Corn Ethanol on Chopping Block?

Old NEWS!

Ethanol was all about the FARM LOBBY to keep corn prices high.

 

Some more details for the politics
Could Congress Kill Ethanol Mandate Altogether In 2014?

The ethanol lobby really poked the pootch campaigning for E15 and no reduction of the RFS based on costs, gas use, or any other thing. The key is will the EPA cut the RFS enough to get rid of the huge problems, or will congress have to act.

I will bet that the threat of this bill is the only thing that brought the epa to their senses, but they are still mandating too much ethanol for many of us.

You have to remeber that the quick change in california to MTBE was political. It backfired big time, and was very costly in terms of creating a great deal of water polllution. The vote for ethanol requirments were not for the environment, and required the VP to break the tie. Gore now has written on why he regrets that vote.

 

Over use of fertilizer, destruction of virgin prairie grasslands (a natural CO2 absorber). The huge amounts of diesel, electrical energy used to transport, manufacture, and distribute ethanol. The INCREASE in food costs (see it every time I go food shopping). The destroying of the Gulf of Mexico from fertilizer washing into the Mississippi Delta and contribute the size of the "dead zone" in the Gulf. Small and not so small engine damage done due to ethanol.

Yep, ethanol is good for the environment - NOT!

The sooner ethanol is declared dead, the better off we will all be.

DBCassidy

 

Yes, the dinner table is where corn should be.

It should, however, NOT be used to feed cattle.

The cow's stomach through thousands of years, has been developed to digest GRASS, NOT corn.

Feeding cow's corn is like a diet of SURGAR and CANDY bars to children. That's why the youths of this country are so OBESE.

Antibiotics are given to cattle that feed on CORN to keep their stomachs from ulcerating.

That's WHY there are so many antibiotic resistant germs.

METHANOL is the answer.

Ford and California develop Methanol at the turn of the 21st. Century, until the FARM Lobby touted Ethanol.

Methanol is cheaply produced from natural gas (methane), coal and garbage dumps. The cost to make it is a one step process that costs about 49 cents a gallon.

In China, where ethanol produced from food is illegal, methanol powers buses and a lot public transportation.

 

I'm fairly calm about the future of ethanol. As others have pointed out, it is another farm subsidy. But ethanol also displaces some gasoline. Unlike fossil fuels, we know how to make it. Fossil fuels don't come back after combustion . . . except as plant material when fixed with solar energy, water, and photosynthesis.

Long term, we're all going to die and the fossil fuels will become more and more expensive leaving . . . solar driven sources.

Bob Wilson

 

There was a lot of politics in california forcing fast adoption of mtbe, it back fired. That is all. I think there will be politics against pushing too much corn ethanol also.

 

It's back to methanol, the stuff that worked, and the stuff they started with first in California.

How does that song go?


"California, here I come; right back where I started from..."

 

Well yes if you look at the problem ethanol was supposed to solve, imported oil, Methanol today seems like a much better solution. Cars need to be modified slightly for that, hence the open fuel standard.

Now the governator killled methanol, and promoted hydrogen, and CARB seems pro hydrogen all the way. It will be tough to take on both the hydrogen and the ethanol lobby, but, its the right thing to do for the american people.

 

Methanol is an easy one step conversion that can be done at a local facility from "garbage" methane emissions or natural gas, which is one of the same.

Production cost, including raw materials, is about 49 cents a gallon.

Like methanol, it would only be needed as an octane booster to prevent pinging in engines.

 

I was talking about being used as a replacement for gasoline. The california experiment showed that up to M85 were pretty practicle (85% methanol, 15% gasoline, about 58% of gasoines energy), but some materials would need to be upgraded. That would allow more less expensive methanol to be used.

 

I take a somewhat longer view on the whole automotive Temperance movement.
Since approximately 0.000000000000000000000000000001 percent of the corn grown in the United States actually winds up on dinner plates as ear corn?
We really don't have much of an up-side on this issue, now do we?

If I were KFAD, I'd probably kill off subsidies for alky, but that would just mean that we would use corn as silage to fatten cows with, or turn it into HFCS or breakfast cereals (usually it's BOTH!) to fatten up our kids......or I guess we could continue to use it in the adult beverage industry to dumb down AND fatten up our adults.
Or....there's always "vegetable oil" which fattens EVERYBODY up.

Probably two of the most benign uses for corn is stuffing it into DelMonte cans so that it can be thrown away by kids in their free school lunch programs, or putting it into E10 gas.

Your call.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/31/opinion/corn-for-food-not-fuel.html?_r=0
In times of bad crops, the mandate means that prices will simply rise, and the corn will be used as fuel instead of fuel. The corn mandate has taken the market out of the equation, and created a virtual tax on most, although it is a small tax, and given it to a few big companies. I don't see the sense in that. Now the brazilian system modifies the amount of ethanol based on the price and availability, the US system does not.

The subsidy was correctly ended, but the mandate threatened forcing stations to E15, that could do damage to lawn mowers, chain saws and some vehicles. The mandate has moved a great deal of crop land from other crops to corn.

 

^ I remember when hybrids came out a decade and a half ago, there was similar FUD about $15,000 batteries, EMI hazards, net carbon loss technology, etc...

How is this different from the FUD that surrounds E10?
I actually made a living when I got out of the canoe club (the first time....in 92) cutting grass for a realtor friend with loads of rental property.
I have 2 lawn mowers (including an 1100# ZTR) a chipper, a pressure washer, 2 weed eaters, and two motorcycles, and 3 cars, a generator, and I'm probably forgetting one or two things.
When am I going to start seeing the E10 destroy any of these motors???

10 Years?
15?
The newest of these is about 5 summers old.

There are Mom and Pop stations that sell E0 at separately priced pumps here (10 cents higher) and I actually had somebody tell me that I was destroying my V-Rod by getting the E10 there.
When he gave me the line about it rusting my gas tank, I thought for a moment about explaining to him why he was full of crap, but instead?
I reached down and thunked my PLASTIC fuel cell and said....
~ "Thunk! Thunk!"~
"Naaah. Don't think so!"

 

huh. There was no uncertainty or doubt in what I wrote. We know how many more acres of corn were put into place, we know what food prices did when the mandate was not weakend.

E15! Read it again E15! The thing the lobby was trying to force, that the epa finally backed away from.

Yes we have lots of premature death from e10, but we will see even more from E15.

So are you saying the EPA should ruin 10 year old mowers to help satisfy a lobby? That just seems wrong on the face of it. Who cares how old.

There are no E0 stations by me. I guess you are lucky, but you want to support ADM, fine, just know that it makes food more expensive, and will ruin things.

 

Political leaning disappear when we 'do the experiment.' Well done. <grins>

On the flip side, I've run both our 2003 and 2010 Prius on E85 . . . and it works. The fuel economy is proportional to the energy content but that was expected. Sad to say, the retail price of E85 is offset severely from the wholesale price, much worse than the fossil fuel spread. But if all fuels were energy content based:

• diesel retail would cost more than gasoline
• E85 retail would cost less than gasoline . . . not the case today

Bob Wilson

 

It's bad enough human food (if you can call GMO's food ) gets served to cattle ... but that's just another bur in the saddle. Yea ... god forbid we should feed people rather that ICE's. We have a perfectly good alternative in methanol ... but apparently the corn lobby is much more powerful than common sense.
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