End of ethanol subsidy

[UFO]

I wondered about ethanol prices recently. A discount station I drive by every week sells E85, which is usually 60-80 cents cheaper per gallon. I was shocked last week to see it cost the same as regular unleaded. No one is going to buy it now, given the MPG hit you'd take.

[Allch Chcar]

Ethanol rack prices exceeded Gasoline back in May so that was likely what that was. The subsidy expiring, from my understanding of business and tax credits, won't affect the pump price directly but instead profit margins.

Ethanol prices are determined mostly by Feedstock(Mostly Corn) prices, distilling, transportation, and Oil. Feed Corn was trading at record levels prior to this year's harvest.

[Ironroad40]

I don't understand where the goodness is in diluting a gallon of good gas with crap that cost money and fuel to make and the end result is less miles per gallon and in turn you have to burn MORE gas to go the same distance, only people benefiting where the corn growers and ethonol plant owners who where getting My tax dollars. Mean while I'm having to buy MORE gas to make up the difference . Get rid of it

I am pretty familiar with the abiotic oil theory, and tend to believe in it. We pump millions of barrels of oil out of the ground every day and have done so for decades. That's a lot of dead dinosaurs!

There is also the fact that many oil wells around the world have been pumped dry and capped, only to discover a couple years later that there's plenty of oil in them. I doubt that more T-Rex's died in that couple of years.

As to the origin of abiotic oil, there is a theory on that: we normally see chemical change as some form of 'burning'... we burn gasoline, converting hydrocarbons into water and CO2. We burn wood, with the same effect. Coal, methane, diesel fuel, the list goes on. For the average layman, the idea of something burning under water (i.e. a reaction rather than an oxidation) seems miraculous.

Yet oxygen on our planet is confined to two areas of nature: free oxygen which is contained in our atmosphere, mostly due to photosynthesis from fauna, and as oxides, which have that oxygen pretty well locked up in compounds. Inside the earth's crust, there is no free oxygen to oxidize substances.

There is hydrogen. Hydrogen does not bond with other substances as strongly as oxygen (this is the basis for acid-base reactions). There is also an abundance of carbon. Under the high heat and pressures inside the earth, that carbon will naturally bond with hydrogen to form... [drum beat] ...hydrocarbons! Which we then pump out of the crust as oil.

In short, it is the anaerobic reaction of the most abundant element in the universe (hydrogen) with the most abundant element in the earth's crust (carbon). It happens other places as well; as nitrobandit pointed out, multiple outer planets have entire atmospheres of methane, which is itself a hydrocarbon, just lighter than those contained in crude oil.

In short, we are not running out of dead dinosaurs. We may at some point be using oil as fast as the planet can make it, but we aren't there yet. There is no oil shortage at present or in the near future.

Makes total sense to me. I've been saying its a reoccurring supply for years.