... to one of the worst ideas ever. Whoever thought turning food into fuel was a good idea was severely misguided. http://www.politico.com/story/2013/11/epa-ethanol-biofuel-regulations-99933.html?hp=t1_3 Ethanol runs out of gas So much for the fuel of the future. By pulling back Friday on an effort to guarantee ethanol an ever-growing share of the nation’s gasoline supply, the Obama administration could be putting a burgeoning industry into the deep freeze, just six years after biofuels drew strong support from both parties in Congress. That chill will certainly affect the industry’s powerhouse, corn ethanol. But the risk is far greater for smaller sectors of the industry still struggling to get out of the gate — those aimed at producing next-generation biofuels like “cellulosic” ethanol, made from ingredients like switchgrass and corn stalks. Corn-based biofuel has for years been untouchable politically, as presidential candidates seemed to over-promise on ethanol every four years in Iowa — but even that clout may be waning as both the tea partiers on the right and greens on the left push to abandon it. Reasons for the turnaround are many: The boom in domestic oil drilling has dimmed the urgency to find other alternatives to Mideast petroleum. Demand for gasoline has slumped. And criticism of the environmental impacts of corn ethanol has dimmed its luster nationally. At the same time, ethanol has faced a growing counterattack from the oil industry, which argues that the mandate could cause gasoline prices to spike. Other opponents include the livestock, poultry and restaurant industries, which say turning corn into fuel drives up the cost of food. Ethanol supporters say that if Friday’s decision is the start of a lasting trend, both jobs and the promise of a new form of energy could be lost to other countries as the shifting federal winds scare off investment in advanced biofuels plants. “The short answer is that it means stagnation in the biofuels market,” said Bob Dinneen, president of the Renewable Fuels Association, one of the main ethanol advocacy groups. “So it’s no growth, and no innovation or evolution of the industry into advanced biofuels or cellulosic ethanol. It’s really about the future. “Boy, my goodness, are the oil companies going to benefit from this,” Dinneen added after the EPA announced its proposal Friday afternoon. “We’re all just sort of scratching our heads here wondering why this administration is telling us to produce less of a clean-burning American fuel.” The administration has been promoting ethanol on multiple fronts, including requiring refiners to blend increasing amounts of ethanol into gasoline and pushing to allow higher-percentage ethanol blends to be sold at gas pumps. But EPA sent a very different signal Friday when it trimmed the blending mandate, the first year-to-year decline since Congress expanded the ethanol requirement in 2007. “I don’t know if the EPA is aiming for uncertainty, but they may inadvertently create it,” said Jan Koninckx, the global business director of biorefineries for DuPont. “The impact could be that another country will lead this rather than the U.S.” Hugh Welsh, president of DSM North America, a company heavily invested in cellulosic biofuels, said investors take note of any hints in Washington about the future of the blending mandate, formally known as the renewable fuel standard. “Everybody that I speak to in the investment bank community … their first question is always, ‘What’s happening with this renewable fuel standard?’” Welsh said. “‘What’s the president’s position on this?’” As recently as the 2012 election, Obama’s position seemed clear: He pledged to increase the use of biofuels and to support the mandate. EPA leaders said Friday that they’re still committed to ensuring that ethanol has a future in the U.S. fuel mix. “Biofuels are a key part of the Obama administration’s ‘all of the above’ energy strategy, helping to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, cut carbon pollution and create jobs,” agency Administrator Gina McCarthy said in a statement. She said the agency “continues to support the RFS goal of increasing biofuel production and use.” Ethanol’s critics say the world is just not what Congress expected in 2005, when it created the mandate, and in 2007, when it expanded it into its current form. Back then, oil imports were soaring, and gasoline demand was expected to continue to grow. “Just about everything … that that law was predicated on, the assumptions have proved to be null and void,” said Charlie Drevna, president of the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, a major petroleum trade group. One complaint by the oil industry involves something it calls the “blend wall”: With gasoline demand flat-lining, and most commonly sold gasoline containing only 10 percent ethanol, it will soon be physically impossible to blend more ethanol into the nation’s fuel supply. Once that line is crossed, the oil companies say, refiners might have to cut production and gasoline prices will spike —the kind of headache no president wants to deal with. ... (more at link)
If you burn more energy from oil than the energy yield from the corn, you're doing it wrong. Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland bought that legislation. They sold it under the guise of domestic energy as a hedge against energy as an international threat.
Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it. - Ronald Reagan
http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_17166.cfm (2009 article) This is all I needed to know to be against it a long time ago.
Never been against its use or production, but admittedly because I'm in favor of farm subsidies and I think this was a potentially more productive way of supplementing them. If we had figured out how to pipeline it earlier or if we still eventually build a full network there might be some additional economic value.
I think it was during the 2008 election season that ethanol was discussed in a thread and it was unanimous here (right-wing nuts and left-wing kooks included) that ethanol was a terrible idea. Good riddance indeed.
There is another..... How Whiskey Makers Could Soon Be Providing A Superior Biofuel With any luck, future whisky fans may be able to enjoy their three fingers in the afternoon with the added knowledge they’ve contributed to a climate-friendly energy economy. According to E&E News, a biochemist in Scotland recently founded a company to piggyback biofuel production off the whisky distillation process. Distillation produces two byproducts: draff — a residual sludge of barley grains — and pot ale — the leftovers in the vat after the high-grade alcohol has been syphoned off. Collectively, they account for roughly 90 percent of the raw material that goes into whisky-making. The industry currently produces 551,156 tons of draff and 422.7 million gallons of pot ale annually, and sells about half the draff as cattle and pig feed. But the rest is simply disposed as waste, at considerable cost. Martin Tangney, the founder of Celtic Renewables Ltd., hopes to turn that waste into a feedstock for the production of biobutanol — an alcohol similar to ethanol, the most widely used biofuel. But it packs a considerably larger energy punch on a pound-for-pound basis — almost as much as traditional gasoline — and current combustion engine technology can take biobutanol at virtually any fuel mix. By contrast, most American cars can run on 10 percent ethanol at most. Biobutanol’s also much more amenable to pipeline transportation, an option that isn’t available for ethanol. Tangney also works at the Biofuel Research Centre at Edinburgh Napier University, which got the project of deriving biobutanol from whisky’s byproducts off the ground back in 2010. They’re using a once widely-employed fermentation process called ABE fermentation (for acetone-butanol-ethanol) to get the job done. Biobutanol’s production process has been considerably less cost-effective than ethanol’s, but a number of projects are working on bringing those costs down. E&E pointed to several biobutanol plants, from Russia to Shanghai, that are producing the fuel using feedstocks like corn, wood chips, and waste from the logging industry. A Scottish power plant that burns the byproducts to generate electricity got up and running recently, but Tangney’s project appears to be the one major effort to turn draff and pot ale into a usable liquid fuel. Besides recycling resources and producing a superior biofuel, Tangney’s process also works off agricultural products that would’ve been grown regardless. Demand for conventional biofuels derived from corn or soybeans drives the conversion of more natural grassland or forest to cropland. That cuts down how much carbon dioxide the land can pull in from the atmosphere, reducing the biofuels’ climate benefits. But a biofuel produced from the waste products of agriculture that would be in operation regardless avoids that problem. It also avoids pumping up demand for crops that double as human food, which in turn raises prices and contributes to food instability, especially for the global poor. “I wanted to set up a biofuels industry in the U.K. from waste products and not use food crops as a substrate,” Tangney said. Celtic Renewables is currently carrying out a demonstration project at the Centre for Process Innovation at Redcar, England, using about £750,000 Tangney received in public grants and private investment. Over 7,000 tons of draff and 528,344 gallons of pot ale from the Tullibardine distillery are involved, and the project is aiming for 2,642 gallons of biobutanol. Tangney hopes to create a large-scale Scottish biofuels industry around ABE fermentation, with the ultimate goal of creating a competitive drop-in fuel for the U.K. gasoline market. E&E News reported that, if Tangney’s vision is fully realized, it could amount to a £100 million annual business in Scotland alone.
This is a major point. Using consumable food or its byproducts is a stupid idea for energy conversion, but things like switchgrass which is readily available and doesn't impact the food supply should be considered as a viable energy supplement. It's just that with the aggro lobby, it's all or nothing when it comes to ethanol. puns everywhere
Said a man who couldn't sniff the nomination of today's Republican Party, in my humble opinion. Notice he didn't say "Democrats." He said government. Smart man, in his way, at least when he was making this point. Not that I agree with all of the quote.
Major, this is why you aren't on my ignore list. Occasionally you're right. It is my fervent hope that some day soon we will reach a general consensus on energy policy. Fossil fuels are GOOD. Renewables are great too, but they're not economically viable yet, and in the meantime we are flush with fossil fuels. It is this nation's Ace in the hole, our ticket to future economic sustainability and prosperity. We can either unleash our potential or shoot ourselves in the foot. We can do it in an environmentally friendly way without too much restraint, just have to get the EPA on the right page. Ethanol was a dumb move from the beginning played to placate the Environazi Left that doesn't tend to think overly hard about things. Natural gas is a Godsend. Nuclear power is clean, available, and isn't going to make you glow. Fracking is technology sent from Heaven. Accept these things and we can prosper. Don't, and the Russians prosper while we wither on the vine while sucking Saudi oil. If this govt (mainly EPA, DoI, and DoE) would simply get out of the way we'd have cheap energy for hundreds of years and would be able to create a massive energy infrastructure that could create hundreds of thousands to millions of high-paying energy jobs. If. If. If.
Ethanol first started in 2005, passed by the Bush Administration with a GOP House and GOP Senate. It came from both the environmental left and the big business agriculture of the midwest. It's never been a simple left/right policy. As noted in the article, the people pushing to kill it now are the far-right tea partiers and the far-left greens. Basically, the people that are most ideological and not really bound to the big money lobbies.
the fallacy is debating the merits of ethanol period if it had value, you wouldn't need to subsidize it, people would pay for it
Does this mean oil has no value? Nuclear energy? The internet? The interstate highway system? The electrical grid? Everything that uses GPS? None of these things have any value since they exist only thanks to government subsidizing their startup?
