism is constantly blamed for policies and programs that are not capitalism. Oh well, that’s what leftist POS do.
E15 should be good for the economy, well good if you manufacture gasoline powered outdoor equipment to replace all of the equipment that will barely run on the new fuel
The idea that you will be sold a “mystery mix” with an unknown (“up to x%”!!) dilution of gasoline with alcohol is astonishing. How about milk with “somewhere between 0 and 3.5% MF?
Why even bother to check the accuracy of the pump volume in this case.
Paul, two missing points…
…when energy prices go up…everything goes up, including rent
Corn for ethanol does not even have the restrictions as feed corn, much less corn for human consumption….that means more pesticides, more fertilizer, more heribcides, and more water…corn is a high water demand crop
While finishing Don’t Sell Your Coat, I worked at a rowing center in Austin. For the record, I taught private rowing lessons, coached high school rowers, started a stand-up paddleboard program, and was one of several managers that ran the place. Keeping our fleet of coaches’ launches functioning was a sometimes monumental challenge, simply because of the water entering the fuel system due to ethanol. There’s nothing like pulling an outboard cord 70 or 100 times on the river during a windy afternoon to make one loathe ethanol. Additives help, but they’re a fair-sized pain.
Besides being a boondoggle based on bad science, one that enriches a few at the expense of the many, E15 will continue to erode the ability of water sport professionals at marinas, rowing centers like the one where I worked, camps and other locations go completely berserk with frustration. (Along with all the users of motors on dry land whose lives will needlessly be made more difficult.) Apart from that, it’s awesome.
VACornell says:
“…the private sector can get us to 100%, or even to the point of exporting crude oil, by say 2020. This is because of horizontal drilling and fracking, now really moving in areas of oil-enriched shale. You know the story on natural gas, the same story. We are about to export LNG, liquified natural gas. The same story, but 5-7 years earlier.”
Obama just signed an Executive Order [which bypasses Congress] mandating a committee to “study” fracking. There is absolutely no doubt that his new committee will move to restrict horizontal drilling. Every action taken by this president is intended to make the U.S. more dependent on foreign oil, and cause the price of energy, as Obama promises, to “necessarily skyrocket”.
Horizontal drilling causes no environmental problems. The shale deposits are far below the water table, and new regulations requiring concrete seals virtually eliminate the possibility of gas leakage.
Remember that gasoline was $1.87 nationally the day Obama took office. There is no reason other than eco-politics that it cannot return to that price level. We have an upcoming election that will offer a stark contrast between the eco-lunacy of this administration, and having grown-ups run things for a change.
ONE single tank of E-85 a year ago cost me an entire replacement of a fuel system in my classic ’78 Ski Nautique to the tune of 3 grand!!!!! grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.!!! Let’s double down and go for the rest of the motor next!!!!
ps and a $800 4 barrel carburetor!
Did they not confirm mad cow in California?
Actually I like E10 in the winter time and sometimes go out of my way to buy it. During the winter the highs where I live are sometimes below -20C and the alcohol in the fuel keeps the fuel lines and the carb from freezing up.
Putting a good quality gas preservative into fuel for lawn equipment etc helps to prevent the seals in the carb etc from being eaten away. My lawn tractor was purchased new in about 2006 and needed a new carb the next year, just after the warranty expired, needless to say I was not very happy. Since then I have not had a problem.
DaveW
That should read “E15 will continue to erode the ability of water sport professionals at marinas, rowing centers like the one where I worked, camps and other locations to do their jobs. It will also lead many of them to go completely berserk with frustration.”
http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/speech-on-peak-oil-and-us-energy-policy.html?m=0
This discusses why the US must not use up domestic petroleum resources. Scroll down to “Energy Policy”, approximately mid-way through the article.
Roger Sowell
Hmm… how about that.
For the sake of argument, based on the 12 mo smoothed vehicle miles traveled data from RITA, August 2011 saw about 245,208,159,175 miles traveled in the US.
Again, for the sake of argument, lets say that those vehicles average 25 mpg. At the US average tax rate of 48.5 cents per gallon, Federal State and Local governments collected about $4,757,038,288. Provided it was pure gasoline.
At a thermal efficiency of 96.6%, E10 requires us to burn an additional 343,046,398 gallons of fuel, for an additional tax revenue of $166,377,502. Effectively at 24.16 mpg.
With E15, the increase in tax revenue is $96,748,345 over the E10, bringing the subsidized fuel boondoggle to $263,125,848 in taxes over regular gas. With that 25 mpg now only about 23.7 mpg.
… yeah. Clean air my ass.
why couldn’t they come up with a replacement for MTBE?
“Even worse, the price of tortillas and tamales also skyrocketed, leaving countless poor Latin American families even more destitute”
The environmentalists could not be happier—starving to death is soooo natural. We were on the road to having no starvation on Earth, except in evil dictatorship countries, until ethanol raised the cost of all food stuffs, particularly corn, which put pressure on rice and grains prices.
Let’s see. Who supports this? Oh, our Undocumented Worker-in-Chief!
Perhaps this is a backward step to kick starting the economy, a massive repair bill to every company, man and woman who owns a car, truck or gas engine whatever.It’s time to upgrade my automotive skill’s for the next big thing. Obuma you a genius– NOT!
Burn whiskey, not dinosaurs!
Reblogged this on TaJnB | TheAverageJoeNewsBlogg.
This should prove once and for all that there is no such animal as an energy policy in this country. There is only energy politics and an assortment of pretend half-hearted mandates, grants, and subsidy deals. Standing back and looking at the big mess shows that we are diverting motor fuel dollars to fund the urban planner political ecosystem and high speed rail. Renewable energy grants and loans were going far and wide without thought to the viable low cost leaders and their business plans. CNG-fueled vehicles coming new off the assembly line would make sense for individual cost minimizing decisions by consumers and small business but we have DOE and White House tactics of looking busy and sound bites instead of anything approaching strategy and least cost, least emission paths. You can tell Obama is just playing stand off games with various interest groups on nuclear, CNG, energy independence proponents, and many others. That in itself is another sign of energy political gamesmanship in place of policy. Looking through their distorted eyes at the White House, there are only large organized voter blocks in place of science, rationality, or least cost decision making by households and business sectors. That is a huge difference in perspective and helps explain outcomes for the mish mash of taxpayer-funded programs and mandates on consumers.
Man!
Am I ever glad I converted to a flex-fuel diesel (yes, it will burn and has burned veggie-oil without modifications) mechanical-injection vehicle back in 2010. Mercedes Benz probably never envisioned there product running on veggie oil back in 1981, but I assure you they will.
The mower is electric; just make sure to NEVER blow the breaker (to the outlet) while the motor is under full load though (the full-wave diode bridge rectifier will __not__ withstand the ‘spike’ from the ‘load dump’ output from the motor as the magnetic field in the rotor collapses in that condition … ask me how I know first-hand about this!)
Now, the weed-eater, she’s still gasoline powered, but, I have seen advertised pre-mixed (oil and gas at the proper ratio) non-alcohol-containing weed-eater ‘fuel’ available for her …
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Please, can we get a Cliff’s Notes version (think: Willis E.-type elevator speech)?
BTW, given what we now envision to hold in the ground, this is policy can and is doing more harm than good economically. For a modern civilization, energy is the ‘key’ to moving forward, to making ‘progress’ as the archaic saying would go.
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While using corn to make ethanol or ethanol to fuel machines is stupid, the whole corn-ageddon argument seem weak to me. The fact that food price crises always hit when oil prices are high seems far easier to explain by the fact that oil is used to harvest, refine, prepare and transport food. Wheat and rice and barley rise too. And since global pork production is continuing to expand it might be a tad unfair for pork producers to blame all their problems on ethanol.
Drop the fuel mandates, yes, and drop fines against foreign ethanol and let the bio-ethanol/biomass industries transfer to smarter sources and to more lucrative markets like replacing petrochemicals as sources for expensive chemical feedstocks. Then use the fossil fuels *as* fuels. We don’t need to throw out an industry just because government is interfering with it and we don’t need to give it sole blame it for problems which it has little impact on compared to other players.
For many years, various studies of the economics and efficiency of ethanol production have indicated it takes more than 1 gallon of gasoline to produce 1.5 gallons of ethanol from corn. The 1.5 gallons of ethanol is the energy equivlentof 1 gallon of gasoline. If these conclusions are still valid today, it means ethanol production doesn’t save us anything interms of foreign oil consumption. In fact, it costs us more, or at least fails to save us much at all.
http://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Biofuels/U.S.-Ethanol-Policy-Contradicting-Every-Principle-of-Sound-Economics.html
Other problems with biofuels (2006 paper).
http://www.pnas.org/content/103/30/11206.abstract
Opportunity cost in land use.
http://gas2.org/2012/03/19/food-as-fuel-by-the-numbers/
Brazil’s production of ethanol works because sugarcane ethanol is more efficiently produced.
http://www.economist.com/node/21542431
Switch grass may be an alternative.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=grass-makes-better-ethanol-than-corn
Butanol may be a better alternative, but it has problems too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biobutanol
Oregon State analysis of biofuel economics
http://arec.oregonstate.edu/sites/default/files/faculty/perry/qadocument5.pdf
From the other side, their counter-argument.
http://www.ethanol.org/pdf/contentmgmt/Issue_Brief_Ethanols_Energy_Balance.pdf
It seems to me because we can’t grow enough corn to replace gasoline, and because it makes food more expensive, we need to abandon the corn ethanol experiment, except as it has been practiced in Kentucky.
http://www.knobcreek.com/lpa
As GeoLurking pointed out above, this is a double whammy, because the more alcohol in it, the more gallons I have to buy. My 2001 Jeep Cherokee gets 4 or 5 miles fewer per gallon when using gas with ethanol in it. I first discovered that by accident when gassing up part of the time with premium at a little mom & pop station. When we go to Oklahoma these days, I try to be as empty as possible on crossing the border so I can fill up with fine pure gasoline. Wish there were some place closer, I would drive farther to get alcohol-free gas.
Never should have banned MTBE, the best fuel additive that man could invent. Further, it is made from methanol and butane, two sources that come from gas, not oil (methane to methanol, and butane from natural gas liquids).
I drove a Z-4 for a few years and when they banned MTBE and was forced to use an ethanol blend I definitely noticed a drop in fuel mileage
In Australia we have 95 octane 5% Ethanol and 98 octane 10% (E5 and E10 respectively). Standard unleaded at 91 octane and the E5 run almost the same, but since the octane is higher in E5, I can advance the timing a bit to offset any reduced horsepower. But E10 – in every single motor I’ve run it gets roughly 10% REDUCED mileage – regardless the bullsh*t they advertise for 98 octane “fuels”, such as cleaner, more power etc. Note this also goes for 98 octane fuels WITHOUT ethanol. Notably, none of my motors were specially configured for higher octane.
I could only imagine the disadvantage of E15 if I ever saw it. There are lots of “octane boosters” on the performance market misleading people. Don’t people understand that higher octane fuels burn slower and create less power for the same engine? This is why LPG at around 110 octane gets low performance. The only reason light aircraft avgas is 130 octane is to reduce the possibility of freezing at altitude (I think- correct me if I’m wrong).
As we can see though, ethanol and its subsidies, is better saved for the bar..
To Tom Rude,
I think she was just visiting California to push E15.
Boy….do the folks who posted above need an education.
1. Ever heard of DDG’s? DDG is the by product of corn distilation. IT is a MUCH better feed than corn. The conversion factor, which means weight gain when fed, is higher.
2. The price of corn and the price of groceries. Ahem…..that corn flakes box has a whole 4.7 cents……..yes cents of corn in it. You could double the price of corn and that box would contain a whole 10 cents worth of corn. Did you know that the BOX costs more than the corn IN the box?
3. Ethanol. IF you live in a northern climate, you will love ethanol. NO more calls from the wife that the car froze up.
4. I have used ethanol for 20 years. I have never had an engine failure in those 20 years. IN fact, I never had fuel injector problems as the ethanol keeps them clean.
5. Please do research. It costs over 5.00 to raise a bushel of corn. Thank goodness for the ehtanol market. IF we didn’t have one, we would have unemplyment running over 10% in the USA for starters. And I guarantee you your food would be a WHOLE lot more expensive. $3.00 corn means no more farmers. The few that would survive would be CERTAIN to make a profit.
I won’t even get into how much per gallon it saves and the effect it has on average retail prices of gasoline.
Why do you think gas is cheaper now than diesel? Even tho diesel is cheaper to make??????
Folks…….please read.
Disclaimer. I am a farmer, but I no longer grow corn. I grew corn for 30 years, and the current price structure is not profitable over time.
Also….a quick question. Since when has wheat been made into ethanol? The op-ed writer somehow got that product in there as well.
OH ya…..I also drive my vehicles till the engine stops. 300,000 miles plus on the last 3.
Tell me again how I am suppose to be having so much trouble???????
How the hell else can they get farmers to vote for them. It is crass politics and absolutely nothing else.
I drive a 2001 Jeep. It isn’t supposed to burn ethanol. Same with the newer ones.
Corn-to-ethanol refineries should be required to burn their product to produce all their energy requirements: electricity, steam, heat, and all transportation for corn and the ethanol. At the farm, also.
Then they can sell what’s left over. (there won’t be any to sell)
Oil refineries have no problem doing this and did so for decades.
@_Jim: sorry, I’m on a smart phone so am asking you to take the time to read the one paragraph identified above. The shortest version is our domestic oil is a strategic resource. It is unwise to waste it.
“rammed through” instead of “rammed though” ?
EPA mandated low-sulfur requirements for diesel as a motor fuel?
The increased cost happened just a year or two back due to new requirements:
http://www.epa.gov/otaq/fuels/dieselfuels/index.htm
http://www.clean-diesel.org/highway.html
“All highway diesel must be ULSD 12/01/10”
Sulfur was reduced from 500 ppm to about 15 parts per million (ppm).
Yes, indeed, please ‘read’.
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EPA should not have moved forward on E15 and should not have ignored studies that indicate serious potential problems with this high-ethanol fuel blend.
Never make the assumption that the EPA is anything other than a revenue gathering machine. I dealt with EPA and DEP bureaucrats for five years, and the only connection any of them had with “science” was the Batchelor of Science header on their Business Administration diplomas.
I’m having trouble with this one … it looks like a variation of the “Broken Window Fallacy” in the way of paying subsidies and redirecting resources (which might otherwise be used for growing foodstuffs, and this includes fuel and fertilizer required for the ‘fuel’ crop) under direction/force of arbitrary law e.g. gasohol fuel mandates (but I can’t be sure, it’s late and I’m tired).
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My apologies.
I was so incensed at the blatant screwing of the US economy, that I misspoke.
I stated:
“…With E15, the increase in tax revenue is $96,748,345 over the E10, bringing the subsidized fuel boondoggle to $263,125,848 in taxes over regular gas. With that 25 mpg now only about 23.7 mpg.…”
This is accurate… what I left off was that using those numbers, the total revenue from gas taxes will climb to $5,020,164,136 for Federal State and Local government, as opposed to the $4,923,415,790 that is currently collected.
per month
Farm subsidies combined with the EPA. What could possibly go wrong?
Conoco service stations do not sell fuel with Ethanol in it.That is why I now avoid all stations that is not a Conoco station.
So, just because it hasn’t happened to you, that means it never happens?
I’ve burned up two 2-cycle motors using the mandated ethanol blend gas. One was a 200 horsepower boat engine. The cost to rebuild was greater than the total value of the boat. I had to sell it for parts
I’ve rebuilt both of my chainsaws several times and I’ve had to put in new gaskets into the carb each year… That is, till I found out 3 years ago that I couldn’t use ethanol blend gas in them. I only rebuilt my weedwacker twice, but then I’m not real thrilled about wacking weeds.
You tell us that it’s great to use ethanol blend gas in the winter? Ethanol absorbs moisture right from the air. When it absorbs enough water it separates out from the gasoline and sits underneath the gasoline. The colder the temperature, the easier hydrated ethanol will separate out. No engine likes to run on ethanol and water, well people might like to, but reciprocating engines don’t. Got any paper filters filtering your gas line? The alcohol water mix will swell the fibers and slow down your fuel flow, even if you manage to get real gas flowing again. If the temperature is cold enough, the ethanol water mix forms a slurry from the water freezing (very small ice crystals). The trouble is, the ice crystals can get filtered and clog the filter. http://bluewaterboatservices.com/ethanol.
Alcohol provides an octane boost to gasoline. When the alcohol phase separates out, the remaining gasoline does not have the octane rating your engine needs anymore. Keep running it and you’re looking at engine damage from the incorrect detonation of the gasoline (knocking).
A farmer for over 30 years huh? Every farmer I’ve known usually has their own gas storage tank installed so they can fill their equipment without dragging five gallon plastic tanks around. Ethanol blended gas, mostly because of it’s tendency to phase separate and otherwise oxidize has a very short shelf life. 90 days max. thirty years ago, you could order your storage tank filled and used that same gas all year. Not so with ethanol blends. http://www.fuel-testers.com/expiration_of_ethanol_gas.html.
From: http://www.extension.purdue.edu/extmedia/ID/ID-339.pdf. So yes, you will need more E10 gas to go the same distance as plain gas.
So what you’re saying is that you think it’s terrific that we pay more per gallon of gas and that we also pay taxes so that we can also pay the subsidies for using the ethanol.
My GMC truck manual (2000 Sierra) advises me to avoid ethanol blended gas if possible. If not possible than to make sure I never use gas with more than 10% alcohol. My current boat engine also advise me to never use gas with any alcohol in it. And as I found out, none of my yard equipment is supposed to use ethanol blended gas. If you’ve never had a problem, you really need to thank your supreme being for being so nice to you.
It hard to conclude other than these loons intend to destroy our existing system one piece at a time.
My emphasis added. Damn right! But that also means that we should use it, but just to use it wisely.
Even stations in areas ‘not in attainment’ (of EPA air quality requirements) where Reformulated Gasoline is mandated?
I would not at first blush think that was possible (like in the DFW area in Texas where we are ‘not in attainment’).
http://www.window.state.tx.us/specialrpt/energy/renewable/ethanol.php
What’s a few million acres of tropical forest lost and more than a few million of the world’s poorest living their short lives in hunger, when you are saving the planet.
And if you want to stop the pain at the pump, promote natural gas vehicles. NG price in the USA is about a quarter of petrol/diesel.
Thank you mr Driessen for a very informative aricle. I think you ar absoloutely right that it is a huge mistace to use corn for methanol production. But what about the claims that it should be possible to use straw and other non-food resources as source for methanol production?
Paul,
We need to tie all this insanity together. Ethanol production in 2011 consumed some 40 million acres using about 6 billion pounds of nitrogen fertilizer. This fertilizer runoffs into the Mississippi River according to EPA creating a New Jersey size dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. (since there is an awful lot of fish and shrimp in the dead zone they must be zombies) In EPA terms one Iowa size area of ethanol destined corn creates one NJ sized Gulf dead zone.
EPA to “save the Gulf” is considering regulations requiring drastic nitrogen reductions of 45% or higher for the entire Miss. River drainage Basin. EPA admits they have no idea how to achieve a 45% reduction without getting us off of meat and other high nitrogen food crops, passing on billions of costs to upgrade treatment plants and new emission controls on fossil fuel NOx.
EPA is similarly pushing smart growth in attempt to limit our sprawling development habits which to date have eaten up about 3% of the land in the US. EPA scolds us that the 66million acres we use for our homes and businesses is unsustainable. Yet they seem happy about ethanol consuming 40 million acres and no end to the growth in sight. We can expect to see ethanol consume more land than all our urban and suburban developed areas in a few years! Homes Bad- Ethanol Good.
So I guess we all have to live in high-rise housing so that EPA can direct more land towards ethanol production that raises the cost of fuel and food. The high costs of corn also will see land pulled out of CRP to produce more corn- hurting wildlife in the process. The large fertilizer needs for corn based ethanol increases the nitrogen loadings to surface waters which allows EPA to declare nitrogen TMDLs for all waters draining into the Gulf of Mexico- expanding its power exponentially. And we will have to listen to increasing calls to go meatless because the nitrogen signature is too high. That is if we have enough money to buy meat and pay for the treatment upgrades.
I have never seen a more fact-deficient illogical rant published on this site, nor such a series of comments in the same vein. Study some history and economics. If you want 1970’s prices on corn, sign up to accept 1970’s wages. If you like MTBE, move to a state that followed the oil companies lead and used it to meet the oxygenated fuels mandate to clean up the air, and now have MTBE in their water. The next time you swallow a line about alcohol damage to engines, ask why 99% don’t have a problem. If you think the U.S. should feed the world with cheap corn, why shouldn’t the Middle East be subsidizing them with cheap oil? If you think you know what’s in your gasoline, can you explain which of the 20+ grades of EPA-approved regular gas you are buying, according to the seasonal requirements in your area.
Ethanol-ers, is this correct?
The energy of ethanol relative to gasoline:
A. 76,000 = BTU of energy in a gallon of ethanol
B. 116,090 = BTU of energy in a gallon of gasoline
C. A / B = .655 ~ 2/3 GGE of energy in a gallon of ethanol. (GGE =Gallon Gas Equiv.)
D. B / A = 1.53 = Gallons of ethanol with the energy of 1 gallon of gasoline.
As this applies to mileage, Ethanol proponents may claim it doesn’t hurt mileage, but this has to go against physics. E85 MPG rating figures, with all other factors being equal (e.g. engine compression ratio), should achieve about 2/3 of the MPG rating for straight gasoline. This seems to be borne out looking at the EPA’s figures for the ethanol mileage tests as they show to be 2/3 of the MPG for gasoline only.
ref
.
It appears atheok answered Camburn quite effectively. I have been studying the ethanol debate for several years (and not just the talking points put out by the ethanol industry). Every point Camburn made was either incorrect, misleading or immaterial. Everybody knows that there’s only about a nickel’s worth of corn in a box of cornflakes. Most of the expense is transportation, processing raw corn into palatable ceral, packaging and marketing. The problem is the cost of feedstock to grow meat (the most efficient form of protein for human consumption).
A couple other quick points. The octane rating of a fuel is just an arbitrary measure to compare the fuel to the properties of pure octane (an eight carbon satuaruated hydrocarbon). Fuels with higher octane ratings don’t necessarily contain more energy. High octane fuels are necessary for high compression engines (general aviation engines are high compression). Burning high octane fuel in an engine not designed for it will not produce added performance and may even result in diminished performance.
Ethanol essentially replaced MTBE as an oxygenator in fuel. There was never really anything wrong with MTBE other than it stinks and tastes bad. It’s not particularly toxic. The fact that it ended up in some water tables is not the fault of the MTBE per se but rather old, leaking storage tanks. Most cars on the road today utilize electronic fuel injection. In these vehicles an oxygenator is not really even needed.
Everyone who feeds at the ethanol trough seems to loathe liberty and the free market. End the subsidies and the mandated use and let’s see if this, now mature, industry can survive. If it can’t survive without taxpayer money or government mandated demand, it is a non-viabale technology.
CO2…
Ethanol is has about 1/2 of the energy of octane… that is you need 2X as much ethanol to develop RPMs and Torque at the wheels of your vehicle.
Ignition and combustion control systems know this and accordingly will put more fuel through the combustion chamber to allow you to drive as if nothing has changed.
The trouble is you will require 7% more fuel to make up for 15% ethanol.
The CO2 production does not change since, any way you slice it, you need to produce enough CO2 and H2O for propulsion and it really doesn’t matter if come from propane, methane, octane or ethane.(ethanol).
The seeming advantage is the reduction is SOx and NOx which is ok with me. Just don’t tell me that CO2 production is reduced. That is neither true nor required, Furthermore, the EPA should get out of the CO2 business.
Never attribute to stupidity what is more parsimoniously explained by malice.
My what an interesting collection of misstatements, outright lies and outdated info presented as fact. You don’t suppose the author is trying to hype his books do you?
Yes ethanol absorbs water — just like the gasoline dryer you pay extra money for from the autoparts store to prevent gas line antifreeze. It absorbs water and carries it out of the fuel tank preventing rust. In modern sealed fuel systems ethanol cannot absorb significant amounts of moisture from the air, and it actually removes water from the fuel system.
Yes it corrodes some plastic, rubber and soft metal parts. Gasket materials and plastics that have not been used in properly designed fuel systems since the 1970’s.
The soft metal parts they are referring to are soft metals like zinc that have not been used in modern fuel systems for decades. Modern cars designed (and warranted to run on 10% ethanol) will have no problem with 15%. In fact most modern cars will run just fine on a 30% or higher blend of ethanol based on actual testing, not some based on the opinion of someone with an ax to grind. Ethanol actually cleans out the fuel system. Some modern cars actually get better fuel mileage on high ethanol fuel blends than they do on straight gasoline, and the certainly make more power.
What cause causes many of the problems mentioned above is the general level of ignorance about fuel ethanol. People are getting ripped off by auto garages who are either through ignorance of malicious intent hitting them with bogus repairs that are not needed. They are using ethanol as a handy scape goat for their screw ups and an excuse to sell parts.
The stalling and other problems mentioned are due to ethanol cleaning out all the crap left by straight gasoline due to the accumulation of tars and partially oxidized gasoline heavy ends. All you need to do is replace the clogged fuel filter and the problem goes away. The City of Denver went through this in the 1970’s when they first introduce ethanol added gasoline to the police car fleet. Replace all the fuel filters after they collected the crud from the gasoline and no more problems.
We have been driving on ethanol added gasoline here in Denver for decades ( required by law in 1988 to reduce emissions) Yes that’s right the ethanol reduced emissions rather that increasing them.In fact that is why it was mandated to meet EPA emissions requirements — specifically winter CO levels.
In fact one of the ways to get cars that have trouble passing the IM240 dyno emissions test here in Colorado to get a clean test is to add 2-3 gallons of E85 to the fuel tank. In many cases the added ethanol it improves combustion enough for the owner to avoid expensive repairs to get a clean emissions test.
In actual controlled tests, added ethanol caused very small changes in fuel mileage typically a only about 1.5% reduction in fuel mileage for E10 blends. In properly run tests it is hardly measurable.
http://www.cdphe.state.co.us/ap/down/oxyfuelstudy.pdf
They did it is called fuel ethanol, much less toxic, does the same job, easy to produce with existing infrastructure.
The assertions it might damage current cars is pure nonsense. In the 1970’s Brazil demonstrated that cars with unsophisticated fuel systems of the period could run on 22% ethanol blends with no problems. That is why they standardized on a low ethanol blend of about 20% (it varied over time) to allow older cars to run on the new ethanol blended fuel.
Modern cars with electronic engine management can adapt to much higher ethanol concentrations automatically with no harm to the engine or fuel system or emissions.
In much of the US we have been driving on ethanol added fuel for over 24 years (first mandated by law in 1988 here in Colorado in the winter pollution season.) It was voluntarily used even prior to that due to its lower cost per gallon, before the oil companies cornered the blending market.
I don’t like mandates any more than most of you do, in fact I would like to see the EPA get out of the way and let me put any fuel I wanted in my gas tank. If they did, I would use a blend of 60% fuel ethanol as that is usually the sweet spot where there is minimal fuel mileage loss and maximum gain in power and best cost of fuel per mile.
Don’t blame the “tax credits” they were phased out last year when the blenders tax credit was allowed to expire at the end of 2011.
Guess what high ethanol fuel blends are still cheaper than gasoline in spite of the elimination of that blenders credit. The suppliers are working a lot harder to make their price spread but is achievable with modern ethanol production methods.
At my local station that pumps E85, last week E85 was selling for $3.49 while regular gasoline was selling for $3.95. At that price spread they are just reaching the break even point where cost per mile is the same for both fuels. In the case of cars that require premium fuel the E85 is an outright steal, as it is a 112 octane fuel for less than the price of regular gas.
Yes some small engines had problems — but they were self inflicted wounds due to poor design and a failure of the manufacture to pull their head out of a dark place between their legs. Anyone with a brain would not have used incompatible gaskets and designs for small engines sold in a country where ethanol added fuel has been required by law in some locations for a generation. Small engines are very easily converted to run on ethanol added fuels with trivial changes in the fuel system. I know several folks that run them on E85 so E10 and E15 would be a no brainer for any competent engineer who was not trying to save a nickel on each engine sold or rip off his customers for expensive repair parts to fix a problem that never should have happened in the first place.
I have run 3 different cars on high ethanol blends, none of them were designed for E85 no changes in the fuel system or engine management or any kind. An 86 and 88 and 2000 model year car, and I know literally hundreds of other folks who have done exactly the same thing.
Don’t tell me what fuel to use in my car, just give me a blender pump and let me burn any mixture I want of ethanol and gasoline. In locations where blender pumps are available the most popular blend is 60% ethanol. Now why would that be if it was so destructive to older cars?
Why would a few gallons of E85 get a marginal car past a dyno emissions cycle if it increased emissions? Simple it does not increase emissions or degrade emissions equipment.
Larry
Ethanol attracts water? Then why is the water removal stuff you put in your tank 100% Ethanol? If you took a bottle of 190 proof alcohol and stuck it in a closet for five years, how much water would it attract? Seems to me that the real argument is that Ethanol burns hotter, is corrosive to parts and costs more. Not that it attracts water.
Not exactly addressing the points in the post as I’m in the UK and this is not directly an issue for us. Our farmers can’t afford to run any part of their agriculture business without subsidies so we are already paying taxes to keep the dairy, meat and cereal industries afloat. We don’t have the land to divert any of it to major biofuel production.
What does amuse me though is the recent trend for Americans to complain about their gas prices when they have had it so good for decades. Our gas prices have always, always increased at a similar rate for as long as I can remember and it has seemingly little to do with the price of world crude. Oh for sure when there is an oil scare and crude prices rise then the forecourts are quick to hike up the prices but sure as eggs is eggs, when the prices settle in the global market you can be damned sure the fuel price to the user never returns to it’s previous value.
Currently the average cost of a litre of fuel is £1.40. That’s £6.30 a gallon and at the current exchange rate that’s just a little over $10 a gallon of unleaded fuel at the pump. 63% of which is taxes (duty) to government revenue. Oh how I’d wish for your fuel woes. The last time we paid for gas what you are paying today was 15 years ago in 1997. I’d take your gas prices in a heartbeat even at today’s levels. Shame there’s not a bridge over the Atlantic, it might be worth driving over to fill up. /sarc
It’s killing heavy fuel users in industry such as the obvious, haulage, and as a result it directly affects the prices of just about every other commodity we consume in the UK.
It kind of makes me wish that ethanol or other biofuels were a credible alternative. (sadly not the case if only because it requires nearly 30% more energy to create than it produces at end product and any CO2 emission reduction is outweight by the CO2 released during the milling process ) Instead it’s another pie in the sky job creation scheme to placate the green vote.
One thing the greens might want to consider is the fact that more and more rainforest in Brazil and Asia is being cleared in order to grow food crops that the US is no longer exporting due to turning over so much land use to fuel crop in a grab for the subsidies. It’s not as sustainable as you might think.
Really sorry to hear of your surging gas (petrol) prices to over $4 a gallon. We’re at over $10 a gallon in the UK but think how green we are. Broke yes, but the green ness more than compensates and obviously our govt will use the tax raised very wisely on building thousands more ultra efficient wind turbines.
tonyb
Wish I lived some where that I could get E15. Sports cars love ethanol.
Yet another attack on ethanol riddled with half-truths, unsupported attacks and outright errors. It is at best a political rant, complete with the requisite tear-jerking foreclosure story, absent of all supporting facts or documentation and in my opinion has no place at a science and fact based site like WUWT.
If this was a AGW proponent writing this – a story with wild assertions wholly unsupported by facts – the author would be immediately and strongly taken to task.
LET ME SAY FIRST I AM A STRONG ADVOCATE OF DRILLING FOR AND USING OUR FOSSIL FUELS. I AM CURRENTLY RESEARCHING INVESTMENT IN PROJECTS IN THE BAKKEN OIL REGION.
That said renewable fuels – of all types – are an important part of our future.
As to the unsubstantiated claims:
1.) Older engines – It has been well known for many years that older cars, small engines and older boats are not appropriate users of ethanol based products. Not a thing has changed. Many older vehicles of all types have been running E10 for years with little negative long term effect, nor significant long term maintenance cost. I also find the claims that a 10% ethanol blend destroyed engines, carb’s etc specious. Ethanol CAN damage some, primarily fuel system, components – but they are things like filters, hoses, old fiberglass marine fuel tanks and some old plastic parts – almost always on OLD equipment and vehicles. The majority of the damage is, as several noted, corrected by the initial repairs, when upgrading to newer quality fuel system parts.
And most small engine manufacturers products over the last 5 years ARE fine running ethanol blends – one example: http://ethanol.husqvarna.com/ .
Husqvarna actually recommends using 89, not 87, octane E1o fuel in their equipment – proving false the authors heated rhetoric about “burning” and catching fire.
2.) Subsidies – The blenders credit subsidies were eliminated last year. The authors continued use of this red herring shows a complete abandonment of any attempt to provide factual, relevant, accurate information or insight. The OLD subsidies have NOTHING to do with TODAYS fuels – they no longer exist.
3.) Mileage – more claims that are all but false. Simple science shows the lie:
Straight gasoline = 114,000 btu/gal
Straight ethanol = 76,000 btu/gal
Straight ethanol (E100) has 33% less energy than straight gas
Those are the inflated numbers ethanol alarmists use – but we do not use straight gas or straight ethanol.
The science shows E10 has 110,000 btu/gal (114k*.9+76k*.1) and E15 has 108,300 btu/gal … E10 has just 3.3% less energy and E15 just 5% less energy than straight 100% gasoline.
Many people are extremely surprised to read fear-mongering claims about lower MPG etc, as in the story above, and then find out the difference in E10 is a paltry 3% lower mileage. Which is offset by as the author admits lower prices.
Well then – E85 must certainly be terrible then, being 85% ethanol?
Nope … E85 has 81,700 btu/gal – appx 28% less than 100% gas (and appx 25% less than E10).
I just paid $2.88 for E85 vs $3.68 for E10 – or appx. 21% less. Using straight science – the btu/gal difference – there is a 5% premium for me to use E85 – and that is with the 45 cent blender credit gone.
But in reality my 2003 Tahoe got 15.4 mpg on last tank E10, and 12.3 mpg on last tank E85 – I got 20.13% lower fuel economy but paid 20.82% less.
That ethanol costs more because of lower mileage is in reality largely a fallacy. Using ONLY the science of the energy differential, and not taking into account that many engines perform better than the base science – using ethanol blends uses a few percent more fuel to get the same energy as gas – but ethanol blends, as even the author notes cost less.
The remaining claims are equally misleading and in many cases outright false – as is the claim in a comment about Net Energy balance.
4.) Corn Yields – corn yield increases have made up much of the additional crop use of corn for ethanol – increasing from just over 100 bushels per acre in the early 1990’s to almost 150 bushels per acre today. Yields are predicted to reach 190 bushels per acre by 202 – a further 29% increase. http://www.farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2012/02/the_historic_pattern_of_us_cor.html
We have plenty of corn – over last several years the USDA and EIA reports show we met 100% of the domestic demand, exported all that others wanted and still had excess to add to the reserves.
5.) Poor pig farmer Jim – more untruths yet here. We used 5 billion bushels of corn to make 13.9 billion gallons of ethanol in 2011. As part of that process nearly 1/3 of the corn used was returned to the market in the form of high quality distillers dried grain animal feed – almost 40 million metric tons in total, along with nearly .1.5 billion pounds of corn oil.
Farmer Jim had far, far worse problems on his Texas pig farm than corn prices if he lost the farm.
5.) Subsidies and taxes – a comment makes note of the additional taxes raised on the increased fuel used with an ethanol blend. A whole whopping 3% – 5% more fuel depending on whether we use E10 or E15. But he also ignores that the higher corn prices received by the farmers for their crops has a large positive effect on other government farm subsidies – reducing the subsidy, insurance and other governmental crop protection costs significantly.
6.) Price/Cost – corn is a COMMODITY – it is subject to laws of supply and demand, but also to speculation. The positive side is that many farmers are finally able to make more consistent, modest profits. Having many farmer friends I challenge each person here to stand up and say these hard working people are not entitled to a decent living – which farming often does not provide.
As others have noted the cost of corn is a tiny fraction of the cost of products that use corn. Even with a box of Corn Flakes – the corn cost is little more than 1-2% of the retail price.
I largely agree with the last 8 paragraphs in the article – but by then they have little meaning after the unsupported and inaccurate attack prior.
Ethanol – especially corn ethanol – is only a PART of a renewable energy strategy. Renewable energy should – must – be in addition to a proper fossil fuel program.
Ethanol – including that from corn – is a stepping stone – a gateway to the future renewable fuels that we will eventually need.
It is neither immoral or wasteful – and those that try to make that claim as with this author – especially when they make inaccurate, misleading and wholly unsubstantiated claims – do far more damage than good.
In my personal opinion they are no better than the worst of the AGW alarmists – their actions are much the same.
Sorry – but yet another silly ethanol attack that ignores simple reality.
The ethanol antagonists pontificate on how terrible it is we are using food to make fuel. That we should be using good ‘ol corn to make tortillas and not fuel.
And then these same folks trot out the fertilizer, water etc etc attacks – that nasty ol ETHANOL corn is purely evil.
Just one little bitty problem. CORN IS CORN!
If you stop using corn for ethanol and use it instead as advocated by the alarmists for food – YOU ARE STILL GROWING THE SAME CORN on the SAME land using the SAME fertilizer, water etc.
I would also point out I largely agree with many, if not most of CFACT’s positions and mission statement.
Which I believe is all the more reason that inaccurate, unsubstantiated and often simply false rhetoric as written here is so wrong. It significantly damages other credible work they may be doing.
Ethanol is far from a perfect solution – but it IS a true renewable fuel that is available now. The increasing use of ethanol will see technology continue to improve, and will see the all important distribution system infrastructure built out.
Ethanol is NOT a mature product and certainly not a mature technology. Distribution is limited, and without a mature robust distriibution infrastructure its use and growth will be artificially limited.
Continuing in building out that infrastructure will provide the distribution (and demand) platform for enhanced and improved technologies down the road. Cellulosic ethanol for one, along with isobutanol which is currently showing good promise, with a recent study showing it has benefits of ethanol without many of the negatives. Some ethanol plants are already being converted now.
Little of this activity would be occurring if there was not a foreseeable real demand.
You think gas prices are high in the USA?
Try the UK. It is not $4/gallon (I wish it were!), it is $10/gallon.
Some 75% of this is tax. We have fuel tax on top of the base price, then another 20% “value Added tax” (VAT) on top of the new price (base price plus fuel tax).
In effect we are paying a tax on a tax!
Then the idiots in Government wonder why the economy is not recovering.
Brian H says:
April 24, 2012 at 11:45 pm
Never attribute to stupidity what is more parsimoniously explained by malice.
Far more appropriate than Hanlon’s original aphorism.
Camburn says:
April 24, 2012 at 7:53 pm
Thank goodness for the ehtanol market. IF we didn’t have one, we would have unemplyment running over 10% in the USA for starters.
For starters, the “official” smoke-and-mirrors unemployment rate may only be 8.2%, but the actual rate (the BLS U6 index) is 14.5%.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm
So, how’s that argument for the bennies of ethanol run again?
Here in Germany Gasoline is 1.70 Eur a liter at the moment; and E10 (90% gasoline, 10% ethanol) is 4 cents cheaper. So it’s still a rip-off: ethanol contains 30% less energy so the 10% mix contains 3% less energy a liter than pure gasoline; and should cost 1.7*3 = 5.1 cents less.
Well, it should cost even less still due to the possible problems with water accumulation, that could become a problem in winter. Maybe not such a grave problem but an aspect that reduces the competitiveness of the product so should result in less demand and lower price.
The oil companies count on people just going for the cheaper price per liter. The mainstream news don’t report about the energy content.
My car runs on it without problems, but I’m not happy with the price/performance ratio of the product.
Anyone else remember “gasahol” from the 70s? Didn’t work then, not going to work now.
Stop trading oil for food…
I wonder what ethanol tastes like I hope it is good for you because all the farms will be growing corn or suger cane for ethanol
Ya know, in thinking last night why Mr. Watts would let drivel like this be posted on his wonderful site, I have come to a conclusion. He allowed this op-ed to demonstrate what a non-fact based piece establishes. The author of this op-ed distorts facts, surely has no clue what he is writing about, yet his words see the light of day and are accepted by some.
Kudo’s to you Mr. Watts for doing this. You have demonstrated what is wrong with a lot of the op-ed pieces written to support the GAWG senerio. Outcomes based on falsified facts, solutions based on inuendo and all contradictory in themselves.
Thank you for demonstrating this.
In EPA terms one Iowa size area of ethanol destined corn creates one NJ sized Gulf dead zone.
First wunna youse guys dat sez dat’s an appropriate measurement fer a dead zone gets it inna kneecaps…
A. Scott says:
April 25, 2012 at 1:36 am
– I got 20.13% lower fuel economy but paid 20.82% less.
[ … ]
– using ethanol blends uses a few percent more fuel to get the same energy as gas.
If using E10 reduced your mileage to 80% of what you got using gasoline, then it appears that you used quite a bit more than “a few percent more fuel” to get the equivalent amount of energy.
Of course, that just may be my Scottish genes kicking in…
Excuse me, but according to Wikipedia ethanol contains only 61% of the energy of gasoline. The more ethanol you put into my fuel, the more watered down it becomes. It will effectively make a gallon of gas even more expensive because I will be buying fuel with fewer btu’s per gallon.
It also means that I will need to put the throttle down slightly further to maintain my speed while driving, thereby burning fuel slightly faster than if I were burning pure gasoline.
The oil companies are going to make more money per gallon with ethanol added than without. This should make them very happy.
I used to think the greenies hated oil companies, but now I think they maybe ‘paid by big oil’.
Read about ethanol here; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol
I have have successfully dealt with the small engine damage issue by putting shut off valves in the fuel lines and running the engines out of fuel after use. Storing them with empty carburetors. But inspect the fuel line and valve periodically and replace when necessary.
Ethanol is CHEAPER. Does this mean that fuel will be cheaper?. Not at all, that´s the “trick”, the same as “Hide the decline” ( in volume, as ethanol evaporates easily).
I see all the supporters of protectionist government welfare farming (corn ethanol) are out again. If their fuel was so superior it would never have needed the government mandates, subsidies and tariffs. Protectionist policies and government welfare checks are only needed for things that are NOT economically viable. Thankfully the worthless ethanol tax credit and tariff expired this year,
After Three Decades, Tax Credit for Ethanol Expires (The New York Times, January 1, 2012)
Now the mandate needs to be abolished. If E85 is such a superior fuel let the market decide.
Myth: Ethanol is Great (Video) (5min) (ABC News)
The Peer-Reviewed Literature is devastating to Ethanol Supporters:
Ethanol Fuels: Energy Balance, Economics, and Environmental Impacts Are Negative
(Natural Resources Research, Volume 12, Number 2, pp. 127-134, June 2003)
– David Pimentel
Ethanol Production Using Corn, Switchgrass, and Wood; Biodiesel Production Using Soybean and Sunflower
(Natural Resources Research, Volume 14, Number 1, pp. 65-76, March 2005)
– David Pimentel, Tad W. Patzek
Ethanol From Corn: Clean Renewable Fuel for the Future, or Drain on Our Resources and Pockets?
(Environment, Development and Sustainability, Volume 7, Number 3, pp. 319-336, September 2005)
– Tad W. Patzek et al.
A First-Law Thermodynamic Analysis of the Corn-Ethanol Cycle
(Natural Resources Research, Volume 15, Number 4, pp. 255-270, December 2006)
– Tad W. Patzek
E85 and fuel efficiency: An empirical analysis of 2007 EPA test data
(Energy Policy, Volume 36, Issue 3, pp. 1233-1235, March 2008)
– Matthew C. Roberts
Food Versus Biofuels: Environmental and Economic Costs
(Human Ecology, Volume 37, Number 1, pp. 1-12, February 2009)
– David Pimentel et al.
Effects of US Maize Ethanol on Global Land Use and Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Estimating Market-mediated Responses
(BioScience, Volume 60, Number 3, pp. 223-231, March 2010)
– Thomas W. Hertel et al.
Diversion, dodge, straw-man argument; no one is discussing ‘wasting it’ but rather using it …
In case you guys missed it (for all I know you may be liberal arts majors??):
a) car, trucks and buses are more fuel efficient than they have ever been (on account of computerization, better designs, better production methods using CNC et al of engines and powertrains),
b) we’re in the midst of an economic depression the likes of which we have certainly never seen nor seen in this country since the Great Depression; energy prices directly affect everything.
c) we have a real problem in being competitive in this world (producing and selling things), in part, because of the cost of raw material, processed materials (priced metals lately?) as well as finished goods; referring back to b) above this also relates to the cost of energy.
d) I repeat what I wrote in my first post on this subject (since I contend one of your basic assumptions is in gross error): … given what we now envision to hold in the ground, this is policy can and is doing more harm than good economically. For a modern civilization, energy is the ‘key’ to moving forward, to making ‘progress’ as the archaic saying would go.
.
Yes, Ethanol can damage engines,
Can E15 Gasoline Really Damage Your Engine? [Yes] (Popular Mechanics, December 21, 2010)
Ethanol Fact and Tip Sheet (PDF) (BoatUS Seaworthy Magazine)
Ethanol fires are also harder to put out,
Ethanol Fuels Fire Concerns (Fox News, February 26, 2008)
The Trouble With Ethanol (Industrial Fire World)
While I don’t envy you the repair costs, I’m certainly jealous of the boat. What a gorgeous craft, and nothing better for skiing. As aggravating as the repairs may be, it’s worth it for that boat.
Now get upset at the station or marina that sells the E85 without sufficient warning.
My simple little Coleman 1500 Watt generator doesn’t have an ‘Ignition and combustion control system’, instead I now have to partially set the choke to get the engine to run where it will accept full load without ‘surging and stumbling’, otherwise, it seems to run lean …
Something else the Ethanol-ers overlook: distribution facility ‘mixing’ accidents, where an incorrect amount of Ethanol (usually much higher concentrations doh!! of Ethanol are added to the base gasoline) before transport (and ‘splash’ mixing) by the truck to the retailer’s tank … this has resulted in a series of damaged customer’s cars.
An article looking back in history on this ‘tragedy’ appearing in Business Week awhile back:
Ethanol: A Tragedy in 3 Acts
by Ed Wallace
.
Whatever is not economically viable should not be produced and those who cannot compete should be unemployed. The companies that can produce something the market wants will stay around and prosper. It is absolutely illogical that when you free up all the farm land that is being used to grow “fuel” to now grow food will somehow make the cost of food more expensive. Farmers are not entitled to any price for what they produce beyond what the market decides. If you don’t like it don’t farm. The socialist farmers (CCF) moved to Canada in the 1930s please join them.
It doesn’t “save” anything. It makes gasoline more expensive otherwise there would not be a need for a mandate to force it to be blended and sold.
It has nothing to do with Ethanol.
Back in the middle of the twentieth century street hot rods often ran 100% alcohol. Converting to alky required and getting the anticipated performance boost meant a significant compression increase or supercharging to make use of the increased octane. The primary requirement was to drill out the jets on your three Stromberg carburetors to greatly increase fuel flow. Mileage was horrible, but performance was outstanding. This did not catch on with the general motoring public.
I have noted the label on my two cycle snowblower that warns “Do not use fuels with more than 10% ethanol”. Toro probably had a reason for this guidance. I believe the best environmentalism is to maintain existing devices and inferstructure and not waste the resources required to replace what works until it is no longer repairable. The idea that we should scrap all our older cars, snowblowers, boats, etc. is the fantasy world of those that can afford to turn “durable goods” into “consumables”.
Is this a good example of self-immolation or what? Please, do not ask for a medal (or any other avenue of commendation) for such brave acts; we see this as some sort of ‘European centric’ dementia and we have our own cases to deal with (based primarily in Washington, DC as well as other (usually) urban centers of progressivism).
In any case, it is not our (the US’s) fault; suggest you pay closer attention at election time, or invoke our solution (we had a ‘War of Independence’ once upon a time as a certain King George the 3rd sought taxation at/under unendurable circumstances).
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Oxygenated fuels were originally mandated as a means of reducing CO and HC emissions from carbureted engines. These were phased out by the early 1980’s. Cars with feedback emissions control systems overcame the issues with “running rich”, which was just an issue of tuning the car properly versus changing the fuel carbon and energy content with an oxygenated fuel.
The advent of effective catalytic converters further reduced the impact of oxygenates on emissions. There were no changes in emissions for 100% hydrocarbon fuels or oxygenated fuels. This statement is based on work done by the excellent scientists at UC Riverside in their CE-CERT lab. Modern cars no longer need oxygenated fuel, but it is still mandated.
Originally, oxygenated fuel was made by blending methyl tert-butyl ether into the fuel. This was a high octane blend component that mixed well with gasoline and was actually mandated by the federal government to be added to gasoline in non-emissions attainment areas (but to little or no effect). However, there were concerns about underground tank leaks allowing water soluble MTBE into groundwater. Lawsuits, mainly from Santa Monica if I remember correctly, caused MTBE to be phased out and replaced with EtOH. This was due to heavy lobbying by ADM and Cargil. At one point, I understood that ADM had the most lobbyists in DC of any single company. Lots of money to be made if your product is mandated to be used!
So now we have E10 mandated, with no impact on either energy security or atmospheric emissions. And they want to mandate that we use more of this fuel because the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 mandated that we produce 16 billion gal of corn EtOH and 16 billion gal of cellulosic ethanol, but there is no home for it in the fuel market. EtOH reached the so-called blending wall last year at about 12 billion gal of corn EtOH. OOPS. A mandated production volume with no market to put it in. So you have to expand the market.
The ethanol producers whine that E85 pumps are not at every station, so they want to government to help them sell their product with $10-30K cost per pump per station. In what world does the Federal Government help market a product that cannot be otherwise sold. Only in the world of EtOH. In those markets in the upper mid-west where E85 is readily available (the Corn Belt), its sales are dismal. Only 2% of ethanol is sold as E85. The consumer response to the opportunity to buy this product is dismal. No one wants it. So to make the EtOH producers happy (political payback is most likely the reason), the Feds need to spend taxpayers money to install equipment to sell something that the taxpayers don’t want. Now that is good use of our tax dollars.
Ethanol has been mandated, protected by tariffs, and subsidized, yet it is still marginal as a profitable product. Time to end this government interference in private enterprise.
Multiple peer reviewed articles have shown that at best ethanol is energy and CO2 neutral. But run-off from the fertilizers necessary to get the massive corn yield per acre are causing eutrophication of our rivers, lakes and the Gulf of Mexico (the massive dead zone of the mouth of the Mississippi is attributed to fertilizer runoff from farms upriver).
Government forcing of markets has never worked in the past and is not working now.
Bob
There shouldn’t be any government farm subsidies or government involvement in farming at all. All government welfare to farmers should be eliminated. I always laugh at the so-called “independent”
farmer crying about not getting enough government handouts.
Who cares if it is subject to speculation? Did you fail economics 101, speculation reduces price volatility. No one is entitled to anything they did not earn and if your friends received government welfare then they did not earn it. If someone thinks farming does not provide a decent living then they should not be farmers and those that can farm profitably should do so instead. If that means big agro-businesses, great. I want my food produced efficiently and cost effectively.
This is absurd. ADM uses Corn to make ethanol and Corn is one of the most energy intensive crops. It has a longer growing cycle, depletes the soil, and requires petrochemical fertilizers.
I thought Congress just eliminated subsides for ethanol production? What’s up with this?
I left a comment over on “Global Warming, Science or Politics” about the history and Big Picture (Agenda 21) of this movement. This latest move by the EPA is just another step along the path to force us into the New Feudalism. Neo-Feudalism. Peonage. UN Agenda 21/Sustainable Development taken to its logical culmination. Remember, Revolution is bad for business.
WHAT IS UNITED NATIONS AGENDA 21? The United Nations International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, (ICLEI) the local manifestation of Agenda 21 is now running the planing boards of most cities, town and counties. They call it Smart Growth The “Revolution” has already taken place and we have lost all the battles. The poison is now manifest from townhall to Washington D.C.
A key point of Agenda 21 is removing private ownership of land and homes. Instead of attacking ownership directly the attack is on transportation or roads or local building codes. This makes resistance very hard. Without cars and the local roads we drive on to get to and from work “private ownership of land” becomes unattainable by all but the very wealthy who can afford private aircraft.
States get about half their moneys from the Federal government and not directly though tax dollars. This is the hold the Federal government has over the states. Collapse the economy, double the money supply and states and local communities have no choice but to take the bribes from the Feds.
A good video with clips from various speakers. Agenda 21 For Dummies
A video of a Liberal democrat, Rosa Koire talking at a Tea Party meeting is excellent once you are over the shock of a Liberal and the Tea Party agreeing.
First quoting wikipedia for anything related to fuel ethanol is like quoting Bevis and Butthead. They are notoriously biased in their information on all controversial topics and their fuel ethanol related articles are right at the top of that list. Just like the global warming articles factual updates to their biased pages would be erased almost as fast as the changes were made by “keepers of the faith” who would not allow correct information to be posted.
Your 61% value is correct however so is the 66% energy value. One is for the comparison on a mass basis (kg for kg of fuel) and the other is a volumetric comparison ( liter for liter). The important point how ever is that mass or volumetric energy comparisons are irrelevent. What is important is how much of that energy the engine can extract from the fuel as useful work. The spark igniton internal combustion piston engine throws away about 66% of the fuels thermal energy. About 1/2 of that (1/3 of fuel energy) goes out the exhaust pipe as heat and the remaining 1/3 of the wasted fuel energy goes to the cooling system. Fuel mileage does not track with volumetric or mass fuel energy — it corresponds with net energy recovery.
Since ethanol gasoline blends are inherently more efficient fuels that straight gasoline they often get better absolute fuel mileage when measured in terms of how much fuel energy is consumed to go a certain distance. The mass basis energy comparison is (27 MJ/kg Vs 44 MJ/kg) 61.36%, the volumetric fuel energy comparison is (21.3 MJ/l Vs 32 MJ/l) 66.56%.
In the real world that energy difference is unimportant due to ethanol gasoline blends being superior fuels for internal combustion engines than either fuel alone.
Back in 2002 Department of Mechanical Engineering University of Michigan-Dearborn did a study on small engines running on ethanol blends (yes martha they were successfully running small engines on these fuel blends 10 years ago). Three fuels were used in the tests: 87 Octane unleaded gasoline (E-0), 90% gasoline and 10% ethanol (E-10) and 15% gasoline and 85% ethanol (E-85).
[img]http://img696.imageshack.us/img696/2247/figure1umreport.png[/img]
As you can see even on small engines with unsophisticated fuel and ignition timing control ethanol gasoline blends are more efficient fuels using less fuel energy to accomplish the same work effort.
On my first E85 conversion I carefully measured net fuel energy used per mile and found that it took noticeably less fuel energy to do the work of going a mile on E85 fuel than on straight gasoline. Based on long term fuel consumption vs miles traveled the numbers worked out as follows.
gasoline mileage Gasoline 125,000 Btu/ gallon / 24 = 5208 BTU/mile
My old setup, @ 92% of gasoline milage or 22 mpg
E85 90,500 BTU/gallon/22 = 4114 BTU/mile
This is why assertions of fuel consumption based purely on fuel energy content are not only false but intentionally misleading, and if done knowingly are out right lies.
Larry
Poptech says:
April 25, 2012 at 7:01 am
============
Thanks, excellent comment which lead me to your site. The Skeptical Science article is great.
Looking forward to reading more.
How much should you pay for E10 and E85? *
If regular gas is $3.00 a gallon you should pay:
. . . . . $2.90 a gallon for E10 (10% ethanol).
. . . . . $2.13 a gallon for E85 (85% ethanol).
Note: adjusting for lower energy content to yield the same fuel quantity per mile driven; can’t escape physics, the same amount of ‘work’ (literally: heat produced during combustion to create pressure to force a piston ‘down’ each ‘power’ stroke on a reciprocating internal combustion engine) must be done regardless of fuel used.
The formula is: For EX, where X is the percent ethanol
. . . . . Ethanol price should = Gasoline price times (100 – X + X / 1.52) / 100
Notice that 100 – X is the percent of gas and X / 1.52 is the percent of ethanol adjusted down by about 2/3 due to lower energy content per reference volume unit.
* Adapted from: http://zfacts.com/p/436.html
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Editorial portion of post:
So, who is ‘making out’ here Ethanol-ers ?
Is paying __the same price__ for a gallon of product that requires a purchase of 1.52 times (as would be close to the case for E85 fuel) as much straight gasoline really ‘cheaper’ looking at this math? (The answer on the surface looks like “no” BTW.)
(_Jim scratches head in wonderment on the economics of all this)
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@_Jim, please take the time to read the article. Waste is the proper word.
There is a good reason much of the US is off limits to drilling. Drill Baby Drill is Dumb Baby Dumb.
Gail Combs says:
April 25, 2012 at 7:55 am
Agenda 21
==========
Gail, that doesn’t make sense. The UN can’t dictate jack in the US. Land ownership in the US runs with Allodial Title its related rights. No one has the right to dictate farming practices in the US.
The UN can go fish abroad.
Global Weirding in Politics seems to be rampant these days.
The modern equivalent is the use of E85 in high performance engines, and this has definitely caught on. There has been a rapid adoption of E85 for use in highperformance applications, and performance enthusiasts who actually have tested the fuel instead of believing many of the bogus misinformation about fuel ethanol love it, and spend their own money out of their own pockets to convert their cars to run on the fuel because it so dominantly superior to even $8.00 – $12.00/gallon racing gasoline.
Hotrod magazine did an article on the fuel several years ago where they did back to back tests using gasoline and E85. (they would not have done the article if there was no demand for the information).
http://www.hotrod.com/techarticles/hrdp_0801_e85_ethanol_alternative_fuel/viewall.html
A couple quotes from the article:
I have never met a highperformance car owner who has made the conversion and not fallen in love with the fuel and its higher performance and lower operating costs. When I first made the move to E85 I dropped my cost per mile from 12 cents per mile to 10 cents per mile and got a substantial performance boost, cooler running engine, and a happy wallet. The conversion cost paid for itself very rapidly, as simple conversions only cost about as much as a night out at a good restaurant. In my case I increased my power output by 11% and cut my fuel costs by about 17%.
Larry
Can you make reference to an actual part, paragraph or sentence in the UN Agenda 21 document that lays all this out instead of a reference to a 3rd party (and possibly misleading and artful) ‘interpretation’? It’s possible that I may have missed where you linked to the primary document in question here today or in the past; I would hate to see a lot of ppl get ‘wound up’ without seeing first-hand the document detailing the purported erasure of personal property ownership.
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@_Jim
The website is here
http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/res_agenda21_00.shtml
It makes for some interesting reading.
Here’s is a great example of the fallacy of picking winners and losers.
Winner — Big Agriculture
Winner — the Farm Vote
Winner — Politicians who can collect more campaign contributions
Winner — Lobbyists
Winner — Environmentalist groups
Losers — All taxpayers and consumers worldwide
Losers — Poor people in underdeveloped countries who can’t afford more expensive food
Unaffected — Big Oil.
The pro-ethanol comments make some good points in their misguided attempts to defend. 1) There is no need to renew the ethanol subsidy because the corn yields went up and the corn will be planted anyway, 2) the negative effects of corn prices on other farm and food mfg. sectors is not as well documented and displayed than they should be, and 3) propping up the gallon-age consumption of demand that is taxed on a per gallon basis serves to keep tax revenues up (for other diversionary games away from highway repair funds) while effectively accomplishing the holy grail of all liberals in raising the gasoline tax. Also, the move ahead on E15 by EPA is in part a compromise to work on technical benefits to the ethanol lobby while temporarily suspending (not fighting for) the subsidy. This serves all the nefarious interests during the election run up and after that the ethanol lobby will regain its subsidy and in the presence of the E15 mandate. Enjoy you piggies but just don’t call it good public policy by any stretch of the imagination. Just don’t come back and tell me a taxpayer-funded ethanol pipeline network is justified!
A crank, and possibly a camshaft change all for the cost of ‘a night out at a good restaurant.’?
Where do you eat?
Even a ‘head’ change can’t be that cheap … I don’t plan on making those kinds of changes to the old L99-equipped V8-engine in the Caprice to accommodate E85; what do you do when lower octane fuels like E10 or straight UL gasoline are used?
(I’m crassly assuming you raised the compression ratio and jockeyed with the ‘advance’ (in/with the computer/ignition/fuel controller via the many kits/firmware/software now available) to achieve these incredible performance and economy figures.)
Will the vehicle pass the emissions standards for the class and model year? I have to get the L99-engined ’94 Caprice run on the dyno each each year for the emissions test, since it it’s not OBDII equipped.
.
Paragraph or part please that addresses the ‘home and land grab’ issue?
This should not be a hard thing, since everybody is ‘talking’ about it and seemingly up in arms too.
(My experience has been that most people simply do a ‘hand wave’ in the general direction of the UN site and can’t locate or point to the specifics of this issue in the docs rather they just want to beat up on the ‘bogey man of the day’ and fall in line following the mad crowd on an issue.)
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FactChecker says:
April 25, 2012 at 8:36 am
@_Jim
The website is here
http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/res_agenda21_00.shtml
It makes for some interesting reading.
===========
Interesting reading is an understatement.
REPORT OF THE UNITED NATIONS CONFERENCE ON ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT
(Rio de Janeiro, 3-14 June 1992)
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT OF ALL TYPES OF FORESTS
http://www.un.org/documents/ga/conf151/aconf15126-3annex3.htm
RIO DECLARATION ON ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT
http://www.un.org/documents/ga/conf151/aconf15126-1annex1.htm
CSD Sessions
http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/csd/csd_index.shtml
Poptech says:
April 25, 2012 at 7:52 am
…There shouldn’t be any government farm subsidies or government involvement in farming at all. All government welfare to farmers should be eliminated. I always laugh at the so-called “independent”
farmer crying about not getting enough government handouts….
________________________
Poptech most farmers do not get subsidies. Those are only for “Commercial” products like cotton, wheat, corn, soy. Vegetables, fruit and meat has no subsidies at all. The subsidy money actually ends up in the pockets of Monsanto who supplies the seed and Cargill, ADM… who buy the farm product BELOW the cost of production. ( The grain was then sold overseas and used to bankrupt third world farmers )
These are the facts no one ever bothers to tell the public.
Agriculture contributes more than $950 billion — 16 percent — to the GNP each year.
There are 2.2 million farms in the USA. According to the 2007 census over half the farms, 1,167,751, reported losses, with an average loss $15,596.
Only 396,054 farms have gains of over $25,000 a year, that means 1.8 million are near or BELOW the poverty threshold.
1,070,668 farms have less than 25% of their income from farming.
Only 4,048 are full time farmers deriving 100% of the income from farming.
The average age is 55.4 years with many farmers beyond or approaching retirement age
According to the USDA, almost 90 percent of the total income of rancher or farmer households now comes from outside earnings. More than 60 percent of US farms are resource, residential or retirement farms.There is a widening gap between retail price and farm value. a USDA market basket of food has increased 2.8 percent while the farm value of that food has fallen by 35.7 percent!
American farmers are working two jobs so YOU can get cheap food and the multinational corporations can make BIG BUCKS and wipe out small farmers in other countries.
References:
Who makes the bread: http://multinationalmonitor.org/mm2000/00july-aug/lilliston.html
Freedom to Fail How U.S. Farming Policies Have Helped Agribusiness And Pushed Family Farmers Toward Extinction: http://www.multinationalmonitor.org/mm2000/072000/lilliston.html
Ag Statistics:
http://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2007/Full_Report/Volume_1,_Chapter_1_US/index.asp
http://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2007/Full_Report/Volume_1,_Chapter_1_US/st99_1_063_063.pdf
http://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2007/Full_Report/Volume_1,_Chapter_1_US/st99_1_004_005.pdf
http://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2007/Full_Report/Volume_1,_Chapter_1_US/st99_1_059_059.pdf
Cui bono ~ Who benefits?
ADM (and Monsanto) are the big winners in the bio-fuel scam. When the Biofuel law went into effect ( the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 ) Archer Daniels Midland cleaned up big time on bio-fuel Biofuel business Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) saw its profits increase throughout all its segments year-over-year, after it formed a strategy to enhance crop-sourcing and processing capacity…. The company reported net earnings of $1.9bn and segment operating profit of $3.2bn for fiscal 2010
Dwayne Andreas worked for Cargill and then worked for Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADMC) becoming CEO in 1971. He is considered the TOP campaign donor in the USA.
Interesting that it was two Florida Journalists who got their behinds handed to them during the “FarmWars”
Remember the adage “Penny wise and pound foolish”?
I think that applies here too.
You are micro-focused on present-day ‘proven reserves’ figures and therefore ‘locked’ into a philosophy of living strictly within tightly defined limits which hampers economic growth. Again, the price and availability of energy factors into economic growth and prosperity.
Another term that come to mind: Zero sum game. Your perspective don’t allow for any further oil/petroleum discoveries so we are stuck with a ‘pie’ of a given, fixed size. … wasn’t the natural gas industry in the same mindset a few years back?
Now look at that market, and make no mistake about it, it is a Drill Baby Drill scenario.
Can you say: “No shortage of supply”? (Well, today anyway!)
.
Corn alcohol is for drinking, not fueling. Long live White Lightening.
No such changes are required.!
My first conversion involved one change and one change only. I replaced the stock 440 cc/min fuel injectors with the Japanese market 550 cc/minute injectors for my model car. It cost me a couple hundred dollars for the new injectors, and the old injectors could be sold for nearly the same price to some one who needed stock injectors.
The only thing you need to do to convert a modern car to run on E85 is to increase the fuel flow between 15% and 30%. A 15% increase will allow the natural tuning adaptability of the modern ecu to use any blend of fuel from straight gasoline to straight E85. It will be slightly rich mixture on straight gasoline and slightly lean on full E85 but the car will run just fine.
A 30% increase in fuel flow rate will fully convert to E85 with the engine management fat dumb and happy at its normal fuel trims.
My 88 and 86 model year cars will run on 30% and 50% blends of E85 with no changes of any kind in warm weather, but need similar modifications if I want to use E85 in cold weather.
Yep passed with flying colors on our IM240 dyno test here in Colorado (2001 model year WRX) it still met the ELV emissions limits. With modern electronic engine management the computer will do most of the adaptation itself if you just give it the capability of reaching sufficient fuel flow to get normal mixtures. In almost every car that folks have tried it on, all that was required for a minimum effort E85 conversion was to install higher flow rate injectors (look for an injector of the same type as stock that flows 130% of the stock injector). E85 runs just fine on stock ignition timing curve, although slight tweaks can be made to timing and mixture if you have the means to adjust them to get slightly better fuel economy. The biggest problem folks have with simple conversions is cold starting on E85 in sub-freezing conditions. The simple solution to that is to add 2-3 gallons of gasoline to the tank of E85 when it is cold. The more complex solution is to play with the cold fuel enrichment and such if you have tunable engine management system.
On naturally aspirated engines if you want to build an “optimized” engine for E85 yes it helps to bump the compression ratio to about 12.5 -13.2 compression ratios, no cam changes are “needed” but slight cam timing changes or a different profile might help if you are going for a whole hog conversion. E85 produces more exhaust gas volume than an equivilent gasoline setup so it likes a low back pressure exhaust system and slightly longer exhaust valve open time would probably help in a full conversion.
What no one wants to admit is most modern cars will run perfectly well on a 30% blend of E85 right from the factory with absolutely no problems of any kind. A hand full wil adapt to far higher blends if given a bit of time to adjust. It is the dirty little secret the EPA and the manufactures don’t want anyone to know. I drove the WRX on a 30% blend of E85 for years and both my 88 and 86 Subaru’s on similar blends in the heat of the summer with no modifications of any kind. The two older cars get a bit cranky about cool morning starts on those blends but run just fine once warmed up. That could be easily cured if I wanted to drop in larger injectors or find some other means like bumping fuel pressure a bit to increase fuel flow a bit.
Larry
@ _Jim says:
April 25, 2012 at 8:57 am
FactChecker says:
April 25, 2012 at 8:36 am
@_Jim
The website is here
http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/res_agenda21_00.shtml …
Paragraph or part please that addresses the ‘home and land grab’ issue?
This should not be a hard thing, since everybody is ‘talking’ about it and seemingly up in arms too.
(My experience has been that most people simply do a ‘hand wave’ in the general direction of the UN site and can’t locate or point to the specifics of this issue in the docs rather they just want to beat up on the ‘bogey man of the day’ and fall in line following the mad crowd on an issue.)
***********************************************************************************************************
Jim, perhaps the “mad crowd” simply thinks you should do your own homework. Or does your, no doubt busy, schedule preclude that?
Agenda 21: its a voluntary effort with some pretty unrealistic objectives like eliminating poverty. If this is one of the goals then its a Fail so far and they’ve poured 20 years of effort into it.
What if anything have they accomplished in the last 20 years?
Gail,
US farming practices are a bit of a Catch 22. Central Midwest farmers have a preference for growing corn and beans even though they know that the value will be diluted by South American imports and regional competition.
There are other crops they could grow but choose not to do it.
Going to assume the carbs on these small engines were re-jetted; as mentioned above, when running my 1500 Coleman these days it takes a small amount of ‘choke’ setting (while running) to make the engine run properly (eliminate surging and stumbling under load), otherwise, it appears to run significantly lean (on E10 even), and that ain’t good as you know …
Anecdotal, but authoritative discussion on the ‘dangers’ of running engines too lean:
http://pmgen.com/hhoscambusters/index.php/topic,195.0.html
This may be the reason why so many small engines fail with E10.
On another note, a technique called Lean of Peak maximizes fuel economy while preserving engine life (piston-powered aircraft engines):
http://www.gami.com/articles/frugalflyer.php
Thanks, government for mandating a ‘motor fuel’ incompatible with our non-vehicular equipment, without an option even to buy straight gasoline for those applications requiring it, as well mandating a product with an even shorter ‘shelf life’ (E10 has a shorter shelf life than gasoline alone even) …
.
@_Jim 4-25 9:17 am
I disagree. I clearly stated proven reserves are increasing. Increases are due to improved technology and in spite of production.
The pie grows. It is suicide to consume domestic oil unnecessarily. Every President has known this. A small but viable domestic industry is required, and this we have.
Drill Baby Drill is Dumb Baby Dumb.
The “grand hand wave”?
Is this turning into Real Climate (“Read the literature – gavin”)?
I’m trying to be civil about it, George, but this is actually a ‘competency test’ to see if the nutters can readily back up their ‘claims’. So far, it does not appear they can …
Besides, I might not ‘zero in’ right away on the phrase or paragraph that they seem to have, in spotting nefarious UN goals. Can I not rely on the expert guidance of those enlightened who have gone before me?
.
.
PS. Pls note the name: _Jim on account of all the Jims/jims on the board. Thanks.
.
VACornell says:
April 24, 2012 at 5:27 pm
About half of the united States is private land. Even though the Administration restricts
the use of its half, the private sector can get us to 100%, or even to the point of exporting
crude oil, by say 2020….
__________________________
Never underestimate the stranglehold of bureaucracy. You forgot the “Spot Owl” Gambit. (Endangered Species Act)
The hype: http://drake.marin.k12.ca.us/academics/seadisc/endangeredspecies/2008/northern_spotted_owl/why_is_it_endangered.htm
The reality:
To show how idiotic this can get. The government even tried to forfeit a farmer’s tractor for allegedly running over an endangered rat….
And there you have it ladies and gentlemen:
Self-imposed limitations.
This is what guides our legislators and executive branch politicians think, as guided by lobbyists, industry ‘professionals’/trade groups and certain think-tanks … this is the philosophy which guides the Obama administration and most all congress on both side of the aisle; the informed intelligentsia setting the course and agenda in regards to domestic oil exploration and supply.
Sorry, Roger, we are going to have to agree to disagree on this subject, and I still think you are totally if not completely wrong on this subject.
.
Jim says:
April 25, 2012 at 7:28 am
Fair point…. I was referring to the predominant automobile fleet situation of fuel injection and computer control…You are correct there are still plenty of carburetors out there with venturies and needle valves and air intake ports… all configured for octane 87.
The ideal gas law makes no provision for the size of the molecule does it!
And SIZE MATTERS!
the volume of 1 mole of vaporized C8 = that of C2….
That has a profound effect on air-fuel ratios.
The Maine DEP is still working to clean up the gasoline additive MBTE from our drinking water… This is just more junk to keep them working ehhh? I’m tired of this BS!
From the GWPF
“Biofuels will cause food prices to rocket, warns ActionAid ahead of clean energy ministerial”
http://www.actionaid.org.uk/103219/biofuels_will_cause_food_prices_to_rocket_warns_actionaid_ahead_of_clean_energy_ministerial.html
“Cameron’s government must beware ‘clean energy’ biofuels con, as new ActionAid report shows the shocking fallout of EU policy”
“This is why assertions of fuel consumption based purely on fuel energy content are not only false but intentionally misleading, and if done knowingly are out right lies.”
Larry
Thanks very much for that comment.
You actually tested E-fuels in your car and found a significant improvement is gas mileage over straight gas. This is the first time I have ever heard anyone claim that ethanol improves gas mileage. All I usually hear about is how ethenol will save us all from the devil CO2. I don’t care about CO2, I care about fuel costs. If it improves my gas mileage, I’m interested.
If it improves gas mileage why aren’t they shouting this benefit from the rooftops?
Dennis Nikols, P. Geo. says:
April 24, 2012 at 8:25 pm
How the hell else can they get farmers to vote for them. It is crass politics and absolutely nothing else.
___________________________________
Corn farmers are a small fraction of the 2.1 million American farmers. They lost the farmers when they passed the “Food Safety Modernization Act” among other things.
From Farmer blogs
NoNais: Government is systematically killing the golden goose.
Farm Wars: A Message from Our Criminal Government: “We Got to Get Paid”… The mainstream media also failed to mention that both the Republican and Democratic political parties accepted this fraudulently obtained money as well.
NAIS Stinks: Democrat’s Secret Attack on Agriculture with Food Safety Bill
Food Freedom S 510 is hissing in the grass: S 510, the Food Safety Modernization Act*, may be the most dangerous bill in the history of the US. It is to our food what the bailout was to our economy, only we can live without money.
R-CALF USA Issues a Baker’s Dozen List of Why Cattle Producers Should Oppose USDA’s New Mandatory Animal ID Rule ~ November 30, 2011 R-CALF USA, the Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund, United Stockgrowers of America, represents thousands of U.S. cattle producers on domestic and international trade and marketing issues.
Here are the names of the 73 US Senators who today sold out the American public’s right to grow and sell crops from their own gardens and farms without government oversight, regulation or permission. Here are the 73 Senators who today made it a crime to store and sell Nature-based seeds and grow crops without artificial contaminants, pesticides, and poisons. About one third of them are coming up for re-election in 2012.
Larry
After readiing the comments here about ethanol, I had completly forgotten that when I was a kid a neighbor converted his rather boring 2-stroke outboard boat motor to ethenol. Once he got it going it took off like a rocket, it was so fast and so loud, it was the hit of the summer, everyone wanted a ride in this really fast beast. He called it his ‘alky’.
I think I’m warming up this ethenol thing after all.
Yep they replaced the stock fixed metering jet with an adjustable orfice jet for he testing (I presume an ajustable needel and seat setup like most carburetors used to have for the idle mixture etc.
You are correct the simple solution is to just partially choke the air intake, that is the function of the choke in the first place to enrich the fuel air mixture for starting. If the manufactures actually cared about the consumer they would give you a simple means to adjust the mixture (although I would not be surprised if EPA regulations make that illegal).
That said 10% ethanol only leans out the mixture by 3% (added oxygen content of the fuel), if the engine is running so lean that that is a problem the manufacture had the engine running dangerously lean in the first place. That mixture change is about the same change in fuel air mixture that would happen if you went to a 1000 ft lower elevation. Does not sound like a good base tune up to begin with. I wonder if your fuel filter is clogged or you have a bit of dirt caught in your carb jet and are just blaming the problem on ethanol added fuel when there is really some other cause. A well tuned internal combustion gasoline engine should not care much at all about a 3% change in fuel air mixture, it certainly should not push it over the edge into lean surge idle behavior. The change in mixture for an engine that comes up here to Denver is almost 18% and modern engines have no problem with that at all.
Maybe you just need a carburetor clean up. Small engines have always been plagued with problems due to long storage periods and dust dirt, cobwebs, bugs and what have you finding their way into their poorly sealed fuel systems. I would suspect the obvious first rather than just blaming the fuel. I had problems with lawn mowers chainsaws, and other small engines long long before ethanol added fuel came around, and it was almost always a piece of grass or a leaf fragment or a bug that decided to die in the gas tank over the winter.
Larry
I have a 2005 Elantra. It went from ca 19mpg when I bought it in 2006, down below 15mpg! I finally realized the gas I used had 10% ethanol. I found a station with just plain gas, and the mpg went back up to ca 19. Then it started dropping again. I finally remembered to check the pump and sure enough – ‘… up to 10% ethanol added to this gasoline…..’
Now I have to TRY and find a station in this town that doesn’t pollute it’s gasoline. There probably isn’t one.
If it’s this bad on 10%, I suppose on 15% the car will get the same mileage as a Patton tank.
Camburn says:
April 24, 2012 at 7:53 pm
Boy….do the folks who posted above need an education.
1. Ever heard of DDG’s? DDG is the by product of corn distilation. IT is a MUCH better feed than corn. The conversion factor, which means weight gain when fed, is higher….
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No it is YOU who needs the education. DDG is a great boon for ADM, Purina and the other mega corporations but it does the farmer no good.
I just dug into my tax files and here are the prices I actually paid for 50 pounds of feed.
1996 – $5.95
2006 – $6.27
It went up $0.32 in ten years
the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007
AFTER the 2008 election –
2009 – $7.79
2012 – $10.59
It went up $4.32 in SIX years!!!!
Politics aside, what I really like about ethanol equipped vehicles is that in a real crunch I can buy my fuel from the good old boys in the hills. Bikes produce more power and run cooler on ethanol and probably last longer; with proper A/F ration of course. Early bikes and cars ran on ethanol. Gasoline did not come into use until high Nickel Chrome alloys became available for exhaust valves. During WW2 when gasoline was rationed more than a few bikes were discreetly run on ethanol in the countryside. In the city the exhaust would give you away.
Be very clear here, I am not claiming “better fuel mileage” I am saying the engine produces more useful work from the fuel energy available. E85 contains about 72% the energy content per gallon as gasoline but my fuel mileage only dropped from 24 mpg on gasoline to 22 mpg on E85, that is a drop in actual fuel mileage of 8.3% if the advocates of lower fuel energy meaning lower fuel mileage were correct I should have seen a drop in fuel mileage to about 17.3 mpg. I did not, the difference is due to the secondary effects of fuel ethanol which make the engine more fuel effecient in terms of extracting useful work from the available fuel energy.
High tech direct injection ethanol fueled engines have achieved thermal effeciencies of 40%. That is comparable to the very best diesel engine designs and totally blows away the typical 25%-30% themal effeciency of typical gasoline engines.
The presence of ethanol mixed with the gasoline improves the engine thermal effeciency for many sound and well documented reasons. It in the most literal sense makes the gasoline more useful.
With no other changes engines switching from gasoline to E85 typically make 5% more power and if turbocharged their power potential can go up over 15% (theoretical limit about 20%). This means a smaller displacement engine can do the same work as a larger displacement gasoline engine. It also needs to down shift less often to climb hills or pass, and since fuel mileage is very sensitive to engine rpm keeping the engine in a higher gear longer saves fuel. Drivers also need to spend less time at high throttle settings to get up to traffic speed.
High ethanol blends produce more gas volume on combustion which means even at lower peak cylinder pressures the average cylinder pressure during the useful part of the pistons power stroke is higher (thus more power and torque with the fuel change). The high evaporative cooling of ethanol compared to gasoline, cools the engines intake charge more, giving a more dense intake air charge giving more power for the displacement. The cooling also benefits the intake valves, and reduces heat loss to the cylinder walls during compression. As a result exhaust gas temps drop about 200 deg F compared to equivalent gasoline fuel mixtures. This makes life easier on the engine and lets the tuner run the engine at leaner more thermodynamically effecient mixtures on high ethanol blends without causing heat damage to the engine components.
All these benefits are lost on the folks making over simplified assertions not based on actual testing (that old no emperical data bugaboo we constantly face with the climate crowd). Don’t bother me with the facts this statement sounds logical so it must be true. They are doing nothing more than creating over simplified logical (models) argumets and ignoring the facts, because the facts do not fit their preconceived notions.
Larry
“Dump it out on the ground!” This is what contractors, gardeners, boaters, motorcyclists, and pretty much everyone is being told by small engine mechanics. As the 10% ethanol keeps wrecking carburetors, the standard advice handed out is to just dump it out of whatever it’s in, because if the ethanol sits in the unit very long, it will foul it. I wonder if the Obama administration ever thinks about the (probably) millions of gallons of fuel being poured into lawns, meadows, waterways, and driveways. Sad.
_Jim says:
April 24, 2012 at 9:30 pm
….I’m having trouble with this one … it looks like a variation of the “Broken Window Fallacy” in the way of paying subsidies and redirecting resources…
_____________________________
You are correct.
What every one ignores is the fact there is only one buyer (monopsony) so he gets to set the price. There has been a major concentration in the Ag business and there are only about ten big guys left. They control the USDA and FDA and have the big bucks to lobby. The Tax payer picks up the tab for growing the commodites like corn, soy, wheat and cotton and the Ag businesses get the profits.
Then to make it even more interesting you get the Commodities Futures Trading Commission deregulated futures markets in 1999
Monopsony in Farming
other references
http://www.newschannel10.com/story/8549597/senate-antitrust-blocking-jbs-swift-acquisitions?clienttype=printable&redirected=true
http://www.justice.gov/atr/public/testimony/232891.htm
http://www.foodcircles.missouri.edu/coop.pdf
http://www.ase.tufts.edu/gdae/Pubs/wp/10-04HogBuyerPower.pdf
Gail Combs says:
April 25, 2012 at 7:55 am
=========
WOW : (
Thank You for the link to Rosa Koire’s video. What an incredible scam Redevelopment has turned into — “The biggest public relations scam in the world”. I worked in Economic and Community Development in the late ’80s but it was never like this.
Title Infringement: “If you’re in a Redevelopment Area you’re under eminent domain for at least 12 years.”
Property Tax Fraud: “Your property tax increases will go to redevelopment companies instead of ”
Social Engineering: “Outcome based education”
Coercion: State and Federal funds leveraged to require conformance to a Smart Growth Plan that introduces the fraud.
Deception: Community and Neighborhood Associations used to distribute disinformation
This is insane and has to be illegal as its entrapment and fundamentally against the rights of property ownership.
Why haven’t property owners filed a class action suit to eliminate it from their community plans, laws, and ordinances?
This video dramatically summarizes all of the concerns expressed in this extended comments queue.
“If I Wanted America To Fail…”
http://youtu.be/CZ-4gnNz0vc
Jan K Andersen says:
April 24, 2012 at 10:31 pm
Thank you mr Driessen for a very informative aricle. I think you ar absoloutely right that it is a huge mistace to use corn for methanol production. But what about the claims that it should be possible to use straw and other non-food resources as source for methanol production?
___________________________
Ever hear of Compost???
To grow decent crops you need compost (decayed organic matter) in your soil. I bought my farm CHEAP because it was 98% inorganic (clay) and would no longer grow crops. I am slowly replacing the topsoil (decayed organic matter) by pasturing animals, and double cropping summer and winter grasses. I do not produce hay I buy it which also helps add organic matter instead of removing it. For the first couple of years I essentially dry-lotted my animals on weedy soil because I could not get much else to grow even soil testing and adding the correct amount of lime and fertilizer.
@ DaveG says:
April 24, 2012 at 6:35 pm
Bingo. Also, it should help the banks by forcing more people to go into debt to afford one of those new vehicles that can use the greater proportion of ethanol. Now, let’s see…whose grandmother was the first female vice president of a bank in our fiftieth state?
And what term do the credit card companies use to describe their customers who pay off their balance every month? “Deadbeats?”
drwilliams says:
April 24, 2012 at 10:42 pm
I have never seen a more fact-deficient illogical rant published on this site, nor such a series of comments in the same vein. Study some history and economics. If you want 1970′s prices on corn, sign up to accept 1970′s wages….
_____________________________
I would be VERY VERY happy to have 1970 wages, however I would much prefer 1959 wages and the corresponding tax rate.
Date…..$ /oz gold.. Money supply….minimum wage…..Pay in gold.
1959 …….35.25 ………..50.1 billion………$1.00………………0.0284 oz.
1974 ……195.20………..101 billion………..$2.00……………….0.0102 oz.
1976 ……124.74 ……….. $113 billion…….$2.30………………0.0184 oz.
2008 …..880.30……….. $831 billion……..$5.85………………..0.0066 oz.
2009…1,020.28………..$1663 billion……..$6.55…………………0.0064.oz.
If you look at the price of gold, you can see how the value of the dollar has dropped and how the minimum wage no longer has the buying power it had in 1959.
Gold price http://www.finfacts.ie/Private/curency/goldmarketprice.htm
Money supply http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/data/BOGUMBNS.txt
Min Wage http://www.dol.gov/whd/minwage/chart.htm
MONEY: Defending Your Prosperity Good Information on US history of Money but a rotten speaker. (start around 1 min)
In real terms (inflation adjusted dollars) corn is not high.
Current price for corn per metric ton in today’s dollars is $275.58.
Peak corn prices in todays dollars were in August 1983 when corn cost $345.167/ metric ton.
Today’s corn prices in real dollars are 79.8% of the historical peak price for corn.
In real dollars corn has been more expensive than it is now at least 6 times since 1981.
Larry
And I see you’re still touting the work of Patzek and Pimental ridiculous that has been thoroughly discredited many times over.
And yes the tax credit is gone – yet you’re still using it to base your attacks.
Roger, how many years of domestic oil supply do you reckon we have? If we have more than a century’s worth, how much do we need to set aside as a strategic resource?
Also, without the capacity to produce and refine domestic oil, we are still vulnerable to having our oil supply shut off. As you know, it takes years to get an oil field developed and pipelines built to carry the oil to the refineries.
A. Scott,
The subsidies may be gone, but the government mandates are still in place.
Funny thing – when you actually read your links you find that:
1. The Popular Mechanics story is about OLD engines:
… and the “damage” discussed is largely minor – and resolved with upgrading comparatively inexpensive parts like rubber hoses, filters, and plastic fuel system parts.
2. As to boats – reading your link we find the same thing – mostly minor issues – like:
‘Be ready to change fuel filters more often … problem typically goes away after several tanks’
‘Make sure you upgrade to appropriate fuel hoses’
‘Do not use ethanol in Fiberglas fuel tanks – mostly built before 1980’s – ethanol does NOT effect aluminum, stainless or polyethylene tanks’
‘problems with phase separation are rear – largely affect boats idle for long periods with low fuel in tanks – filling tanks largely addresses issue’
Yep – lotsa terrible thing in that link.
3. Ethanol fires scaremongering – a 2007 and a 2008 story is the best you can come up with? Better yet are what they say:
“Wrecks involving ordinary cars and trucks are not the major concern. They carry modest amounts of fuel, and it is typically a low-concentration, 10 percent blend of ethanol and gasoline.”
In a seven year period the other story shows the extent of the issue they raise:
“Since 2000, there have been at least 26 major fires in the U.S. involving polar solvents, of which 14 were ethanol plant fires and three were ethanol tanker fires. In addition there have been six train derailments, five with fires.
The incidents at ethanol plants are irrelevant – Fire departments are equipped to handle fires at KNOWN fixed locations in their districts.
THREE ethanol tanker fires and FIVE train derailment issues in 7 years – a whopping 8 incidents in 7 years.
Sorry – its never fun when a link doesn’t paint the picture you think and/or want them too.
Well, I was not disappointed. When I went to bed last night I was wondering what had happened to A. Scott who always appears on any comment thread discussing ethanol. He did indeed appear to parrot the talking points of the ethanol industry. Nothing has changed from the last exchange. All those who oppose ethanol as a motor fuel (as opposed to a breakfast beverage) are misinformed and all information we present is inaccurate and outdated. Yeah? Well, it’s still BS. Mr. Driessen’s article was still mostly (like > 90%) correct.
Good ol’ Hotrod Larry is another faithful acolyte of ethanol. I have to give Larry a pass because he appears not to be all hat and no cattle. He has actually experimented with fuels adulterated with ethanol. Want really impressive performance? For several decades the answer has been to build engines designed to burn pure methanol. Very high compression, very high fuel throughput, very extreme HP, torque and performance. High speed, incredible acceleration, mileage measured in gallons per mile and engine life measured in single digit hours. High performance, indeed, but most of us are not in a position (or of the inclination) to make such modifications to our vehicles or submit to the additional maintenance requirements.
I’m pleased Larry has achieved such success with adulterated gasoline. But keep in mind, he’s obviously a motorhead. Most of us are not. One of my best friends has mechanical engineering degrees from Michigan State University and is now a Distinguished Scientist at Sandia National Laboratory. He’s also a die hard motorhead. He mostly builds 60s and early 70s classics from the ground up – from junk to original showroom. He HATES ethanol blends. He can demonstrate, with all the mind numbing math, that any adulteration of gasoline with ethanol results in diminished fuel efficiency. Oddly, like Larry, he cares more about performance than fuel efficiency.
Good for Larry! Good for every ethanol advocate. Me…I want to burn pure gasoline. I have nothing against ethanol as a fuel if folks want to use it. I just don’t want my tax dollars used to support it nor do I want the government to mandate it’s use. If ethanol can produce the marvelous results Larry claims, mandated use is unnecessary. The free market will embrace it..
More simply false statement unsupported by fact. And your concern for farmers is touching. I suggest you try farming for your food sometime.
The facts are ethanol reduces the cost of gasoline significantly:
Smokey,
You’re absolutely right. The subsidies are chump change relative to the government mandate which creates an artificial demand.
@_Jim: Ethanol DOES cost LESS. And you do not need 1.52 times more fuel using E85 compared to straight gasoline.
One more time – using ONLY the energy difference between fuels (and ignoring that real world examples usually show better performance than the straight energy comparison) these are the numbers:
Straight gasoline = 114,000 btu/gal
Straight ethanol = 76,000 btu/gal
Straight ethanol (E100) has 33% less energy than straight gas
BUT WE DO NOT USE straight ethanol or straight gas – these comparisons are meaningless.
E10 has 110,000 btu/gal (114k*.9+76k*.1) and E15 has 108,300 btu/gal …
E10 has just 3.3% less energy and E15 just 5% less energy than straight 100% gasoline.
E85 has 81,700 btu/gal – appx 28% less than 100% gas (and appx 25% less than E10).
I just paid $2.88 for E85 vs $3.68 for E10 – or appx. 21% less.
In reality I get appx 20% lower fuel mileage on E85 than on E10 … while paying appx 21% less.
In simple terms E85, when considering the lower mileage and lower price costs me almost exactly the same as e10.
Dr. Dave, good comments and a rational conclusion.
The comparison between the cost of ethanol vs gasoline is completely artificial, because the production of oil is artificially constrained. When Obama took office the national cost of a gallon of gas was $1.78. Ethanol could not compete with that. So the Administration put millions of acres off limits to drilling. Therefore, the price of gasoline keeps climbing. Simply by allowing the free market to operate, we could easily have gasoline at and below that price again. There is no doubt, because the oil is there.
If there were no government mandates for ethanol, its use would plummet to near zero. Because who really wants it? Gasoline is the real deal. It has the most energy per volume. The infrastructure is in place. And it is certainly more trouble free than ethanol blends.
When your product requires government intervention to make people use the product, you lose the argument.
I’m not sure how I missed the Agenda 21 issue for all these years. I even missed Willis’s post in February. Are there any other absurd schemes afoot that should be part of the up coming election debates?
Rio+20 meets Agenda 21
Posted on February 26, 2012 by Willis Eschenbach
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/26/rio20-meets-agenda-21/
ZootCadillac says: April 25, 2012 at 12:28 am
What does amuse me though is the recent trend for Americans to complain about their gas prices when they have had it so good for decades. Our gas prices have always, always increased at a similar rate for as long as I can remember and it has seemingly little to do with the price of world crude.
————————————————————————–
No argument on this, but you EU folks have your choice of cars that get 40, 50, or even 60 miles/gallon. We can’t buy them here in the US because the EPA makes them illegal.
John from CA says:
April 25, 2012 at 8:15 am
Gail Combs says:
April 25, 2012 at 7:55 am
Agenda 21
==========
Gail, that doesn’t make sense. The UN can’t dictate jack in the US. Land ownership in the US runs with Allodial Title its related rights. No one has the right to dictate farming practices in the US…
_________________________
OH???
Here is the Gosh Darn LAW!
From FDA website in 2008
That statement happens to be an outright LIE. The US Senate included a clause protecting the then current US laws from any changes dictated by the WTO in the ratification legislation. That is why when farmers raise a dust over WTO’s traceability a new law had to be passed. (Can not find my reference)
HACCP in the USA
Good Farming Practices to Lead the Transition to Sustainable Agriculture: Slide presentation by FAO
Source: http://www.fao.org/prods/PP6401/GoodFarming/tsld001.htm
These are from FAO and OIE (Good Farming Practices)
FAO GAPs (fruits and veggies)
This is a University PDF with Links to outside documents or web sites are marked in blue. Good Agricultural Practices. A Self-Audit for Growers and Handlers. http://ucce.ucdavis.edu/files/filelibrary/5453/4362.pdf
OIE Good Farming Practices: Livestock
GUIDE TO GOOD FARMING PRACTICES FOR ANIMAL PRODUCTION FOOD
Good Dairy Farming Practice.
Short Report of what the S.O.B.s are up to: OIE WORKING GROUP ON ANIMAL PRODUCTION FOOD SAFETY Report to the 77th General Session of the OIE International Committee – Paris, 24–29 May 2009
These are from FAO and OIE (Good Farming Practices)
FAO GAPs (fruits and veggies)
[ex]What are Good Agricultural Practices?
A multiplicity of Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) codes, standards and regulations have been developed in recent years by the food industry and producers organizations but also governments and NGOs, aiming to codify agricultural practices at farm level for a range of commodities….
http://www.fao.org/prods/gap/ [has links] [/ex]
This is a University PDF with Links to outside documents or web sites are marked in blue. Good Agricultural Practices. A Self-Audit for Growers and Handlers. http://ucce.ucdavis.edu/files/filelibrary/5453/4362.pdf
OIE Good Farming Practices: Livestock
[url=http://www.oie.int/fileadmin/Home/eng/Food_Safety/docs/pdf/GGFP.pdf]GUIDE TO GOOD FARMING PRACTICES FOR ANIMAL PRODUCTION FOOD .[/url]
[url=http://www.oie.int/doc/ged/D7201.PDF]Good Dairy Farming Practice.[/url]
Short Report of what the S.O.B.s are up to:[url=http://www.oie.int/fileadmin/Home/eng/Specific_Issues/docs/pdf/Presentation_77SG_En.pdf] OIE WORKING GROUP ON ANIMAL PRODUCTION FOOD SAFETY Report to the 77th General Session of the OIE International Committee – Paris, 24–29 May 2009[/url]
The WTO is hand in glove with the United Nations and with the US Bureaucrats. It is called “Global Governance”.
Pascal Lamy, Director, World Trade Organization (WTO) on Global Govenance: http://theglobaljournal.net/article/view/56/
A freedom of Information dump from the CIA: notice what it is called .foia.cia.gov/2025/2025_Global_Governance.pdf
Original url: http://www.foia.cia.gov/2025/2025_Global_Governance.pdf
Tiny url: http://tinyurl.com/gg2025
backed up a copy of it at CALAMEO: http://www.calameo.com/books/000111790b4dd76a2c850
@_Jim April 25, 10:15
I hope to persuade you. I will have more time to respond more completely this evening.
What must be considered is the US position on the world stage, and the utter futility of waging a war without adequate oil supplies. Both Japan and Germany learned this lesson the hard way, in the early 1940s.
@ more soylent green April 25 at 1:19,
I hope to persuade you to my thinking.
Please check back in a few hours when I can make a more detailed response.
Gail – feed comes from farmers.
These are the same folks you just complained (and I agree) are barely surviving, and only get a small fraction of the profits from their work.
You note for 10 years (199602006) price of feed only rose 5.4% – or 0.54% a year. A boon for you as consumer but a disaster for the farmer who grew that feed for you.
By 2009 the price had risen 31% over 13 years – or 2.38% avg per year.
In 2012 the price had risen 78% over 16 years – or 4.87% avg per year.
I don’t know about you, but I think those farmers well deserve an increase over time – a 4.87% average annual increase over 16 years does not seem grossly excessive.
And while it may not be appropriate for your needs the Distillers Dried Grain byproduct of ethanol production is a high quality animal feed that seems to lower feed costs overall.
John from CA says:
April 25, 2012 at 8:15 am
Gail Combs says:
April 25, 2012 at 7:55 am
Agenda 21
==========
Gail, that doesn’t make sense. The UN can’t dictate jack in the US. Land ownership in the US runs with Allodial Title its related rights. No one has the right to dictate farming practices in the US.
_______________________
After thinking it over I realise you do not understand the “Modern Law Making Process” I am going to use the food laws again since that is what I am very familiar with. However the process works with all the laws the international bureaucrats want to see “Harmonized”
1. The United Nations/World Trade Organization comes up with an Idea. (UN Agenda 21/Sustainability)
2. The “Idea” is sent to a “Working Group” For example the FDA states they are part of the following “Working Groups”
Those Working Groups come up with Standards, Recommendations, and Guidelines, “Model Laws” if you will. The proposed laws are then brought back to various countries and passed. If there is a public out cry like there was against Animal ID then a “Campaign strategy” is used to get the law passed. In the case of food it was a deliberate increase (Doubling) of food borne disease. See: Shielding the Giant: USDA’s ‘Don’t Look, Don’t Know’ Policy
In addition the United Nations NGOs are mobilized to show “grassroots” support for the proposed bill. With the food bill the fight got rather down and dirty. see google’s HR875 stop the hysteria from the NGO side and A Solemn walk through HR 875 plus a commerce clause lawyer weighing in Trojan Horse Law: The Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009 Unfortunately Trojan horse NGOs like Organic Consumers, La Vida Locavore and Food & Water Watch did the thinking for many Americans. (All three are connected to the UN, I did the research)
The USDA also used the “Delphi Technique” To “Build Consensus” only farmers were awake and it did not work. (Ain’t the internet great?) USDA employing Delphi Technique: Prepare to be Delphi’d! and “Watch out for the Delphi Technique. “Public meetings” are run by highly trained “facillators” things got uncomfortable enough that the USDA brought armed police to the listening session in Kentucky
USING THE DELPHI TECHNIQUE TO BUILD CONSENSUS: How it is leading us away from representative government to an illusion of
citizen participation.
Notice US citizens are completely cut out of the loop It is an UNELECTED bureaucracy that is completely in control. Even the NGOs are really Astroturf.
(Organic Consumers get a lot of money from the Rockefeller foundations)
I agree that corn derived ethanol is stupid because of its marginal net energy equation (EROEI) and its not a great idea if we use use food as fuel or devote vast tracts of arable land to fuel (this applies only if we are starving). Sugar Cane derived ethanol is a good idea for tropical and semi tropical areas however as it is a very efficient photosynthesis plant with very high sugar content and with a small % of arable land can provide a lot of fuel. An engine designed to use ethanol (with appropriate materials) has no issues mechanically. Using the wrong fuel in the wrong engine is always a bad idea – like using 2 stroke in a 4 stroke etc or diesel in a petrol engine but i’m sure people of average intelligence can cope with the idea that certain engines can use different fuels to other engines.
Brazil provides 80% of its domestic vehicle fuel with ethanol and 30% of its electricity by burining the stalks. THEY PAY LESS $ for fuel than petrochemical fuel! Diversity in fuels is a good idea for competition and consumer prices. My car is able to run 85% ethanol but nobody supplies it here. I pay about $1.50 per litre. I am a skeptic on the role of CO2 in observed warming but ethanol fuels from appropriate plants is a good thing on many levels in terms of alternatives to finite and increasingly expensive resources and lower pump prices. Sugar cane dervied ethanol blends have been used on the east coast of Australia for many years and has caused no issues with vehicle reliability.
There should be a way for people to buy 100% gas if E15 is mandated. Perhaps make the mandate only apply to regular gasoline, and allow stations to sell premium at 100%? But the problem I see with that is that it’s a tax on those with older vehicles who can’t use E15. (The poor.)
Smokey says:
April 25, 2012 at 2:08 pm
“The comparison between the cost of ethanol vs gasoline is completely artificial, because the production of oil is artificially constrained.”
You are absolutely correct This is why few will ever substantially invest in any alternative fuel that cannot compete with the price of gasoline if crude oil sold at free market prices. It doesn’t now because of the OPEC cartel
OPEC understands the free market far better than our president or Congress and is only able to control the worlds production because, thanks to present government policy, no one else is permitted to compete with them. Meanwhile, they are sucking the wealth out of the industrialized world by agreeing to limit production to keep the market price high, a tactic that would result in a long prison terms if practiced by any group of business executives.
A worldwide, unified, “drill baby drill” policy would dramatically increase the worlds production capacity, ultimately breaking the back of the OPEC cartel, and lower the price of crude to the true free market price.
No Patzek and Pimental have not been discredited despite your delusions otherwise. I mentioned the tax credit expired, did you fail to read that?
The Ethanol mandate still needs to be abolished so I am free to choose the fuel I wish to use in my car.
Gail,
The Power of Eminent Domain
“Eminent Domain” – also called “condemnation” – is the power of local, state or federal government agencies to take private property for “public use” so long as the government pays “just compensation.” The government can exercise its power of eminent domain even if the owner does not wish to sell his or her property.
However, Government MUST show just case to exercise this right.
NGOs and Redevelopment Corporations are NOT government agencies and therefore have no right to the use of “Eminent Domain”. If this is occurring they should immediately be sued and imprisoned for fraud.
The Rule of Law governs contracts especially for land which include additional rights which run with the ownership of real property. The land rights account for a significant portion of the freedoms we enjoy in the USA.
If the UN is attempting to influence US Real Estate law then its time to move the UN to Ethiopia.
This scheme is Nuts. Its time for a Class Action Law Suit in each and every US State where this is occurring and it very definitely should be a debate question for anyone seeking office!
The big argument against Obamacare is the mandate, forcing people to buy something, which is most likely unconstitutional. The argument against ethanol should be likewise. If the end result is ethanol dies, then tough cookies.
John from CA says:
“However, Government MUST show just case to exercise this right.”
Unfortunately, the Kelo decision made it much easier for government to take private property.
_Jim says: @ April 25, 2012 at 8:22 am
Can you make reference to an actual part, paragraph or sentence in the UN Agenda 21 document that lays all this out instead of a reference to a 3rd party (and possibly misleading and artful) ‘interpretation’? It’s possible that I may have missed where you linked to the primary document in question here today or in the past; I would hate to see a lot of ppl get ‘wound up’ without seeing first-hand the document detailing the purported erasure of personal property ownership.
______________________
Be happy to, but realize it is written in Lawyerez bafflegab and you have to read between the lines. They are not going to come out and say what they actually plan in public documents. I know you can follow the stuff but I worried others could not if they do not know what they are looking for. BTW Rosa Koire, who I quoted works for the government in California in the area of Eminent Domain takings.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Public-private partnerships need a special mention. Like “Sustainability” and “Smart Growth” it is one of the key phrases to look for.
Examples:
http://www.dot.ca.gov/hq/innovfinance/Public-Private%20Partnerships/PPP_main.html
http://www.oregon.gov/ODOT/HWY/OIPP/docs/solar_partners.pdf
The Redevelopment Agency connection to “Sustainability” http://www.calredevelop.org/
President’s Council on Sustainable Development: Between June 1993 and June 1999, the PCSD has advised President Clinton on sustainable development and develops bold, new approaches to achieve economic, environmental, and equity goals. http://clinton2.nara.gov/PCSD/
USDA Director of Sustainable Development: http://www.usda.gov/oce/sustainable/index.htm
This newest Biofuel mandate ties into the Policy Resolution on the. 25 x ’25 Initiative.
The 25 by ’25 resolution expresses the sense of the Congress that by the year 2025, at least 25 percent of total U.S. energy will come from renewable, domestically produced sources.
search [“25 x 25” Sustainable Development Resolution] and you will find a lot of info. such as Midwestern governors have been national leaders in the effort to produce more homegrown energy… : http://www.midwesterngovernors.org/resolutions/25×25.pdf
The whole mess is like a can of worms… No make that Cottonmouth Water Moccasins.
Intentionally causing damage to any engine is never minor. What kind of absurd reasoning is that? So before the engine worked perfectly fine, now gaskets and hoses leak, filters are clogged and the engine does not work thanks to worthless government mandates?
Are you kidding me? It is not minor to have your engine stall when you are adrift out in the ocean. How is having your fiberglass fuel tank fall apart minor?
That story is the most comprehensive, it does not change the irrefutable fact that Ethanol fires are harder to put out than gasoline. There is no guarantee that all fire departments along train or truck routes are properly equipped to handle Ethanol fires.
The Trouble With Ethanol (Industrial Fire World)
“ETHANOL ON FIRE
Whether blended with gasoline or not, ethanol is highly flammable. Ethanol burns different from gasoline. On the bright side, it is an almost smokeless fire. Unlike alcohol, it has a red visible flame. On the not so bright side, pure ethanol has a flash point of only 55 degrees F. Add 15 percent water and the flashpoint rises to 68 degrees F. Diluted down to a 24 percent solution, ethanol has a flash point of 97 degrees F, so it is still flammable.
At 10 percent, ethanol is still combustible. That means that if you had a spill involving a 100,000 gallon tanker you could dilute it with as much as 900,000 gallons of water and still have a fire hazard. Good luck finding that kind of water. Other than a small spill on the highway, diluting ethanol is out. Picking up that small spill with absorbent materials designed for hydrocarbon is likely to be difficult too. The ethanol may be left behind as if it were water.
Dealing with ethanol on fire involves using an ATC (alcohol type concentrate) foam specifically designed for polar solvents. Straight AFFF and protein foam will not work. A fire department with an extensive stockpile of the wrong kind of foam would be on the same footing as the poorest rural VFD equipped with no more than fire axes and good intentions.
Even with the right kind of foam, fighting a polar solvent fire is no cake walk. I remember a burning 160-foot diameter storage tank in Texas City. Even with a foam blanket six to eight feet deep, flames were still visible. It took four days to bring that one under control.“
Bill Tuttle says: April 25, 2012 at 6:08 am
> A. Scott says:April 25, 2012 at 1:36 am
>>– I got 20.13% lower fuel economy but paid 20.82% less.
…
> If using E10 reduced your mileage to 80% of what you got using gasoline,
> then it appears that you used quite a bit more than “a few percent more
> fuel” to get the equivalent amount of energy.
Those figures were claimed for E85, not E10.
Smokey,
That was KELO et al. v. CITY OF NEW LONDON et al in CT. Not an NGO acting in conjunction with a City. The City can’t grant the power to an NGO. I HOPE!!!
They’re screwing around with the 5th:
…nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
(c) Petitioners’ proposal that the Court adopt a new bright-line rule that economic development does not qualify as a public use is supported by neither precedent nor logic. Promoting economic development is a traditional and long accepted governmental function, and there is no principled way of distinguishing it from the other public purposes the Court has recognized. See, e.g., Berman, 348 U.S., at 24.
I have no concern for those who are too incompetent to farm profitably. The competent farmers will gladly take their market share. I am not interested in propping up failure.
This is elementary to test, as those filling stations that continue to sell the ethanol blends should easily put those who sell straight gasoline out of business. You thus obviously support ending the mandate so you can prove empirically how much it really saves!
Why are ethanol supporters so afraid of proving their claims?
John from CA says: @ April 25, 2012 at 9:45 am
US farming practices are a bit of a Catch 22. Central Midwest farmers have a preference for growing corn and beans even though they know that the value will be diluted by South American imports and regional competition.
There are other crops they could grow but choose not to do it.
___________________________
It is like welfare. If you pay teenagers to have babies do not be surprised when “Government Funded Unwed Mother” is seen as a viable career path. If you pay farmers to grow corn, they will grow corn. If you pay them to land bank they will leave their fields fallow.
Where I am we get a lot of direct sales farming especially since tobbaco farming went belly up due to government regulations. Corn is grown for the owners cattle or sold to hunters as deer bait. An ethanol plant was finally built in the state in 2010.
The whole Farm/Food situation needs a lot of thought and a delicate touch. If someone screws up the production of cars it is not a catastrophe. If it is food we are in deep doo doo. I really do not want to read Today, says USDA Undersecretary Mark Keenum, “Our cupboard is bare.” U.S. government food surpluses have evaporated… or ABA Band of Bakers March on Washington, D.C. Announce Action Plan for Wheat Crisis again.
I am stunned to learn large fires are hard to put out, even with the best equipment they sometimes take days to control. /sarc
I do get a chuckle out of your quoted article where it says:
“Unlike alcohol, it has a red visible flame.”
News flash ethanol is an alcohol, and fuel ethanol which is what we are talking about here is denatured with from 2%-5% hydrocarbon denaturants and has an easily visible flame not the pale flame color of pure technical ethanol.
The same exact problem occurs with large petroleum tank fires. In Nov 1990 Stapleton International airport had a fuel farm fire (JP4) that took 2 days to put out and they were bringing in truck loads of foam from cities within 100 miles of the fire and even eventually contracted with the Red Adair fire fighting team to help knock it down by bringing in specialized equipment and of course their experience.
It is a cost of doing business with large accumulations of any flammable liquid, there is nothing particularly unique about fuel ethanol fires, it is just another chemical fire risk that has its own unique fire fighting challenges just like every other flammable chemical be it petroleum, keytones like acetone, natural flammable liquids like turpentine or alcohol. In many cases the control strategy of choice in these large flammable liquid fires is to let them burn out as even the largest municipal fire departments have difficulty controlling them promptly.
source FAA report
“AVIATION ACCIDENT REPORT
FUEL FARM FIRE AT
STAPLETON INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
DENVER, COLORADO
NOVEMBER 25,199O”
Fire departments allow burning gasoline tanker fires burn out all the time because they cannot put them out, same goes with flammable liquid fires in rail road accidents. In those cases the best strategy is to control the spread and limit damage to adjacent property, and keep people away as the risk to fire fighters is too high not to mention the cost to try and control the fire.
Your comments about fire suppression by dilution are simply a distraction and add no useful information to the discussion as that is not the way you fight an alcohol fire (or a gasoline fire), and is specifically mentioned as something not to do. As would be well known by any competent fire service or anyone who has bothered to read either an MSDS sheet for denatured fuel ethanol (MSDS #: 004 CAS # : 64-17-5) or the U.S. Department of Energy handbook on E85.
source “Handbook for Handling, Storing, and Dispensing E85” page 18
Larry
Not when adjusted for it’s BTU rating,
E85 BTU Adjusted Price (AAA)
$3.840 – Regular Gasoline (4-25-2012)
$3.298 – E85 (4-25-2012)
$4.341 – E85 BTU Adjusted (4-25-2012)
And yes energy content is related to mileage,
E85 and fuel efficiency: An empirical analysis of 2007 EPA test data (PDF)
(Energy Policy, Volume 36, Issue 3, pp. 1233-1235, March 2008)
– Matthew C. Roberts
Roger Sowell says:
April 25, 2012 at 2:41 pm
I hope to persuade you. I will have more time to respond more completely this evening.
What must be considered is the US position on the world stage, and the utter futility of waging a war without adequate oil supplies. Both Japan and Germany learned this lesson the hard way, in the early 1940s.
________________________________________
As I recall you do not like nuclear either not even thorium. If you do not want to use oil (I consider it a wast of a great chemical precursor) then you should at least look at the pros and cons of thorium.
E. M. Smith’s comment on Thorium: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/21/the-moon-and-sick-plans/#comment-964024
Gail Combs says:
April 25, 2012 at 5:49 pm
=========
I completely agree with you, The whole Farm/Food situation needs a lot of thought and a delicate touch.
Protecting Farms from this not so Smart Growth and EPA nonsense that’s based on CO2 emission reduction should also be a priority. Thankfully, other States in our Republic aren’t as dysfunctional as California.
Minnesota is a beautiful state by the way, I used to drive thru it on fishing trips to the Chain of Lakes in Canada as a kid.
One of the things Rosa suggested was to get ICLEI out of town and out of ordinances, laws, and general plan legislation. Three-fourths of California cities have a city manager to carry out policy and zoning plans. There’s no need for ICLEI or a private Redevelopment Corp. in any of these cities.
Here’s what we are up against folks. In the EPA’s own words. Video included in article:
***********************************************************************
Quote:
“It was kind of like how the Romans used to, you know, conquer villages in the Mediterranean. They’d go in to a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw and they’d crucify them.
“Then, you know, that town was really easy to manage for the next few years.”
“It’s a deterrent factor,” Armendariz said, explaining that the EPA is following the Romans’ philosophy for subjugating conquered villages.
http://cnsnews.com/blog/craig-bannister/epa-officials-philosophy-oil-companies-crucify-them-just-romans-crucified
*******************************************************************************
Now I don’t know about anyone else, but them’s fightin’ words to me. I don’t give shit about “hyperbole” excuses for this. The EPA and this administration is the enemy. Not because I say so, but because they say so. Treat them as such.
Congratulations you have just demonstrated you have absolutely no clue and totally ignore the facts. The EPA btu adjusted nonsense is part of the problem and as I have demonstrated and multiple other reports have demonstrated actual fuel mileage is not related to energy content. If it was, the fact that any car can get better than 72 percent of its gasoline fuel mileage proves absolutely that the EPA has its head up its butt and does not want to be bothered with the facts.
As the saying goes it only takes one fact to disprove a theory, the fact that some cars get better fuel mileage on 30% ethanol blends than they do on straight gasoline proves that theory is bogus. The fact that almost all Detroit FFV’s get between 80% and 85% of their gasoline fuel mileage on a fuel that only contains 72% of the fuel energy per gallon absolutely proves the theory is bogus. Especially when the make 5% more power doing it. The fact I could get over 90% of my gasoline fuel mileage on E85 which only contains 72% of the fuel energy of gasoline also proves it. Not to mention MIT developing a direct injection ethanol engine that gets substantially better energy recovery than conventional gasoline engines at 40% thermal efficiency.
Then to top it all off your very post includes an explicit statement in your quote that says exactly the same thing I am saying!
Differences in engine design and fuel characteristics affect the efficiency with which the chemical energy in gasoline and ethanol is converted into mechanical energy, so that the change in fuel economy may not be a linear function of energy content.
In other words engine design and tuning methodology is far more important than the volumetric fuel energy. Bottom line you buy a gallon of fuel with the understanding that it will allow you to go so many miles, and the real measure of the fuel is not some esoteric EPA btu corrected value but the cost per mile it takes to go from point A to point B. That is all real consumers care about. My cost per mile dropped from 12 cents a mile to 10 cents a mile, no matter how many idiotic EPA assertions you throw at that fact it stands on its own, and proves with absolutely no doubt that btu corrected energy content is meaningless.
At the above quoted prices of $3.84 for regular the cost per mile of my car at 24 mpg works out to 16 cents/mile. At the listed E85 price of $3.298 / gallon and my fuel mileage of 22 mpg on E85 the cost per mile works out to 14.995 cents per mile, so using your own data your comment is meaningless propaganda and a red herring argument.
Even if I got the typical fuel mileage of a FFV and only got 85% of my gasoline fuel mileage or 20.4 mpg the cost per mile on E85 is essentially identical to the gasoline at 16.16 cents per mile (without any blenders tax credit applied).
Since my car requires premium fuel, I come out even farther ahead given premium fuels higher price of about 3.95/gal today I am making a choice between spending 17.955 cents a mile for pump premium or getting better performance and a lower fuel cost of 16.16 cents a mile on E85. Over a years driving that is a savings of a bit over $275 a year or $23 a month by simply using a different pump nozzle.
Larry
Laughable.
Just a small sampling from an old report.
Among many issues including using old data, Patzek and Pimentel also failed to include co-products in their calculations – attributing all of the production energy to ethanol.
Both Patzek and Pimentel also really are are in the paid employ of oil companies.
Their work has been repeatedly refuted and show deficient by many sources including the USDA, Argonne Labs, US Dept of Energy, Colorado School of Mines, University of California, Michigan University and many others including in peer reviewed work published in major publications such as Science, environmental Science and Technology, and others.
A. Scott says:
April 25, 2012 at 2:56 pm
Gail Combs says:
April 25, 2012 at 11:18 am
Camburn says:
April 24, 2012 at 7:53 pm
If most of the money was going to the farmer I would not have a problem but in most cases it is going to the Ag Giants. It is why I buy as much food direct from the farmer as I can and I buy my corn (for my goats & sheep) from the guy down the street when available. Ethanol has been a boon for farmers but it has been a heck of a lot more profitable for the Ag Giants and the speculators like Goldman Sachs.
The situation is just not straight forward at all. You have the 1995 WTO open borders – tariff reductions, the “Freedom to Farm Act of 1996” the “Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000” China’s entry into the WTO (2001), and the “Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007” On top of that there was a major reduction in the number of Ag companies over the last few decades.
Disentangling the effects of all of those has been the subject of more than one PhD thesis. (from my Uni)
THE CORRUPTION OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE is another.
Curiousgeorge says:
April 25, 2012 at 6:16 pm
Here’s what we are up against folks. In the EPA’s own words.
============
Time to craft some PSAs — this is out of control.
A basic economics/civics lesson regarding ethanol:
1. Government is force
2. Good ideas do not have to be forced on others
3. Bad ideas should not be forced on others
4. Liberty is necessary for the difference between good ideas and bad ideas to be revealed
You could pay $100,000 for an Econ education and never learn the above.
Showing yet again you simply have no clue about what you are talking. And you refuse to even acknowledge others who provide direct factual evidence to you.
I have a 2003 Tahoe. I run everything from staright gas tro E85 and have since new. I use E85 better than 50% of the time. I have had no service issues.
Even with 90,000 miles, I get approximately 20% lower gas mileage in the REAL WORLD with E85 compared to E10. In the REAL WORLD I pay 21% less fpor E*% tah for E10. In the REAL WORLD I get almost identical fuel cost per mile with E85 than with E10.
Actually if you are going to use plants to produce fuel I rather see vats of algae wher the exhaust from coal plants ~ CO2, NOx, SO2 and waste heat ~ is put to good use. http://www.oilgae.com/algae/cult/cos/cos.html
Corn is really an obnoxious plant. It is particularly hard on the soil, requiring plenty of fertilizer, water, and pesticides. On top of that it does not produce a decent “cover” to protect the soil from erosion. http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/eij/article/peak_soil/
A. Scott says:
April 25, 2012 at 1:50 am
“Just one little bitty problem. CORN IS CORN!
If you stop using corn for ethanol and use it instead as advocated by the alarmists for food – YOU ARE STILL GROWING THE SAME CORN on the SAME land using the SAME fertilizer, water etc.”
No you are not using the same amount of fertilizer. While crop yields have indeed increased- those yields (bu/ac) remain a linear function of the amount of N added. For corn figure 1 to 1.5 pounds of nitrogen per bushel of corn. Increase yield are obtained with increase fertilizer.
My point above however was focused on the hypocrisy of EPA pushing draconian nitrogen regulations at the same time it pushes ethanol. Maryland under EPA orders will need to spend somewhere in the $100m per year range to remove 10M pounds of nitrogen from the Chesapeake. Corn adds some 20million pounds per year. So EPA pushes corn which increases N allowing the Agency to claim nitrogen pollution and impose nitrogen TMDLs. These TMDLs beside being financially crippling allows EPA to decide not only how much nitrogen we are allowed to use but with the Chesapeake TMDLs- decide what industry sectors get the now reduced nitrogen allocation- what percent goes to agriculture, development etc.
Nitrogen is the new CO2. Control nitrogen and you can control every food, energy and development decision we make. I strongly urge you to read the 2011 EPA report “Reactive Nitrogen in the United States: An Analysis of Inputs, Flows, Consequences, and Management” to get an idea of where this is all going. (And watch how nitrogen “critical loads” will be the biggest hammer yet against coal)
EPA is proposing an across the board 25% reduction in nitrogen for the US and 45% for the Mississippi River Basin. Corn is the largest user of nitrogen fertilizer. EPA is pushing more corn. Go figure.
Additionally, if EPA was truly concerned about the environment they would pay some attention to the potential loss of land from CRP in response to the high corn price.
Yes I completely ignored your unsubstantiated claims. The EPA actually bases it’s figures on laboratory testing, something you do not have.
2012 Fuel Economy Guide (PDF) (EPA, pp. 31-35)
“These fuel economy estimates are based on laboratory testing. All vehicles are tested in the same manner to allow fair comparisons.”
“, FFVs operating on E85 usually experience a 25–30% drop in MPG due to ethanol’s lower energy content.”
Please, do not be fooled by Larry’s long winded rants that completely lack empirical evidence and scientific sources.
A. Scott says:
April 25, 2012 at 6:32 pm
….The USDA findings have been confirmed by additional studies conducted by the University of Nebraska and Argonne National Laboratory. These figures take into account the energy required to plant, grow and harvest the corn—as well as the energy required to manufacture and distribute the ethanol…..
________________________________
As I thought the numbers are probably rigged.
No one ever bothers to take into account the energy to mine the ore, smelt the ore, fabricate the parts, build all the equipment and ship all that equipment to the farmer. Do they also include all the energy needed to produce the fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides? Or do they only include the fuel used for a farmer to drive around his fields? Some how given the precision of the numbers I think it is only the amount of fuel.
Do you see how you can get a vast number of different answers depending on how you do the accounting? It is a lot like trying to figure out how much you actually pay in tax.
Gail Combs says:
April 25, 2012 at 6:53 pm
Corn is really an obnoxious plant. It is particularly hard on the soil, requiring plenty of fertilizer, water, and pesticides. On top of that it does not produce a decent “cover” to protect the soil from erosion.
=========
Long growing season as well. Try chisel plowing once you get the soil the way you like it.
Someone’s unsubstantiated comments is NOT “factual evidence”.
That is nice rhetoric, lets see what empirical testing actually shows,
Test results: E85 vs. gasoline (Consumer Reports)
“This chart shows how our 2007 Chevrolet Tahoe performed while running on E85 and gasoline in three fuel-economy tests and overall, in four acceleration tests, and in three emissions tests for gasoline vehicles.”
Fuel Economy
14 MPG – Gasoline (Overall)
10 MPG – E85 (Overall)
– 28.5% Decrease in fuel economy.
Lets see, “Larry (HotRod)” and “A. Scott” vs Consumer Reports, hmmm that is a tough call.
My comments? Those were from the Industrial Fire World article I quoted. Fighting Ethanol fires is different than other fuels,
NRT Quick Reference Guide: Fuel Grade Ethanol Spills (including E85) (PDF) (U.S. National Response Team)
“Differences between ethanol and gasoline: Ethanol is completely miscible (soluble) in water at any ratio, while gasoline has a low solubility in water. Fighting fires of fuel blends containing 10% or more ethanol by volume requires the use of an Alcohol Resistant-Aqueous Film Forming Foam (AR-AFFF).”
That’s a hard link to refute, Poptech.
Smokey says:
April 25, 2012 at 6:40 pm
A basic economics/civics lesson regarding ethanol:
1. Government is force
2. Good ideas do not have to be forced on others
3. Bad ideas should not be forced on others
4. Liberty is necessary for the difference between good ideas and bad ideas to be revealed
You could pay $100,000 for an Econ education and never learn the above.
___________________
This reminded me of a lecture given by someone running for the Senate I heard back in the late 70’s. He said that most civics classes talked about the balance of powers in the US Constution as being 3 branches of government, the Executive Branch, the Legislative Branch and the Supreme Court. He said there was really a 4th branch. The rights of the people embodied in the Bill of Rights. (Unfortunately, he lost.)
_____________________
Pat Moffitt says:
April 25, 2012 at 7:05 pm
A. Scott says:
April 25, 2012 at 1:50 am
“Just one little bitty problem. CORN IS CORN!
If you stop using corn for ethanol and use it instead as advocated by the alarmists for food – YOU ARE STILL GROWING THE SAME CORN on the SAME land using the SAME fertilizer, water etc.”
….
No you are not using the same amount of fertilizer. While crop yields have indeed increased- those yields (bu/ac) remain a linear function of the amount of N added. For corn figure 1 to 1.5 pounds of nitrogen per bushel of corn. Increase yield are obtained with increase fertilizer.
My point above however was focused on the hypocrisy of EPA pushing draconian nitrogen regulations at the same time it pushes ethanol. Maryland under EPA orders will need to spend somewhere in the $100m per year range to remove 10M pounds of nitrogen from the Chesapeake.
______________________
I work in water treatment. Convential treatment does not remove nitrates from water. If this extra nitrogen enters the streams and reaches the treatment plants as nitrates (I don’t know if they would. Maybe somebody here does know.), most small cities and even large cities can ill afford to install the additional processes neccessary to remove them.
I don’t know if it would reach the plants as nitrates, but if it does then you can add that to the cost of ethanol production. And that’s not counting the cost of removing the increased herbicides and pesticides likely to enter the streams if higher amounts are allowed for the production of ethanol corn.
“He said there was really a 4th branch.”
OOPS!
“Branch” should read “balance”.
“crony capitalists” – ha ha. You probably believe in the concept of “redistribution of wealth”, too.
You have to applaud our cunning linguists for their fantastic work, and our loyal media for propagation.
@Gail Combs April 25 at 6:10 pm,
‘As I recall you do not like nuclear either not even thorium. If you do not want to use oil (I consider it a wast of a great chemical precursor) then you should at least look at the pros and cons of thorium.
E. M. Smith’s comment on Thorium.”
No, I do advocate using petroleum. I do not advocate using up America’s domestic petroleum reserves when cheap foreign oil is abundant. We will need our own oil at some future day when we are once again at war and foreign oil supplies are cut off.
I do not favor nuclear for electric power production for reasons I have stated many times on WUWT, chiefly it’s extremely high cost compared to almost any alternative except wind and solar, it’s inherently unsafe with catastrophic release of toxic radiation and radioactive particles (see e.g. Japan Fukushima, US Three Mile Island, and Russian Chernobyl — all within 50 years. The world’s reactors are not yet near end-of-life where more accidents are expected to occur), and spent fuel creates a toxic legacy lasting thousands of years.
Thorium power is a pie-in-the-sky future technology. Its advocates praise its positives and completely gloss over all the negatives. Anyone can prove me wrong by building a full-scale thorium power plant, then having it run for 10 years to collect data on availability, maintainabiliy, and costs. Good luck competing with a combined-cycle gas-fired turbine plant, for both initial cost and operating cost. Total cycle cost for a CCGT plant is very tough to beat, with a thermal efficiency approaching 60 percent and natural gas at $2 per million Btu.
As to E.M. Smith’s writings, I agree with his basic conclusion. There is more than adequate uranium in the ocean. There is also many tons of gold dissolved in the ocean. Nobody mines it because they would go broke doing that. E.M. and I agree that nothing ever leaves the Earth (unless in a rocket and escapes the gravity field). Everything, every single atom, is still here ready to be used over and over again. All that need be applied is energy and ingenuity. The molecules may change, but the atoms do not. This also ignores the very small loss of some large atoms into smaller ones via nuclear fission. On a tonnage basis, it is so small that it may be ignored.
Farmers in particular know this, as their crops pull CO2 out of the sky, and convert the carbon to plant mass. Then the farmers burn some of the plant mass after the harvest, or allow the plant mass to rot, converting the carbon back into CO2. Energy is input to accomplish this, primarily from sunshine. There is also energy input via fertilizers, pesticides and other chemicals, plus fuel to operate various machinery.
A “report” from the ethanol lobby. The differences between Pimentel & Patzek vs. Kim & Dale are discussed in this paper,
Seeking to Understand the Reasons for Different Energy Return on Investment (EROI) Estimates for Biofuels
(Sustainability, Volume 3, Issue 12, pp. 2413-2432, December 2011)
– Charles A.S. Hall, Bruce E. Dale, David Pimentel
As you can see Pimentel and Patzek are more thorough with allocation costs.
This is a nice smear, something we would expect from AGW Alarmists. Is the desperation showing? Both scientists are highly credentialed,
David Pimentel, B.S. University of Massachusetts, Amherst (1948); Ph.D. Cornell University (1951); Hon. D.Sc. (Honorary Doctorate of Science), University of Massachusetts at Amherst (2008); United States Army Air Force (1943-1945); Chief, Tropical Research Laboratory, U.S. Public Health Service, San Juan, Puerto Rico (1951-1954); Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Chicago (1954-1955); Project Leader, Technical Development Laboratory, U.S. Public Health Service (1954-1955); Assistant Professor of Ecology, Cornell University (1955-1960); Associate Professor of Ecology, Cornell University (1960-1963); O.E.E.C. Fellow, Oxford University, UK (1961); NSF Computer Scholar, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1961); Professor and Head, Department of Entomology and Limnology, Cornell University (1963-1969); Professor of Ecology, Cornell University (1969-1976); Professor, Core Faculty, Center for Environmental Quality Management, Cornell University (1973-1974); Professor of Ecology and Agricultural Sciences, Cornell University (1976-2005); Member, Secretary of Energy’s Energy Research Advisory Board, U.S. Department of Energy (1979-1983); Member, Ecological Society of America; Member, Entomological Society of America; Member, Society for the Study of Evolution; Member, Entomological Society of Canada; Member, American Society of Naturalists; Member, American Association for the Advancement of Science; Member, American Institute of Biological Sciences; Professor Emeritus of Ecology and Agricultural Sciences, Cornell University (2005-Present)
Tadeusz W. Patzek, M.S. Chemical Engineering, Silesian Technical University, Poland (1974); Ph.D. Chemical Engineering, Silesian Technical University, Poland (1980); Research Associate, Chemical Engineering Research Center, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland (1974-1980); Fulbright Fellow, Chemical Engineering Department, University of Minnesota (1978-1979); Research Associate, Chemical Engineering Department, University of Minnesota (1981-1983); Research Engineer, Enhanced Recovery Research Department, Shell Development (1983-1989); Senior Reservoir Engineer, Shell Western E&P, Inc. (1989-1990); Assistant Professor, Department of Materials Science and Mineral Engineering, U.C. Berkeley (1990-1995); Associate Professor, Department of Materials Science and Mineral Engineering, U.C. Berkeley (1995-2002); Professor of Geoengineering, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, U.C. Berkeley (2002-2008); Invited Professor, Earth Sciences Department, TU Delft, The Netherlands (2004), Member, American Geophysical Union; Member, American Physical Society; Member, American Chemical Society; Professor and Chairman, Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin (2008-Present)
Patzek at best has energy industry experience from over 30 years ago. All that means is he is less likely to be influenced by things that are not supported by empirical evidence as most environmentalists are.
All the ethanol proponents here should demand the mandate is abolished so they can show us how much “better” mileage they get, how much “cheaper” their fuel blends are and put straight gasoline to shame!
Why are they so afraid to do this if their arguments are so superior?
@_Jim on April 25, at 10:16 am
Referring to my statement: “A small but viable domestic industry is required, and this we have.”, you then wrote
“And there you have it ladies and gentlemen:
Self-imposed limitations.
This is what guides our legislators and executive branch politicians think, as guided by lobbyists, industry ‘professionals’/trade groups and certain think-tanks … this is the philosophy which guides the Obama administration and most all congress on both side of the aisle; the informed intelligentsia setting the course and agenda in regards to domestic oil exploration and supply.”
Yes, a self-imposed limitation on domestic drilling. Again, for a very good set or reasons. Briefly, they are these:
1. Oil is not distributed equally amongst all nations. For example, Japan has virtually none and must purchase oil from others. Middle East countries are well-known oil exporters, along with Indonesia, Canada, North Sea participants, and a few others.
2. As Daniel Yergin wrote so elegantly in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book: The Prize, The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, oil is the single most important commodity in the world. His book details the history of oil, and notes how vitally important oil is to any nation that finds itself at war. The US was the oil provider for the Allies in World War II since the Middle East oil fields were not yet producing in great quantity.
3. The US has a vast number of enemies, both active and passive at this time. There will be future wars, and they could easily escalate into many years. We could easily find our oil imports cut off.
4. Only an idiot or a madman would wage a war with inadequate oil supplies. Yes, nuclear powered ships are great, but oil propels most ships, not nuclear power. Oil propels each aircraft. Oil propels every ground vehicle. Back on the home front, oil is essential to a war effort for manufacturing and transport of goods. As I wrote earlier, Japan and Germany learned this the hard way in the early 1940s. There was an excellent reason the Allies’ strategy was to cut off the oil supplies to both Germany and to Japan at the earliest opportunity.
5. The US presently has adequate domestic production and an oil industry that can, if need arises, ramp up to replace any loss from an oil embargo. The oil is in the ground, we know where it is, and we know how to get it.
6. We have ample oil available for purchase from those with an excess, and every barrel we purchase preserves a precious barrel in our soil for that day when we will most assuredly need it desperately.
So, yes, your conclusion is correct, this is a self-imposed limitation and it arises from some very smart people who think things through, who take a long view, who are sober and serious. One might ask the question, why has the US oil production rate hovered around 6 million barrels per day, year in and year out, even as our technology for finding and producing oil has greatly improved? The idea is to make the other fellow sell off his oil, and preserve ours for a critical time. Other countries do this also, unless they are desperate for foreign exchange — see e.g. United Kingdom, selling their oil since they have little else to sell these days.
Note that China has very little domestic oil reserves, and this puts a great disadvantage on them for any future conflicts. Their first move, as was Japan’s, will be to occupy the Indonesian oil fields. They might also occupy Australia’s oil fields. India will not be a belligerent due to a lack of oil. They are an importing nation.
Smokey says:
April 25, 2012 at 6:40 pm:
“A basic economics/civics lesson regarding ethanol:
1. Government is force
2. Good ideas do not have to be forced on others
3. Bad ideas should not be forced on others
4. Liberty is necessary for the difference between good ideas and bad ideas to be revealed
You could pay $100,000 for an Econ education and never learn the above.”
Smokey,
Of the 182 comments (so far) on this article, yours are a fine distillate from the weak mash of other arguments… and the most succinct and applicable herein.
These truths should be self evident. Unfortunately, to oh-so-many, they are not.
MtK
Gunga Din says:
April 25, 2012 at 7:52 pm
I don’t know if it would reach the plants as nitrates, but if it does then you can add that to the cost of ethanol production. And that’s not counting the cost of removing the increased herbicides and pesticides likely to enter the streams if higher amounts are allowed for the production of ethanol corn.
Yes they are a cost – a big one given EPA regulations. Like much else with the Agency the nitrate assumptions are built on a mountain of sketchy science. Consider the water treatment costs (and forestalled development) for the 10mg/l drinking water standard supposedly to prevent blue baby syndrome. More than 15% of the US drinking water exceeds the standard—- how many cases of methemoglobinemia in the US from drinking water over the last decade? I can’t find any. California is now focusing on the “nitrate crisis” in its agricultural regions with potentially massive agriculture policy and cost implications. And yet I can’t find a single case from drinking water in California. Seems California forgot the study done in 1972 that found no reported cases in the State and followed 256 children in low and high nitrate areas and found while the effect of nitrate was detectable-“it was not impressive.” http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.62.9.1174
Blue Baby syndrome may be more related to bacterial contamination and in the very few cases of Blue Baby found in the US nitrate may simply be a proxy for bacterial contamination.
@ more soylent greet, April 25 at 1:19 pm
Re your question, “Roger, how many years of domestic oil supply do you reckon we have? If we have more than a century’s worth, how much do we need to set aside as a strategic resource?
Also, without the capacity to produce and refine domestic oil, we are still vulnerable to having our oil supply shut off. As you know, it takes years to get an oil field developed and pipelines built to carry the oil to the refineries.”
Taking this one at a time: How many years of US production? Per the EIA in 2009, the US has approximately 20 billion barrels of proved reserves. Our daily consumption is about 18 million barrels per day, so roughly 1000 days, a little more than 3 years. Don’t be fooled by this calculation, because we have been “running out” of oil ever since I can remember. That is at least 50 years in my memory. Curiously, running out has never happened. Worldwide, the proved reserves will last approximately 40 to 45 years at current consumption rates. That, too, has been the case since at least 1960. We never run out of oil, as I explained in my speech to Tulane Law School (see link above), because we keep finding more and more as technology improves. Peak Oil adherents fail to allow for technical progress. Several of my friends are petroleum engineers, and they know for a fact that we will never run out of oil.
The question of how much to set aside as a strategic resource was answered just above, all of it except the amount we produce to maintain a viable oil industry capable of quickly ramping up should the need arise.
Your statement about lack of production and refining capacity is puzzling. We have immense reserves of oil, and it will not require many years to bring the oil into production. That is a convenient myth. It has some basis in fact, for extreme locations such as the Arctic, and very deep water wells. Land-based wells are routinely producing within a very few months. No need to believe me, ask any competent oil industry executive.
With the existing crude oil pipeline system in place, there is very little need for additional pipeline capacity in the US. Even the much-discussed Keystone pipeline is simply a political football. Notice that the gas stations continue to have plenty of gasoline. Without the Keystone pipeline. The Bakken oil field is one small exception; it could use a bigger pipeline to bring oil to the refineries.
As to inadequate refining capacity, that is a pure myth. The fact is that the US has over-capacity and has had for some years. Refineries on the East Coast are being shut down. One does not shut down capacity if there is already a shortage.
Ah yes, “very smart” bureaucrats are always better at making decisions than markets. The former Soviet Union proved this policy very well.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/29/canada-yanks-some-climate-change-programs-from-
budget/#comment-939257
Excerpt:
In North America, our greatest folly has been corn ethanol. Now, almost 40% of the huge US crop is used for corn ethanol – about 130 million tonnes per year of corn goes into our gas tanks, forced into gasoline by government mandates. This folly has driven up the cost of food worldwide, at great cost to the world’s poor.
Grid-connected wind power, solar power and corn ethanol all require huge life-of-project subsidies to survive, and would go bankrupt the minute these subsidies cease. Many of the subsidies are in the form of mandates – forcing power companies and gasoline suppliers to include these costly and counterproductive enviro-schemes in their products, at great expense to consumers.
The radical environmentalists have been remarkably effective at forcing really foolish, costly and counterproductive schemes upon Western society. The backlash, when it comes, won’t be pretty.
When you hear the term “green energy”, it’s not about greening the environment – it’s all about the money.
An interesting piece on the EPA’s enforcement philosophy in regard to oil and gas producers and apparently everybody else as well
“In a Senate speech, Senator Inhofe will draw attention to a little known video from 2010, which shows a top EPA official, Region VI Administrator Al Armendariz, using the vivid metaphor of crucifixion to explain EPA’s enforcement tactics for oil and gas producers. In this video Administrator Armendariz says:
“But as I said, oil and gas is an enforcement priority, it’s one of seven, so we are going to spend a fair amount of time looking at oil and gas production. And I gave, I was in a meeting once and I gave an analogy to my staff about my philosophy of enforcement, and I think it was probably a little crude and maybe not appropriate for the meeting but I’ll go ahead and tell you what I said. It was kind of like how the Romans used to conquer little villages in the Mediterranean. They’d go into a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw and they would crucify them. And then you know that town was really easy to manage for the next few years. And so you make examples out of people who are in this case not compliant with the law. Find people who are not compliant with the law, and you hit them as hard as you can and you make examples out of them, and there is a deterrent effect there. And, companies that are smart see that, they don’t want to play that game, and they decide at that point that it’s time to clean up. And, that won’t happen unless you have somebody out there making examples of people. So you go out, you look at an industry, you find people violating the law, you go aggressively after them. And we do have some pretty effective enforcement tools. Compliance can get very high, very, very quickly. That’s what these companies respond to is both their public image but also financial pressure. So you put some financial pressure on a company, you get other people in that industry to clean up very quickly. So, that’s our general philosophy.””
@Poptech April 25, 2012 at 9:00 pm
“Ah yes, “very smart” bureaucrats are always better at making decisions than markets. The former Soviet Union proved this policy very well.”
Poptech, the snark is misplaced on this issue. Oil is not an ordinary commodity. Many countries do as we do: hoard domestic reserves and purchase on the market. This is a very long game, a very serious game, with absolutely deadly consequences. Anybody who wants to leave oil to “free market” is either deliberately blind or hopelessly naive. Does anybody seriously believe that wars are a thing of the past? Has anyone been watching the daily developments in Iran re nuclear explosives, and Israel? Does no one consider Iran’s threat to the US’ existence? The world is continuing to simmer with barely controlled rage and hate, and very little is required for that to burst out into war. We would be absolutely stupid to drill and produce our domestic oil reserves. Better to buy what we can while we can.
As I noted earlier, every President since and including Truman has seen the wisdom of this. Even Obama, for all his faults, has ensured that we maintain our domestic production at about the same level as the previous couple of decades, and no more.
Roger Sowell,
That analysis would make sense but for one thing: this Administration will not even allow drilling to determine new reserves, and where they are located.
@Smokey,
Here is a recent article re actual data on US well drilling. The numbers are not far off, year-on-year. We are still drilling, as note the increase in dry holes. This is from API, American Petroleum Institute.
http://www.ogj.com/articles/2012/04/api-1q-total-drilling-down-exploratory-well-completions-up.html
Roger Sowell,
Sorry, but I’m not buying your argument. Btw, the last time I heard it was from a young Arab student in an international petroleum course I taught over a decade ago.
I don’t claim to have all the answers in the energy industry, but I’m comfortable with my track record.
I wrote a decade ago that “green energy” was going to be a failure, and if anything I was too kind – corn ethanol and grid-connected wind and solar power are economic and environmental disasters.
Here are some of the achievements in my former career, which had a major positive impact on US energy supply and security.
http://www.OilsandsExpert.com
If US oil production increases in the future, as it certainly may, it will probably be because of new methods of oil production that unlock unconventional oil resources.*
The USA has tripled its monetary base since late 2007, in increasingly desperate measures to support an economy that is “running on empty”.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/BASE
One of the main causes of this economic debacle has been the high cost of imported oil. If as you suggest this was a strategic move by the US “brain trust” to preserve domestic oil reserves, then I think they have made a huge mistake. I would much rather think that this continuing economic debacle was a product of stupidity and greed rather than a deliberate attempt to buy “cheap” oil from abroad and preserve domestic supplies for some future need.
_________________
* At this time, North America has a significant economic advantage over the rest of the world because of the revolution in shale gas production, such that North American natural gas is now selling at ~1/8th the energy-equivalent price of oil.
No they are neither blind nor naive they just understand economics and do not have an affection for socialist energy policies.
Conventional wars, for the most part, yes. No I do not consider Iran a threat to the U.S. existence and believe we should be buying oil from them directly, Sanctions only lead to war. A single U.S. ballistic missile submarine keeps any remote Iranian nuclear threat at bay. What are they going to do sacrifice their entire country to attack us? Oh, right they are going to sell the nukes to terrorists and of course risk annihilation. Why can’t these terrorists get nukes from North Korea and Pakistan? For the same reasons they will not get them from Iran.
Nuclear Iran Is an Exaggerated Threat (Malou Innocent, M.A. International Relations; New York Daily News, March 8, 2012)
Iran sanctions won’t work (Ivan Elan, Ph.D. National Security Policy; Washington Times, January 17, 2012
Lets check what the API has to say,
Production on U.S. Federal Offshore & Onshore Areas is Down (PDF) (API)
THE FACTS:
– EIA estimates that oil production in the Gulf was down 22% in 2011 and projected to be down 30% in 2012 with respect to production forecasts before President Obama’s moratorium policies were put in place.
– Today, leasing and permitting are slow, which could depress future production.
– In the Gulf of Mexico, rigs have left to work in other parts of the world taking jobs with them.
– In Alaska in 2008, the industry spent $2.6 billion to obtain 487 leases in the Chukchi Sea, yet so far the administration has not allowed a single well to be drilled on any of these leases.
– In the Rockies, leasing is down by 68 percent since President Obama took office, and the number of wells drilled is down.
My 2011 car manual says specifically that the warranty is void if I use anything higher than 10% ethanol gasoline. Where is the EPA getting the idea that all post 2001 cars love E15?
Regarding net energy balance you posted Patzek and Pimentel papers from 2003-2006. Those papers as I showed have been thoroughly refuted. By USDA, Argonne Labs, numerous universities and others. There were refuted in numerous peer reviewed papers published in top publications such as “Science”.
These are not “the ethanol lobby” as you ridiculously assert.
I wonder if you even read the new paper you now link to – had you done so you would see, first, it makes no conclusion – it in no way proves Patzek and Pimental correct. It simply lists the differecnes between the two approaches.
What is DOES do is show the biggest difference between the two – it shows Dale’s work is built upon the detailed published work of others; Schmer, Shapouri, and many others, while many of the counterpoints from Patzek and Pimetel start off with “Patzek and Pimentel believe …”
The biggest difference is exactly what I said it was – Patzek and Pimentel allocate a tiny portion of the energy to co-products (7%) while Dale allocates 26%.
10kg of corn yields appx 3.3kg Distiller Dried Grain solids – 33% … DDGS are well proven as a superior high quality animal feed. One pound of DDGS is equivalent to 1.25 lbs of corn in feed value. DDGS also replace soybean meal for feed.
Curiously Pimental and Patzek want to add all sorts of additional energy inputs to the ethanol side yet when it comes to co-products they want to cook the books. When comparing the energy cost of DDGS with the soy meal feed it can replace they refuse to include the considerable energy required to turn soy beans into feed
The vast majority – half – of the Patzek and Pimetel difference comes from their refusal to accurate address energy allocation to co-products. These co-products are directly replacing corn, soybeans etc. Almost 40 million metric tons of DDGS in 2011, They are legitimate high value products. Not to mention the corn meal, corn gluten and the 1.5 billion pounds of corn oil produced last year.
P&P all but ignore these valuable co-products in order to cook they books. They also improperly inflate and add costs. They include the cost to REFINE the energy used which is simply ridiculous – that energy had to be refined regardless of its use. They also inflate fertilizer costs by 30% despite clear ag industry and scientific documentation of the real numbers.
Some scientists, such as Shapouri et al., based on actual real world research in operating corn ethanol plants would allocate a substantially higher percentage of energy costs to co-products than Dale.
When it comes to cellulosic Patzek and Pimetel get even more silly. Dale (and the many, many others who have refuted P&P) use published studies and real world performance. Patzek & Pimetel simply ignore that there are already small scale commercial plants in operation producing the higher yields. Dale also points out the Germans successfully produced cellulosic ethanol 100 years ago at close to the current projected net energy balance numbers, and that plants such as Duponts 250,000 gal Vonores, TN plant are already achieving similar real world numbers.
Dale shows – thru extensive research by the National Renewable fuel Laboratory and others that there is more than enough residual biomass to run the refinery and produce surplus electricity. This position is based on solid research and data. The lead author of the report all but ridicules Patzek and Pimentals position that only a small amount or residual biomass can be burned for energy :
Patzek and Pimentel’s support – a website – Dales support the NREL, backed up by a bunch of highly qualified engineers, whose conclusions are supported by similar REAL WORLD OPERATING plants.
Your link does little or nothing to support your claim that Patzek and Pimentels work is valid … and provides a whole load of evidence, from the co-author – that shows their work to be simply wrong.
All of that said EROI – net energy yield – is in many ways less important than the net value of the energy produced – and the two key components of that are portability and renew-ability.
Because it is “portable” liquid fuel if far more valuable energy than say electricity. It has many more uses and can be sent almost anywhere as needed. Ethanol is also fully renewable – the same resource – the same piece of ground will provide ethanol as long as we plant a renewable feedstock on it. Domestically produced renewable energy – no matter what portion of our overall use is a net positive.
It reduces our offshore energy dependance, And provides an alternate additional fuel source we control … too many people place zero value on these important aspects.
Poptech;
Don’t underestimate the dedicated looniness of Iran’s Ayatollahs and mullahs. From the get-go, they’ve said that they’d gladly let Iran burn if it brought about the chaos that presaged the return of the 12th Imam. You can’t do standard political trade-off analysis on those dudes.
PS Poptech;
And Ahmadinejad is on board, even to the extent of frequently implying that he will himself be revealed to be said 12th Imam when the prophesies are fulfilled.
Nothing is out of bounds for such whackjobs. Nothing.
This is all nice propaganda for those who do not read. Your ethanol lobby “report” cites exactly two peer-reviewed papers. So much for the “numerous” “debunking”,
1. Hammerschlag (2006) – “Ethanol’s Energy Return on Investment: A Survey of the Literature, 1990 – Present”
This is a literature review and is NOT a refutation of anything.
2. Farrell et al. (2006) – “Ethanol can contribute to energy and environmental goals”
This is rebutted here,
Ethanol Production: Energy, Economic, and Environmental Losses (PDF)
(Reviews of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology, Volume 189, pp. 25-41, 2007)
– David Pimentel, Tad Patzek, Gerald Cecil
Everything else cited in your ethanol lobby report was not peer-reviewed.
Roger Sowell,
Obama has said “NO!” to drilling in the red areas.
It’s no wonder gas prices are so high.
The current administration is doing everything it can to increase the price of gasoline,
Administration Oil Strategy Contributes to Price Increases (PDF) (API)
Pat Moffitt says:
April 25, 2012 at 7:05 pm
…My point above however was focused on the hypocrisy of EPA pushing draconian nitrogen regulations at the same time it pushes ethanol….
EPA is proposing an across the board 25% reduction in nitrogen for the US and 45% for the Mississippi River Basin. Corn is the largest user of nitrogen fertilizer. EPA is pushing more corn. Go figure.
Additionally, if EPA was truly concerned about the environment they would pay some attention to the potential loss of land from CRP in response to the high corn price.
________________________________
Thanks for the heads up on that crap. Time to plant more white clover, hop clover and Lespedeza.
So far the USA govenment has floated the idea of requiring farmers to have CDLs to drive tractors, and the EPA wanted to regulate dust from farm fields oh and do not forget the EPA floated the idea of regulating cow belches and farts. Soon the US government will want detailed report on each time we visit the toilet. Oh, I forgot they already regulate US toilets and shower heads.
You do realize the comparison was to E85 not E30?
@ Allan MacRae on 4-25 at 10:51 pm,
What makes you imply that oil is expensive? What is your basis for that? Do you agree that the price of oil has a ceiling?
@ Poptech,
The concept of domestic oil preservation for future strategic needs is not widely discussed but is certainly real. It is not new either.
As I wrote above, every President has accepted and embraced this after World War II. It is a matter of national survival, not economics.
Gail Combs says:
April 26, 2012 at 4:31 am
Thanks for the heads up on that crap. Time to plant more white clover, hop clover and Lespedeza.
That might not fly as clover fixes large amounts of nitrogen.
You have provided no evidence to support your conspiracy theory.
Poptech says: @ April 26, 2012 at 4:24 am
A. Scott, ……This is all nice propaganda for those who do not read. Your ethanol lobby “report” cites exactly two peer-reviewed papers. So much for the “numerous” “debunking”….
This is rebutted here…
_____________________________________________
There is another side issue on this. As Pat Moffitt says @ April 25, 2012 at 7:05 pm and I mentioned corn is a problem plant. Corn is a high user of nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P). So it is a big drain on soil nutrients Corn requires approximately 1.25 lbs. of elemental nitrogen (N), 0.6 lbs. of phosphate (P2O5) and 1.4 lbs. of potash (K2O) to produce one bushel of grain corn….The entire recommended fertilizer rate can be safely applied in a band 2 inches to the side and 2 inches below the seed, although N rates higher than 50 lb/acre may inhibit early season P uptake. In addition as you can see from this photo of a corn field, it leaves a lot of the soil “uncovered” and subject to erosion if the farmer uses traditional methods of growing. This is a photo of corn roots. As can be seen there is no root system to hold soil in place in the middle of the rows.
Compare corn to this photo of a soybean field and a description of the soybean root system.
Remember Crop Rotation?
Peanuts and soybeans are both legumes and if inoculated with the correct bacteria (simple process) will fix nitrogen in the soil. This enriches the soil with out the excess use of fertilizer as mentioned above.
Roger Sowell says: April 26, 2012 at 4:52 am
@ Allan MacRae on 4-25 at 10:51 pm,
Roger:
What makes you imply that oil is expensive? What is your basis for that?
Allan:
Given that the greenback, the yen, the pound sterling and the Euro have all ~tripled their monetary bases in recent years, your question is a moving target.
Is oil expensive? First you have to say :”compared to what?” Compared to North American natural gas, it is 8 times (800%) as expensive, on an energy-equivalent basis. This is a special case – perhaps you can find other better comparisons.
Roger:
Do you agree that the price of oil has a ceiling?
Allan:
Every commodity has an approximate price ceiling at a given time, but that ceiling depends on many factors, not the least of which is currency dilution. How much more money is the Fed going to print? Will tripling the monetary base be enough, or is this just the beginning? When was the last time this was done with a global reserve currency? I think the closest similarity was the late Roman Empire (“Hey – we’re the Roman Empire – we’ll just print the money we need – what could go wrong?”).
As your next-door neighbour in Canada, I am very concerned about the well-being of America. Our bilateral trade is huge, perhaps still the largest in the world. Canada is the biggest foreign supplier of oil to the USA, most of it from the much-maligned oil sands.
Finally, if America fails, it appears improbable that any of the “leading contenders” will act benevolently, in the interests of humanity or the environment.
@Roger Sowell says: April 25, 2012 at 8:58 pm
Roger,
It is the popular perception that it takes years to get oil out of a new field. I don’t know any details about it and I’ll take your word for it. So if we were cut off from Middle Eastern oil, how long would it take to replace it with domestic production?
I understand your thinking on preserving our domestic oil supplies for future use, but I have some issues with it. If oil isn’t really rare and we have a large supply, how much do we really need to keep for future use? The answer depends upon how much oil we really have, how much we estimate the technology to extract it will improve in the future and when/whether we develop new energy sources to compete with oil in terms of convenience and economy. We have Coal-to-Liquid technology now; will it improve in the future? How about Natural Gas-to-Liquid?
As for refinery capacity, how much will we need when our economy recovers? We currently have more than we need, but I expect domestic demand to increase once we get the redistributionist, neo-Marxist greens out of power.
Regarding Keystone: You keep saying it’s better to use their oil instead of ours. Doesn’t that still apply?
thanks
Nothing prevents a filling station from installing a 100% gasoline pump … in fact some in my area have exactly that for the many boaters in the area.
That most stations do not answers your question – there is little demand for it.
This article reads just like something an AGW warmanista would write. It presents opinions or beliefs as if they were hard proven facts. It uses these “facts” to sell fear and catastrophy. It presents selected data to prove its beliefs leaving out other data that would prove otherwise
“Because ethanol burns hotter than gasoline…” Absolutely not! Ethanol has a higher heat of vaporization. It absorbs more heat during the combustion process than does gasoline. At the end of the power stroke the cylinder will be cooler than with straight gasoline. This increases thermal efficiency and reduces pumping loses, The higher the ethanol percentage the greater this effect. Everthing this man says about hotter burning ethanol is fear mongering catastrophic BS!
“But when corn and ethanol subsidies when into effect, the cost of feed corn shot from $2.80 per bushel in 2005 to over $7.00 in 2008. Absolutely correct! He fails to mention that from the high of around $7.25 in June of 2008 corn dropped (or should I say collapsed/cratered/plumeted) to around $2.90 in December of 2008, only six months later. I don’t recall the corn and ethanol subsidies being eliminated at that time, do you? What gets even more interesting is that crude oil peaked at around $145/ barrel in July of 2008 and collapsed to around $30/barrel in December of 2008. Pretty similar, no? Agriculture is an energy intence business.
“Largley because of corn based ethanol, US corn prices shot up from an annual average of $1.96/bushel in 2005 to $6.01 in 2001.” Again correct. He doesn’t mention that in the same time frame crude oil went from around $20/barrel to around $95. Agriculture is an energy intensive business.
The USDA says that 19% of food dollar costs comes from on farm expenses (like corn costs). The rest is labor (over 40% of the total), processing, packaging, advertising, transportation, depreciation, energy, insurance. “However, skyrocketing corn prices….and families see prices soar for almost everything on their dinner table.” What about the other 81% of food dollar costs that contribute to price of those items? What about the 4.5 fold increase in crude oil prices?
To me, the gas mileage debate gets really intersting. Ford recently published a paper stating “substantial societal benefits” in using higher volume blends of ethanol. With blends up to E30 octane ratings of up to RON 98.6 are achieved. This enables higher compression ratios up to 3 more compression ratios and/or more aggressive turbocharging and downsizing of engines. All this means significant improvements in gas mileage. You can make higher octane gasoline but the yield in gallons of gas per barrel drops as octane rating goes up. At RON 98.6 octane the yield drops about 8% from 91 RON octane.
Ricardo did a study on the effects of E15 on vehicles from the years 1994 to 2000. They found more corrosion on the outside of the vehicle that inside the fuel system. They found no drivability problems related to E15.
The EROEI for ethanol keeps increasing. The gallons per acre keep increasing. This article has an agenda. I don’t know the final answer for Ethanol but this article contributes nothing constructive in determinig ethanols’ future.
Once again – Those stations selling E10 HAVE put stations selling 100% gasoline out of business. If there was ANY demand for 100% gasoline there is nothing preventing stations from offering it.