It’s been a while since we’ve run an E85 BOTD. The big news on the corn-for-fuel front: the E85 lobby is pressuring the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to allow states to raise the minimum required amount of ethanol from 10 to 15 percent. For some reason, Agweek seems to think ethanol producers haven’t yet hit “the blend wall”: the point at which there’s more ethanol than demand. (The fact huge swaths of the food-for-fuel industry have gone bust may have provided a clue). But at least they acknowledge the Everest ahead. “Many environmental and consumer groups and small engine and car manufacturers are concerned that the increased blend rate might damage pollution control equipment, reduce air quality, and undermine vehicle and equipment performance and warranties. The EPA and Department of Energy are currently testing the effects of higher blend rates on engine performance and emissions.” We’ll keep an eye on that one. Meanwhile, the Minnesota Auditor’s office has had a look at the state’s $93 million worth of ethanol subsidies and asked the logical question WTF is that all about?
The Star Tribune tells the tale of the anti-E85 (E10?) report that couldn’t be quashed:
At a time of crushing state budget deficits, the $44 million expected to be spent on the program through 2012 could be redirected to other uses, according to the report.
“Legislators should look carefully at this program in light of the current budget deficit and the state’s goals of reducing energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions,” the report states.
But can be ignored.
Legislative audits are strictly advisory and legislators are not bound to follow their recommendations.
In fact, will be.
In a letter sent to the auditor’s office last week, Agriculture Secretary Gene Hugoson pushed back against the recommendation to end the subsidy because of the “profoundly positive impact” the ethanol industry has had on the state’s economy.
In 2007, he wrote, the industry’s economic impact on the state totaled $2.27 billion, employing 4,300 Minnesotans.
Huh?
However, the auditor’s report said the subsidies represent only slightly more than 1 percent of the industry’s sales and that producers earned profits of $619 million during the past five years.
What?
The report also said the state should give tax breaks to ethanol plants only if they need it and are able to offer energy and environmental benefits. In the past, it said, the state has used incentives through its Job Opportunity Building Zone program for ethanol plants that might not have needed it.
Holy corn ears, Batman! Is that a bushel of misleading stats or what? In truth, bottom line, without taxpayers footing the bill, there wouldn’t BE an ethanol industry in Minnesota or anywhere else, for that matter. Oh well, it’s nice to see someone in government stand up to special interests, even if he is brushed aside.
When is someone going to admit that ethanol is really not that great a fuel? Who cares if Brazil uses nothing but. That’s their business and they elected people who made those decisions. The free market certainly didn’t choose ethanol.
We had a poster on this site from Brazil who laid it down how awful the ethanol runs in their small cars compared to the blends with more gasoline.
Here we have a classic case of doing everything possible to avoid the best choice which is petroleum.
W realy should investigate producing biodiesel out of garbage. I hear microbial action can accomplish this and there is no shortage of food waste.
Big Corn won’t like that very much. Try and get subsidies for garbage processing.
“Big Corn”?? Thanks to this remark there is a noseful of Rosso Fortissimo all over my keyboard.
Seriously though, why are we back on the ethanol issue? I thought this was dead and buried, like disco and Al Gore.
Because ethanol is made by mixing corn with your tax dollars and both seem to be in plentiful supply.
Ethanol is making fuel more expensive and less powerful. Most if not all cars get less MPG on ethanol blends and we know what happens when food is used for fuel.
Only in America could a nation turn it’s back on plentiful supplies of petroleum from sea to sea and gulf to great lake for a feel good proposition to “Grow our Own Fuel!”, extensively to reduce our dependence on fuel from people who don’t like us.
If we really wanted to stop buying fuel from our enemies we should drill for our own oil and stop making it expensive to do so. Every act of congress against domestic production makes foreign oil a better buy, even at today’s prices. Then the same bunch cries we buy too much from foreigners and wonders why we don’t run cars on french fry oil.
Other countries shake their heads and laugh. Japan has little in the way of oil reserves and built 50 nuke plants to power the trains and industry with. If they had our representatives they would be growing rice to make ethanol from while ignoring the benefits of nuclear energy because it’s all about looking green and feeling good.
Eventually it’s all going to catch up to us all.
GS650G: can’t wait!
I’m all about fuel efficiency – but ethanol is kinda like using more water to make your coffee – you end up drinking more coffee to get the “bump” you need.
The benefits of ethanol (oxygenation) are far exceeded by even a 10% blend in an engine designed to run on gasoline – it’s all downhill from there.
NOOOOO! 10% is still a crap blend for a performance car and 15% will be worse. If this was passed, it would piss me off more than most things the govt does as it would directly take enjoyment from my driving.
You can tax me, but don’t tell me I can’t have as much fun anymore so you can eat another steak.
http://farm.ewg.org/farm/index.php?key=nosign
The Farm Subsidy Database.
Poke around the site. Great essays about the waste of your tax dollars.
Look up the amount individual farmers/ranchers/etc receive in corporate welfare.
Mu uncle has a “hobby farm,” intended to be a tax write-off that allows him to live cheaper than in a house within a town.
Not intended to actually make money or actually have eatable output, he still qualified for an average of close to $50,000 yearly for many years for NOT growing crops or NOT doing this or that or for setting aside land to just sit (where he charges hunters to enter and hunt various critters during the hunting season).
It is such a racket. A method of transferring wealth to a privileged few.
Last time I was at the site it was not the most user-friendly thing. I had to poke and peek before being able to find the relatives who are farmers.
I wonder if you will be as angered as I was after spending some time at the site.
I live in Minnesota. Ethanol is crap. Most folks hate the stuff, and don’t understand the reason we keep chasing this inefficient source of energy. Finally the folks over in St. Paul are getting the message … none too soon I might add. Maybe we can be at the front of the movement to get rid of this crap. At least I can still get the pure stuff for my ’63 Dodge with the 383.
The Federal Government is contemplating E15 instead of E10 and is requesting “public comments” be sent to: caldwell.jim@epa.gov
Here’s what I emailed him last week:
Sir,
I understand you want public comments on E15 becoming the new standard for automotive fuels in the USA.
I’ve been a car-guy my entire life, and have enjoyed the ownership of ultra-high-efficiency automobiles since 2005 (and before; having used a Dodge Neon and Chevrolet Cavalier as family sedans for years prior, while surrounded on the roads by SUV”s, “mini”-vans with massive V6’s and pickup trucks).
Let me count the ways this E15 business is an awful idea, if I may.
1. The warrantee on millions of new vehicles will be VOIDED. Having the Federal Government on the hook for millions of lawsuits is not a fundamentally logical thing to do. Because, I’ll be one of the first in line to sue once my car breaks down. Count on it. (My cars include a 2008 Toyota Prius and 2009 Hyundai Sonata 4 cyl, and in both owner’s manuals, NOTHING OVER E10 MAY BE USED).
2. My Prius – and the preceding 2005 Prius – both already lose 10% to 22% MPG’s on E10; I can only imagine how bad this will get on E15. Did you catch the salient fact that HYBRID technology does not seem to work well (“slight understatement”) with ETHANOL blended fuels? I’ve driven 48,000 miles on the 2005 Prius and 25,000 miles on the 2008 Prius. One example: When the “last” E0 (PURE GASOLINE) pumps went away in my area (Traverse City Michigan), my winter-time Prius MPG went from 42 to 33. That’s 21.5% fewer MPG’s. Because of 10% ethanol. Luckily, a friend found me another E0 filling station and my MPG’s went back up. Now it’s spring time, I’m back up to 43-45 mpg. My wife’s Sonata “only” loses 6% efficiency on 10% ethanol.
3. Ethanol is just plain foolish. I have tested some 30 vehicles on E10 (aka “gasohol”) since 1979, and have found that, without exception, ALL of them lose between 6% and 25% MPG’s on 10% ethanol. Not forgetting on top of these losses, the NATURAL GAS used to make the ethanol; the CRUDE OIL turned into DIESEL FUEL to deliver the ethanol by tanker truck (as you know, it cannot be put through oil pipelines) and the MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF UNDERGROUND WATER used to produce corn for ethanol… (as much as 479 litres per 1 litre of ethanol produced). E10, E15 and E85 only makes sense to Washington DC’ers, not to anyone in the real world of common sense. Mandating E15 over E10 can only make the situation worse overall. May I also remind you about the dead-zone in the Gulf of Mexico from over-use of certain pesticides, partly due to the over-production of corn upstream, solely because of ethanol? If we kill the sea, we all die; comprende?
4. Ethanol is corrosive. See #1. See you (as in the US Government) in Court. After all, even with one gas station in my area with E0 fuel, I have no choice but to fuel with whatever ethanol-laced drek-fuel available to me while traveling.
5. Instead of this ethanol foolishness, why isn’t the US Government using AMERICAN DEVELOPED technology to make clean ‘crude oil’ out of sewage, offal and garbage IN AMERICA? Please go to http://www.changingworldtech.com and read it for yourself. I wrote to President Bush in his first term about this (and was ignored), indicating that crude oil was likely to go up sharply in price as the world was obviously coming up to peak-oil (which it did, in 2007 in case it missed your notice). But using MORE crude oil to make a poor substitute (i.e. ethanol) is certainly not logical nor, if true numbers are considered, remotely intelligent. Our motor fuels infrastructure is based upon hydrocarbons; making clean hydrocarbons which may be used in 100% of the current motor vehicles without problems makes 100% sense. Taking sewage, offal and garbage and making motor-fuels makes 100% sense. It is also “carbon neutral” since it is simply re-using carbon already in place.
Put as plainly as I can; How much more sensible is it to make fuel for motor vehicles out of the waste materials AFTER feeding humans, rather than using food stock and causing food prices to go up?
6. If growing fuels is still desired, why ethanol? Ethanol is simply not a logical motor fuel for a fleet of millions of vehicles, most of which cannot use it effectively. Look at the failure of the CNG fuelled vehicles in this country, and how the big-3 tried to sell them 15 years ago and flopped. Honda is also experiencing failure in trying to market natural gas fuelled Civic automobiles at this time. Perhaps, instead, a drop-in substitute (again, using AMERICAN technology). Try reading http://www.butanol.com in your spare time. Butanol, which is a 4-carbon alcohol, is a drop-in substitute for gasoline, rather than a mismatched fuel. Butanol may also be made of switch grass and other non-corn crops, as well as sugar-beets. We, as a nation, could grow sugar-beets along the tens of thousands of miles of medians between the expressways which currently grow weeds and grass, and make motor-fuels out of it.
7. We already have a massive, current (if you’ll pardon the pun) infrastructure for fuelling vehicles; it is called the electric grid. I realize fully that it needs upgrading (whether or not we plug hundreds of thousands of cars into it or not), but electric cars seem to make sense on many levels for a limited number of users; but this seems to be so much more logical than ethanol to my mind. Overall the efficiency factor is many many times better for pure electric vehicles. Hybrid-gasoline vehicles is also an extremely good way to go, with plug-in hybrid-gasoline vehicle also up there in overall efficiency, too.
8. Given the above facts, I’d like to say that if true figures were parsed out, oil imports would be REDUCED if we entirely got rid of the ethanol requirements for motor-fuels. As for so-called emission benefits of ethanol-laced fuels, I call b-s. Modern catalytic convertors convert nearly all of the emissions to CO2 and water vapor, whether the car is running E0, E10 or E85. Plus, the oxygen sensor on virtually all cars since 1984 is engineered to make gasoline engines run at exactly 14.7 pounds of air to 1 pound of fuel; adding an OXYGENATE (i.e. ethanol) to the fuel simply causes MORE FUEL TO BE USED because the oxygen content overall is enleaned from oxygen being both in the 147.7 pounds of air AND the 1 pound of fuel ingested.
9. The average American automobile on the road right now is 2 years older than those in what used to be Communist Eastern Europe; that is, 9.5 years old. A short study of owners manuals on cars that old and older will show you that not only is E15 not acceptible for use, but that E10 is also forbidden from use by the manufacturers in many of these vehicles. So, the United States Government is even now, essentially mandating the mis-fuelling of millions upon millions of vehicles for no good reason, causing mechanical problems and expense to the population.
10. Food prices in the United States and other countries have been proven to have increased from the reduction in land available for food production directly attributable to growing corn for ethanol. Put another way, as a Christian man, I find it unconscionable that my elected government is putting the fuelling of SUVs and trucks with ethanol ahead of feeding human beings. The food riots in Mexico two years ago, after food prices doubled, stem directly from the export of their staple food (corn) to the US for production of ethanol.
Menno,
Nice letter. Sadly, this part is not fully accurate: Instead of this ethanol foolishness, why isn’t the US Government using AMERICAN DEVELOPED technology to make clean ‘crude oil’ out of sewage, offal and garbage IN AMERICA? Please go to http://www.changingworldtech.com/ and read it for yourself.
1. Changing World Technologies (CWT) was going to list on the NYSE. Instead they have filed for bankruptcy. Of course, CWT blames others.
2. CWT’s technology is NOT able to convert garbage into fuel, only lipids (i.e. fats and oils). That said, it is a better technology than biodiesel: it uses a dirtier feedstock and produces a superior product.
3. Well, potentially superior anyway: Fuel quality was another challenge. Changing World Technologies‘ thick, tarry fuel resembles boiler-grade fuel oil. One prospective buyer insisted on what the company called “unacceptable pricing terms” for its relatively unproven product.
4. It hasn’t helped that CWT over-promised and under-delivered.
4.1 Promise: “We’ve done so much testing in Philadelphia, we already know the costs,” he says. “This is our first-out plant, and we estimate we’ll make oil at $15 a barrel. In three to five years, we’ll drop that to $10, the same as a medium-size oil exploration and production company. And it will get cheaper from there.”
4.2 Delivery: Final cost, as of January 2005, was $80/barrel ($1.90/gal).
CWT had the right idea: Waste->Fuel, far superior to Washington’s boneheaded Food->Fuel. They failed to execute. Let’s hope CHOREN or Range Fuels can do better. Stay tuned…
Hi Engineer,
I’m sure I read that CWT had been working on the other processes; certainly they boasted about them (but admittedly you are absolutely right that the only process they managed to get into full scale production in Missouri, was using offal from a turkey processing plant). When they set up their plant next to the Butter Ball turkey processing facility, it was apparently with the UNDERSTANDING that since Butter Ball had hitherto had to PAY to have the offal taken away to a landfill, that CWT would get the offal for “free” to save Butter Ball money. Instead, once they got the plant built, Butter Ball had them by the B*lls and demanded money for the offal…. or so I read.
Even so, the process did work, though they did have problems with odor, I also read (and had been working diligently to solve that).
I’d read that the outgoing liquid fuel was more or less the same as very clean home heating oil, and therefore could have been made into diesel fuel easily (and I presume, also cracked to make gasoline?).
I’d also read that CWT had sold a license to a company in Eire? Perhaps that didn’t pan out.
I had high hopes to see large scale production of synthetic oil/fuels and plastics from garbage, sewage and offal.
This depression/recession is having more costs every day…
I kind of took exception to you comment that the CWT people “were blaming everyone but themselves” because it makes it seem that they’re being lame about it – I didn’t see that in the article you referenced. I see the facts that a lot of IPO’s have gone by the wayside.
Good gawd, I just thought. Watch the Chinese come and buy the company for pennies on the dollar, then go away and refuse to license the technology…
Menno,
You are right about CWT getting shafted by Butterball: the way Appel once described it, they assumed Mad Cow Disease would lead USDA to outlaw the disgusting practice of feeding farm animals (the bits we don’t eat) to farm animals. I guess CWT didn’t understand farm state politics. They have learned a lot in that regard.
But that is only one issue: it does not explain away the entire difference between the projected $15/bbl and the actual $80/bbl, it at best accounts for $30/bbl of the difference.
The rest of the difference is due to shoddy engineering, in other words they got both the mass and energy balances wrong. In particular, the 85% efficiency claim is patently ridiculous.
BTW, the lipids->hydrocarbon claim comes from CWT themselves, if you care to wade through this presentation. See slide #19 for the short explanation.
The waste plastic (automotive shredder residue -> fuel) system was never tested on large scale, as far as I know. One would think if it was feasible somebody would have implemented it by now. Maybe we just don’t produce enough plastic waste.
The odor issue was never resolved, as far as I can tell. Slides #32 thru #34 and #37 suggests why: parking turkey offal in the sun, open to the surroundings is something only someone unfamiliar with waste disposal or wastewater would do.
My conclusion is that CWT was started with all the right intensions, but that these guys did not include people with the right backgrounds (waste disposal) or skills (engineering) to allow them to build a properly functioning alpha plant, or better yet, a demonstration scale plant that would have highlighted among others the odor issue.
More troubling is that CWT keeps perpetuating their original claims (85% efficient!), leading me to believe they are either grossly incompetent (like MBAs in charge of a car company) or willfully dishonest. As time goes by, it is harder and harder to believe it is mere incompetence.
But have no fear. Waste to fuel will survive. Most likely in a gasification system of one sort or another.