The Ethanol Scam: Are ethanol advocates giving slanted mpg numbers?
 

http://www.climatescience.gov/Librar...-cover-200.jpg
Final Report: Climate Projections Based on Emissions Scenarios for Long-Lived and Short-Lived Radiatively Active Gases and Aerosols - September 2008

Ptero says: This report from the U.S. Climate Change Program is discussed below by Clyde Novitz. It is very technical but my take is that a group of very intelligent scientists are basically throwing up their hands and saying that they can't figure out what is going on because the mix of pollutants is building and changing too rapidly for them to get a handle on it - and the move to ethanol (although they doin't refer to ethanol, per se, but rather VOCs characteristic of ethanol emissions) has thrown a huge monkeywrench into their ability to take meaningful measurements.

Clyde's interpretation is given here.

Clyde Novitz says: "The highlight of the report is their recommendation that we limit our emissions of volatile organic compound (VOC’s)and carbon monoxide (CO) because they are what is causing our climate change problems here in the US. It’s revolutionary that they’re drawing so much serious attention to what they call short term gases being the cause of the weather pattern changes that we previously have been attributing to a global warming process caused by long lived gases like carbon dioxide. But it’s been known for a long time that VOC’s and methane reacting with water vapor in the suns rays effect regional weather pattern changes, it’s just been more publically popular to talk about carbon dioxide and global warming."

and

"...the most important part of the report we ought to be paying attention to is about VOC emissions because there is a large volume of them coming from a particular source that we can actually do something about – ethanol being used as fuel and its production. Ethanol increases by a wide margin the amount of VOC’s emitted into the troposphere from the way it’s refined and coming from ignition systems it’s used in when mixed with gasoline. In fact both its production and use produces excessively high nitrogen oxides (Nox) emissions that are premixed with VOC’s while ethanol refinery emissions come already blended with billions of tons of water vapor from distilling corn beer and then re-distilling the resulting hydrous ethanol into anhydrous ethanol."

http://www.opednews.com/articles/NAS...81026-233.html

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Ptero says: This blatantly political but nontheless scientificly accurate op-ed piece from an extremely pissed off Clyde Novitz provides a 2x4 upside the head wake-up call to the flowery ethanol talk I keep hearing on Ecomodder. My experience in California, where we are all forced to use trucked-in ethanol from the Midwest (that our state has sued to stop), has been a dramatic loss in mpg - up to 30% less mileage than when I travel in parts of Nevada or Arizona where pure gasoline is still available. People should realize that there are no real gains for the climate or consumers from this federal giveaway program to Midwest agriculture, which is nothing more than a form of robbery of our hard-won cash.

Here it is.
OpEdNews » Obama blindly supports anhydrous ethanol

I encourage you to read the entire article, but here are some excerpts. Note that Clyde Novitz explains how Europeans are able to receive actual benefits from ethanol because they us a different type. This explains how europeans can post on Ecomodder about mpg performance gains, but these performance gains are unavailable to North Americans. Please spare me reports from the ethanol industry supporting ethanol. I wasn't born yesterday.
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Clyde Novitz says: Right now, ethanol is costing us a 3 percent loss in mileage using E10. That's all the DOE will admit to. But complaints from consumers and independent studies point to much higher losses even as high as 30 percent in some vehicles. But just the admitted 3% is a pretty big cut in our national fuel supply. So now that will be increased to twice as much of a loss if we move to using E20. Then there's the increase in VOC pollutants that come from ethanol blended gasoline that will also increase. A new report from NOAA and NASA titled "Climate Projections Based on Emissions Scenarios for Long-Lived and Short-Lived Radiatively Active Gases and Aerosols" that forms the basis our new climate change policy says VOC's are responsible for the weather pattern changes we've been seeing since ethanol use started in the spring of 2006.
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Clyde Novitz says: Ethanol is not just "ethanol." The ethanol we're required to add to our national gasoline supplies is anhydrous ethanol. It's an oxygenate. Oxygenates were mandated by the Clean Air Act of 1990 as the brainstorm of the first Bush president, Ken Lay of Enron, and Phil Gramm, an ex-senator from Texas who now works on Park Avenue for the United Bank of Switzerland, UBS. Phil Gramm was McCain's lead economic advisor before he made comments about how Americans have turned into "a nation of whiners" because we're not happy with the high price of gasoline ripping our economy apart.
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Clyde Novitz says: Getting back to my point, anhydrous ethanol is not a fuel, it's an oxygenate that replaced another oxygenate called MTBE. MTBE is an invention of the oil industry that helped them get rid of poisonous byproducts of refining crude oil that the EPA doesn't allow them to legally dump into the atmosphere - isobutylene (anhydrous ether). Enron made its climb to the top of the economic ladder supporting and controlling the logistics of MTBE production and distribution.

Oxygenates were designed to enhance emissions from gasoline engines, not as fuel. They purposely cause mileage losses to increase emissions of VOC's. In 1990, there was bad smog problem nationwide. VOC's mix with smog and dissolve it. The resulting pollution, low level ozone, is much more dangerous than the smog oxygenates get rid of but it's largely invisible so complaints about air quality were marginalized by using them. When it became too widely known that MTBE polluted groundwater nationwide, it was replaced with anhydrous ethanol in 2006.

When the state of California took the EPA to court and proved oxygenates worsen air quality, the president stepped in saying ethanol was now being required under the Clean Air Act to be used as a fuel additive to lessen our dependence of foreign oil. He sited Brazil's use of ethanol to become energy independent to validate his reasoning. For whatever reason, no one challenged him with the fact that Brazil uses hydrous ethanol, not anhydrous ethanol. If you query experts on the issue, they will say that hydrous ethanol has water in it that can't be mixed with gasoline. But if you search the keywords "hydrous ethanol" and "gasoline," you will find countless articles relating how it is being done successfully and has been for a very long time in places that were until recently considered third world countries without causing mileage losses or pollution like anhydrous ethanol does.

MTBE is made from natural gas and toxic byproducts of refining oil. Both are resources we have an overabundance of. Since we started making anhydrous ethanol from our most precious national asset, corn, our economy has fastly been falling apart. In fact the value of the dollar began the steep decline in value that lead to 4 dollar a gallon gasoline just as the EPA oxygenate program switched from MTBE to ethanol. And according to this new report on climate change, VOC emissions from ethanol and the refineries that produce it are causing the extreme weather pattern changes that we're being told are part of a global warming process caused by carbon dioxide. But if we look at how these other countries use ethanol, we find they do it in a way that doesn't cause these problems while none of our leader seem to know the difference between hydrous and anhydrous ethanol.
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Ptero says: A final comment. Look at Slide 15 from Stanford's highly-respected atmospheric and environmental health researcher Mark Jacobson.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/j...rgySeminar.pdf

Note that compared to the real renewable energy alternatives decribed in this presentation, ethanol is a serious threat. It is a threat because it takes money from research and commercialization of these beneficial, climate benign clean technologies and gives it away to farmers. Ethanol clearly provides no benefit to society and serves only to transfer wealth to the Midwest farm states.

interesting, ive never heard a correlation between Corn values and our economy. I was under the impression that we make far more corn than we can use and the government subsidizes it just for that reason (to interest farmers in making it)

what irritates me is subsidizing something that farmers are obviously making money off of.

From my own hypermiling experience I have lost 6mpg with the introduction of E-10. It doesn't surprise me that this fuel source developed in the this way is more harmful than gasoline to the enviroment.

We have over 100 years invested in the internal combustion engine, it is about time we change our thinking. I wish they would invest more time and money into developing a different engine instead of trying to refuel a design that was never that efficient to begin with.

You mean, like this?

Ford Motor Co.

Or this?

Aptera

Or this?

http://www.ballard.com/files/pdf/Cas...e_study_v9.pdf

Or this?

Hydrogen Engine Center

Or this?

Hydrogen Engine Center

Or this?

Hydrogen Engine Center

Or this?

Hydrogen Engine Center

All these engines, battery, fuel cell or internal combustion, are designed to run on fuel from renewable energy resources (electricity or "liquid electricity: hydrogen"). However, the Republican Party that has been running my country sold its honor to Big Oil eight years ago. But at least the engine technology is ready. (By the way, hydrogen internal combustion is nearly as efficient as fuel cell with efficiency around 30-percent.)

See:
http://www.fuelcells.org/thomasstudy.pdf

NO !!! I mean throw away the ICE, and figure out a new way to propel vehicles, ala electric motors, nuclear power etc .... The rotary engine was step in the right direction, but that is what I mean ...

I disagree with you that the ICE engine has lost its usefulness. It is an incredibly sophistocated device that can achieve high relative efficiency numbers at a low production cost.

The rotary engine, like other gasoline engines, was about 15-percent thermal efficient. The Ford hydrogen fuel cell engine is around 36-percent efficient. The Hydrogen Engine Center internal combustion hydrogenengines are nearly 30-percent efficient, and some models are designed to run on ammonia, a carbonless fuel. The Aptera and Ford vehicles use electric motors.

You are never going to see a nuclear powered car, sorry. Even if you built one, we wouldn't let you drive it through our county - and we're probably not alone. There might be a scrap market for it in Afghanistan near the Pakistan border, however.

Now that was funny ...

As a gesture of good will we could perhaps develop nuclear powered cars and hand them over to our "friends" around the world.. LOL

That was a long read, but I read the entire post :p

I find this sentence amusing... Why do we assume that there is only one country's contribution?

Sure, as soon as we started E10 max, we started consuming more ethanol than Brazil (starting in 2006) - but that doesn't mean their 4+ billion gallons of ethanol is a trivial amount. I can't really draw any conclusions from that though :p

Sounds like a bit of a a fallacy :p Corn farmers have been in hard times long before 2006 ;)

Which brings me to
False, Brazil's blends are anhydrous - their E100 is hydrous. I think that's been slowly changing, but last I checked - they're still producing more anhydrous ethanol ;)

Going along with the 3% number.... That's a 3% increase in vehicle consumption with a 10% reduction of fuel. Insinuating that -3% results in a net increase in raw gasoline consumption is quite biased. I've personally noticed a range between 1.5% and ~5% reduction (purely anecdotal of course).
As for the E20 statement... The 20mpg flex fuel vehicles DO NOT get 3mpg (20*(1-.85)).

With respect to VOC's
This is like looking at your left hand while your right hand is bleeding....
The purpose of an oxygenate is to reduce CO emissions among others. Turns out it's a double edged sword - it does reduce CO et. al. but at the cost of increased VOC's.

And with MTBE - it was/is ruining groundwater... MTBE in water tastes pretty freaking nasty (and it doesn't take much) - not even a Brita filter was able to get it all out :/


Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending it.... But some of the statements are blatantly wrong... And some of the conclusions are just terrible. I personally hope that ethanol is a very short term thing unless there's a significant production efficiency breakthrough.

trebuchet03 -

Isn't it difficult to make a one-to-one comparison with Brazil because of the source of their ethanol? I thought they used sugar-cane while we used corn. The gist I got was that they were extracting more energy from sugar-cane than we are from corn.

CarloSW2

As far as production is concerned, that's very likely the case.... as far as VOC's out your tailpipe.... No.

Think of China's deep coal mines versus US open pit mines... Yes, they're harvested differently, but that doesn't change that burning it results in emissions.

Also throw in the fact that their climate is hot and perfect for ethanol production without burning fuel and throw in the fact that they generally don't blend ethanol with gas and can tollerate higher water percentages, etc ,etc.

If we wanted to produce ethanol more efficiently we could, potatoes are much better than corn and there are slower methods of making alcohol that would require fewer fossil fuels.

The trouble with anything in our "economy" is that it has to be fast and easy and almost always use oil.

With more thought and investment we could make alcohol more efficiently without the use of fossil fuels but sadly lobbies control this sector and they rarely do things that save resources

e85forum.com

Also mileage as in MPG on a vehicle does not always go down running alcohol. My buick got the same mileage both ways running a 50% blend of e85 and e10 AKA 30mpg-32mpg highway. Sadly that motor had major issues to begin with and blew out (not alcohol related) and I haven't tested the new 01 with e85 mixes yet.

The odd thing is most folks who run a mix of e85 in a car NOT DESIGNED TO RUN ON IT tend to get almost exactly the same mileage (e85 mileage is best in warm climates), those that have flex fuel MPG almost always goes down on e85.

Ah well

Ja my mpg is the same at 50/50 blends or less.

In my Villager on E0 gas I get 20-21 MPG; on E85 I get 16.5-17 mpg. Yes I lose mpg, but the lower cost in my area made up for it.

I'm all for a plug in beat about town vehicle and a long range hydrogen fuel cell vehicle. I'm also interested in the pnuematic powered vehicles, which use only compressed air. I think that has a lot of merit due to wieght considerations and the variety of ways air can be compressed. Heck, using a windmill for the power plant you could compress air, or even powering an air compressor with solar cells.

But how does poor good ole boy from Arkansas afford to even think about affording such a thing?

No offense, but I think the jury has already returned a verdict on hydrogen, and it is considered a storage medium and a pretty crummy one at that, unless you are building a rocket with LOTS of other peoples money.

But little sub $1000 econoboxes with a stickshift can be finessed to 50mpg pretty easily (to 100mpg+ by some patient masters), sub $500 motorbikes get about 100mpg without trying too hard, theres a lot room for improvement on the cheap, especially for a do-it-yourself modder.

Very much misinformation and ad hoc thinking. The EPA starts requiring Ethanol use and our economy promptly fails apart, very unlikely. The reason these scientists can only give up is that Emissions and VOC are a minor part of climate factors. The Green House effect is a minor player in the entire process and the Sun's nuclear rate and speed of heat ray generation is usually the biggest factor. So I'm no expert but they're measuring gold fish to find the problems with the ocean. Scientists have done silly things to find the answer to problems and this is just crazy talk.

I thought this was going to be a discussion of E85 fuel mileage difference from anecdotal sources. The E85 lobby has also given up on giving mileage numbers and just states that, "E85 has 70% of the BTU content of Gasoline and should return at least that much mileage" and "they have see reports of better MPG" but always less than 100% of Gasoline MPG.

The dry vs wet ethanol argument is simple moot. You cannot mix "wet" ethanol with gasoline. Brazil mixes "dry" ethanol with their gasoline which is a 25% Ethanol, 75% Gasoline Mixture and they sell ethanol in it's maximum wet form of 95% Ethanol 5% water. It's been said that taking Ethanol to 95% alcohol content takes half of the energy and the other half is spent getting to to 98-99% alcohol content. But there's no other way around mixing it with gasoline. I wish we could have "wet" ethanol(denatured of course) here instead of E85, it'd be a lot cheaper and better albeit with more corrosion so changing fuel system components would be a bigger factor than they already are. But with our climate and the required components to make a Flex Fuel car run on "wet" ethanol and regular gasoline would be a major problem for regulators.

Corn Ethanol has been shown to be essentially just be a transient fuel and a is a First Generation Biofuel so it gives a small energy surplus from modern production which uses mostly Coal and Natural Gas instead of Petroleum. The next point is how much more efficient Ethanol is than Gasoline but that's another topic eh?

There is an interesting little documentary (King Corn) about the costs of producing 1 acre of corn and the subsidies involved.

I think I watched in on the instant Netflix deal, but there is an extend PBS clip here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDurZc5Yr6c

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