The Renewable Fuels Association (RFA)—the ethanol producer’s bestest best friend—is in a fight for its life. As the Wall Street Journal [sub] reports “The Environmental Protection Agency dealt a big blow to the ethanol industry earlier this year when it decreed that the corn-based fuel doesn’t have a much better carbon footprint than gasoline made with crude oil.” While the RFA lobbies the hell out of congress to subvert/get an exemption from the EPA’s final decree on the subject, they’re “counting the angels on the head of a pin” (quoth RFA CEO Bob Dinneen). Less poetically, what if peak oilers are right? If the supply of easily-extracted light sweet crude dries up, then it’s oil shale for us! And if you compare corn/theoretical sawgrass for fuel, well, then, huzzah! The RFA just happens to have a study that proves that ethanol beats the snot out of shale, carbon footprint-wise [download pdf here]. Unless you count the carbon needed to produce the tires of the tractor harvesting the corn. Unwind that!
Feeding food to SUVs, trucks and cars.
How very smart. (NOT)
E85 is the Homo neanderthalensis of the evolution of energy alternatives…a hairy, grunting dead end.
Peak oiler I am and have been for over a year. (Hence the sale last week of the Z before the proverbial hits the fan…)
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/48192
The above article was written in February 2009 in $40 a barrel times…I much prefer to listen to people like this who predict correctly rather than spouters who shout out whatever message suits their lobby/goal…
A great place to read more about Peak oil is The Oil Drum and here is a great (technical)article on the effect Peak Oil will have on one very important area….world food supplies.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5558
Hey, good luck out there!
Show me a study that is 100% objective, and I’ll show you a seven-year-old arguing the merits of broccoli.
Energy and the environment are uber-hot buttons these days, with trillions of dollars just looking for a place to run. Is it any surprise that everyone, from corn growers to Exxon, Al Gore to Kofi Annan, has an opinion and a compelling study to back it up?
In this case I’d say the EPA is the voice of reason, but others might cry oil lobbying. And who really knows for sure? Even the highest government agency was put there by – and answers to – somebody.
Emit all the carbon you want. They’ve solved the Global Warming problem.
They’re going to move the planet to a higher orbit.
Should work well.
@ RangerM: thanks for my best laugh of the week so far!
I would expect the market will take care of peak oil if we hit it, unless RFA and others get congress to subvert it. And I would expect to see a lot more people driving prions and fits, and more new developments that will make cars more efficient. I would not expect to see much corn ethanol unless subsidies continue and increase.
For an excellent summary of the carbon impact of biofuels, if you haven’t already read this (I’ve touted it here before), go here:
http://www.ehponline.org/docs/2008/116-6/focus-abs.html
Well, how about taxing foreign oil, so that:
1) Ethanol will have a price advantage and the farmers are now happy.
2) Domestic oil companies are happy.
3) Less of a need to send troops to mid-east, so tax payers and Democrats are happy.
Seems like a win-win to me.
Show me a study that is 100% objective, and I’ll show you a seven-year-old arguing the merits of broccoli.
Studies reviewed in decent journals are objective. Any that aren’t are YMMV. The problem is that most people don’t know what that means and tend to put everything on equal footing when quality varies hugely.
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Peak oiler I am and have been for over a year. (Hence the sale last week of the Z before the proverbial hits the fan…)
You realize the timelines involved are not immediate, right?
Well, how about taxing foreign oil, so that:
1) Ethanol will have a price advantage and the farmers are now happy.
2) Domestic oil companies are happy.
3) Less of a need to send troops to mid-east, so tax payers and Democrats are happy.
Seems like a win-win to me.
Oh great idea. Farmers pay more for petroluem products. Domestic oil companies see their investments in Canada, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere become less economic. And we end up sending troops to Venezuela, anyways.
Both corn and shale require unconscionable amounts of water to be turned into fuel. Conserve and continue to look for that magic bullet — solar-electric hydrogen? Hmmmm … how much energy and resources will all the photovoltaic cells take to produce? The road to energy independence really leads to using less.
It would be better to grab the waste stalks etc and burn it to produce electricity and then use that to power cars.
It’s more environmentally friendly and encourages the production of electric cars, rather than the inefficient ICE we’re stuck with now.
Ethanol is a boondoggle. Burning biomass to produce electricity FTW.
Andrew van der Stock:
Yeah, because electricity generation, transmission, storage, and use is 100% efficient.
Biomass is pretty low-energy density. Lots of tons for not a lot of power.
Corn ethanol isn’t the long term answer. But it does solve some problems. Namely, oxygenates for smog prone areas, oversupply of US corn, and a bridge to future biofuels.
I do believe that peak oil, if it hasn’t happened already, eventually will do so.
Earth isn’t making more oil. Oil is stored in the Earth’s crust. That crust is between 3 and 7 miles thick, and therefore has a finite maximum storage capacity. Enormous, yes, but finite. Even more finite, since “all” of the crust does not store oil.
Each day we take a barrel out, the earth has less oil to be retrieved. Hence, one day there will be “no more”. Some day prior to “no more”, what’s left will be so expensive to recover that only the very wealthy (governments) will have the ability (or freedom) to do so.
When that happens, the average person won’t own a car, and may not even have access to a license or vehicle tag.
The only question remaining (in my mind) is “when?” I hope it happens after I (and all of my loved ones) die.
Shale oil has a lower carbon footprint then ethanol ?
You’re hilarious mate !
They’ve solved the Global Warming problem. They’re going to move the planet to a higher orbit.
Priceless! If this story were written today, I’d say it was the Nasdaq 5000 of the climate change bubble.
I have often said that there is one thing that has almost universal agreement with regard to domestic energy policy – and gas for our toys. That is that no one really wants to send our money to unstable and often hostile foreign countries. Sure we are happy with Canada, possibly Mexico and Brasil, and the North Sea producers. But sending vast sums to the rest of the pack is the worst near term issue.
Secondly, the long term [50-100 years]availability of affordable transportation fuel is not assured. So the alternatives today are limited and are being explored – unfortunately with a lot of political meddling.
If – and its a big if – we in the US and other developed countries can keep our eye on the goal of reducing dependence on petroleum for transportation and incentivise the market to achieve that goal, we will end up having efficient and effective solutions and possibly avoid future energy crisis.
Taxing/import duties or cap-and-trade programs are not incentives, they are politically driven wealth distribution programs wearing a disguise.
Taxing/import duties or cap-and-trade programs are not incentives, they are politically driven wealth distribution programs wearing a disguise.
But wealth distribution is what all incetives are – we take finite capital resources, such as money, time, labor – and redistribute them to areas that need attention.
Taxation and import duties are precisely incentives/disincentives, it’s just that outcomes of a policy imposed on an otherwise liberal market can be hard to predict. Our dependence on oil is caused by decades of incentives the auto and oil-and-gas industries received from the American people. Our numerous bases in Middle East, our worldwide militarism, our huge public capital investments in the highway system – all are incentives to use cars that run on dead dinosaurs.
Current ethanol subsidies are a drop in the bucket compared to what we already have spent and continue to spend on oil subsidies.