Why is Ethanol such a polarizing topic?
 

Like the title says, ethanol somehow seems to have become akin to abortion, partisan politics, and religion with a lot of people.

I didn't create this thread to discuss which side of that argument each of us are on, or to discuss the relative merits of ethanol itself... just why people get their panties in such a bunch over a substance. Nobody seems as emotionally invested in mayonnaise or bar soap or shoe polish... just ethanol.

Thoughts?

Many politicians receive money from big oil lobbyists, which causes them to oppose ethanol, and to create ads attacking ethanol. So, this leads some ordinary people to believe that ethanol is bad. Meanwhile, other politicians receive money from ethanol lobbyists, so they make pro-ethanol ads, and so on and so forth. So really, the divisiveness is primarily because big corporations have turned this into a divisive political issue. At least from my analysis. People tend to get worked up over politics, so since ethanol is a political issue, people will get worked up over it.

The subject involves three other topics:
1) Politics
2) Fuel prices
3) Food prices

...and you're wondering why it's polarizing?

My beef with Ethanol, is the BTU content per pound, and the related price you pay for that content, especially when compared to gasoline.

Simple as that, no politics involved for me.

Jim.

Corn ethanol is what particularly raises my hackles.

* More energy in than energy out (total waste).
* Use of food as fuel.

Why?

If cellulose ethanol (switch grass) were viable today, I might feel differently, but that's not what's going on.

Actually, it looks like I'm a little out of date:
http://blogs.usda.gov/2010/09/21/usd...gy-efficiency/
But maybe that's debatable:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_ethanol

This is the problem!

I don't like it for three reasons.

*It takes more energy to make it out of corn then you get out of it, but we subsidize corn with tax dollars to make it cheap because corn has a lot of uses, in other words, if you couldn't use diesel fuel, natural gas and oil based chemicals, but instead only used ethanol powered tractors and powered the ethanol factory with ethanol, you could not produce enough to run everything, that is not the case with veggie oil based fuels because they are much less energy intensive to produce.

*Using corn to make fuel tends to drive up food prices when it's a bad year, like this year because of the drought, is easier to store and ship then veggies so it's easy to pay farmers to grow corn as "food" without risking the extra rotting away, but in a bad year the price of corn for food sky rocket but we don't notice that much because we export a lot of corn to poor countries where a jump in food prices is a bigger deal.

*My 3rd point is under a bit of debate, depending on the vehicle, some people find that 10% ethanol drops their mileage by more then 10%, so if you left the ethanol out you would use less gasoline.

Hah- should I even bother with this? :rolleyes:

It is my understanding that the refining process has become more efficient than the oft-quoted old study that "showed" a net energy loss. The ethanol industry didn't even protest the demise of one of their subsidies, as they are making it anyway. If it was so inefficient could they do that?

It is also my understanding that because of the efficient use of "brewer's grains" (the high-quality, non-liquid "leftovers" from distilling) as feed that really, ethanol has not swiped any food out of anybody's mouth.

But even if that was the case, I'd say it points to an overpopulation problem more than anything else. If we are utilizing every square inch of arable land and even that isn't enough to support our food AND fuel needs, me thinks that points to a tipping point of sorts.

Ethanol is not the answer,unless it is made from waste material it is taking over our farmland.
Clearly it is not the "fuel of the future" but more of the Fuel from our food supply.

Which is why people feel strongly about it.
That and it has 10% less energy by volume.

I guess that's pretty much it. Politics is another word for Lies, so thanks to lies about an imagined threat to our food supply we get to make no progress at all.

Well, that stinks. Any way past this deadlock?

As stated at the top of this post, I didn't start this thread to discuss the relative merits of ethanol itself - there are plenty of those threads already and it is pretty clear that citing available data can only lead us a finite way toward homogenizing our opinions. This topic isn't one I care about for personal superiority, to say "I'M RIGHT AND YOU'RE WRONG NYEAH!" - my motivation is to see progress occur in how humans use the world.

Petroleum appears to be a finite resource, and the best time to ready ourselves is before we absolutely must. There are also hundreds of millions of cars already in peoples' driveways that need a liquid fuel and similar amounts of people who cannot be counted-upon to simply discard their vehicle for want of a new fuel source when the era of petroleum necessarily ends itself nor can the systems of commerce and lifestyle established over the past century be expected to simply end without incident when we face petroleum's end.

So if we're going to rely on a new fuel, and ethanol is unacceptable to many - then what fuel is suggested and what means of production is suggested that poses less perceived threat than ethanol production?

If ethanol was made from an inedible plant, would this still be a point of contention? SH2 grade corns aren't even table edible (shriveled appearance when ripe, very chewy, not tasty) and barely useful for starch because they lack many of the enzymes that produce starches from the early sugars in the kernels. For the most part, SH2 are only useful to make DDG/DDS for the derivatives market and the byproduct of DDG manufacture from SH2 stock happens to be a flammable liquid useable in many automotive engines. Is this still robbing food from your table? If so, how do you figure?

Energy density is really a point of contention? So is gasoline unacceptable because it has less energy density by volume than liquid hydrogen?

Its unacceptable because the diluted ethanol is sold to us at the same rate as gas even though it has less BTU's
I have a Propane fireplace even though i have Natural gas lines threw my neighborhood. Reason is Propane has 10% more BTU then Natural gas. Who wants to pay more for less?
Who wants ethanol ? is it the consumer or business who wants it.
I am really hoping the future is without ICE's.

Why don't they bump the BTU's up on it ? seems like a scam, low output fuel for a 10% percent increase on your fuel bills.

Damn that Ethanol, lol

Seems like pyrolysis would be the way to go... take all the products we've made from hydrocarbons (primarily plastics) that can't feasibly be recycled any other way and extract usable fuel back out of it.

I'm old enough to remember the "energy crisis" of the early 70's. After things stabilized (albiet higher pump prices) Citgo offered a product called Gasahol. 10% ethanol blended into gasoline. They had a picture of an ear of corn on the pumps. Cost about 2 cents more per gal. at a time when gasoline was selling about 50 cents / gal. The experiment lasted about a year when after poor sales they pulled it off the market. The point I'm trying to make is back then I had a choice. Read the report about Archer Daniels Mcneal to get a little history of how the stuff got into our fuel supply. If you think the stuff is so great you haven't done your homework.

I am sure it is better then a net loss now days.
As for the subsidie who needs that when many states mandate the usage of it. So they can charge what ever they want.

Now lets take what we learned and find something other than corn to use to make fuel.

Sure... but what about all the ICE's already deployed? Throw them in the trash?

If, starting today, every automotive manufacturer made the boardroom decision that every future car they design from a clean slate would be ICE-free, they would still need to make their current crop of vehicles for many years. It's not a one day change-over. They have equipment and property to amortize, they have purchase obligations to satisfy, it would easily be 15 years before we saw the last ICE roll off an assembly line from that boardroom decision made today.

We would still have 100 years worth of ICE powered cars on the streets, sure they'd slowly die off but if someone told me to take my paid off and fully functional transportation out of service just because we ran out of petroleum and they feel emotionally opposed to ethanol use, I'd tell 'em to pack it in their prison suitcase.

How about all the people who make their living distributing liquid fuel from the refineries to the points of sale? And the properties and equipment tied to that? Whatever kind of fuel source we use in the future will be needing distribution and end point sales, even if that source is electrons. Unless you've got a Mr. Fusion patent you forgot to market...

Hopes are cool and all, but hopes don't run engines.

If not ethanol, then what do you suggest?

CAUTION: the following text contains Macabre Humor ! ! !

Maybe the petroleum industry should 'partner' with hospitals and 'extract & recover' ethanol alcohol from the blood of dead and/or arrested drunk drivers?

Sure, I hear that a lot. And then I do homework. And as a response I get unsupported rejections.

Do you agree that petroleum is a finite resource? If so, what do you suggest as an alternative to ethanol when we eventually discover how finite petroleum is? Or, do you believe that time will be after our deaths and it is the job of our grandchildren to figure out their next step?

I don't ask these things combatively... I just don't want impossible ideals to be the enemy of improvement. If a superior option exists that can be put into actual practice in the actual real world, I am genuinely curious to learn about it.

There has to be a better idea then growing hybrid corn for energy.
The future is closer then Shovel reports. I would assume that in the next 50 years we will all be driving something other than corn powered ICE vehicles.
Electric comes to mind.

You see! You can't even have a non-polarizing discussion about why it's polarizing!:D

Economics. Gasoline is currently cheaper than Ethanol. Just like Diesel is cheaper than Gasoline. Americans, are very concerned with the economics of everything. All the other issues are secondary.


@ecomodded, Ethanol has 2/3 the energy density of Gasoline. If you're talking about the 10% Ethanol in Gasoline, that only lowers the energy density by 3%. The "10% less MPG mystery" is not due to the lower energy density.

Let me just look through my files, hmm. There it is. Energy density per gallon (use the Lower heating value for an ICE).
http://www.afdc.energy.gov/pdfs/fueltable.pdf

Hope that helps.

You get more ethanol per lb of cattails than you do per lb of corn.
If we made our sewer systems into hybrid swamp systems, you could use our poop to fertilize the cattails needed to make ethanol. You would also be filtering sewage naturally.
They are already doing this in India.

That's pretty rad! :thumbup: What do you suppose they do with the post-distillation material?

I think we use our poop in Phoenix to cool the Palo Verde nuke plant.. or some of our runoff water anyway. No large bodies of water around here to cool it any other way. We eat a lot of burritos, maybe we can do both?

Nooooooo! Don't do it! It will use up all our poop and then where will we be??? :eek:

Already suggested... see my previous post

I would link to an article about it but I'm lazy, and I read it in an actual book (who uses THOSE any more?) so I can't quote it exactly, BUT:
As I recall, the raw sewage first goes through a standard stir-station type holding pond, where bacterium can begin to grow. Then the sewage runs through a series of ponds with lilies in them. The lilies absorb the mercury and other heavy metals, and so are regularly harvested and thrown in the landfill. By the time the sewage water has made its way to the cattails, the bacterium have already broken down most of the actual poop, and so the nitrates and other beneficial chemicals are already free-floating.
The cattail system in question is NOT used to make ethanol, rather to filter sewage water, but it's so effective I see no reason why we couldn't take it a step further.
The water that runs out of the cattails goes into another swampy area with fish (that are regularly caught and eaten), and by the time it leaves that it's 100% drinkable, pure water (none of the waterborne pathogens you would expect from sewage). This then runs into a natural water system. The algae, cattails, lilies and bacterium have already pulled the nitrogen out of the water, so there is none of the algae bloom you often see downstream of such a facility. It's a win-win, in my opinion.
EDIT: Though I would be dubious about eating poop-factory fish.

Now this is along the right lines, imo

Quote: NachtRitter
Seems like pyrolysis would be the way to go... take all the products we've made from hydrocarbons (primarily plastics) that can't feasibly be recycled any other way and extract usable fuel back out of it.

and this

Quote: Flakbadger

You get more ethanol per lb of cattails than you do per lb of corn.
If we made our sewer systems into hybrid swamp systems, you could use our poop to fertilize the cattails needed to make ethanol. You would also be filtering sewage naturally.
They are already doing this in India.

Taking the ethanol harvest off of our farm fields will return the farms to their intended use, feeding us not our cars.

We could make biodiesel, bio-ethanol, and biogas out of hemp.
Hemp strands without THC, that is. ;)
Before people get all funny about their biofuel ...

Corn and rapeseed are woefully inefficient crops to produce biodiesel and bio-ethanol from. Should be stopped right away.

SH2 (shrunken) is a gene that prevents sugar from being converted to starch in the corn kernel and is one of the genes used to produce super sweet corn for table use that will hold its sweetness for over a week after harvest (unlike traditional sweet corn cultivars that lose their sweetness within hours of being picked. SH2 corn is a sweet corn used for human consumption. The corn used for ethanol production, livestock feed, and for conversion into various corn derived chemicals is dent corn, a hard corn that converts all of its sugars into starch.

Even if ethanol was made from an inedible plant, it would still be competing for the limited supply of arable land, land that could otherwise be producing a food crop, so it would still be cutting into the food supply.

The biggest problem with our ethanol program is that it is in the form of a mandate, so they have to produce that no matter what else happens. They are federally mandated to produce 13.2 billion gallons of ethanol in 2012. So to produce that 13.2 billion gallons of ethanol they require about 5 billion bushels of corn to produce it, which was about 40% of the total corn crop in 2011. But since it is a mandate, ethanol is the first at the "trough" for any available corn and any other uses are filled after ethanol has taken its share, which works ok in a normal growing year. But if there is a severe drought (and this is the first really bad growing year since the ethanol program was implemented) then the corn market gets badly skewed by the effects of the mandate.

Say the drought was bad enough that the corn crop is down 50% compared with last year's. That 5 billion bushels that was 40% of last year's corn crop is now 80% of this year's corn crop. After ethanol takes its mandated share, that leaves only 20% of the crop remaining (equal to 10% of last year's) for all of the other uses of dent corn. Guess what that will do to the price of corn and any food, pharmaceutical, and chemical products derived from corn.

You missed a step, you first use anerobic bacteria to make methane from it which converts the rest into sterile high quality nitrogen fertalizer then you use cattails.

Thank you for this data. It directly conflicts with data from my Nebraska-native girlfriend but I admit that corn variety nomenclature is a topic beyond my education so either of you could be right.


Any sugar-rich crop is going to have a byproduct, and any byproduct in sufficient supply has value. I don't see how this is an exclusive relationship.

Don't livestock still need to eat? Pig and cattle farms are currently set up to feed DDG to their animals, and by feeding them the byproduct of ethanol production (or is ethanol a byproduct of DDG production?) they greatly reduce the risk of some health problems in their livestock. Distillers' grains are cheap and easy to transport because of their consistency and reduced mass compared to their nutrition content.. if farmers had to transport and feed whole corn to their animals, it would cost more and the animals would be less healthy. What's that do to your food prices?

This continues to not be a matter of food OR fuel. This is politics and it needs to stop being politics.


Here I admit to not having hard data to confirm this, but it seems like a plastic grocery bag weighs about 5 grams and if I go to the store and buy $100 worth of groceries I'll have maybe 35 or 40 grams of grocery bags, or less than 1.5 ounces of material. If pyrolysis is enormously efficient it could net a quarter ounce of fuel. Will that get me home from the grocery store?

Yeah, drought year with low corn production = higher corn prices, even if ethanol did not exist.

This is some good background for our current farming culture from the USDA. It also has a chart of the historical usage of Corn since 1980, near the bottom of the page.

USDA ERS - Corn: Background

CNG looks like a winner to me. Hydrogen enhanced combustion along with gasoline or CNG yields impressive fuel economy gains. Recomend reading Sustainable Energy without the hot air by David MacKay. Conservation which most of the people that chime in on this forum practice will help in the short term and should be encouraged.

You might be able to use DDG for livestock feed in cases where you don't need the starch content of whole corn for their diet (I couldn't use it for my sheep since I only feed corn in the winter as a source of concentrated calories to help them keep warm in cold weather). But I've never heard it being promoted for use as human food and you can't use it to make corn flakes, corn meal, grits, tortillas, or other forms of corn for human consumption. Likewise DDG can't be used as a chemical feedstock for any uses that require the starch content of corn.

I just read that 80% of corn is used for animal feed.

Have you seen King Corn? Pretty amazing to realize that the average cow we consume is 90% corn that we CAN'T consume (all starch/fiber).

I did not realize that there was an unstated assumption that you must create the alternative fuel only on whatever you yourself can supply... If there is, then you are probably right... you yourself would not be able to produce enough fuel only on the plastic grocery bags you get (if you even get any) to get you to the store.

If not, then I do hope that you (and we) don't limit ourselves to a very tiny fraction of what is produced by hydrocarbons (plastic grocery bags) if we were to go the direction of pyrolysis... landfills & wrecking yards are absolutely packed with hydrocarbon-based products (especially plastics) that aren't being (or can't be) recycled in the traditional sense. Let's do a quick list:

• Tires
• Automotive interior panels
• Automotive engine parts
• Automotive exterior panels
• Computer Cases
• Laptop Cases
• Display (TV, Monitor) Cases
• Printer cases and parts
• Toner, inkjet cases
• Medicine bottles
• Shower curtains
• Plastic corrective lenses
• Canoes, kayaks, etc (plastic ones, of course)
• Children's toys
• Advertising, political banners
• Motorcycle bodywork
• Polyester carpets, cloth, clothes, etc
• etc, etc, etc... I'm sure you can think of another 10, 20, 100 list items

Think we might be able to find enough of those kinds of items to get you (and me and everyone else) to the store?

While you could certainly generate the fuel through pyrolysis yourself at home, I think it only really makes sense at a large scale... a plant that takes all the different types of hydrocarbons, preps them for processing, and then turns them into fuel. Heck, they can charge to pick up the waste products and then charge to sell the resulting fuel... income on both ends!

That figure was valid before the mandated ethanol program started consuming corn starting in 2005. The following is a breakdown on corn usage in 2010:

"The best estimates for consumption offered by Good and Irwin are 4.9 billion bushels for ethanol, 5.1 billion bushels for feed, 2.0 billion for exports, 1.4 billion for other processing, and 5% ending stocks at 674 million bushels. "

Of these uses, livestock feed consumption is the most responsive to changes in corn prices, ethanol and corn exports less so.

A bunch of different livestock and rancher associations are attempting to get the ethanol mandate temporarily suspended until corn production gets back to normal levels. Good luck trying to get that done with the current administration. See articles below:

http://www.argusleader.com/article/2...yssey=nav|head

http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2012/J...hanol-Mandate/

Here is a Forbes article on the effect ethanol and drought is having on corn prices:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybel...-consequences/


Dried brewer's grain isn't a direct replacement for whole corn. Compared with whole corn, dried brewer's grain has much lower starch, slightly higher protein and fat levels and has some added vitamins that aren't present in whole corn. Basically the brewing process uses yeast to consume the starch content of the corn in an anaerobic environment, producing ethanol, CO2, and yeast biomass containing various vitamins and proteins, but this process consumes a portion of the total caloric content of the corn in the process, so the brewer's grains end up being a less energy dense product than the whole corn you started with. And you can't just feed brewer's grains to livestock as their main feed as you can with corn. Most of the articles I have read talk about how it is an inexpensive feed additive, but discuss how much dried brewer's grains can be added to poultry or dairy cow feed without having adverse effects on their performance.

It's nice to learn something new. Thanks Basjoos.

regards
Mech