Tim Worstall

Bio-Ethanol and Maize

I’d rather hope that the environment editor of The Telegraph would actually, in a comment piece, look at the facts behind a subject, or at least report the claims, before swallowing the industry line. Clearly, I hope in vain:

President George W Bush’s aim to cut American petrol
usage by 20 per cent over 10 years looks achievable – though not
necessarily through the way he has chosen to do it.

Half
of the target, set out in his State of the Union address, is to be
achieved by developing supplies of ethanol, the other half by an
increase in vehicle efficiency.

As David Pimental has repeatedly pointed out, corn ethanol requires more energy to produce than it provides. The past attempt to increase fuel efficiency, the CAFE standards, are what lead to the creation of the SUV in the first place so perhaps that’s not a wise route to go down either. There’s a simple way to reduce petrol consumption: raise the gas tax.

Why does everyone insist on doing things the difficult way?

In

4 responses

  1. llamas Avatar
    llamas

    It’s not quite true to say that corn-based ethanol requires more energy to produce than it provides. In the very best, most-efficient dry-mill processes, with lots of re-generation and co-generation approaches, it can have a modest positive energy balance. And there are plants (in the US, at least) that achieve this.
    The worm in the apple is the co-products – the non-fermentable solids and the CO² that are the by-product of making ethanol this way. The positive energy balance can only be obtained if these co-products are assigned a positive energy credit in the equation. That would be a fair thing to do if there were a ready market for both. While there is a market for both – as animal feed and as industrial gas – the market is limited, and if it is very far from the plant gates, the energy costs of drying, compressing (for the gas) and transporting them quickly drive the energy equation for the ethanol into the red.
    Raising the gas tax, I submit, is not a good way to reduce petrol consumption in the US, where the vast majority of workers have no alternative to the automobile. As we have seen during the recent price spikes in the US, many have few choices in a place where gasoline is a necessity. Consumption was reduced but marginally even though the price (briefly) doubled within a period of a few months. The discretionary consumption of gasoline in the US is a far smaller portion of total consumption than it may be in other places. The one thing that the surge in prices did was knock the stuffing out of the SUV and pickup-truck market. People buying new vehicles did buy according to COO, CAFE or no CAFE. As we saw at the recent auto show in Detroit, the monster SUV is in decline and the pickup is returning to what it used-to-was – a work vehicle, not driveable jewellery.
    The CAFE fiasco created the SUV because of artfully-constructed loopholes. If those loopholes were plugged effectively, and the Seantors and Congressmen from Michigan were told to go pound sand for a change, it would make a significant reduction in US consumption.
    The one sure thing that would significantly reduce US auto fuel consumption would be a sensible approach to the regulation of diesel engines, so that we could have the same small, high-injection-pressure, high-efficiency diesel engines that are SOP in Europe. But the watermelons have a stranglehold on regulation of these things, and their efforts are actively restricting the deployment of diesels in the US. Daimler-Chrysler (the “Chrysler” is silent) recently discontinued the Jeep Liberty diesel, a great step in the right direction – a light crossover SUV with a small high-revving diesel and great fuel economy – because they could not make a consumer-acceptable version that would meet incoming regulatory standards. Seems like they could not persuade customers to replace a urea NOX-absorbtion cartridge every few months, and an exhaust temperature that would set fire to asphalt on a hot day was another minor inconvenience. This was already one of the cleanest diesels ever made, yet it was still not good enough for the regulators and the “green” lobbyists, whose main interest is in prevcenting anyone from driving at all.
    llater,
    llamas

    Reply
  2. Russ Brown Avatar
    Russ Brown

    Bioethanol is an energy “Potemkin Village.”
    35 billion gallons of ethanol has the energy content of 22.9 billion gallons of gasoline. When all input fossil hydrocarbon (diesel, gasoline, NG, LPG, and coal) energies are subtracted, the net energy production is about 1.3 billion gallons of gasoline equivalent.
    At $0.51 per gallon, the ethanol subsidy payment would be 17.85 billion dollars, or $13.73 per gallon of net gasoline energy production.
    By any standard, this looks like a bad deal, producing very little energy at a very high cost. Pork a la barrel is still pork.

    Reply
  3. llamas Avatar
    llamas

    Russ Brown’s subsidy math is another compelling exmaple of why corn-based ethanol, as practised in the US, is such a bad deal.
    Only to add that, as if $0.51 per gallon in direct Federal excise tax exepmtion is not enough, there’s another $0.10 per gallon subsidy for ‘small’ producers (less than 60 million gallons per annum).
    As a quick reference to this listing of all current US ethanol plants will show, that means ‘just about all of them’.
    http://www.ethanolrfa.org/industry/locations/
    That drives the total Federal ethanol subsidy payment to $21.35 billion, or $16.42 per gallon of gasoline equivalent.
    Tack on the State excise tax breaks, and the total subsidy approaches $20 per gallon of gasoline equivalent.
    This is rather like buying oil at $410 a barrel.
    llater,
    llamas

    Reply
  4. Kay Tie Avatar
    Kay Tie

    “corn ethanol requires more energy to produce than it provides”
    That’s not what this January’s Scientific American says. 0.77 MJ of fossil energy to make 1.0 MJ of fuel.
    The article concludes that ethanol from corn kernels is largely futile, but that if we can get the industrial chemistry working to ferment and distil corn husks then the ratio of in:out drops to 0.10 MJ of fossil fuel to make 1.0 MJ of fuel.

    Reply

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