Ethanol update reports $1.09/gal fuel savings

...OK well the other thing refineries do aside from clean-up, they can shift (crack) the heavy crude to make more gasoline and/or diesel from the heavies. In USA the today refineries are having to shift more to diesel since gasoline is demand is impacted by Prii and ethanol (eg; ethanol necessiates a shift to more diesel to supply the farm tractors, and less dino-gasoline since ethanol is bio-gasoline).

 

Good point, tracy. While I do not think ethanol is viable, long term, biodiesel is an excellent choice. Nobody is arguing that the energy budget for biodiesel production is not positive. (Yes, I know that's a double negative - it says exactly what I meant.)
Now, a biodiesel Prius...

 

That is fairly easy. The new refinery would cost around $8B, while refinery upgrades are much less expesive. With the US now a net exporter of refined products, and the likelyhood that the oil would eventually make it to US refineries would make that a bad investment. It should be noted the refinery would be built by one of the same companies that refines in the US, and they make more money with less refinery capacity. Distribution is already set up from US refineries. It would therefore that a large Canadian subsidy to get a company to build a refinery in Alberta. It would take a much smaller subsidy to keep east coast refineries open, and again this could be paid for by an oil tax.

The midwest has a double impact, right. Those refiners can buy less expensive oil, and because of transportation costs get less expensive ethanol as well. They are correct in the direction of the cost savings in the midwest, but they are off by an order of magnitude on the amount of savings. What I am saying is, if instead of mandating all that alcohol, the country had encouraged refinery expansion, the savings would have been there. The EPA could have stuck with only mandating oxygenated fuel where they felt it was needed for pollution, but required an E10 capable fleet. This would have built the refinery capacity and still allowed blenders to use alcohol when it made sense.

California's government is at war with the refiners. It would make sense to invest more in those refineries, but CARB wants the price of gas to go up and have added future ghg taxes and a mandate that the refiners have to pay for hydrogen refueling stations. The refiners are fighting back by underinvesting, and planning maintenance where they will cause the biggest price spikes. The alcohol added actually makes summer blends more expensive to produce. Its a failure of regulation.

East Coast is more a problem with costs of the old refineries. The refiners plan on shipping gas, diesel, and heating oil from europe and the gulf coast. There isn't the infrastructure to do this now though. It would be better for gas prices if all the refineries were taxed with an oil tax, and money given to the companies that would upgrade these refineries. But in the current climate they will probably just close leading to higher prices.

 

...well I do not want to stray off topic but would think biodiesel is also non-economic without farm subsidies and gov't mandated use. The possible exception is palm oil which is cheapest source but has eco-baggage. Not sure your location (USA?). Agree that biodiesel has some CO2 advantage over ethanol (ethanol requires energy intensive azeotropic distillation process to get all the ~85% water out of the ethanol - gee I forgot exactly how much %alcohol yeast can make - I need to make some home brew to bone up technically).

 

WVO converted to bio-diesel has huge economic advantages over other fuels, but still produces tailpipe emissions that may be larger than diesel. The big drawback is limited supply of the WVO. The most promising biodiesel comes from algea right now, and would cost about $8/gallon today. Costs are stedily dropping and private capital is funding development. The algea converts CO2 to fuel, and will produce about 10 times more fuel per acre than corn. Currently the EU has large trade barriers to US produced biodiesel. Without these barriers the US could produce, refine, and export biodiesel economically today.

 

...You're talkin' soybean biodiesel is what USA would want to export, versus canola/rapeseed mostly used in EU. IMHO the biofuels movement is mainly to support ag business and create jobs such as ethanol plants, so you do not really want imports of biofuels from other countries. You want to grow and produce in your own country. I am not sure why USA is not mandating 5% biodiesel B5 like EU at all diesel pumps. But this would be an outlet for (soybean) biodiesel. Waste Veggie Oil (WVO) is good idea but lots of cost associated with collection and all. I would probably support it, but believe it would need to be subsidized. By the same anaolgy we could convert waste plastics and tires to liquids for fuels via pyrolysis, but will not compete economically with oil. But its probably a good idea.

 

Stanford researchers question whether biofuel is the answer to U.S. energy independence « Environment « Science & Tech « Peninsula Press

Stanford U put the above article together regarding plant/grain fuel ... it hopefully points out some of the horrible downside to grain fuel(s).

Higher power numbers? Higher than what ... E100?
Alcohol has less BTU's than gas ... so the more you add, the less power your fuel has, and thus you're mpg's necessarily have to go down. Below is a link to a chart showing how straight alchohol has only 2/3 the energy of gasoline, and E85 has a bit less than 3/4 the btu's of gas.

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Gasoline gallon equivalent - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

If it weren't for subsidies to corn growers, the entire process could not be done for less then the cost of gas. E85 is simply a way to prop up the farm industry - but ultimately, the higher cost of our grains, means a lot of the grain exports will be too costly for other nations to afford. Maybe that's not supposed to bother folks ... thinking about food being too expensive.

Also, the above article, as far as I can tell, only counts ultimate btu values of the final product. If you count all the btu's wasted via the petrochemical pesticides to grow the source/grain, the petrochemical fertilizers, the btu's/electricity pumping water to the crop, transportation, energy to harvest, then ferment, etc, the net BTU losses just keep adding up.

Bottom line, trace back who it was that sought to have this report created. Follow the money. Someone knows what side of the bread that the butter is on. Unlike corn, biofuel from switchgrass may actually yield a net btu benefit:

Grass Makes Better Ethanol than Corn Does: Scientific American

but the corn lobby has more money to throw down for legislation than switchgrass to biofuel does . . . . . . how would farmer John survive, if corn prices aren't artificially high. I'm just sayin' ... it ain't a silver bullet by any means.
.

 

Although I disrespect Inhofe as you do, there is no scientific evidence that corn based ethanol mandate contributes to reduced ghg or global warming. The key science that ethanol lobbyist try to remove from the science is land use. When land use is considered the ethanol mandate only results in a very small reduction in some calculations and a slight increase in others. We do know that the mandate increases corn prices, which in turn increases the price of meat. When coupled with the sugar tarrif and price floor, has resulted in food manufacturers to switch to hfcs, which may have negative health implications.

That article seemed to just say ethanol got over built with inefficient companies. Since there is still a mandate out there, blenders simply bought more ethanol early at a lower price, then have lower demand now. Blenders still need to blend the same amount of ethanol, but they can buy it from the most efficient plants. Removing the mandate would further reduce the amount of corn and energy used to produce ethanol.

I don't know if the new law is any different, but if the new proposal is simply to allow E0 but still require E10 pumps, I don't know how that would raise E10 prices. If E0 jumped in price consumers would switch to E10. It would also remove the push for E15 as this is only to use up the ethanol required in the mandate as gas consumption goes down.

A different experiment would be to require manufacturers of new cars to require they are able to burn E25 as they do in Brazil. This adds very little to the price of a new car. Then some places would add E25 pumps, and when oil price spikes happen, consumers with the newer cars could easily switch to E25. It would not happen inexpensively without a government requirement though.

 

...probably Northeast USA got screwed with ethanol mandate, because it increased cost of home heating oil/diesel out of sight, not to mention higher gaso prices for boutique fuels, NE refineries are closing, and Northeast probably does not see too many $$ corn dollars in return. Originally, Northeast politicians were hoping to participate in the ethanol job boom, but I do not know if they ever got much out of it. Had to do over, NE region might not support ethanol, but I do not see ethanol going away now. We'd be dead-in-the-water industrially in NE, except now we have shale gas boom and all kinds of industry re-birth possibilities.

 

The big screwover of the NE is the closing of refineries, as the study clearly showed lack of refining capacity raises gas prices.
East Coast Gas Squeeze Expected - Businessweek
This is a failure of public policy. The refineries are losing money and can't pass there costs to consumers, but if they close the companies can make more money at other refineries.

The North East is the only region that still uses a great deal of home heating oil, and that is bad for the country. Again this is a failure of public policy not to get natural gas lines run, and subsidies for families and businesses to convert from heating oil.

Compared to those things the ethanol mandates don't affect you that much. In texas the mandate hurts ranchers with high feed prices, and shifts farm land to corn when it would be more productive on other crops. In california it makes summer blends of gas more expensive. Getting rid of the mandate won't get rid of ethanol, but it will allow the market to set a better level of production.

 

These costs already occur in most locations with the oil going to soaps and cosmetics. With the supply constraint of WVO, McDonalds might get paid for it, instead of having to pay to remove it.

Higher than the E10 or straight gas. The lower energy content reduces the distance per volume. The higher octane allows the timing to advance, and more power captured per cycle. There might also be some cylinder cooling that can further advance the timing. I haven't come across someone actually dyno testing a stock flex fuel vehicle though.

If the flex fuel engine had the compression ratio for premium fuel, the fuel economy drop on E85 would be less.

Some studies have shown that the economy drop of ethanol mixes isn't linear. Measured fuel economy was higher than what predicted from btu content.

Does it include new injectors. Factory flex fuel engines can have higher rated injectors to handle a higher flow rate for the E85. I don't think a power increase is possible without them.

That said, we should be investing in bio-butanol instead of ethanol. It has an energy content closer to gas without ethanol's negatives.

 

The reason the ethanol lobby does not like methanol or butanol is that these are less expensive to produce using natural gas for methanol and oil for butanol than using plant material. One solution to encourage bio-butanol would be a crude oil tax. This would eliminate the subsidy. The ethanol lobby is quite strong. One thing to future proof our fleet would be to mandate that cars be able to run at higher levels of ethanol, methanol, and butanol. Using E20 would reduce the cost of alcohol as the water does not need to be removed We would need good laws for labeling on the pumps, as a M10 blend has 95% the energy, E10 97% the energy of E0.

 

Another case of one group impeding the common good then.
Dupont and BP have already formed a partnership to explore biobutanol, and it appears they are moving forward on commercial production.


Butamax™ Advanced Biofuels LLC | Home

Green Car Congress: BP/DuPont JV Butamax and Fagen collaborate to retrofit ethanol plants for biobutanol production

 

...saw on TV that NYC is getting a new nat gas main soon, first new gas supply line in some decades. When complete this should allow the buildings in the NYC to start converting away from heavy heating oil <sheesh>. Believe this was mentioned by ConEd CEO appearing on Mad Money with Jim Cramer. We've discussed the NYC situation a few times here.

 

Up to some point in time US refineries were at 98% capacity and the gas prices were driven up by refinery output (hence the huge jump when Golf Coast was hit by Katrina). If Ex-M wanted to jack market prices, all they needed to put a refinery for unscheduled maintenance, under-report stocks, etc. This type of pricing had nothing to do with actual production costs.

E10 and reduced consumption due to economic downturn relieved the refinery load and made it impossible to fix prices. So the savings are not really from E10 production being cheaper, but from making it hard to rig the prices.

 

Here's something you DEFINITELY need to consider. Go find a graph of Google relating to "new oil field discovery" ... and guess what you'll find. How 'bout the 1960's. Hopefully that will disturb you . . . a LOT. What that means is that we are on the decline, when it comes to (not only) new oil field discovery . . . but we are on the decline (world wide) when it comes to refinery PRODUCTION. Tell me . . .WHO . . . in their right (corporate) mind would build a new refinery - when well capacity has been reached - already. "Peak Oil has already been reaches? . . . Really?" you ask? Look at how refinary - product0n/delivery of fossil fuels / byproducts PEAKED (emphasis ... PEAKED) around 2008 or earlier. Considering (at least the possibility of) the theory of 'peak oil' . . . what corporate moron do you think would build another refinary . . . when there may be no possible way, that the world can produce more fossil fuel? Just something to consider . . . if someone is in the 'Oil company conspiracy' camp.

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