Funny, I was going to say the same of you!

For some reason that you’ve failed to substantiate, you think that chewing on energy and running it through an esophagus is inherently superior to using a spark and air to burn it.

That’s just not particularly logical. The fact that we can eat corn has nothing whatsoever to do with whether we should or shouldn’t run vehicles with it.

That point cuts both ways. On one hand, the fact that we chew on it at summer barbeques doesn’t make it particularly “green” — since when did burgers, ribs and Wonder Bread become environmentally friendly? On the other hand, the fact that we put butter on it and get it stuck in our teeth doesn’t make it particularly bad for fuel, either. We judge energy sources based upon other factors (energy output, production capability, emissions, transportability, etc.), not on whether it doesn’t taste good.

Alcohol as a motor fuel is perfectly fine. Your local drag strip will vouch for that, as would Henry Ford, who was making flex fuel cars long before they became a CAFE loophole. But there are flaws related to producing the amounts of it that we need. The ability to swallow it has nothing to do with those.

I’ve been clear that government has a role to play. That role does NOT include the ability to develop or even identify the fuel of the future.

You’re entitled to believe that, but you are wrong to assume that everyone shares your view.

Unless you believe that inventors should have access to cash without supporting their need for it, government obviously has to decide which ones to choose, and which to reject, if it is going to dole out the incubator money to experiment with it. A guy who requests $100 billion to experiment with monkey methane is rightfully going to be rejected, and the government should be able to send him to the door without a free marketeer claiming that the feds are anti-primate.

Ethanol obviously works as a fuel, at least on a small scale, so it’s fair to study it further. That doesn’t mean that we should commit all of resources to it or use corn to produce it, but it deserves a look.

Did you look at the references for CHOREN and Range Fuels. They’re doing exactly that. Range Fuels call their technology cellulosic ethanol to stick with the flavor-of-the-month, and grab some subsidies.

Another case of Uncle Sam blindly sabotaging a workable altenative fuel.

Tellingly ethanol struggles to compete, even with all those distortions.

As it turns out, humans had no logical problem using moving water to power their mills, transport their boats, and fill their bellies. Just so long as there is enough water to go around, the versatility of the resource is not a problem and more likely a benefit. By your standard, that would be some sort of lunacy, and the Dutch wouldn’t have existed at all.
Wowa, with that level of distortion-capability you should run for office.

You’re also confused about the Dutch: they mainly use windmills to harvest wind energy to lift the water out of their low-lying country.

Just because oil is cheaper and has a head start doesn’t necessarily make it better.
I specifically pointed out that a subsidy can work. The goal of the subsidy would be to overcome oil’s legacy price-advantage and allow a viable alternative fuel to develop.

Corn ethanol have failed to develop much in spite of all the subsidies, then had a growth spurt due to mandates and is now dying out due to the supply-and-demand limitations you mention.

A lot of pain could have been avoided if Uncle Sam was willing to consider the failure of subsidies to achieve much growth a sign of corn ethanol’s limited potential.

which gave us the internet, and the chance to engage in virtual talk here at TTAC about the alleged uselessness of government
You may fancy a TEA party, but I’ve been clear that government has a role to play. That role does NOT include the ability to develop or even identify the fuel of the future. Leave that to the inventors.

The role of government is to provide the proper incentives that would encourage the development of alternative fuels. Broad based so that anything Joe Sixpack invents in his garage may qualify. Unlike the current scenario where the lobbyists limit the benefit to [insert my client's product here].

The US uses so much energy already that we can’t introduce a crop that will ever keep up, ever.
Conservation will certainly help. Even Obama does not push that simple solution enough, preferring to pretend (like his predecessor) that some magic biofuel will save us all.

There isn’t enough Chinese restaurant waste, either, so no biodiesel paradise is in our future.
The Chinese restaurant waste is the low-hanging fruit, but it does point us in the right direction: waste-based alternative fuels. You know, the energy crop we have been producing without even trying…

How did we allow ourselves to get into this mess?

More to the point, we mandated MTBE by law in 1990 for certain areas only to outlaw it because alarm bells were rang over groundwater contamination. OK, fair enough but what about the waste water from ethanol production? Or the unbelievable amount of water consumed to make it? Does mixing corn with tax dollars make it all right?

The alternative fuel process to watch is carbon to syngas followed by syngas to liquid fuel. It’s currently too expensive, but at least it scales up. The US has large quantities of cheap low quality coal to make into syngas.

Syngas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syngas
Fischer-Tropsch Process: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer-Tropsch
Coskata process: http://www.coskata.com/Process.asp

Now that gas is $3 or less a gal, this makes no sense, and is energy-negative.

I so wish I could get ‘real gas’ here in NY.

There are a lot of valid arguments against corn-based ethanol, but this isn’t one of them.

Consuming energy presumably creates value for the person consuming it, or else he wouldn’t bother to consume it in the first place. (He may not be paying for all of the externalities, but that’s a different argument.)

Whether or not the resource is versatile makes no difference as to whether it is worth using as energy. From a purely economic standpoint, if it was cheaper and easier to run your car on butterflies than it was to run it on oil, you’d get a net and head for the fields for your next fill up.

As it turns out, humans had no logical problem using moving water to power their mills, transport their boats, and fill their bellies. Just so long as there is enough water to go around, the versatility of the resource is not a problem and more likely a benefit. By your standard, that would be some sort of lunacy, and the Dutch wouldn’t have existed at all.

Why does corn ethanol need BOTH subsidies AND mandates? Because even with all those subsidies it can’t compete.

Just because oil is cheaper and has a head start doesn’t necessarily make it better.

The main argument against oil is that the consumer retail price that drives consumption doesn’t include all of the externalities, which effectively leads to overconsumption, which leads to current or future problems.

So, for example, if we consume so much that we become vulnerable to being owned by the oil barons of the Middle East (who already aren’t our biggest fans) and set ourselves up for some political calamity down the road, we’ll have not covered that cost in today’s gallon of gas. Ditto with the guy who gets cancer 30 years from now or the kid who gets mowed down in a crosswalk because cheap oil fell into too many or the wrong hands.

Again, using that argument, there would have been no Manhattan Project or ARPANET (which gave us the internet, and the chance to engage in virtual talk here at TTAC about the alleged uselessness of government), because there was no free market impetus to pay for it. Not a very good argument, because it fails to account for the fact that the short-term costs and risks that preclude a free-market solution from launching a product don’t necessarily lead to its failure once a foundation has been created by government that can support that product.

The better argument against ethanol is that you can’t make nearly enough of it. Take the amount of spare arable land we have and grow whatever you want on it to make fuel, and you just won’t end up with a lot of fuel.

The US uses so much energy already that we can’t introduce a crop that will ever keep up, ever. (There isn’t enough Chinese restaurant waste, either, so no biodiesel paradise is in our future.) We just use too much, and we can’t grow our way out of it, no matter what. It would make sense to try if we could, but since we can’t, it’s a waste of money to pretend that we ever could.

Second step: Strip away the mandates, limit the subsidies. Why does corn ethanol need BOTH subsidies AND mandates? Because even with all those subsidies it can’t compete. That sums up everything that’s wrong with corn ethanol.

Subsidies may help to speed a workable alternative fuel to market, but tellingly it has consistently failed to do so yet. And subsidies these days get written by the lobbyists, which means only [insert my client's product here] qualifies. A broad-based subsidy, that allows any fuel that meets carefully selected criteria might work. But considering all the political interference, we’re probably better off without any subsidies.

Third step: follow the money (or logic). When you are converting Food into Fuel, you are destroying value. Food has to meet many requirements, including safe production, nutritional value, etc. Fuel has so little value that we burn it to get the energy. Socialist agricultural policies may allow food prices to be as low as that of fuel, but food has much more value than fuel.

A simple way to create value, would be to convert Waste into Fuel. We certainly have plenty of it. The technology is also available, as CHOREN and Range Fuels demonstrate. But really, any waste-based technology would help to solve several problems, while providing low cost fuel. Unlike the current offerings…

I too own a classic and live in California. Carburetor problems have been my bane sice we went from MTBE to ethanol. Luckily, I haven’t had any problems with the valve seats, that I know of, since they eliminated lead from the fuel.

Annually rebuild the carburetor, replace all rubber fuel lines and gaskets, and recommended replacing the fuel pump at least every five years. No big deal since you are doing your part to save the world, right?

The problem of corn as an animal feed is not a new one, but ethanol exacerbates it by keeping it around, if not ramping it up because all that corn by-product is good for (sort of) is animal feed. And yes, it’s net-positive, but the ratio is not great and can easily be offset elsewhere in the supply chain.

And then there’s the health issue: most ruminant animals are not really set up to live off of corn cellulose (and non-ruminants can’t digest it at all), but because we produce so damn much of the stuff we feed it to them anyway.

About the only good thing, if you could call it that, is that the more corn ethanol we use, the less corn gets made into corn syrup and starches. All in all, it’s a terrible crop.

Grasses, cane/beet and (eventually) algal ethanol are better sources, but they’re not replacements, nor should we be putting money into supplementing or replacing fuel instead of reducing it’s use.

Also, corn is not the best material available for producing ethanol, because corn is an energy-intensive crop that has a lot of byproducts that can’t be used efficiently to create ethanol. With current technology, the only stuff that can be process into ethanol is the part of the corn that you can eat, while the rest of it either gets tossed out or else costs too much to be processed.

There are better materials for producing ethanol than corn. Unfortunately, ethanol in the US has become a big-ag football that has put the focus on growing corn, instead of on the fuel output.

Also: corn is used for some 3000 different products, it’s not just for food any longer and hasn’t been for some time. How does that fit into the equation ?

Set to open in Lancaster Blue Fire Ethanol refinery using waste products to produce ethanol
http://WWW.bluefireethanol.com. Would this not change things in a positive way, especially over corn derived ethanol ? Or is Big Ag going to stomp this out as soon as it can?

Not every barrel of oil that came out of the ground at the trun of the 20th Century produced the energy and by products that it does today.

This is just a beginning isn’t it ?

Sorry for all the questions and not trying to be antagonistic, but for an oppressive enviro mob that says “we can’t” to every solution from drilling, to wind farms that kill birds, to “land raping” oil shale recovery and still wants to scold us all for our “addiction to oil” [for the last 35 or 36 years], is this not a start for an alternative ? The infrastructure is already in place. If/when the cost is lowered to offset the reduction in energy derived, why not an alternative ? What’s the alternative ? Fuel cells in 20 years? And what of the “climate changing” effects of millions of cars releasing water vapor into the air? What a schvitz that will be!!!!!

NG has it’s limitations as well: refueling infrastructure, tank size, weight etc.

All the alternatives have problems and people to say ‘it can’t be done’.

This is here right now. Not 10-15 25 years away.
So, B&B : ’splain me. I understand the “boondoggle” and the problems and have been a member of the Ethanol Coalition because I am fascinated by the idea of alternative fuels. This industry is in it’s infancy isn’t it?

After 40 years of having no energy policy and hearing the same thing…..what’s the answer then?Just keep sucking up every last frigging drop of petrol and dismissing any and all alternatives because they’re not perfect replacements for oil?
I don’t think that’s too bright an idea either.

Please enlighten me. I have an old car too. I was concerned when lead was phased out. It’s still running fine. It’s been years since CA banned all lead in gasoline. I sincerely want to know and not trying to troll here.

For a real alternative…..compressed natural gas + anti-sprawl zoning laws would be a better start.

ymmv.

Those studies ignore the food byproduct. If you include the food stuffs (animal feed) generated by ethanol production, it’s a net positive.

There have been several, and it really depends on the study as to the amount, but corn-based ethanol is between 0.7 and 2.0 units of energy in for every unit out. In other words, it’s net-negative except for a precious few studies.

Cellulosic ethanol might be net-positive, but it’s as easy to scale up in production, doesn’t solve the mechanical issues, and suffers the same “growing fuel instead of food” problem. Of course, this might be an issue if we stopped putting corn in goddamn everything.

As above, and regardless of the source it makes sense as a replacement for MTBE, or in situations where very high octane ratings are helpful. It does not make sense as a replacement for mass-market gasoline.

Well, though the marina’s price is awful, there’s always the option of filling up the boat’s tank and then using a siphon hose (sometimes called an Oklahoma credit card).

I wish outfits such as AAA, the Horseless Carriage Club, lawnmower manufacturers and the like would speak up on behalf of easier access to non-adulterated gasoline.

Not necessarily true. New cars are designed to run on something in the range of E5 to E10. At those levels, ethanol is a positive because it acts as a detergent.

But new cars are not designed to run on E15. At those levels, the benefits of ethanol to your engine are lost, as what acts as a detergent at lower levels becomes corrosive at higher levels.

For a modern gas engine, a little ethanol is good, but too much is bad. It’s not an all-or-nothing affair, it is something to be consumed in moderation.

Minnesota is also applying for a waiver, this one to mandate E20 (or more) in all gas by 2013.

I seem to recall reference to a study that domestic corn ethanol uses about as much energy to make it as it generates as fuel. Does anyone else recall this?

The paragraph “Any approval, either fully or partially, is likely to elicit a market response to add E15 blends to E10 and E0 blends in the marketplace, rather than replace them. Thus consumers would merely have an additional choice of fuel” is misleading. How many of you see the choice between E10 and E0 blends, especially in the winter? I didn’t even see that even when E10 was more expensive than E0 during the corn boom, thanks to legal environmental requirements in this area. If you believe that the current regime with E10 makes it no more difficult to get pure gasoline, only adding a choice to the marketplace, then by all means believe the EPA and support this application.

In reality, the result of legalizing E15 and treating it as a normal gas, indistinguishable from E0 (and E10) for legal and marketing purposes, would be to allow the EPA, state EPAs, and other governmental bodies to mandate E15 during particular periods for claimed emissions and pollution benefits.

The same application’s “context” from the EPA also argues that “Several examples include the phasedown of the amount of lead allowed in gasoline in the 1980s and the introduction of reformulated gasoline (RFG) in 1995. Some segments of the public were convinced that the new fuels caused vehicle problems or decreases in fuel economy. Although substantial test data proved otherwise, these concerns lingered in some cases for several years.” So the EPA argues that decreases in fuel economy and any vehicle problems from current reformulated gasoline (which means E10, since MTBE is phased out) are a myth. If you believe that, then you’ll have no problem with the rest of their assertions and E15.

Nothing stops a flex-fuel gas station that sells E85 from also offering a E15 blend, and nothing stops someone who owns a regular, non-flex-fuel vehicle from purchasing E15 from that station and filling their car with it. Other than voiding their warranty, etc. Just can’t treat it as real gas.

Minnesota is also applying for a waiver, this one to mandate E20 (or more) in all gas by 2013.