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?
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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)
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.
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* 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?
@ur momisugly 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?
@ur momisugly 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: @ur momisugly 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 @ur momisugly 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
@ur momisugly 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.
When people have nothing to support their claims the first thing they turn to is adhominem attack. Which largely sums up your entire rant on the subject.
Both Larry and my claims are based on real world experience … mine on 90,000 miles of use.
I posted that in my experience, that while my mileage is appx 20% lower on E85, when coupled with lower price for E85 I pay almost exactly the same per mile.
YOUR most recent EPA fuel economy link agrees:
Even though the EPA shows a 3.8% to 6.6% (Hwy/City) HIGHER reduction in fuel economy than my real world experience they CONFIRM the annual fuel costs are almost identical.
With my slightly better real world fuel economy, if we use the EPA calculations I actually save money using E85.
Don’t you just HATE it when that link you thought was so great turns out to prove the other guy’s point?