Ethanol – the Good, the Bad, the Ugly, and the Beautiful
Corn ethanol that is transported over 1,000 miles on a tanker truck, and then delivered as E85 into a flexfuel vehicle that fails to deliver 20 miles per gallon is bad. GM and Ford have pushed flexfuel vehicles that can run on gasoline or E85, which is a blend with as much as 85 percent ethanol. For the 2009 model year, the best rated car running on E85 in the United States was the Chevrolet HHR using a stick-shift, with a United States EPA gasoline mileage rating of 26 miles per gallon, and an E85 rating of only 19 miles per gallon.
In other words, if you passed on using E85 and drove a hybrid with good mileage, you would double miles per gallon and produce far less greenhouse gas emissions than any U.S. flexfuel offering. (see Top 10 Low Carbon Footprint Four-Door Sedans for 2009)
The problem is not the idea of flexfuel. You can get a flexfuel vehicle with good mileage in Brazil. The problem is that GM and Ford used their flexfuel strategy as an eay way out, instead of making the tougher choices to truly embrace hybrids and real fuel efficiency. Flexfuel buying credits and ethanol subsidies have created incentives to buy cars that fail to cut emissions.
A new paper - Economic and Environmental Transportation Effects of Large-Scale Ethanol Production and Distribution in the United States - documents that the cost and emissions from transporting ethanol long-distance is much higher than previously thought. Ethanol is transported by tanker truck, not by pipeline, although Brazil will experiment with pipeline transportation.
The Ugly
It’s a tough time to make money with ethanol. Major players, like Verasun, are in bankruptcy. For the industry, stranded assets are being sold for pennies on the dollar. With thin margins, low oil prices, and high perceived risk, it is difficult to get a new plant financed.
Activists worry about oil refiners, such as Valero, offering to buy ethanol producers such as Verasun. But oil companies can bring needed financing, program management, and blending of next generation biofuels with existing petroleum refined gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel.
Government mandates for more ethanol do not match today’s reality. Subsidies to industrial corn agriculture are not good uses of taxpayer money. Encouraging federal, state, and local governments with their 4 million vehicles to give priority to flexfuel vehicles with lousy mileage is government waste.
Not all government help is misplaced. Range Fuels large-scale cellulosic ethanol production was helped with an $80 million loan guarantee. The loan guarantee falls under the Section 9003 Biorefinery Assistance Program authorized by the 2008 Farm Bill, which provides loan guarantees for commercial-scale biorefineries and grants for demonstration-scale biorefineries that produce advanced biofuels or any fuel that is not corn- based.
The Beautiful
Beautiful is the transition to electric drive systems and the development of next generation biofuels. Last year, Americans in record numbers road electric light-rail in record numbers. In 2008, Americans drove 100 billion miles less than 2007. Americans also drove 40,000 electric vehicles.
There’s a lot of good information here, but there’s also some bias information. I’m amused that the article seems to blame corn ethanol for everything, including the lower mileage. But then, the author tells us how wonderful cellulosic ethanol (which I also support) is going to be over first generation ethanol – As if that is going to get you any better mileage. The problem with ethanol is that most cars are not optimized for it. That’s going to change. Turbocharged, high compression, “Ethanol Optimized” engines are coming, and they go way beyond flex-fueled. EPA had one of these in 1995, with a 19.5 compression ratio, that got more power and better mileage than it got on gasoline. Just recently both Ricardo and Lotus announced ethanol optimized engines that get better mileage on 100% ethanol than they get on gasoline, with all the torque and power of diesel. GM, Ford, and Chrysler had 70 mpg technology in the mid 90s, but they were in bed with Big-Oil and Gov. That’s where the problem is, not with ethanol. Ethanol is an excellent domestic fuel, if you have engines optimized to use it. We have been steered to keep burning fossil fuels, so the Oil Barrons could keep their monopoly going. This began years ago when there was a conflict between Henry Ford’s Vision of Ethanol vs Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. Guess who won.
John Addison makes the mistake of quoting Lester Brown, who’s views are warped. Here’s what this quote: “The grain required to fill an SUV’s 25-gallon tank with ethanol just once will feed one person for a whole year” does not tell you – That out of those same corn kernels, came a year’s worth of distiller’s grains that fed livestock and dairy cows that put food on your table. Like many other biofuel critics, Omission is a common practice. Again just taking the starch out of one third of the corn crop to make ethanol is not causing starvation in any way. Only a third of our arable land is in cultivation, and we have a surplus of corn. It may not be getting to the people who need it. But that’s not ethanol’s fault. Even after we made 9 billion gallons of ethanol last year, corn is $3.55 a bushel for 56 pounds. That’s only 6 cents a pound. If you’re so concerned about it, then buy surplus corn and distillers grains and feed the hungry.
John Addison talks about transporting ethanol long-distance. OK, then let’s talk about transporting crude oil from the middle east and other foreign countries. Ever see the smoke pouring out of an ocean going oil tanker? Let’s talk about wasting $200 billion a year on an oil war to protect our oil interests overseas, and the amount of fuels and pollution that expends. A recent study concluded that shipping crude oil long distances accounts for half as much again as the pollution and global warming caused by burning fossil fuels in our transportation vehicles. Furthermore the trend, blender pumps and new ethanol plants being built in many other states, points to Localization.
This claim by Addison is totally false: “Subsidies to industrial corn agriculture are not good uses of taxpayer money”. Big oil companies collect 6 times more subsidies than the entire biofuels industry. Coal is subsidized. Natural gas is subsidized. Anything that relates to National Security. The ethanol subsidy you are talking about is a 45 cent per gallon blending subsidy, that’s mainly going to oil companies who splash blend ethanol and gasoline. “In 2007, the (ethanol) tax incentive, that tax break, was $3.3 billion, but the ethanol industry returned $4.6 billion in tax revenue to the Treasury,” Broin says. “We saved $8 billion in farm payments because we eliminated farm payments for the first time in almost 40 years. We saved the consumer $40 to $60 billion in gas prices with extra supplies that kept prices down. We added $47 billion to the Gross Domestic Product” (Jeff Broin – Poet Ethanol). Not a good use of taxpayer money?
Aside from what Addison thinks, next generation biofuels will include the next generation of corn ethanol. Because Algae will be mass produced, onsite, from corn ethanol refinery waste products: CO2, waste heat, and nutrient rich waste water - thin stillage centrate, which contains 6% minerals. That may become the most efficient way to produce biofuels, feed and food.
One billion people are hungry or starving. Without any ethanol production whatsoever, they would still be hungry or starving.
Devoting all of our excess crop production to biofuels might raise those numbers slightly, because excess wouldn’t be available to dump on the market.
Crops grown in the US don’t feed the hungry people of the world by themselves. The process is usually the government using your tax dollars to buy up excess, artificially raising commodity prices, then spending more tax dollars to burn barrel after barrel of bunker fuel to ship the food overseas, so it can be seized by foreign armies and traded for military supplies. Sometimes, the governments of these other countries let people get fed, but if it happens, it is usually due to a lack of planning.
If those billion people are to be fed, someone is paying for the food. TANSTAAFL. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Literally.
I am told over and over that these people live where nothing can grow. That is not true. These people live where they cannot grow enough for their population. Very often there are agricultural means to produce the calories they need where they are, but only by growing foods they don’t want.
It is easy to say beggars can’t be choosers, it is difficult to understand why hungry people won’t consider alternatives that would end their hunger. Work with the poor and hungry, and you will often find people who could feed themselves, but will not, partially through ignorance, partially through unwillingness.