Bio-Fuels Bite the Dust

You'll be providn' a cite for that claim, right?

Call it what you want, I don't care, but when you have to lie and distort about it to make your points, it weakens your point of view's credibility.

When you have to include insults and personal attacks in every post, you have ZERO credibility. Address the issues, if you can.

I can't help but notice that you have dodged this request for a cite.

Sorry, but you have misrepresented me several times by claiming I'm saying things I have not. And, if you take "lie and distort about it" to be a "insult and personal attack", it makes me wonder how an actual insult or personal attack would look.

I've asked you for a cite. Can you provide one? I asked you how me growing corn instead of something else is, as you claim, bad for the environment. I must have missed your substantive response to that question too.

Well, all the enviro-nuts who actually quantified how much gas cows pass in the course of a day, but they beg the "in their right mind" question rather severely.

Member of PETA - People Eating Tasty Animals. (In moderation.)

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Search google for "bio fuel" and "boondoggle", 47,800 hits.

Biofuel boondoggle: US subsidy aids Europe's drivers

Even Communists Can See Through Biofuel Boondoggle Biofuels may harm more than help >< The Facts About Ethanol Will this infant industry ever grow up? Note the tax subsidies that the company is getting.

Ethanol Hurts the Environment And Is One of America's Biggest Political Boondoggles

Ethanol, of course, is nothing new. American refiners will produce nearly 6 billion gallons of corn ethanol this year, mostly for use as a gasoline additive to make engines burn cleaner. But in June, the Senate all but announced that America's future is going to be powered by biofuels, mandating the production of 36 billion gallons of ethanol by

2022. According to ethanol boosters, this is the beginning of a much larger revolution that could entirely replace our 21-million-barrel-a-day oil addiction. Midwest farmers will get rich, the air will be cleaner, the planet will be cooler, and, best of all, we can tell those greedy sheiks to f*ck off. As the king of ethanol hype, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, put it recently, "Everything about ethanol is good, good, good."

This is not just hype -- it's dangerous, delusional bullshit. Ethanol doesn't burn cleaner than gasoline, nor is it cheaper. Our current ethanol production represents only 3.5 percent of our gasoline consumption -- yet it consumes twenty percent of the entire U.S. corn crop, causing the price of corn to double in the last two years and raising the threat of hunger in the Third World. And the increasing acreage devoted to corn for ethanol means less land for other staple crops, giving farmers in South America an incentive to carve fields out of tropical forests that help to cool the planet and stave off global warming.

So why bother? Because the whole point of corn ethanol is not to solve America's energy crisis, but to generate one of the great political boondoggles of our time. Corn is already the most subsidized crop in America, raking in a total of $51 billion in federal handouts between

1995 and 2005 -- twice as much as wheat subsidies and four times as much as soybeans. Ethanol itself is propped up by hefty subsidies, including a fifty-one-cent-per-gallon tax allowance for refiners. And a study by the International Institute for Sustainable Development found that ethanol subsidies amount to as much as $1.38 per gallon -- about half of ethanol's wholesale market price.

But as a gasoline substitute, ethanol has big problems: Its energy density is one-third less than gasoline, which means you have to burn more of it to get the same amount of power. It also has a nasty tendency to absorb water, so it can't be transported in existing pipelines and must be distributed by truck or rail, which is tremendously inefficient.

Nor is all ethanol created equal. In Brazil, ethanol made from sugar cane has an energy balance of 8-to-1 -- that is, when you add up the fossil fuels used to irrigate, fertilize, grow, transport and refine sugar cane into ethanol, the energy output is eight times higher than the energy inputs. That's a better deal than gasoline, which has an energy balance of 5-to-1. In contrast, the energy balance of corn ethanol is only 1.3-to-1 - making it practically worthless as an energy source. "Corn ethanol is essentially a way of recycling natural gas," says Robert Rapier, an oil-industry engineer who runs the R-Squared Energy Blog.

The ethanol boondoggle is largely a tribute to the political muscle of a single company: agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland. In the

1970s, looking for new ways to profit from corn, ADM began pushing ethanol as a fuel additive. By the early 1980s, ADM was producing 175 million gallons of ethanol a year. The company's then-chairman, Dwayne Andreas, struck up a close relationship with Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas, a.k.a. "Senator Ethanol." During the 1992 election, ADM gave $1 million to Dole and his friends in the GOP (compared with $455,000 to the Democrats). In return, Dole helped the company secure billions of dollars in subsidies and tax breaks. In 1995, the conservative Cato Institute, estimating that nearly half of ADM's profits came from products either subsidized or protected by the federal government, called the company "the most prominent recipient of corporate welfare in recent U.S. history."

But the biggest problem with ethanol is that it steals vast swaths of land that might be better used for growing food. In a recent article in Foreign Affairs titled "How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor," University of Minnesota economists C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer point out that filling the gas tank of an SUV with pure ethanol requires more than

450 pounds of corn -- roughly enough calories to feed one person for a year.

Thanks in large part to the ethanol craze, the price of beef, poultry and pork in the United States rose more than three percent during the first five months of this year. In some parts of the country, hog farmers now find it cheaper to fatten their animals on trail mix, french fries and chocolate bars. And since America provides two-thirds of all global corn exports, the impact is being felt around the world. In Mexico, tortilla prices have jumped sixty percent, leading to food riots. In Europe, butter prices have spiked forty percent, and pork prices in China are up twenty percent. By 2025, according to Runge and Senauer, rising food prices caused by the demand for ethanol and other biofuels could cause as many as 600 million more people to go hungry worldwide.

Dave, the world is your oyster, just crack the shell...

Dave H>>> >>>> The major problem with corn based ethanol is the energy input to make a

Having watched this stuff go by several times, I finally have to clear something else: the large methane production quoted for cows refers to cow burps, not cow farts.

So forget about collecting it with a simple exhaust hose.

-- Ed Huntress

Harvard magazine " The Ethanol Illusion " Nov/Dec 2006

Dan

Right, because anything using such emotionally charged language is _sure_ to be an accurate, unbiased reference, is that it?

So, cleaner burning and less foreign oil. If it was a net-negative as some claim, obviously that wouldn't work. So someone is wrong - either biased people with a grudge writing emonionally charged rhetoric, or it's the people investing millions or billions in the projects. I'm guessing they've done their research.

I'm not going to go be a chearleader for it but, what specific problem do you have with it?

This is not just hype -- it's dangerous, delusional bullshit. Ethanol

Really? Can you show me how a complex hydrocarbon will burn more cleanly than an alcohol? Because I'm not seeing the chemistry as being what you describe.

It's a lot closer than it was 2 years ago. And, once production volumes go up, economies of scale and process improvements will change the equation drastically.

Which is an elastic supply, quantity being driven by market forces. As of course you know.

That's amazing. Sorry, "incredible" rather. According to the Chicago Board of Trade, corn futures are currently trading at 350. Two years ago, they were trading at 225. Not sure where you get "double" out of that. As far as the third world goes - per the USDA at this URL:

says we're using 14% of our corn for ethanol as of 2005/06. So that's 86% that isn't.

Wrong again. As I've mentioned at least twice, CRP programs exist and have for decades. Land is held out of production to allow it to rejuvinate, and to give us a strategic reserve of cropland when the situation shows it's needed. There's a reserve of more than 36 million acres in CRP programs at this time. Source: USDA, here:

If the price goes up enough to get people more than the average they're getting at $43.00/acre/year, then they just might decide to put that land into corn. Market forces will work it out. The sooner we push to get this and other biofuels into production quantities that will allow better economies of scale, the sooner it'll be less expensive than petro-based fuels.

They're doing that now already without our help.

How much has gasoline gone up during the Iraq war?

Good. Let's keep the money here. You do know that it then gets _spent_ here, right?

There's water in our pipelines? Can you please provide a cite for this? And certainly, ethanol is a drying agent - HEET and similar additives use it. You notice that it still burns. So I'm not seeing the problem.

Cite for these figures, please?

Yeah, about cites. I've been using USDA and CBOT, you're using biased blogs. Just thought I'd point that out.

That's an outright lie. See previous re: CRP land reserves.

Couldn't have had _anything_ to do with the rise in fuel costs which made everything more expensive across the board, I suppose?

Wow. So by using a whole 14% of our corn crop for ethanol, we are responsible for all this mayhem? Oh, the humanity! Or perhaps, somoene is ascribing more effects than just the ethanol can account for.

Corn, and other crops, are not an inelastic supply.

Got any good cites? You know, with facts? Or just pointers to more blogs.

Dave, the whole deal is a production of Archer Daniels Midland. Once they developed the market and did the lobbying, independents jumped in. Now ADL, according to _The Economist_ or the _WSJ_, I forget which, has only 20% of the market.

But the fact is that *nobody* cared whether it was a real net-energy producer. ADL wanted to sell more corn products. Farm-state legislators wanted to sell more corn products, too. And the rest of the government found themselves a terrific red herring they could use to sound like they were doing something to combat those evil Arabs and to protect the environment at the same time.

As far as I'm concerned, it's mostly a hoax. Even if the DOE is correct, and there's a 20% - 30% net gain, we're still burning a hell of a lot of oil to produce only a little more (in energy equivalents) ethanol.

This has all the earmarks of a boondoggle with big-time financial payoffs for a few, and political payoffs for practically everyone in the US government. It's in the same league with PV solar.

-- Ed Huntress

Ahhh, Pimentel.

"Ethanol. A wide variety of starch and sugar crops, food processing wastes, and woody materials (Lynd et al. 1991) have been evaluated as raw materials for ethanol production. In the United States, corn appears to be the most feasible biomass feedstock in terms of availability and technology (Pimentel 1991)."

In this very paper, is the nugget of his that keeps getting thrown around, 16 years later, as if it's current: "The total fossil energy expended to produce 1 liter of ethanol from corn is 10,200 kcal, but note that 1 liter of ethanol has an energy value of only 5130 kcal. Thus, there is an energy imbalance causing a net energy loss. Approximately 53% of the total cost (55¢ per liter) of producing ethanol in a large, modern plant is for the corn raw material (Pimentel 1991)."

Yet, further in the paper, they write: "The most promising systems rely on distillation to bring the ethanol concentration up to 90%, and selective-membrane processes are used to further raise the ethanol concentration to 99.5% (Maeda and Kai 1991). The energy input for this upgrading is approximately 1280 kcal/liter. In laboratory tests, the total input for producing a liter of ethanol can potentially be reduced from 10,200 to 6200 kcal by using membranes, but even then the energy balance remains negative."

So even Pimentel knows, for at least 13 years, that with 13 year old technology, it took 6200 kcal of energy input to produce the 5130 kcal worth of ethanol. So his very own figures show an 82.7 percent efficiency, with 13 year old technology. Also, these figures ignore possible cogeneration or other uses of "waste" heat, and of the material left after the fermentation. Brewery byproducts used as cattle feed, for instance.

Now, if we'd power the ethanol plants with nuclear-generated electricity, then even the 17% net energy loss that existed 13 years ago, is a lot more attractive than what we're doing now.

Pimentel updated his data in 2005 and he still shows a 30% net loss.

The argument has boiled down to a question of how far you go with an energy audit. Pimentel says you have to go all the way through the machinery costs, the machines-to-make-the-machinery costs, and so on. His detractors, such as Bruce Dale of Mich. State, say that violates academic standards for scholarship on such issues.

But does it? When you close the system under consideration, as we can almost do with petroleum, all of these arguments disappear when we measure how much gasoline is produced, and then measure how much is purchased by consumers. The difference is the loss, which is considerable.

When you're using petroleum and gas sources to produce ethanol, you get into the argument over what is really a production cost (energy, as well as dollars). The only sure way to know the answer is to close the system, so that all of the energy costs needed to produce ethanol are fueled by...ethanol.

If you can't do it, I think the logic is in Pimentel's favor: a great deal of energy costs to produce ethanol get lost or passed over because petroleum is fueling the entire support and production system, and the systems that produce those systems, and so on ad infinitum. Take away the petroleum and the whole thing, says Pimentel, collapses.

The DOE, academicians like Dale, and most particularly the interested parties such as ADM and farm-state politicians gloss this over or try to dismiss it, as Dale has tried to do with Pimentel. I find Pimentel's logic more compelling. And with his more recent data, I think the argument over his basic numbers goes away, too.

-- Ed Huntress

Hey Dan, please throw the dog a bone and give us some cites of the efficiency of ethanol?

Ethanol Production Using Corn, Switchgrass, and Wood; Biodiesel Production Using Soybean and Sunflower

The research includes 2001, 2003 and 2005. Is that current enough?

The Ethanol Forum

National Corn Grower's Association "Ethanol opponents frequently cite a study by Cornell University?s Dr. David Pimentel, who concluded that it takes 70 percent more energy to produce ethanol than it yields. Pimentel?s findings have been consistently refuted by USDA and other scientists who say his methodology uses obsolete data and is fundamentally unsound."

Amaz> >

Not to mention that it cites nine other studies that indicate ethanol is a net energy loser.

Did you read the NCGA "refutation"? It's not impressive.

The USDA thinks ethanol is wonderful. The DOE thinks it's wonderful. George Bush thinks it's wonderful. The whole friggin' government thinks it's wonderful. Politically, it's a can't-lose situation for them.

-- Ed Huntress

It's about 25% less power dense than Gasoline, right? Should be easy enough to google up but, cost per mile more important than volume of product, isn't it?

Right, as I showed with a few minutes of analysis below.

So Pimentel contradicts himself and ignores findings in his own papers (as I cited in my last post), and his peers reject his findings, but you choose to trust him anyway? Or, am I reading you wrong?

Can we start giving money to farmers please, and stop financing arabs?

Compared to "the hydrogen economy", it is wonderful.

WHAT "hydrogen economy"? I haven't seen one.

-- Ed Huntress

Nor, do I expect, will you ever see one. But that doesn't mean billions won't be spent on it.

Actually, I thought that was a funny from Ed.

Then Ken had to ruin the joke.

TOO much reality.