Posted 12/14/2011 06:08:00 PM by Douglas

I've ranted on this topic before, but every year that goes by where seemingly everyone is aware of the sheer lunacy of creating ethanol as fuel while we're still subsidizing it with billions of public dollars, well, that tends to wonder why everyone hasn't, as I have, completely lost faith in the system. We've already established, by their own reports that ethanol is a thermodynamic loss, meaning it takes more energy to create it than you can get by burning it. Hell, even Al Gore has come out against it for being unfeasible. Yet the money keeps flowing. Now it's coming from oil companies for not buying enough of the stuff. Nevermind the fact that it doesn't exist.

To launch this wonder-fuel industry, the feds under Mr. Bush and President Obama have pumped at least $1.5 billion of grants and loan subsidies to fledgling producers. Mr. Bush signed an energy bill in 2007 that established a tax credit of $1.01 per gallon produced.

Most important, the Nancy Pelosi Congress passed and Mr. Bush signed a law imposing mandates on oil companies to blend cellulosic fuel into conventional gasoline. This guaranteed producers a market. In 2010 the mandate was 100 million barrels, rising to 250 million in 2011 and 500 million in 2012. By the end of this decade the requirements leap to 10.5 billion gallons a year.

When these mandates were established, no companies produced commercially viable cellulosic fuel. But the dream was: If you mandate and subsidize it, someone will build it.

Guess what? Nobody has.

It gets worse. Because there was no cellulosic fuel available, oil companies have had to purchase "waiver credits"—for failing to comply with a mandate to buy a product that doesn't exist. In 2010 and this year, the EPA has forced oil companies to pay about $10 million for these credits. Since these costs are eventually passed on to consumers, the biofuels mandate is an invisible tax paid at the gas pump.

So, yay? Billions get paid out to snake-oil selling start ups under both the Bush and Obama administrations, and the taxpayers have to pay for it? Where have I heard this before?

To recap: Congress subsidized a product that didn't exist, mandated its purchase though it still didn't exist, is punishing oil companies for not buying the product that doesn't exist, and is now doubling down on the subsidies in the hope that someday it might exist. We'd call this the march of folly, but that's unfair to fools.

Sleep tight America, the government is in control and going to solve all your problems. Just remember, it's Ron Paul that's the "crazy one" when he says that the federal government has no business doing this stupid shit. All the rest of them think they can "fix" this.

Labels: ethanol

Posted 11/22/2010 05:22:00 PM by Douglas

I've ranted in the past about how corn-derived ethanol is a net loss, thermodynamically. Well, you know it's official when Al Gore comes out and says it's all horseshit.

Former U.S. vice-president Al Gore said support for corn-based ethanol in the United States was “not a good policy”, weeks before tax credits are up for renewal.

“It is not a good policy to have these massive subsidies for (U.S.) first generation ethanol,” said Gore, speaking at a green energy business conference in Athens sponsored by Marfin Popular Bank.

“First generation ethanol I think was a mistake. The energy conversion ratios are at best very small."

Wow, and that mistake only cost $40 Billion dollars of our money going to ADM. Yay?

Labels: ethanol

Posted 4/26/2008 04:20:00 PM by Douglas

Probably the first effect of the country's disastrous ethanol-as-fuel program is felt by those that like to purchase rice in quantities usually reserved for the Department of Defense:

Two major US bulk retailers are rationing the sale of large bags of rice to consumers amid a growing global food crisis marked by skyrocketing prices and heavy pressure on demand.

Sam's Club, a chain owned by retail giant Wal-Mart, announced Wednesday it was placing a limit of four 20-pound (nine-kilogram) bags per person for imported jasmine, basmati and long grain white rices as a "precautionary step."

"This temporary cap is intended to ensure there is plenty of rice for all our members," said Sam's Club, which has 600 stores across the United States, adding that the measure did not apply to smaller bags of rice.

The move follows similar steps taken by its main rival, Costco, which has also limited the sale of rice in its stores.

Both companies insist that they have plenty of rice but say the steps were necessary to ensure there was enough for all of their clients.

I wonder if they're rationing aluminum foil in quantities sufficient to make a bass boat or the five gallon bucket of sliced pickles?

Labels: ethanol

Posted 4/28/2006 05:17:00 PM by Douglas

I know I've ranted on ethanol, which is different than ranting while on ethanol, but still. This has to be the best article I've seen that sums up the sheer stupidity of the "ethanol as fuel" movement. This article has it all. CAFE mileage requirements, EPA emission requirements. Not to mention ADM corn subsidies and Brazilian exports to support their ethanol industry. But you can't make up this stuff:

But the government site's automatic calculations are based on E85 selling for 37 cents per gallon less than regular gasoline, when the USA Today article reports that at many stations in the Midwest E85 is actually selling for 13 cents per gallon more than ordinary gas. Using the corrected prices for both gasoline and E85, the annual cost of fueling GM's Suburban goes from $2,709 to $3,763. Hence the suggestion that truth in advertising should come back into play. Possibly GM could rename this ad campaign "Shell Out Green, Turn Yellow."

Well, no shit. If it were cost effective, don't you think we'd been doing it years (decades) ago? Pardon my libertarian head poking through, but the market has a strange way of bringing about the most cost effective way of doing business. But it gets better:

Even more damaging, the EPA's own attorney admitted to the judges that because of its higher volatility, putting ethanol into the nation's fuel supply would likely increase smog where it was used. One of the judges, on hearing that the EPA was actively promoting a substance that could in fact diminish air quality, wondered aloud, "Is the EPA in outer space?"

What GM left out of its ads was that the use of this fuel would likely increase the amount of smog during the summer months (as the EPA's own attorneys had admitted in 1995) -- and that using E85 in GM products would lower their fuel efficiency by as much as 25%. (USA Today recently reported that the Energy Dept. estimated the drop in mileage at 40%.)

So not only does it make more smog, it takes more fuel to power the same internal combustion engine? Take ADM's profit's out of this equation, and I'm having a hard time seeing any advantage, but what do I know? I'm just an engineer. Here's the final nail:

The other negative aspect of this inefficient fuel is that numerous studies have found that ethanol creates less energy than is required to make it. Other studies have found that ethanol creates "slightly" more energy than is used in its production. Yet not one of these studies takes into account that when E85 is used, the vehicle's fuel efficiency drops by at least 25% -- and possibly by as much as 40%. Using any of the accredited studies as a baseline in an energy-efficiency equation, ethanol when used as a fuel is a net energy waste.

Corn ain't cheap. It's cheap to ADM because they get it for free (courtesy of your federal government). Ethanol as fuel is a thermodynamic nightmare, and we're better off using alchemy to turn rocks into coal than we are using switch-grass into a renewable energy source.

Labels: ethanol

Posted 7/17/2005 05:09:00 PM by Douglas

If the blog dies in its sleep tonight, it will die happy. Cornell and Berkeley have finally released a study showing the absurdity of ethanol as a renewable energy source.

Farmers, businesses and state officials are investing millions of dollars in ethanol and biofuel plants as renewable energy sources, but a new study says the alternative fuels burn more energy than they produce.

It's about damn time someone said it, because I was beginning to annoy myself.

Supporters of ethanol and other biofuels contend they burn cleaner than fossil fuels, reduce U.S. dependence on oil and give farmers another market to sell their produce.

That's probably all true, but when the government is the one paying the farmers (or more specifically, ADM) to grow the corn and soy beans, it doesn't come out with a net positive, financially, or thermodynamically.

But researchers at Cornell University and the University of California-Berkeley say it takes 29 percent more fossil energy to turn corn into ethanol than the amount of fuel the process produces. For switch grass, a warm weather perennial grass found in the Great Plains and eastern North America United States, it takes 45 percent more energy and for wood, 57 percent.

It takes 27 percent more energy to turn soybeans into biodiesel fuel and more than double the energy produced is needed to do the same to sunflower plants, the study found.

The researchers included such factors as the energy used in producing the crop, costs that were not used in other studies that supported ethanol production, said Pimentel.

The study also omitted $3 billion in state and federal government subsidies that go toward ethanol production in the United States each year, payments that mask the true costs, Pimentel said.

If the corn is rotting in the silo anyway, then you might make some money turning it into ethanol for fuel. But when you figure in the $3 billion in production costs, it makes Saudi oil cheap by comparison.

Q.E.D. I will officially shut up about this topic.

Labels: ethanol

Posted 6/28/2005 05:40:00 PM by Douglas

It's about that time: another story about how ethanol is the clean-burning fuel of the future.

Like lots of motorists, Chuck Nye thought he had no choice but to grin and bear it as rising gas prices made filling up his minivan a painful experience. But then he heard a radio ad promoting E85 — a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline — that sells for an average of about 45 cents per gallon less than regular unleaded.

Inside his fuel door was a sticker saying Nye had a flexible fuel vehicle, which can burn the homegrown alternative. Nye was sold.

"It's good gas," he said while fueling up at a Holiday station just off Interstate 35E in this Twin Cities suburb. "I haven't noticed any difference in gas mileage performance or engine performance as well."

I don't know what "ethanol-tree" these guys are getting the ethanol, but I smell a big fat government kick-back in this deal.

Labels: ethanol