Corn Ethanol Bust Provides an Opening for 2nd Gen Biofuels
It’s a fact. Corn ethanol has lost its luster. Its intrigue has gone from, say, Sean Connery in Dr. No, to the “let’s-just-pretend-they-never-happened” Timothy Dalton years. Each day now brings news of another ethanol plant closure or project put on “hold.” In fact, the stream of bad news for corn ethanol has become so steady that it has largely faded into background noise — just another sign of a crashing economy.
In reality, however, corn ethanol was set up for a crash before the faltering world economy gave it the impetus to go over the edge. I’m not suggesting that corn ethanol is going extinct, just that, as some industry experts have put it, corn ethanol is going through a “major adjustment” where the outcome will be large swaths of consolidation and efficiency improvements within the industry.
In a way, corn ethanol is finally coming of age. To put it crudely, little Timmy has stopped having wet dreams and gone out and met some actual women.
- » See also: Scientists Researching How Plants Can Make Petroleum
- » Get Gas 2.0 by RSS or sign up by email.
Just so we’re clear, I think corn ethanol still has a place in the US economy, but it finally seems to have taken on a value related to the true level of its usefulness. Regardless of the food versus fuel political boondoggle, there was never any way we could have grown enough corn at a cheap enough price for some future president to stand in front of a corn ethanol refinery with a banner proclaiming “mission accomplished.”
And I say good riddance to the hype. Corn ethanol was starting to become a distraction. A political toy to dangle in front of the right constituents. A complicated enough issue that you could pay the right person to come up with whatever answer you wanted to support your position.
In fact, I think the corn ethanol bubble bust is actually A Good Thing for the biofuels industry as whole. Corn ethanol was always just a way to get from here to there. Nobody with a good grasp of the big picture ever thought we’d be filling all the cars in the US with 85% corn ethanol fuel. In their quiet moments, when they were really being honest with themselves, even the staunchest corn ethanol supporters would agree.
And with corn ethanol’s downfall, I think the potential major winners are second generation biofuels — biofuels made from non-food crops grown in a sustainable manner, waste agricultural material, or garbage. Biofuels like cellulosic ethanol (can’t we just call it “Celluline”), algae diesel, and perhaps butanol.
Now that attention has shifted from “Woo-hoo corn ethanol!” to “what’s next?”, second generation biofuels might actually get some of the political and investment attention they so desperately need.
If there’s any real hope for us to span the gap from now to when we can all drive, say, hydrogen fuel cell cars, we need biofuels. There’s no way around that folks. It’s a progression that has to happen and biofuels are the only way — and the only truly good biofuels are the ones most folks have never heard about (or have mistakenly confused with corn ethanol). These second generation biofuels are full of promise that they can provide energy independence in a sustainable manner.
I just hope that the bad name of corn ethanol hasn’t harmed the good name of biofuels in general.
Image Credit: tauntingpanda’s Flickr photostream under a Creative Commons License.
If you’re driving around on gasoline, chances are you also have up to 10% ethanol in your fuel. So credit ethanol for replacing toxic methanol based MTBE and for oxygenating your gasoline, without contaminating your ground water. Studies show that ethanol lowers the price of gasoline by 15%. This saves us billions of dollars every year. Take note of the thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in county, state, and federal tax revenue that ethanol is generating. Every dollar in ethanol subsidies spins-off ten dollars worth of economic stimulus.
People who live in states with blender pumps, like S. Dakota, Minnesota, and Iowa, save more on fuel. Because locally produced ethanol goes straight to the retail pump, instead of being shipped far away to a gasoline blending terminal and then shipped back to gas stations. Local ethanol blender pumps have an advantage over a centralized oil industry. They take local ethanol and cut out long distance shipping costs. Part of the blending subsidy may also be passed-on to consumers. That translates into higher efficiency and cheaper fuel at the pump. You can also try different ethanol blends and find out which one gets your vehicle the best mileage for the money. Steve-O, I remember you got 20% better mileage on E20 than you got on regular gasoline. That’s why blender pumps are sweeping the Corn Belt and will also be installed in emerging ethanol states, such as Texas, California, Arizona, Tennessee, Louisiana, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania and others.
Louisiana now has the most advanced ethanol development program in the country, expected to get a 5 to 1 return. Renergie Inc. is building 10 sweet sorghum based modular ethanol plants around the state, which will supply local ethanol directly to local blender pumps. Another approach in Texas and Arizona is to integrate ethanol refineries with cattle feeding operations and dairy farms. The adjacent manure is converted into biogas CHP for plant production power, and the distillers grains byproduct is fed to the adjacent cows to produce milk or meat. This is better than a 3 to 1 return.
You can also credit the corn ethanol industry for laying the groundwork for the emerging cellulosic ethanol industry. Poet Ethanol is equipping their corn ethanol plants with cellulose capability, which will also make them energy self sufficient. Same with Chippowee Valley Ethanol and others. Ethanol efficiency is improving dramatically. What may have been true 5 years ago is not true today. You can throw the old negative studies in the trash.
Companies like Vera Sun and Pacific Ethanol are having problems, because of the way they mismanaged their companies. They agreed to buy high priced future supplies of corn, just before the price of wholesale ethanol took a nosedive along with crude oil. That caused sudden imbalances for ethanol producers that they will have to adjust to. The stronger companies are still stable and the industry is viable.
Corn ethanol was never meant to save the country. But it does supplement gasoline with a clean domestic fuel that replaces some foreign oil. Corn ethanol is capped at 15 billion gallons a year, which is too low. What we should do is take ALL of our feed corn, extract the starch for ethanol, and use mainly distillers grains for domestic feed and export. That would triple our domestic ethanol production to about 30 billion gallons a year. We should increase the blending wall to somewhere between 20 and 30%. And we should mandate that all new vehicles be ethanol compatible. Ethanol refineries should not be converted to butanol. They should be converted to algae production, whereby the corn sugars are fed to multiply algae in dark tanks as in the Solazyme system. At corn ethanol refineries, the components for algae production are already in place: CO2, corn sugar, waste heat, nutrient rich effluent and waste water. That would give you biodiesel from the algae oils, ethanol from the algae starch, and additional high protein animal feed to sell alongside distillers grains. This would be more than a 10 to 1 return.
Ethanol has the potential to be transformed well beyond our expectations. The engines that are coming are smaller, lighter, and more efficient, with a much higher power to weight ratio, because they will be optimized for ethanol, not just gasoline.
Actually if you build engines specifically to run on ethanol with 13 or 14:1 compression and appropriate cam you will get about 15 to 20% better mileage than a comparable gas engine and about 98% less pollution.
“What kind of monkey math is that. You must be one of the guys that does the polls for GM. Ethanol is not an efficient form of fuel, it burns cleaner, and is sustainable yes, but efficient no. ”
If you’re referring to the fact that ethanol has a lower energy density than gasoline, you’re correct, but that’s already accounted for in the data mentioned in my post above. In most of the studies I’ve seen, they use the unit GGE (gallon of gasoline equivalent) which for ethanol is very close to 1.5 gallons.
Tim, you can not compare ethanol efficiency with gasoline on a gallon per gallon basis. It takes about 55% more ethanol to cover the same distance when it is used in the same engine.
It doesn’t matter if it is efficient or not, it is a fuel that you can make in your garage, cheap and easy. No more money into the hands of the corporations that are robbing us is the point, self sufficiency is the only answer.
ChuckL
It depends on the engine. A higher compression ratio improves the efficiency of the engine. Problem is that an engine with a higher compression ratio requires higher octane gasoline otherwise you get preignition, dieseling, knocking and all sorts of problems that ruin performance and will destroy your engine pretty quickly. That is why when lead was removed from gasoline in the early 1970s which lowered the octane rating of gasoline, the car manufacturers had to respond by decreasing the compression ratio. At the time, people complained that the new cars had poor performance and got worse gas mileage.
Unleaded gasoline has more energy content than ethanol but it can only be used in engines that are inherently less efficient. Ethanol increases the octane rating of gasoline when mixed which allows the use of more efficient high compression ratio engines. The increase in efficiency translates into more miles per gallon as well as more horsepower from the same size engine.
Nick
Sadly, I think that you have it wrong on how the price drop is going to encourage celulosic ethanol.
If prices were still high, it would be possible for some laboratory processes to be tried out in the commercial world, despite costing more than corn ethanol to produce. The high price of ethanol in the market would have allowed them to still make money while gaining valuable knowledge and experience in actual production which would eventually translate into cheaper cellulosic ethanol production.
As it is, the ethanol industry is going to limp along, largely supported by government mandates until the price of gasoline heads back up. Most of the innovations in the ethanol industry are going to be aimed at reducing the cost of producing corn ethanol. This is a good thing in and of itself, but probably not what you were hoping for.
Jeff,
Thank you for the info and helping to prove my point. Ethanol is not the bad guy, corn ethanol is. Corn can be used for many things and the byproducts can as well, but it is still the least efficent crop to use for fuel. Corn is a resource dependent crop compared to most other viable fuel stocks. I would love to see your idea about corn sugars for the algae process given serious consideration.
Douglas,
Have you seriously broken down the cost to “home brew” ethanol? Once you factor in the equipment and the feedstock, you don’t save money for 5-10 years unless you are cranking out a lot of fuel.
“Tim, you can not compare ethanol efficiency with gasoline on a gallon per gallon basis. It takes about 55% more ethanol to cover the same distance when it is used in the same engine.”
I agree with you, and I thought that was clear on that in my second post above. 1.0 GGE (gallon gasoline equivalent) of energy is ~1.5 gallons of ethoanol. They take all that into consideration in the all studies I’ve seen.
I agree with Nick (Mr. Celluline) and Jeff. Doug has some valid arguements, as well. A wide spectrum of information is always better than a narrow viewpoint. Thank you, fellas.
My take on the subject of corn-based ethanol is that it is a “bridge fuel”, but not a particularly good one. I believe that we have put our ethanol eggs in the corn basket for infrastructure reasons.
By that I mean the equipment farmers have to grow and harvest the feedstock, the state of technology to distill the fuel and the distrbution network. And so, as a nation, we must resolve ourselves to upgrade and modify the existing infrastructure. Our government should focus on thee re-creation of that infrastucture, more than the sex life of the farting tree bat.
We should focus on the second generation technologies and the use of alternative sources. Perfecting the cellulosic process to produce “celluline” would bust the possibilities wide open. Plant stock such as Jerusalem Artichokes would be an excellent source for this process. They’re weeds in most parts of the country and have limited food interest, but with the cellulosic process could produce as much as 16 times the ethanol per acre than corn, according to some studies.
Another possibility would be to form a partnership with the Dominican Republic for sugar cane, since Brazil doesn’t generate enough ethanol for export to put a seriuos dent in our needs. On a recent trip to the island, I saw thousands of acres planted in cane and thousands more sitting fallow. (They make better cigars than the Cubans now, too _ BTW.)
Something that could have a very positive impact on ethanol availability would be the availability of home distilleries at a reasonable price. The proliferation of these would open up a whole new market opportunity…feedstock suppliers who buy their product directly from farmers and sell at whoelsale prices to the public. I, for one, would be all over this.
I drive a 2003 Mustang Mach 1 with a 10:1 compression ratio. I am planning to converting it to ethanol, someday soon. Distribution and availability are the only things holding me back. They are also holding me back on my plans to start a business producing ethanol-powered crate engines for car enthusiasts.
I guess the answer depends on how much cooperation, or more likely, interference our government will give. That’s the discouraging aspect of it all. Until it becomes a serious vote-getter, I’m afraid that the second generation of biofuels may have to wait until the current generation of politicians either comes on board, gets voted out or dies off. Given the number of career politicians in Washington, it will probably be the latter.
Biofuels may well end up being a “We the People” thing, with local cooperatives and feedstock cartels as the driving force. But rest assured, our government WILL come up with a way to tax that! That is the one thing they are quite adroit at.