Andris Piebalgs : getting a sense of proportion

Andris Piebalgs continues this Friday his blogging on bio-fuels, addressing some of the concerns expressed by the readers of the last blog-entry.

I agree that a radical change in consumer behavior is needed if we want Europe to be more energy efficient. At the same time, as policy makers we have to come up with policies that are based on present day realities. And the reality is that most Europeans are living and working in big cities and using modern means of transport. It would be unrealistic to impose sanctions on car producers and users if no alternatives are provided.

Before continuing I can't but express once more my joy in seeing EU's leaders having such a close interaction with their citizens. More bio-fuel talk under the fold.

Crossposted at the European Tribune.

In Europe, we use less than 2 percent of our cereals production for biofuels, so they do not contribute significantly to higher food prices in the European context. Even if we reach our 10% biofuels target by 2020, the price impact will be small. Our modeling suggests that it will cause a 8 to 10% increase in rape seed prices and 3 to 6% increase in cereal prices. Increase in the price of the latest has very small influence on the cost of bread. It makes up around 4 per cent of the consumer price of a loaf.

[...]

We need to use first-generation biofuels as a bridge to the second generation biofuels using lignocellulosic materials as a feedstock. With this in mind, the Commission within the forthcoming review of the Common Agricultural Policy will urge the farmers to invest more in short rotation forestry crops and perennial grasses which are the most typical feedstocks for advanced biofuels.Over the past 30 years, Europe’s farmers have stood accused, through their association with the Common Agricultural Policy, of over-producing and dumping their surpluses with the aid of massive export subsidies on over supplied world markets, therefore depressing market prices and contributing massively to poverty and starvation in poor countries. That criticism has now been reversed. The charge now is that EU biofuel policy will contribute to third world poverty by driving food prices up. My impression from this debate sometimes is that we the Europeans know best what is good for people in developing world. Let them speak for themselves.

[...]

And let’s not forget that oil is a finite commodity, and high oil prices are one of the main factors making food more expensive, particularly in poor countries.

The most important questions raised in the previous log entries were left unattended. Here's a simple accounting exercise to get a real sense of proportion:

The EU consumes today roughly 20 Mb/d of Oil. Of that about two thirds are used in Transport, make it 13 Mb/d. Assuming that EU's Transport use remains unchanged up to 2020 that turns the target to something like 1.3 Mb/d.

Ethanol has an energy density of about 60% of gasoline, biodiesel is somewhat better, so make it 75%. Thus to replace those 1.3 Mb/d of Oil, about 1.75 Mb/d of bio-fuels are needed ( 1.3/0.75 ).

Ethanol production in temperate climates has an EROEI below 2:1, biodiesel about 4:1. Oil's EROEI differs markedly from place to place (offshore versus onshore, etc) but 10:1 is a general enough mark. Accounting for EROEI, the useful energy the EU gets from Oil is about 1.2 Mb/d. To match that useful energy, total bio-fuels production has to rise to 2.1 Mb/d ( 1.2/0.75/0.75 ).

Corn crops yield about 3500 litres of ethanol per hectare per year (that's 9.5 litres per hectare per day). With sugar cane in the tropics that number goes up to 6000 (16,5 litres per hectare per day). But for bio-diesels the numbers are considerably lower, around 1250 litres per hectare per year (3,5 per hectare litres per day).

Using 159 litres for a barrel, 2.1 Mb correspond roughly to 333 Ml (mega-litre). Using again the most optimistic figure for the temperate regions, the EU needs to allocate thirty five million (35 000 000) hectares to bio-fuels production.

I live in a state that has an area of less than 9 million hectares. Germany has an area just over 35 million hectares.




All that dark green area producing ethanol in 2020?

Good or evil? Friend or foe? This kind of wording doesn't fit in my Engeneering/Architecture dictionaries. Bio-fuels are not an option, it's all a matter of numbers.




Data sources:

Ethanol fuel

Biodiesel

The EROEI of ehtanol



Previous coverage of Andris Piebalgs blog:

Andris Piebalgs on Bio Fuels

Piebalgs on European Energy Security

Andris Piebalgs' Blog




Luís de Sousa
TheOilDrum:Europe

Great analysis, Luis.

The big question is, why haven't the EU policymakers done this little bit of arithmetic, or hired someone who can?

The big question is, why haven't the EU policymakers done this little bit of arithmetic, or hired someone who can?

The arithmetic might have spoilt the show, that's why --- at least from the perspective of the powerful biofuel-pushing agri-lobby. And Piebalgs isn't really engaging in dialogue: he is churning out the party line. Including the insinuation that opposition to biofuels is a symptom of the Communist mindset.

We've had the Fidel Castro tune song twice already in his blog:

Fidel Castro is a Commie thug
Fidel Castro is opposed to biofuels.
Other people are also opposed to biofuels.
Therefore, nudge-nudge, those other people are quite possibly Commie thugs as well.

I fear Commissioner Piebalgs is trying to sell a product rather than debating whether the product is worth selling at all. Still, his blog is uncensored, and we should make the most of the opportunity to enlighten his readers, even if he himself has a closed mind.

Cuba / the Castro-system is one real world place where “we the world” can get real-time information as to whether bio-fuels would work or not!

B/c Cuba would go after bio-fuels years ago, if it was possible, no? Sure they would and probable have tried, and concluded accordingly: Not possible.
If 1 square meter returned say 1-2 liter of bio-fuel, just like that, without any other inputs – it would have driven Cuban society as a showcase society for the transition to such ways, for "the rest of us". BUT sadly this is not the case.

That's a sharp question EP.

It leads the common man to think that they are either dumb for never had done the math or just puppets serving some vested interest.

I'm sure that Andris is neither of those, so this insistence on bio-fuels leaves me very unconfortable.

Of course, they did their own calculations! E.g., have a look here.

In fact, their calculation yields exactly half the needed area as in the analysis of Luis, namely 17.5 million instead of 35 million hectares.

Why this big of a difference?!

I suppose the most important reason is that they speak about a "10% biofuels target", which I interprete as "10 % of fuel used for transportation is biofuel". On the other hand, Luis analysis is about "10 % less fossil transport fuel needs". Because of lower energy density and EROI of biofuel in comparison with fossil fuels, for "10 % less fossil transport fuel needs" one then actually needs a lot more biofuel, namely 2.1 Mb! In comparison with a total of (13 - 1.3 + 2.1 = 13.8 Mb), that actually makes 15 % instead of 10 % of "fuel used for transportation"!

For "10 % of fuel used for transportation is biofuel", one would only need 1.3 Mb instead of 2.1 Mb, resulting in 21.7 million hectares, which is 13.3 million hectares less as Luis suggested, but still 4.2 million hectares more as in the above linked presentation.

The analysis of Luis also shows that "10 % of fuel used for transportation is biofuel" results in only about 6 to 7 % "less fossil transport fuel needs".

The remaining 4.2 million hectares differences could probably be explained with expected car fuel efficiency gains I suppose they incorporated into their calculation.

17.5 million hectares is still a hell of a lot, and although also I am very, very sceptical about biofuels, I think Andris Piebalgs made some relevant points.

By the way, a very interesting article about the nonsense of biofuels, and how much more efficient it would be to use this arable land for photovoltaics, I found here. Unfortunately, it is in German, but the diagramm at the bottom is clear for everyone. It was at least astonishing for me...

Plants are typically only 1% or 2% efficient at producing energy we can use.

A solar PV panel can produce 15% or more but only if it is kept at 90 degrees to the suns rays, I suspect the calculations have been made assuming this - what is it if the panel is just flat on the ground like the plants?

I doubt I (or most people) could afford to use current PV panels to power any car I might want to use - no oil, no car! - PV is VERY expensive, especially at high lattitudes.

The efficiency of the Photosynthesis process for plants is indeed typically 1% or 2%. But only a very small part of the energy is converted into usable oil. According to the article I referred to, rapeseed converts only 0,15% of the solar energy into oil!

Roughly speaking, a tracking PV panel produces about one third more electricity as an optimally positioned fixed PV panel (not flat on the ground). A panel lying flat on the ground produces about 85% of an optimally positioned fixed PV panel (at least in Germany, on the equator the optimal position is flat on the ground). But than you could use the whole field, instead of only about one third, because then you don't have the problem of one panel shadowing another. In total you would even have more yield pro hectare, but at a much larger cost because you need a lot more panels!

And that brings us to costs. In Germany, they have a feed-in tariff of 35.49 cents/kWh for freestanding PV-plants. So, a car consuming 16kWh/100km has a 'fuel cost' of about 5.68€/100km... The fuel cost of a typical 7.4 l/100km (32mpg) gasoline car is considerably higher! (at least in Europe) And feed-in tariffs are falling (up till now 6,5% a year, from next year on probably 8,5%), whereas oil prices are rising. For a PV powered hybrid car, not as much the price of the "PV fuel" is the problem, it's the battery cost!

R G

You are forgetting the taxation component of automotive fuels. The government will eventually have to tax "automotive" electricity if we all start using it. The price will rise 6 fold then. How they will do this, I don't know but they will find a way!

It would make sense to tax mileage and perhaps adjust that tax according to the 'fuel' efficiency of the car and perhaps price in some form of peak congestion charging.

I suspect this would create a new industry in 'clocking' although many of the big brother propsals for satelite tracking on vehicles would resolve this.

Jevons' Paradox in operation?

Jevons' Paradox in operation?

Comparing biofuels to PV-powered plug-in hybrids is a valid comparison, but several things must also be examined;

1. EROEI of the PV panels: How much energy was used in the manufacture compared to lifecycle energy output?

2. Hybrid extras: How much more energy was used to make the batteries, electric motor, and any additional items?

3. Costs: What are the cost differences between the two alternatives to the consumer?

4. Environment: How do the environmental impacts of each compare?

5. Food prices: What will the food price differential be between the two alternatives?

I currently have both a hybrid and a PV-powered house, so the above comparison is of great interest to me as well.

Incidentally, a field of tracking PV arrays could also be a source of switchgrass or other cellulosic ethanol feedstock, as seen in the main photo at this link provided by RenewableGuy above. It would be nice to see a translation of this article, which compares ethanol and PV-powered plug-in hybrids.

As has been mentioned before here and on Andris blog, simply continuing the same level of automobile use should not be considered a sustainable approach. Increased levels of mass transit, buses, biking, and walking are certainly more sustainable, and rely on best land use planning practices. For those unable or unwilling due to current distant suburb/exurb locations, velomobiles with electric boost can be considered the next step.

Of course, this crashes head-on with the size and influence of the EU auto industry;

Europe is the world’s largest motor vehicle producer. In total, there are more than 250 automobile manufacturing plants in Europe, directly employing 2.3 million Europeans (and indirectly supporting a further 10 million jobs in related sectors). These sites produce more than 18.5 million vehicles each year, including over 32% of the world’s passenger cars.

Why do you reject biofuels? They can suerly be a partial solution.

Magnus, I think what bugs most critics of biofuels is the a priori assumption that they are a 'good thing', regardless of the empirical data relating to relative market prices, EROEI, and environmental externalities. That's all. Critics belong to the a posteriori community -- people who are at least willing to change their minds when the data doesn't fit in with the theory.

Luis has come up with hard facts. Piebalgs has come with such near-meaningless statements as " Our crops are more than capable of producing food and fuel".

I think Piebalgs just doesn't get it. He is a consummate politician. He got his job by politicking, not by reading Geoergescu-Roegen or agonising about entropy. The EU boat has been sailing towards biofuels for the past decade and there is no way Piebalgs is going to rock it. The downside of biofuels is of no more interest to him than the downside of chain-smoking is to the tobacco industry. But as I said already, Piebalgs's blog is open and uncensored, so make the most of it!

I work inside the Swedish political system and have talked with more then a dozen of the companies, organizations and authorities that are involved in biofuels. They are not dumb, all has been aware of the limitations with different biofuels and markets. Its known that it is a question about finding efficient ways of turning different raw materials into fuel and other products with the maximum sale value and the value varies between customers. The people who actually do things then start with the raw materials, knowledge, infrastructure and customers they already have. Thus we got RME, biogas and ethanol from wheat and distillation with forest biomass.

The production volumes and mix of technologies will be another one in 10 and 20 years. There is technology development of making high value chemicals and fuel from celulose and ligning with multiple companies pursuing different solutions. The refineries are working with adding biomass to different stages of their process. There is a push for recultivating all of the fallow fields and intensifie forestry. And there are enourmous investments in new electricity production and lots of plug-in hybrid initatives.

I would expect EU politicians and transnational companies in EU to be as smart as the local ones. The problem is the PR, that it is very hard to sell something that is more complex then a single method solution. This is true for all kinds of sale efforts including getting voters. I think I can be lucky that most of our politicians within the field talk about multiple solutions.

Magnus, the population of Sweden (~9 million) is similar to that of a large city in other European countries - try and see the bigger picture.

To give you an idea, Sweden has a population density of ~20 per km2 the European average is ~112 per km2. Sweden comes #195 out of 241 independent territories recognised by the UN.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_density

I know we have a lot of natural resources per capita. But I do not get why having a larger populations would lead to dumber entreprenuers and politicians.

Some facts about the UK where I live:

we don't have any wood - all the forests were chopped down so we could conquer the world centuries ago - so we will have to rely on net exports of others
we don't have any excess agricultural land, fish stocks are falling - we already import 40% of our food - so we will have to rely on net exports of others
we don't have adequate amounts of inorganic N, P & K - so we will have to rely on net exports of others

in 10 years or so we won't have any oil - so we will have to rely on net exports of others
in 10 years or so we won't have any natural gas - so we will have to rely on net exports of others
we have a small amount of coal - we don't produce all we use, our production is back to levels last seen ~1820 - so we will have to rely on net exports of others
we don't have any uranium - so we will have to rely on net exports of others
we are at a high latitude so solar doesn't work in the winter when we need the power

our population density is high at ~380 per km2 and is growing about 0.6% a year
we already run a current account deficit of ~£58 billion, around 4.2% of GDP - so we will have to rely on net credit of others
gold is currently near it's all time peak price - our government sold all our gold at the bottom of the market costing us £2 billion - (are your politicians as dumb as that) so do we rely on the politicians of others?

What is good for others isn't necessarily good for us.

xeroid,well put, but I'm afraid you've come to grips with reality.

REALITY Definition: facts of existence .... and then of course there is REALITYs ANTONYMS like : belief, fantasy, hypothesis, imagination, theory

Ok some realy dumb decisions have been made in Sweden, like toying with socialism and a large number of realy awfull school refors and emptying or cold war era stock of refined fuels. (Tripple dumb, abandoning having a year or more of spare fuel, selling it cheap and abandoning the hardened storage facilities. )

We will be able to export a lot of wood products to you and Sweden and probably also the nordic electricity trading area is likely to have spare electricity. You could move energy intensive production over here and/or build a cable to Norway.

You could pay for it by exporting culture, labour intensive goods and specialist services and hight tech products from niche industries.

Norway is already maxed-out on hydro-electricity, if that is what you have in mind. We’ve built our first nat.gas-station and there is a lot of handwringing over where to install wind farms.

In the same 10-15-years that UK will run out of oil, Norway will follow suit. By then the whole of Europe will import oil from … ehh ……… ehhh don’t ask me. And in the same very years bio-fuels will eventually have been understood for what it is: NONSENCE

There is only one way out of this mess to come: Conservation! Only conservation!

Magnus : Start to demand from SAAB and Volvo to only manufacture buses and trucks that have small engines and a lot of seats. Private cars must be banned ASAP, but some years of lead time must be allowed to introduce politics that will make the world go round ...... after the ban is to be enforced.
Your government doesn’t get it - in increasing the Swedish speed limits up to 120 km/h… pity

Neither Norway or Sweden is maxed out in hydropower but we would rather build anything else then dam some of the rivers that are left more or less unchanged. Some additions can be made and Norway has a good potential for combined heat and power, and lots of possible wind power, wave power if that works out and the technology level needed to support nuclear powerplants.

The Swedish near term "surplus" is a government prognosis based on already buidling investments that mostly are combined heat and power and nuclear power.

Conversation is extremely important but we also need biofuels, more electricity, etc.

The possibility for most of the population to use a car when needed needs to be preserved for us to keep the old rural part of our culture alive. Loosing it would be a major cultural problem and would also make it harder to use the biomass resources.

Scania, Volvo(trucks), Saab(GM) and Volvo(Ford) are all working on efficiency, hybridization and biofuels for all kinds of wehicels. There is no way the car will be banned and we will end up with a better solution then WW-2 producer gas wehicels.

Norway is virtually maxed out for all practical purposes !!!! There are a few national park rivers , but those are outside the discussion.

This is the sort of charts you simply don't grasp !
Try to see where all sorts of renewable is today. Then try to imagine the OIL PORTION ONLY go to zero ... and then follows ; what substances or fluids in motion (remember we must make energycatching equippments for such) will ever be able to replace that energy. Let alone nat.gas and coal are headed the very same way as oil .... man!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:World_energy_usage_width_chart.svg

This is not a new issue for me.

The local heating oil use in Sweden is currently going to zero. It is replaced with a combination of nuclear and renewable power. This change started in the 70:s and will be completed within about 10 years. It could probbaly have been done in about 20 years.

Doing the same for wehicle fuels would probably be possible for Sweden with a multiple decade effort working with every partial solution in parallell. A large number of the reasonable efforts are already started and I think that we locally can handle a peak oil downslope where most of the work will be done via market mechanisms.

Handling such a change takes multiple decades and cost a noticable fraction of GNP. It might be so that only they who already have started will handle it gracefully and those who do not do anything for a few years will be "demand destructed" in favor for more efficient economies.

I am not arguing that biofuels etc will save the whole world, it will be enough for manny millions but not all billions. I think there are enough knowledge and resources for everybody but they have not been used in a wise way and its not likely that they will be used wisely. I hope there will be manny and large prosperous areas on the globe and I care about is adding to those areas.

This is not a new issue for me.....

no sure ... Magnus sure it's not an issue for you.

You are a dreaming poet Magnus, that’s what you are.

Take Norway as a Western example, b/c I know our numbers, and done the math’s before.

Norway uses 250 000 b/day /365, converted by volume into rape-fields at running conversion rates, Norwegians need a rape-acreage amounting to 20 km X 20 km every single day . On an annual basis that goes to about half of Norway’s mainland area. Norway is a rugged, mountainous and cold place with a short growth season and God forbid a bad harvest, because that we can’t afford after oil is gone. Norway has 4,7 Mega inhabitants …. This world has 6,7 Giga inhabitants. When oil is gone I don’t think the Brazilians or anyone else is gonna sell us any of their bio-fuel at any cost, as opposed to what is touted in today’s MSM dreams.

Whatever you understood from these NUMBERS Magnus ….. NUMBERS and AREA …. Magnus … use it in your poetry. BUT for God’s sake, make it RHYME.

You could start by ignoring the NIMBY people and build more high tension lines, wind power and hydro power and you have a nearly unlimited potential to build pumped hydro storage. You dont have to ever run out of electricity.

Then I recommend building more electrified railways, when natural gas starts to run out you can make nitrogen fertlizer with the old electric Norsk Hydro methods and you can electrolyze more water into hydrogen and oxygen for gasifieng wood and from the gasified wood and electric hydrogen you can make fuel for the high value uses like powering capilary logistics, tractors and fishing boats.

I guess the Norwegian rapeseed crop will be eaten locally and used to lubricate chainsaws.

A lot of the current oil use will simply become impossible. There might not even be any flights or manny freight ships between Norway and continental Europe, it could all go on rail via Sweden, a new Helsingör - Helsingborg tunnel, thru Denmark and the soon to be built Fehmarn belt bride.

How about investing some of the oil money in domestic infrastructure and infrastructure in the neighbouring countries? It could make life easier for manny generations.

I hope this reads like poetry. ;-)

Magnus what you write here make a lot of sense in a future scenario. But IMO it’s completely out of course as compared to what you have been writing earlier… and yes this is a more realistic kind a' poetry.

The intent of Luis' post here is the silliness(impossibility) of EUs goals of 10% bio fuel by 2020, remember? That is what is at focus here. You are shooting in all directions….

Between today and the picturesque (low energy) picture you paint just here, something has to happen : Either planned OR unplanned, b/c the oil will be gone for all practical purposes between 2050 and 2100.

I am for the PLANNED version of the above, you are seemingly against that b/c you cannot see the concept of banning the private car, on-the-other-hand that I can.… and in doing so we have a lot of available “free” oil-energy to do some real planning with (!) That's where Scania/Volvo make my proposed "cheaply-run-engines-with-many-seats-buses"

We are off on a tanget in this part of the thread but Swedens share of the EU targets will probably be met.

I would suggest you start exporting your young ones and only import Birth Control. How the Hell does the UK plan to exist much longer?
Any one over there got an IQ over 50?

Oh, sorry, the Queen will take care of all her subjects....
I guess you Folks in the UK are that stupid.

BZ

How the Hell does the UK plan to exist much longer?

I visit the UK Parliament once or twice a month for the Peak Oil discussions - apparently, the Government thinks the "fundamentals are sound".

However, I'm not sure what the 'fundamentals' that they talk about are.

Should I trust that the UK Government, Banking System, MSM etc are all looking out for me and planning for my best interests?

We tried exporting people before (the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand are full of them) and still our population grows - it seems the economy is better here than elsewhere in Europe!

lol

We tried exporting people before....

maybe it's due time to call them all back home, for a nifty Peak Oil party, and at the same time ask for some advice ?

Xeroid,

Its funny you mentioned Gordon Brown's selling (giving away as it now turns out) of our gold stocks since only yesterday did I have this very converasation. Same applies to North Sea Oil, which was actually how the conversation started, the gold issue was later mentioned as a similar act of stupidity!.

I think we are in general agreement that we are probably stuffed.

There's a huge difference between Uranium and carbon based fuels (wood coal oil etc). A lump of coal for example can be burnt by anybody anywhere to do any pupose viz direct heat source or to generate mechanical power. To extract energy from uranium, things are a little more involved!

"we don't have any wood - all the forests were chopped down"

Kielder Forest
475,000 cubic meters of timber is harvested annually.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kielder_Forest

Its big. I cycled about in it. And its one of many.

Almost no wood is used as fuel in the UK any more, it is not an alternate for oil.

The area of the UK is 241,590 km2, the area of Kielder is just 500 km2 - I leave you to do the math to see how insignificant a % that is - 'big' is not an apropriate word to describe something so small!

In 2005 the 'net import' of wood into the UK was 45,000,000 m3. Kielder produced just 475,000 m3 - and was it sustainable production?

http://www.forestry.gov.uk/website/foreststats.nsf/byunique/imports.html

You might think that Kielder is sustainable in the long term and will adequately supply all our energy needs - I sure hope you are correct, but I don't think you have grasped the scale of the problem facing us. Try using Google Earth to see how bad it really is.

We need food more than we do wood.

More than anything we need a surplus of something to trade for the oil, gas , coal, wood, uranium, food etc that we need - instead we have an accelerating deficit.

Xeroid

People seem incapable of grasping the scale of our energy consumption and the problem sustaining the level at what it is, including those promoting biofuels. Recently, Using the very figure you quote for UK land area, i did the sums for rape oil production in the uk using every square mm of the uk land area for that production, at 2.5 tonnes per hectare yield. I'm not going through it again, but it won't work and can't work, even if you assume no energy is used in the process, we can't get the fuel volumes needed.

The uk alone requires about 70 million tonnes of oil each year, the world consumes 31 billion barrels or 1.3 cubic miles of oil every year. Bio fuels, Not a chance!

Appeal to the lowest common denominator ? (The larger the group, the lower the LCD).

Less voter-politician contact and more media directed "contact" ?

Alan

Biofuel is contributing to the current trend of increasing price of food and vegetable oil.

As of now, the demand for biofuel is increasing, but as Luis pointed out, the energy density of ethanol and other biofuels is lower than that of gasoline, more crops are needed to fill the gap, which results in the competition for crops between food and biofuels.

What is making this rising food price even worse is the biofuel use mandated by the governments in Europe and North America. This makes raising crops for biofuels more lucrative than for food. As a result, many farmers are switching their crops that are being grown for biofuels, not food.

While governments may feel 'good' that they are doing something for the environment, they really should have more insights into what might happen as side effects.

Wheat shortage sends bread, pasta prices soaring: http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2008/02/20/wheat-prices.html

The prices must go up to repriorotize resources to grow more crops for both food, fuel and chemicals. We have had a multiple decade SALE on crops and now fields need to be recultivated, more farmers need to use modern methods and poor contries need to start producing. And in the next stage there is need for new industries, more machines and more fertilizer and for new energy production to make the fertilizer.

This has a potential to eradicate more biodiversity and those effects will vary from country to country depending on circumstances and policy. I hope countries who are rich enough to buy what they need anyway tries to increasse production to get more resources for the global burden.

Tescos near to me is one of the biggest in the UK. Completely out of rapeseed oil. Not 1 litre on the shelves in the whole store. Seeing that really made me start to think its tin foil hat time.

I suspect sunflower oil which is next up the price chain will start disappearing.

Are you counting canola as rapeseed?

I recall seeing that sunflower oil was falling victim to the US ethanol mandates, as acreage formerly planted to sunflowers was switched to maize.

Magnus,

I look into these issues from a higher abstraction level. Surely bio-diesels can have some usefullness, especially when taking advantage of farm or city wastes. But as a major energy source, as proposed by Andris, no chance.

Do you have numbers for the diesel needed per hectare for a regular farm? Say a common cereal crop. It'd be interesting to know the extra crop area needed per hectare to fully run a farm on bio-diesel.

I got all of that and more within a 496 page official report in Swedish.
http://www.regeringen.se/sb/d/8963/a/81974

Sorting and translating is some work and this is my spare time.
The most inefficient fuel in southern Sweden is RME from rapeseed and that yields about 6 MWh per ha after cultivation and refining wich cost about 2 MWh per ha.

4 MWH net = 14.4 GJ ~= 2.4 bbl crude oil equivalent (6.1 GJ/bbl).

Thankyou but it is 6 MWh net.

Actually, I think the situation is much worse than you say.

The currently required 2.1 million barrels is NET energy - if this is produced only from biological sources then a very much larger area is required! I'm off up the pub now so I'll leave somebody else to do the math.

It will have to be biologically sourced eventually since the world 'net exports' of conventional crude will be approaching zero in twenty years or so and by then Europe will have almost none of it's own production either.

However, as long as the mandated amount stays at a fixed percentage we will be ok - in 20 years or so if we have almost zero conventional oil in Europe, 10% of that is cock-all!

The Daily Mash

I'LL BE JUST FINE, SAYS PLANET

THE planet Earth has dismissed claims it is in danger from global warming, stressing the worst that could happen is the extinction of the human race.

Image'If you don't mind, I've got some orbiting to do'The Earth spoke out after a series of books, television programmes and environmental campaigns urged people to do everything in their power to 'Save the Planet'.

Earth, 4,000,000,000, said last night: "I'll be absolutely fine, seriously. I might get a bit warmer and a bit wetter, but to be honest, that actually sounds quite nice.

"Try living through an ice age. Pardon my French, but it's absolutely fucking freezing."The planet, based 93 million miles from the Sun, said it was 'sick and tired' of being drawn into arguments about human behaviour.

"Look, I'm just a planet doing its thing, alright? If you want to live on me, that's your business, but I've got important planet stuff to do, okay?

"Try being in elliptical orbit for five minutes, or balancing your gravitational pull with a medium-sized moon. Let me assure you, it's no fucking picnic."

The planet said environmental campaigners should change their slogan from 'Save the Planet' to something more relevant such as 'Save Your Sorry Arse'.

Earth added: "Okay, so there may come a time when, for a variety of reasons, I am no longer able to support pandas, polar bears, and humans, but you know what? Life goes on. "Who knows, I might end up being a haven for toads."

I must say, I'm terrified to think that "Mother" Earth has greater priorities than Humans. Absolute disgrace. I'm personally planning to dig a hole in my garden today in protest. Maybe, if enough of us do that, she will whince in pain and do something. Surely we need her to propel us further from the Sun? I mean, how can we be expected to reduce economic output when we have all these cars to drive around? Maybe we can ask the Moon to lobby Earth to raise some continental shelves for miles of new land for bio-fuel so that we can carry on our obligation to fly those lovely big shiny planes. Surely Earth enjoys them orbiting around her, with those pretty contrails? I'm disgusted with her current fascination with orbiting around the sun. I seem to remember her protesting when, in the 1500's, all the planets and suns stopped orbiting around her and started doing their own thing. It must have been a trauma to go from being flat to being a ball. It certainly was for us.

LOOOOOOOOOL :)
You made my day sir.

Seriously we humans might have transitioned from the geocentric to heliocentric version of the Solar system, but in our minds we are still to come up with something different than this ridiculous anthropocentrism... and if mother Earth could laugh she would certainly be laughing now while patiently waiting the human rash to self-destruct.

I liked the "SAVE YOUR SORRY ASS" part the most. Unlike all the tunes in the "Save the Earth" charade the talking monkeys are using to calm their troubled instincts [also known as conscious], that one might indeed work. Seriously, isn't that the best slogan to put forth for all our "green" activities?

I have to agree...that was funny.

I was once in Las Vegas playing blckjack at the Hard Rock Casino and all of the gambling chips were inscribed with "Save the Planet". (I swear to God!) What the F@#k does drinking, gambling and behaving like an asshole have to do with saving the F*&kin' planet?

Thanks for this Luis ! and yes as you say ….

it's all a matter of numbers.

Personally I’m getting sick to my stomach every time I read about those bio-solutions. B/c it's all there in the numbers: It will not scale and is only possible as long it’s done with the help of the “free” energy of petroleum. One can just wonder what part of the intellect EU politicians activate, when they aim at the bio-salvation … One day it will stand brilliantly clear to everybody: This will not work!

My take on bio-fuel: Have farmers use their “home-made” bio-fuel run all their machinery and sub-processes and then it will be all laid out and clear: NOT POSSIBLE, move to next square …!?

I ran the numbers on German rapeseed-production some time back, and IMO they have some 14400 sq km under rape-cultivation. That is a square of 120 km X 120 km.
Also at that time, I grabbed my calculator and ran the “rapeseed-to-global crude-oil” numbers …. Are you ready? Rape seed yields circa 1 dl or 0.1 liter per sq meter harvested land … and crude amounts to 26 bbl/year at 159 liter/barrel.

Now to grow rape-diesel on this planet to equal the volumetric amount of annual extracted AND READY MADE crude oil we the earthlings have to grow and cultivate an area of the whole continents of AFRICA AND NORTH AMERICA ………

Obviously there is no need to say this will need additional energy to get cultivated, harvested and processed … and it is only ¾ as energy efficient as compared to crude … so I think we need to add SOUTH AMERICA AND AUSTRALIA to make it equal to The Crude Cubic Mile.... ENERGYWISE thet is...

Why run all farming sub processes on biofuel when you can use it where it is easiest and most efficient to introduce?

what was that supposed to mean ?

If you mean that putting the bio-fuels into market ready bio-fuel cars is the easiest way of introducing these fuels , I agree with you. BUT that action conceals the entire problem with bio-fuels, b/c its difficult to trace where various energy-types comes from and where its goes …
That is actually WHY this still works, the bio-scam I mean !!!

Remember Luis claim : Its all in the numbers ...
and one more thing : we live under CAPITALISM .... and even under this system the US farmers are not able to make profit from bio-ethanol without subsidies. Does that tell you anything ? It tells me all, a variety over those Receding Horisons.

My take on bio-fuel: Have farmers use their “home-made” bio-fuel run all their machinery and sub-processes and then it will be all laid out and clear: NOT POSSIBLE, move to next square …!?

Converting every farm implement and process is not as rational as to for instance convert a fleet of busses to run on biogas.

And it makes more sense to run a high hours/year tractor on fuel that needs special handling like fresh rapeseed oil or RME then a low hour/year combine.

Magnus, you say

Converting every farm implement and process is not as rational as to for instance convert a fleet of busses to run on biogas.

Why not have the farmers prove their activities today Magnus?

Remember crude-oil is finite and in the round year of 2100 there is "nothing left”, so why not start this exercise today? Do you understand the implications of crude-declines of say 3-4% a year after PO occeurs ... forinstance ?

When do you like to get squared to the idea whether bio-fuel is: a REAL solution or none at all? Don’t you see that if bio-fuel is a pure impossibility due to EROEI issues and other issues (food, land, water, pop. growth, the list goes on and on here…) …. Then all we do with this bio-regard is pure stupid waste of time and energy?

Economics, doing the easiest conversations first gives the best return on investment and allows biofuel experiences to accumulate, biofuel companies to grow and efficiency of scale to be improved and the ability to convert more wehicles to biofuels grows.

From my point of view are biofuels a set of technologoes where some alreade are proven to work but they can only fill a small part of the demand for fuel. The production will grow and the technologies will become more efficient, it is already in the pipeline.

This do of course not mean that biofuels will become a 1 to 1 replacement for the current crude oil production. Society will have to make do with what is possible. Societies who can not make travel and logistics more efficient, electrifie transportation, produce lots of electricity, produce a combination of fuels and accomondate change in preferences and consumption patterns will be screwed.

Yeah, it’s obvious you are within some political circles in reading your circle blah-blah-argumentation here. I challenged you on your personal stands, but you failed to respond to my questions.
Try to read once more what you write her, and see if you find it intelligent!

Could you rephrace your "challange"?

never mind Magnus. I dont know how to phrase it correctly according to your standards :-)

I hate breakdowns in communication. I suspect you are being frustrated since I do not instantly change my views to yours but I would like to be sure about that.

You are not able to quantify anything Magnus, all you say is : Let the people have cake, and there it sits.
Your imagination is severly limited and that scares the living shit out of me. Ultimately you rely on the good records for Sweden /west after WW2 and thus there is no room in your mind that this may change for the worse …

Its not lack of imagination or knowledge, its laziness and that I hate quoting numbers I might have remembered wrong.

My goal is not proving for myself and others that we will have immediate and complete world salvation, only that a lot of people can live good lives post peak oil and that number increases if we do our best with handling this problem.

I can imagine scenarios were the world realy goes to hell but what use is that? Its a lot better to build on the good parts one knows about and see how far that carries.

You observation that I refer to Sweden in close proxemity to WW2 is correct, that is the kind of spirt I hope can be recreated if the problems with global warming and peak oil accelarates. But I am also refering to near time and ongoing efforts like the nuclear build and the phase out of heating oil.

Magnus,

probalby more than 3 billion people in the world already live without much Fossil Fuel or nuclear energy imput - it clearly isn't essential to survival (or happiness?) to consume the amounts we do in OECD countries.

But in the end I suspect we all live up to the limits imposed by our particular environmental niches.

For sure, the world, in general, will not be using large amounts of bio-fuels for personal transport in thirty years or so if the world population keeps increasing.

Also bear in mind that post peak 'net exports' the part of a barrel of oil that currently isn't used for energy in Europe will be declining as well - so any alternates for those goods will probably have to come from agriculture - but food production for humans will take priority when possible.

I suspect that means less cotton shirts per person, less carpets on the floors, less detergents per person, less paint on everything that might rot, less cigarettes, less leather, less dogs and cats etc. The decline in supply of these goods (controlled by increasing their relative cost) might be quite steep if the fossil carbon is used for fuel preferentially.

probalby more than 3 billion people in the world already live without much Fossil Fuel or nuclear energy imput - it clearly isn't essential to survival (or happiness?) to consume the amounts we do in OECD countries.

Money and by extention energy consumption is certainly essential to happiness. The relationship is one where happiness increases quite quickly up to a saturation point where more wealth cannot buy more happiness. Most people in OECD are above saturation already, but much of the world is not; certainly not the 3 billion living in abject poverty you reference above.

This relationship exists because having not enough money causes all sorts of misery like starvation, excessive toiling and an inabillity to cure or innoculate against even the easily preventable diseases. This can be alliviated by quite modest wealth. Above a certain point you have enough wealth for some spare time, basic entertainments, basic time saving conveniences and an assured food supply and further non-essential doodads will not make you significantly more happy.

"Bio-fuels" ultimately means "people" -- they also do work for food, and they seem to scale up rather nicely. In the "free market" the price of everything depends totally on the price of transforming available energy. Petroleum, run through diesel engines happens to be much cheaper than anything else right now -- that won't always be the case, and some day feeding slaves whatever is available to eat will once again be cheaper than building machines.

It will certainly be a different world, but some kind of transition to it seems inevitable.

I would not call the US and EU farming industry a market capitalistic one but it might become one in 10-20 years if subsidies and regulations are phased out. Changing it in any way is political dynamite, you are dammed in some way regardless if prices or subsidoes go up or down. But the higher prices are healthy for repriorotizing where society uses its resources. Investing in lower but sustainable surpluses is not a bad thing.

Poor Planning Resulting in Ethanol Craze

In 2006 the United States produced 3.9 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol.

EIA Statement: "Currently, no large-scale cellulosic ethanol production facilities are operating or under construction. EPACT2005 provides financial incentives that in the AEO2007 reference case are projected to bring the first cellulosic ethanol production facilities on line between 2010 and 2015, with a total capacity of 250 million gallons per year. Cellulosic ethanol currently is not cost-competitive with gasoline or corn-based ethanol."

250 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol/per year within the next 8 years is insignificant and very expensive.

Not all land was created equally. In Europe and the United States most of the best land is under cultivation or has been covered with man made structures, roads, and parking lots. To consider hectares in the Bavarian Alps as productive for biofuels is ludicrous. Numerous people who tried to farm clay in the SE United States went out of business. In California, Arizona, New Mexico etc. cities were competing with farms for water and sometimes winning. In Tucson, AZ the politicians had to decide whether to allot treated gray water to pecan farmers south of town or to golf course development. The golf course people won.

Some ethanol distilleries are in danger of going out of business before 2012 due to rapidly rising feedstock prices. Since corn and soybeans were interchangable on United States farms, the amount of acres of soybeans planted dropped in order to increase acres planted with corn for ethanol production. There have been spot shortaages of soybean (vegetable) oil in China and Malaysia. Food prices were rising. If the production caps for grain ethanol in the United States are reached by the mandated cutoff date of 2016, an estimated 40% of United States grain production will be diverted to expensive ethanol production replacing less than 6 percent of our oil needs. Europe passed legislation requiring 10 percent of their transport fuel be from biofuels. In 2005 the European Union was using about 14.7 million barrels of oil per day. Ten percent of this would be about 22 billion gallons of ethanol or biodiesel. Since estimates indicated as much as 90% of oil was used for transportation fuel per year the situation is bleak for Europe. The United States might require about 7.6 billion gallons of grain ethanol production if as stated above cellulosic ethanol might not be available in large quantities. Neither the United States nor Europe should boast. Unless laws are changed, the world might be headed for a global depression of unprecedented preportions.

Supposidely up to 30 percent of corn was leftover as dregs after ethanol production. This does not replace the 70 percent of the corn that went into ethanol. As the seeds used for ethanol production were bioengineered they were not approved for human consumption. Canada was working on whether or not the leftovers could be used as livestock feed in as much as they are not approved for humans. It would require natural gas to dry the dregs and this would decrease the overall energy output from ethanol production. Taking huge portions of the worlds grain harvests and giving back 30 percent of what was taken to livestock production is risky. It is also risky to assume the leftovers would have 30 percent of the content of an equal weight of cracked corn. Milling corn for human consumption also provided byproducts useful in livestock production.

Re: it's all a matter of numbers.

No it is not. Logic is the boss of numbers. Not the other way around. Numbers can be tortured and twisted outside of logic to say almost anything one wants. Logic has rules that can not be violated with impunity just as numbers do. If logic rules are violated whatever the numbers and data say, while true numerically, is false logically. Logic errors can not be made and yet result in a valid answer. EROEI if full of logic errors as I have posted many times in the past to little effect.

EROEI is the basis of the anti ethanol argument. Here are some of the logic errors:

1. EROEI compares energy apples and oranges when applied to unlike and unlike as with ethanol and gasoline. While these liquids are used the same, look the same and are both energy sources, they are not the same and can not be validly compared. Why? Because ethanol is renewable. It is different. EROEI deems renewability as irrelevant. It is not.

2. EROEI is calculated on a world basis. It is probably valid for the world where it does not matter where energy is consumed or produced. But from a European or American point of view it does matter since both are big oil importers. For Europeans and Americans imported oil has a negative EROEI. Why? Because imported oil has to be paid for. EROEI does not recognize price as relevant which is not only illogical but absurd. When importers purchase oil they are paying the monetary equivalent of the oil's energy content. This is obvious since the seller would not part with it's oil for less. Energy production can not be counted twice. It would would make no logic sense, yet that is what EROEI does since no distinction is made between the world and the locality.

After the crude is purchased, the refining, distribution and consumption are all energy users which further indicates the exporting country received the energy gain from extracting the oil.

Thus logically, from the importers point of view it follows that the EROEI is negative for imported oil. All the importer's gain is economic gain not energy gain. In contrast, if the importer produces ethanol from locally grown crops the country receives the energy gain and the economic gain from ethanol thus making EROEI positive. It is the misapplication of EROEI that make ethanol look like a loser for oil importing countries when in fact it is not.

3. The oft repeated claim that ethanol is behind rising food prices, while it may have a smidgen of truth in it, is largely false. The reason is there is a surplus of corn and sugar and the price rises for each have been small compared to the price increase of oil. Not only that, oil is a much bigger factor in retail food prices than feed grains like corn. Weather has also been a factor this year with wheat, which has had a effect on other grain prices. On top of that the Central Bank in the U.S. is following an inflationary monetary policy and the government is also running wild deficits to pay for the Iraq War among many other silly things. Ethanol is a bit player in this farce.

4. The idea that rising food prices are something harmful to poor countries is clearly illogical since most of them have little else to sell except agricultural products. It has long been the complaint of these countries that agricultural prices are held artificially low by government subsidies in Europe and America and that they can't compete with the subsidized crops. How then is it logical that rising grain prices, which likely will result in lower subsidies, will hurt poor countries? The logical answer is it will help and not hurt.

There are other gross logic errors in the misapplication of EROEI to biofuels but this post is long enough.

It is your logic that obviously doesn't work here:

EROEI is the basis of the anti ethanol argument.

No it is not. It is just one of the arguments, but the real basis of the argument as Louis patiently showed is that we will need incredible amounts of land and other resources diverted to fuel crops in order for them to make a difference.

How important is EROEI? In the above calculation Louis was using 4:1 figure. If per your arguments the true number was 8:1 this changes the end result from 35 down to 29 mln.hectares for 10% of oil use. What difference does it make whether it is 35 or 29 mln.ha or somewhere in between?? 29mln.ha is still an enormous amount of land, more than the areable land of France, Germany and UK combined. And what are we going to achieve by diverting all that land to fuel? 10% of only the transportation use of oil!

It is simply outrageous where this is leading us to. I am not a religious person but I will assert that using the land for fuel fits the best definition of a sin I have seen - something our kids and grandkids will be sorry that we did. And rest assured they will be very, very sorry.

Thanks for doing the math Levin, you spared me a reply.

I also don't see how can a low (or negative) EROEI energy source be of any help even being renewable.

Even if they had a 1,000:1 EROEI, biofuels would still be terrible for climate change.

We've just got to get over this idea that burning stuff is the only way to get things done.

EROEI deems renewability as irrelevant. It is not.

Wrong. EROEI in the case of corn ethanol shows that it is only marginally renewable - and that's if we ignore all of the negative externalities. I don't suspect that someone whose livelihood is dependent upon this is going to ever understand.

The oft repeated claim that ethanol is behind rising food prices, while it may have a smidgen of truth in it, is largely false. The reason is there is a surplus of corn...

Yes, that surplus surely explains falling corn stocks. That is what happens with a surplus, right? Inventories get pulled down? No?

It helps to have your facts straight. Our carryover was 1.3 Billion Bushels in 07'. Up from 1.2 in 06'.

And, our Corn exports were up by 14% (if you include distillers grains - the Other cattle feed - they were up a great deal more than that.) Soybean exports were up, substantially, also.

It helps to have your facts straight.

Like this?

http://www.cattlenetwork.com/content.asp?contentid=163984

Corn stocks in all positions on September 1, 2007 totaled 1.30 billion bushels, down 34 percent from September 1, 2006. Of the total stocks, 460 million bushels are stored on farms, down 39 percent from a year earlier. Off-farm stocks, at 844 million bushels, are down 31 percent from a year ago. The June - August 2007 indicated disappearance is 2.23 billion bushels, compared with 2.39 billion bushels during the same period last year.

Those are NOT year-ending stocks. They represent the higher usage, but NOT the huge harvest.

Sheesh.

Well I for one appreciate criticism of EROEI, good grist for the mill. It is a rough, or sometimes very accurate, measure of one parameter of energy extraction/production, incorporating some aspects of energy *usage.* (To make an omelette you have to break eggs.) Cost (in money) is another, worse, in my eyes, as it is so strongly influenced by many factors - as accounting system it is a hopeless mess, as a vehicle for trade ppl seem to like it. So I don’t follow, or don’t take to, or disagree with, point 2. The other points all encapsulate reasonable arguments that could be thrashed out further, notably point 4, which does show up a contradiction, but leaves out the end-point situation for many, which is that they ‘earn’ money outside of agriculture and have to pay for food, or get if for ‘free’ with aid, and even small hikes in prices spell disaster. Point 3 is very valid, bio-fuels are bit players, as said.

Lastly, going a bit further, EROEI is a rational, scientific, kinda measure, which says nothing about how the energy is used, by whom, for what purpose, etc. Given an airplane and a pile of coal lumps, some process has to be implemented to fly that plane, which brings in new business, or intangibles like fame, pride, pleasure, domination, etc. None can be measured. Hardly stop news - but the different levels of argument are often mixed up.

The featured rules of thumb today coincidentally come from pilots:

http://rulesofthumb.org/

(site only for amusement and curiosity about how ppl figger things.)

"How then is it logical that rising grain prices, which likely will result in lower subsidies, will hurt poor countries?"

The real problem is not rising grain prices, but DECLINING grain VOLUMES being used for food production because of diversion into biofuel production. Volume of food production directly determines quantity of population that can eat and hence survive. Period.

Now, there is a very important side of the biofuel issue that is overlooked most of the time: the geoeconomic (and geopolitical) side: turning an ever greater share of US corn to ethanol (and then soybeans to biodiesel) can easily cause in a few years the halving of US agricultural exports in volume and their doubling in dollars (i.e. quadrupling agricultural prices). That will substantially reduce the US current account deficit and give the US a significant strategic advantage.

The US has certainly the right to follow that path. But they also have the duty to tell the world openly that they will do it. Like: "Along the coming years and decades our food exports will become progressively lower in volume, and the same will probably happen to total world food production. It is conceivable that they could be half their current volume in 10 years. People, and particularly poor people, should have it in mind when making procreation decisions."

Dropping a nuke on a city is not genocide if its dwellers are given a week's notice.

I replied to him as follows:

With all due respect to your fine models, the reality is that food prices are rising already. Now, if we ask the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation what’s happening, most recently they told us,

Soaring petroleum prices have contributed to the increase in prices of most agricultural crops: by raising input costs, on the one hand, and by boosting demand for agricultural crops used as feedstock in the production of alternative energy sources (e.g. biofuels) on the other. National policies that aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are behind the fast growth of the biofuel industry.

So when the Commissioner blames high oil prices for high food prices, he is half right. High oil prices make food production more expensive, but they also divert food into fuel. People are going hungry so that the Commissioner may fuel his Saab.

The Commissioner has not answered the environmental concerns, and has cherry-picked his figures. Sugar cane production may take up a small portion of Brazil’s total land area, but large areas are being cleared each year in Brazil; often the sugar cane production is on a different piece of land each year.

He also offers a false choice to the EU. The choice is not simply between oil and biofuels. There are other options. Just as the EU increases its proportion of renewably generated electricity, so too it may increase its proportion of electric-driven public transport. While the Commissioner may feel his only choices are a petrol-driven Saab and an ethanol-driven Saab, in fact he could take an electric train.

And then of course there’s the bicycle. In Copenhagen and Amsterdam over a third of all trips taken are by bicycle. There’s no particular reason not every EU city could do this.

Lastly, the reason that the EU was in the past accused of driving the food price too low, and now too high, and that both have been held to harm the Third World, is quite simple. It’s just as in Mexico with the United States.

First US subsidies to their own farmers made Mexican maize farming unprofitable - small farmers lost their land and moved to work in low-wage jobs in the free trade zone on the border. They at least had cheap US maize to eat.

But then the US decided they liked biofuels, and the price of maize went up.

The Mexicans lost their land because traditionally they produced more than they could eat, and sold the surplus to get things to improve their lives - clothing, education, and so on. But with low prices their surplus couldn’t buy them anything extra, so they got into debt to wealthy landowners; they couldn’t repay their debt and lost their land. They never returned to their land because the land, now being held by ranchers, was too expensive, they couldn’t afford it.

So, first US trade policies stopped the Mexicans from being able to feed themselves, forcing them to buy US food; now US trade policies have raised that food price. So the Mexicans can’t grow their own, and can’t afford to buy the US stuff. Thus anger and riots.

Much the same’s happened with the EU and many Third World countries. First the EU’s low-priced food drove Third World farmers off their land, then the price went up and so now they can neither grow their own food nor afford to buy the imported food.

And that’s why there were complaints when EU policies kept the prices low, and complaints now that EU policies are keeping them high. Driven off their land, the people are unable to take advantage of the higher prices by producing more.

My comments on his blog (awaiting moderation)

Commissioner Piebalgs wrote: I agree that a radical change in consumer behavior is needed if we want Europe to be more energy efficient. At the same time, as policy makers we have to come up with policies that are based on present day realities. And the reality is that most Europeans are living and working in big cities and using modern means of transport. It would be unrealistic to impose sanctions on car producers and users if no alternatives are provided

It is true that democracies prefer positive incentives over negative ones. We like carrots more than we do sticks !

IMVHO, public policy should focus on providing Non-Oil Transportation alternatives that attract rather than punishing oil users. Post-Peak Oil, many oil users will seek alternatives IF THEY ARE AVAILABLE. No incentive except the price and availability of oil will be required.

In microcosm, look at Mulhouse France, population 110,900 metro 271,000. No trams in 2005, 54 km of trams in 2012. Velib rental bicycles around town, and the LGV Rhin-Rhône arrives in 2011.

Mulhouse, in a few short years, is going from an oil based transportation system to having a very viable non-oil based alternative.

Mulhouse is not a major city, but it is easier to provide this alternative in major cities. What France is doing in Mulhouse should be held up as a model for the EU, IMVHO.

France has set the goal of building 1,500 km of new tram lines in the next decade. Other EU members should try to do as much.

On a grand scale, the EU is far behind the USA in freight rail, but they are encouraging rail expansion.

My number are USA specific (the USA uses double stack rail containers, the EU does not) but transferring freight from truck to electrified rail trades 17 to 20 joules of diesle for 1 joule of electricity. Better for the economy, the environment and energy !

One means to shift modes is to create rail-only solutions to transportation bottlenecks. The Chunnel, the Swiss Trans-Alp tunnels, the new France-Italy TGV & freight tunnel all require part of the trip to be on rail. And shippers will consider that “If part must be on rail, then why not all of the trip on rail ?”

There is another MAJOR project that the EU is ignoring, creating a standard gauge rail line between China and the EU. The first stage broke ground in Kazakhstan a few months ago.

China has had 100 million people migrate to the export industries on the coast, straining all infrastructure. They think that building a low cost, electrified rail link to the EU (3 days to Berlin) will attract export industries to the interior, and stop the migration. This rail line will also carry EU goods to China.

Instead of trucking goods to ports for export to China, the EU can use non-oil transportation all the way and enlarge volumes on EU rail systems. The newer EU members are closer to China by rail and could benefit more from this new rail link.

IMHO, Poland, among others, is on the cusp of a decision as to whether to spend money expanding and improving their roads or their railroads. They should be encouraged to electrify their railroads (some are already) and expand them. The Baltic Republics should be helped by the EU to switch to standard gauge and electrify as well.

Electrifying EU railroads not only gets them off oil, but also expands capacity (by about 15% since trains can accelerate and brake faster) and speeds them up a bit. This is a carrot that hurts no one !

Best Hopes,

Alan Drake

Some good points touched there Alan. Beyond the scaling restrictions, bio-fuels are a way prepetuating the ICE, which doesn't seem efficient enough for the XXI century. Diesel engines might still have a long life ahead, but unfortunatelly the yields per hectare for bio-diesels are even lower than for ethanol.

On the rail connection to China, it might prove usefull to move people, but on freight I don't think that it can compete with diesel powered waterborne freighters, especially to westerns Europe.

There is already a demand for price/performance between air cargo and slow container ship.

Yep, that's right. But on a tonnage basis that's a small number.

The price of water vs. rail depends on many factors (tolls on the Suez Canal for one).

One potential savings is port transfer costs. Siemens or Alsthom loads a new turbine on a rail car in Germany or France, it is delivered to the Chinese site 89 hours later.

The alternative is truck or rail > ship > rail or truck and a couple of weeks. Each transfer is not free.

Also what is the cost of electricity vs. bunker fuel oil in the future ?

Berlin-Beijing is 7,400 km straight line and rail is not so much further. Travel to port and then by ship is more than twice as far (3 x ?) Beijing > Harbin > Singapore, Red Sea & Suez, then Gibraltar > Hamburg > Berlin.

For cities 700 km inland from the coast, rail looks even better.

Best Hopes for China-EU rail,

Alan

Yes that is very good Alan. I would have just ranted about this:

Piebalgs wrote: I agree that a radical change in consumer behavior is needed if we want Europe to be more energy efficient.

Well sure. But it makes it sound like the difficulties and future catastrophes are comparable to ‘If Europeans want to be healthier they should eat less trans-fats, consumer behavior has to be changed’, ‘If Europeans want smarter, more literate, kids, parental control of TV watching is needed’, ‘To eliminate car accidents, we need to put black boxes in all cars.’ And so on.

In short, the status quo; ppl just have to change their pesky or unhealthy habits a bit, to effect gradualist change in the right direction. Be a bit greener, give up plastic bags, or be healthier and eat less sausage, or if public health has a look in, use a condom.

Oil is not being guzzled by pesky ‘consumers’ who waste. Oil is the life blood of the economy, of transport, of keeping ppl alive and fed. (Not to deny that conservation or no-use measures would be good.)

Good and sensible stuff as always, Alan.

But Piebalgs is worried where he'll park his Saab...

Several interesting letters on EU biofuels policy in today's 'Guardian':

www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/mar/29/biofuels.alternativeenergy

All commodity prices are up, all across the board, all over the world. The favorite scapegoat has been biofuels, but biofuel production can't impact minerals prices, which are also up. The factor that connects the fuel, food and minerals commodity markets are investment (hedge) funds which have become heavily invested in commodities futures. This was not the case in the past.

Hedge funds have jumped into commodities because they have a surplus of rapidly-declining-in-value dollars to invest, and other avenues of investment do not bring the return commodities do at this time. As we say in farming, any fool can make money on a rising market. Commodities prices have now exceeded true value and are in the speculative value range. Commodities are the next bubble that will burst.

Almost all discussion of electrification of transportation focuses on public mains linear forms (rail, trolley, bus) or private energy-stored isotropic forms (battery, ultracapacitor, compressed air, hydrogen). This misses the needs of industrial isotropic forms (farming, trucking, marine shipping).

I did some back of the envelope calculations on an area I'm most familiar with, farming on the Northern Plains of North America. A typical combine or field tractor would require roughly 3,000 kwh of energy storage for an ordinary 12 hour workday. To put this number in perspective, a Tesla electric roadster has a 57 kwh battery pack which costs $20,000 and weighs 1,000 pounds.

Although the cost may go down on battery packs, weights will not drop significantly. For industrial use, stored electrical energy will not work. There will be a need for biofuels for industrial use because of the concentrated, portable energy stored within them.

Why don't farmers make their own on-farm biofuels now? How much free time do you people think we farmers have? We buy fuel because it is the most time and cost effective process at this time. Our engines are very fussy about their fuel and one can't just throw anything in the tank. When the equation switches, we will set aside acreage for fuel production, just as in the past we had pastures to provide fuel for draft animals.

Although the cost may go down on battery packs, weights will not drop significantly. For industrial use, stored electrical energy will not work.

In conventional secondary cells, you mean.  But those aren't the only options.

A typical combine or field tractor would require roughly 3,000 kwh of energy storage for an ordinary 12 hour workday. To put this number in perspective, a Tesla electric roadster has a 57 kwh battery pack which costs $20,000 and weighs 1,000 pounds.

Electric Fuel has demonstrated 200 Wh/kg in a refuelable zinc-air fuel cell, and Power Air Corp has units which can be refilled in place not unlike a fuel tank.

Of course, if the industry already has a pile of investment in diesel equipment and needs to replace fossil-supplied nitrates anyway (Stranded Wind), co-fueling a diesel with ammonia and using a bit of biodiesel for pilot ignition may wind up being the winner.

I may have done my maths wrong, but isn't 3000kWhr @ 200Whr/kg 15 tonnes of zinc? 3000kWhr's worth of diesel is 300kg. Even if the ICE wastes 70% of that there still a small weight advantage in favour of oil!
Yes oil will run out but Zinc may not be avaiable in those sort of quantities either. I know it is recycled, but the volumes need to be found in the first place. Affotdability is what matters. If a solution is not affordable, it won't be profitable and so no one will take it up.

isn't 3000kWhr @ 200Whr/kg 15 tonnes of zinc?

15 tons of cells; the quoted weight is for the fully-assembled units, not just the active material.

3000kWhr's worth of diesel is 300kg.

The zinc-air fuel cell appears to require about 0.72 g of zinc per Wh, so the required mass to supply 3000 kWh/day would be ~2200 kg/day.  But this isn't consumed, it's cycled; it can be regenerated locally by electrolysis (albeit inefficiently) as well as by thermochemical processes.  How much you need depends on how tight the cycle is.

3000 kg isn't much compared to the weight of a modern high-end tractor.  If you replaced the diesel engine, you'd come close to breaking even.

EP,

I am fully aware the zinc is recovered, I said this in my post!. What I am not sure about is the ability to find the volumes of zinc metal at the required "flow rate" and cost to start the process going. There are a billion or so ICE powered machines on the planet, and there is no real effort to curb the use of ICE technology. Honda, VW are investing heavily in ICE manufacturing and I don't see Tata in India SIAC in China ditching the ICE any time soon. The ICE has had a 100 years plus to expand to its current population and its food supply has grown with it
I do not support ICE technology per se, but I have to use it to do my current job and feed my family. I will go of the cliff with everybody else when our oil supply falters. Every time I put 40+ litres in my tank I wonder how much longer I have got.
The ICE is like any successful species, it will keep growing in numbers until its food supply runs out and then its curtains.
The problem is the next genetic leap to electrical vehicle technology. We should have poured weed killer on the ICE to control its growth several years ago when there was time to play, but the RSPCICE, (the automotive sector), prevented this act of cruelty. The situation now is we don't really have any idea what will work or not at the scale required and no mass infrastructure project is on the cards to feed a replacement.
Sorry, this is my opinion, you have yours and I understand your opinion may be just as valid as mine.

There are many intelligent supporters of biofuels and Hydrogen, we both agree on this one, but could both be wrong. This uncertainty and lack of universal agreement as to what is the solution is the real cause for concern for me. When the ICE was conceived it was an instant hit, and there are good reasons for this. Battery and fuel cell technology have both been around longer than the ICE, and yet the ICE bred like wild fire starving the others on its way.

What I am not sure about is the ability to find the volumes of zinc metal at the required "flow rate" and cost to start the process going.

You were specifically concerned about tractors; these are a difficult case because they have to work far from infrastructure, but they are a relatively small part of our total motive energy demand.

Zinc is currently being quoted at just over a dollar a pound.  $6000 of zinc in inventory at a carrying cost of 14%/year would cost $840; if it allows the farmer to replace 8 gallons/acre/year times some thousands of acres (call it 2500 acres, for a total of 20,000 gallons) times $4.00/gallon with electricity at $2.00/gallon-equivalent delivered, that's $40,000 a year in savings.  Clearly, zinc could go up quite a bit without affecting the economics of electric conversions very much.  It might even pay to reclaim it from scrap galvanized metal and die-cast alloy.

Sure, this may not work nearly as well for replacing the rest of ICE-powered stuff.  Does it have to?  Let's try a few other possibilities for applications which aren't quite so extreme, and look at the oil-guzzling USA:

  • The urbanized population starts riding buses.  Because of the price of diesel fuel, it becomes attractive to re-power the buses with flywheels or ultracaps and put overhead charging connectors at regularly-spaced bus stops.  A small auxiliary generator fills in for emergencies and helps supply winter heat.
  • Freight moves to rail, heavily-travelled urban routes get streetcars, it all gets electrified.
  • A government program like the CCC replaces poorly-insulated housing with rapid-construction buildings prefabbed out of structural insulated panels.  Areas where heat comes from oil are targeted first.
  • Idle plants in Detroit are turned to making electric bicycles.
  • Lead-acid battery manufacturing goes to reticulated vitreous carbon electrodes throughout, effectively increasing the lead supply about 3 times.

These are nothing that a good solid government push couldn't get moving in a couple years.

Every time I put 40+ litres in my tank I wonder how much longer I have got.

I just paid over US$68 to fill my tank the other day (a bit under 17 gallons), and you know what?  I don't wonder about that.  I think about things like my co-worker who drives a diesel 4x4 and claims to get 15 MPG.  How easily could all the people like him cut their fuel consumption in half?  It just takes enough pain, or a shift in social mores to esteem those who save instead of those who consume conspicuously.

The ICE is like any successful species, it will keep growing in numbers until its food supply runs out and then its curtains.

You mean, it will go the way of the spermaceti candle?  I could not agree more.  But we didn't run out of light when we had to stop hunting whales.  The end of cheap oil is a bigger problem, but we have more knowledge and far greater capabilities also.

If I was Energy secretary, my proposal for the USA would be electric vehicles, IGCC-repowered coal plants, wind farms and nukes.  The side-stream CO2 from the IGCC plants (captured in syngas desulfurization) would go into the depleted and abandoned oil fields from Pennsylvania all the way to Texas and beyond.  This would pull up some extra oil to extend the production a bit while the other efforts hit the consumption end.

Would it work?  I don't know, but the example of Switzerland in WWII is cause for cautious optimism.  If the Swiss could get through a war with less than a tenth of current European oil consumption, there's got to be a way to manage a much slower slide down from a much higher peak.

Does the biofuel requirement have to be in the form of liquid fuels? Couldn't ag waste be used as a replacement for the fossil fuels used to generate electricity? What about gasification methods like Choren, LS9, Range Fuels, etc. If you are going to blog on biofuels you really should be aware that it means more than just fermentation of starch and transestrification of vegetable oil. But then opponents of biofuels tend to emphasize the least efficient methods and completely ignore the more efficient concepts.

You should read Andris blog and the Commission proposal before firing away. We are talking of bio-fuels for Transport here.

Not to mention that this fixation with arable land is also a rather myopic concept on a planet whose surface is about 75% water.
http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/mg19626356.200-marine-...
Shell is to become the first major oil company to produce diesel fuel from marine algae.

Bio-fuels are not an option, ...

This is nonsense. Before there was civilization as we know it, there were bio-fuels used by humans. And before there were humans, there were bio-fuels accumulating in the biosphere and sometimes burning in lightning initiated fires. There will be bio-fuels so long as the biosphere is capable of supporting human life, and beyond.

But, let me correct myself: They are not 'optional', they simply are a given. They may have little role to play in a pure nuclear vision of the future, but a pure nuclear future is not sustainable. So, I suggest stop railing against bio-fuels.

Before there was civilization as we know it there were no ICE.

" ... there were no ICE."

What is 'ICE'?

Internal Combustion Engine(s)

I love it! "Scientists," and "Engineers" excoriate the hoi-polloi for not using numbers, and math; then come right out of the chute using incorrect numbers.

Here are the Real Numbers:

Ethanol has an Octane Rating of 113 AKI (compared to 86 for straight gasoline.) This means that even though it's "energy content" is lower, it can achieve much greater Efficiency than gasoline when burned in a proper engine.

That's why recent tests, such as the one performed by N.Dakota Univ, and Mn State, show that, when burned in newer vehicles, E20 gave slightly better mileage than straight gasoline in three of four cars tested.

As for "Corn/Acre:"

In the U.S. we achieved 151 bu/acre last year (this is Not a record.)

When we process a bushel of corn we get 2.8 gallons of ethanol. Poet's newest plant will probably get closer to 3.0) I'm not even going to add in the 0.20 gal of corn oil taken out by the fractionation process now coming into play.

We Return to the cattle-feeding process (that's, really, what field corn is all about) 30% of the bushel in DDGS. These have a weight gain efficiency 33% Higher than Corn. This means, for all practical purposes, that we have used 60% of the bushel of corn for Ethanol.

151 x 2.8 x 10/6 = 704.66 bu/acre

NOW, for EROEI:

Life cycle, it requires a bit over 30,000 btus of fossil fuel to produce a gallon of corn ethanol. (BTW, even the "Prophet" of the ethanol-haters, old doomer Pimental, himself now recognizes this as being true.) This includes a bit under 6,000 btus of nat gas to produce the nitrogen fertilizer. It, also, includes the 8 Gallons of Diesel required (per the U.N.) to grow an acre of corn. I'm putting in 23,000 btus at the plant, even though this number is falling rapidly, and will, in some cases be closer to 4 or 5,000 btus than the above number in the not too distant future.

I Suggest:

Inasmuch as it has been show that one gallon of ethanol can, in a newer engine, for all practical purposes, replace one gallon of gasoline (116,000 btus,) THEN, the proper EROEI for ethanol is:

116,000/30,000 = 3.87:1

Fire Away!

Well mate, you're saying that corn yields a higher volume of ethanol than sugar cane. It would be nice if you were able to produce some reference on that.

E20 would imply Europe to substitute half of it's ICE transport fleet from now up to 2020. Is this realistic?

An Otto engine is an heat engine, it's efficiency can't change markedly by using a different fuel. Gasoline in Europe ranges from 95 to 100 octanes in our system, while in the US regular gasoline would have 91 octanes by our standards.

On EROEI I used 4:1 in my calculations.

Now, let's suppose all this optimism was right, we would still need some 20 million hectares to make your dream come true.

Luis,

both corn, and sugar cane have their advantages (mostly, geographic.) I'm not sure it's a good idea to get too carried away comparing the two.

I have posted many references on this site in the last month verifying my numbers. It seems that many with an axe to grind keep ignoring the numbers on the New Plants, and keep citing stats from the past.

I do think that, with Europe's investment in Diesel, THIS is a better fit.

http://thefraserdomain.typepad.com/energy/2008/03/fyi-petrosun-to.html

I'm thinking Spain, and, possibly, Italy.

The EPA came up with an efficiency of 41% with ethanol using a 2.0 liter VW engine and 19:1 compression ratio. That's what? 80% higher than the standard engine using gasoline?

Luis, I don't for a minute think that corn ethanol is the Long-Term Solution to all our energy needs; but, it seems only logical that it can, be a valuable player in the next decade as we transition to other technologies.

kdollisco,
Biofuels in Europe itself will never
make up for present oil consumption.
Suppose that all the lumber production in Russia(200 million tons) were entirely diverted to cellulosic ethanol at 100 gal per ton; you'd only end up with 330 million barrels of oil equivalent and the EU consumes 15 million barrels per day(31 quads).

The Europeans are really aiming at South America and possibly Central Africa. The biomass of Latin America is a maximum of 189 quads(Table 3.3.1 pg244)
http://www.grida.no/climate/IPCC_tar/wg3/pdf/3.pdf

The logistics of moving that much ethanol across the Atlantic doesn't seem realistic. All the oil tankers in the world currently add up to 15 billion barrels.

I would guess for Europe electricity and bicycles would make more sense.

The US is a bit different but even then domestic cellulosic will only go to around 30% of current gasoline.

Biofuels can't do much for the EU, Japan, China, or India. They'd do a lot for South America and Africa.

I have posted many references on this site in the last month verifying my numbers. It seems that many with an axe to grind keep ignoring the numbers on the New Plants, and keep citing stats from the past.

I may have missed that. What I recall is seeing a penchant for cherry-picking data. What I have shown are actual plant surveys; what you have shown is a liking for anecdotal data. For instance, if we have 10 tests that show that ethanol lowers gas mileage, and 1 that says it improves it, you trot out the latter. It's as if the other studies don't exist. That's been a pretty consistent pattern from you: Absolutely zero objectivity and tortured logic of the numbers to puff up the corn ethanol resume. But I know, you are just a retired insurance salesman....

Could you post the references showing the 30,000 BTUs of fossil fuel to produce a gallon of ethanol? I mean, I have actual plant statistics from a recently built plant that are higher than that, but I am sure you have a good source for your information. As far as a reference, all I can ever remember is "POET says...." According to my estimates, you are seriously low-balling the numbers. And I did challenge you on this number the last time, and I don't recall seeing you rise to that challenge.

In fact, I don't recall seeing references for hardly any of your claims. The 33% weight gain, now the 41% efficiency - those numbers just materialize, and then start to get repeated. It would be very helpful if whenever you make a new claim, you could reference it. That way, we can determine whether you are leaning toward references from the National Corn Grower's Association over studies published in Science.

I gave a "Specific" test involving E20, and late-model (not new) vehicles. It's "Your" turn.

"Cherry Picking?" You mean, like insisting that air quality had gotten worse since LA started using ethanol by referring to having seen the stats for "ONE" measuring location (and, not giving it,) while I went to the CARB website, and gave their numbers WITH A LINK?

You have higher numbers from an actual plant? Well, post those puppies, Bubba.

The 41% efficiency? I gave the link; and, we discussed it. Remember? You decided that You Figured (despite what the Scientific Test said) that it would be closer to 37%. Remember?

"Cherry Picking?" You mean, like insisting that air quality had gotten worse since LA started using ethanol by referring to having seen the stats for "ONE" measuring location (and, not giving it,) while I went to the CARB website, and gave their numbers WITH A LINK?

Your memory is faulty. At least I hope that's the problem and not that you have decided to start being deliberately deceptive with me. With CARB, what I did was go over and just check a site at random. I don't recall you asking for it. And I told you that based on that one random site, it did confirm the worsening air quality argument - but that there were quite a number of sites to choose from. Therefore, one could certainly cherry-pick the result they wanted. For instance, see the database here:

http://www.arb.ca.gov/adam/welcome.html

Again, I am going to hit one at random. Here are the parameters: Number of days above the state 1 hour standard for ozone at Pomona. Here are the results, with the year 2000 listed first:

18 12 28 39 31 26 34

There was almost a doubling by 2006, the last reported year. But I don't recall the context of your link. Could you post it again? One thing is well-known. Adding ethanol to gasoline raises the vapor pressure, and thus emissions. That's why the EPA has to grant a vapor pressure waiver for ethanol blends.

You have higher numbers from an actual plant? Well, post those puppies, Bubba.

I do. My actual plant numbers say that the ethanol plant input BTUs are greater than the "total" you have posted above. That's why I asked you for a reference. On this one, I do dispute your numbers.

So would you mind providing a reference? Let's review your claim:

It currently (with the more modern technology) takes between 30,000, and 35,000 btus to produce a gallon of ethanol. This includes raising - and, fertilizing - the corn, making the fertilizer, and processing the corn to make ethanol.

By the way, in that thread you also claimed: "due to the increasing use of no-till farming - that's almost 80% of corn land, now - we are INCREASING TOPSOIL in many parts of the Midwest." No reference for that one either. May I ask that in the future when you are making such unconventional claims, you do provide the source? It seems like you are pulling data out of thin air. Recall that I have good reason to wonder about some of your claims, given your recent claim that "all ethanol gets the subsidy." That wasn't true, yet you presented that claim without qualification (and without reference).

The 41% efficiency? I gave the link; and, we discussed it. Remember? You decided that You Figured (despite what the Scientific Test said) that it would be closer to 37%. Remember?

Ah, the non-scientific test where there were some huge outliers in favor of ethanol? I remember being amused that you used such a test to argue a point - almost as if you had an agenda and were only selecting data supportive of that agenda. You are talking about this study, right?

http://www.mda.state.mn.us/news/publications/renewable/ethanol/e20drivab...

Table 15? Or are you talking about some other link? I don't recall the context of 37% or 41%.

I gave a "Specific" test involving E20, and late-model (not new) vehicles. It's "Your" turn.

OK, back to reality. Here's one from Consumer Reports. I think we can agree that they are independent, unlike the source you have cited:

http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/cars/new-cars/news/2006/ethanol-10-06...

But after putting a 2007 Chevrolet Tahoe FFV through an array of fuel economy, acceleration, and emissions tests, and interviewing more than 50 experts on ethanol fuel, CR determined that E85 will cost consumers more money than gasoline and that there are concerns about whether the government’s support of FFVs is really helping the U.S. achieve energy independence. Among our findings:

The fuel economy of the Tahoe dropped 27 percent when running on E85 compared with gasoline, from an already low 14 mpg overall to 10 mpg (rounded to the nearest mpg). This is the lowest fuel mileage we’ve gotten from any vehicle in recent years.

Of course DOE results confirm the same thing:

http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/info.shtml#estimates

Now that's E85, which proponents are rushing to spread as fast as they can. Do you agree that the evidence supports a stiff mileage penalty with E85?

So, what we are left with is some indication, paid by the ethanol lobby - using data from Minnesota which is about to enact a 20% ethanol mandate - that some intermediate blends may actually not have this stiff penalty, and in fact in some instances could be slightly better than straight gasoline. Again, I will await independent confirmation, as most objective observers would.

Robert,

It took me exactly two seconds to google distillers grains/weight gain, and come up with this:

http://beef.unl.edu/beefreports/199913.shtml

Excuse me; It was 34%!

Tar Sands required a quarter of a barrel of oil energy equivalent input to yield one barrel of oil output. 1:4 EROIE = 4? Ethanol EROIE = 1.35?

One ton of coal contains the about 70% of the energy equivalent of oil.

Now some people claimed you could get 2.7 gallons of ethanol per bushel of corn if you added some natural gas and/or electricity for milling and distilling to get the ethanol. The United States produced roughly 14 billion bushels of corn + 2 billion bushels of wheat per year. The United States was the largest exporter of corn. To convert all this harvest to ethanol might yield:

16 billion bushels X 2.7 gallons = 43 billion gallons/yr

43 billion gallons per year divided by 42 gallons per barrel = roughly 1.02 billion barrels of ethanol.

1.02 billion barrels divided by 365 days = 2.8 million barrels of ethanol per day.

We use more than 20 million barrels of oil per day. 2.8/20 million = 14%

Regardless of the EROIE of ethanol, the grain supplies on hand are not sufficient to fuel the United States transportation fleets. All the wheat and corn in the land might only displace 14% of our oil needs. The cellulosic ethanol industry is non-existent and the master planning people are counting on it to do miracles; much like the use of grain ethanol seemed to be a miracle solution to some when the cost of ethanol was below the cost of gasoline. They cannot drive to work if they have not eaten in weeks. The cost of grain goes up when people decide they need food before they need Saudi crude or Iowan ethanol. They would rather buy the food. They might try to tear up the streets to grow it instead of drive on them as has happened during times of crisis in other lands. While once ethanol was cheaper than gasoline eventually the production might cut into the food supply causing a bidding war for grain and then ethanol distilleries might the target of investigations.

Ethanol was advertised as a miracle fuel when the price of ethanol was less than the price of a gallon of gasoline. Once the scope of ethanol production will be expanded more; a bidding war for grain might ensue. People will need to buy grain if they have not eaten in days and will defer purchases of Saudi crude or Iowan ethanol. People may demand big ethanol special interests should be investigated as to determine if they conspired to produce legislation that might drive up both food and mandatory ethanol based fuel prices across the land. Were there special interests that are not beneficial to a majority of consumers.

Converting the 16 billion bushels of U.S. grain harvested to ethanol would create about 2.8 million barrels of ethanol per day in a nation that used more than 20 million barrels of oil per day. The volume of ethanol produced by the entire harvest might only displace about 14% of oil consumption.

The EROIE of ethanol was stated to be about 1.35.

One quarter of a barrel of oil equivalent input yielded a full barrel of oil output at a tar sands production facility. EROIE = 4.

One ton of coal may contain 70% of the energy equivalent of the same weight of crude oil.

Chemicals called alkylates may be used instead of ethanol to reduce ozone and nitrous oxide emissions.

http://www.gronkemi.nu/alcylate.html

That link just brings up an error for me (server not found). I also looked through a lot of your recent posts on Ethanol threads and couldn't find a single link. That doesn't mean there hasn't been any, just that I couldn't find any out of a couple of dozen posts on ethanol related subjects.

It took me exactly two seconds to google distillers grains/weight gain, and come up with this:

Wait, weren't you just complaining about me posting old data? Nothing I have posted is as old as that study.

At question here, is this bizarre calculation (and an example of data torturing) that you keep posting with respect to your DDGS claims:

We Return to the cattle-feeding process (that's, really, what field corn is all about) 30% of the bushel in DDGS. These have a weight gain efficiency 33% Higher than Corn. This means, for all practical purposes, that we have used 60% of the bushel of corn for Ethanol.

151 x 2.8 x 10/6 = 704.66 bu/acre

Let's think about that. Put your units into the equation. The first is bushels per acre. The second is gallons per bushel. That leaves gallons per acre. What are you trying to represent with 10/6? How do you get units of bu/acre to fall out of that equation?

Note: I never disputed your higher weight gain number, but I did want to see the reference.

In essence, I'm dividing the product of 151 x 2.8 by 2/3. Instead of multiplying by 5/3 I use 10/6 since it's easier for an old, math-challenged man to multiply by ten than five.

But why are you doing it? And how on earth do you come up with those units? Looks to me like you have your units wrong in any case.

Okay, let's take a hypothetical unit of corn, ten of which would generate 10 lbs of weight gain on a bovine (this is the true mission of yellow field corn.)

Now, we run it through an ethanol process, and we are left with 3 units of bovine food; but, these units are 33.3% more efficient at the primary task (putting weight on cattle.) This means we have retained 40% of our ability to add weight to cattle. We have used 60% of that utility for other means (to produce ethanol.)

It, therefore, follows that we have produced 2.8 gallons of ethanol by using 60% of the weight-inducing utility of said bushel of corn. We get 151 bushels/acre. Hence:

151 X 2.8 divided by .60 - I simplified it by stating: 151 X 2.8 X 10/6

That's the best I can do.

But that calculation doesn't make any sense. When you multiply bushels per acre times gallons per bushel, you are left with gallons per acre. No matter what you do to that number - multiply, divide, etc. by a fraction (as you are doing), you still have gallons per acre. So the number you are generating is nonsense. It's like multiplying miles per gallon times feet per second and going, "Wow, that's a lot of miles per second."

No, it's not nonsense; it's just saying something you don't want to hear.

This calculation is important when one starts trying to calculate the number of acres of corn that will have to be planted to produce a certain amount of ethanol, and still provide a certain amount of cattle feed.

Let's say you need to produce another 2.1 Billion Gallons of ethanol. How many acres of corn do you have to plant in order not to impact your cattle feed production?

2.1 Billion/423 ? No. It's 2.1 B/704. Remember, You're getting 40% of your cattle feeding ability back in the form of DDGS. So, the correct answer would be 2.1 B/704 = 2.98 million acres.

It is a meaningless answer - after producing the ethanol the cattle food is now not enough to feed the cattle - you can't feed them a 100% diet of that waste even if the world has enough spare agricultural land (which it almost certainly won't have if population growth continues as it currently is.)

If I understand you correctly you are advocating running SUVs on beef - that's worse than running them (unsustainably) on switchgrass, at least I can eat beef, milk, butter and cheese in the winter when crops won't grow. I don't think you have a basic grasp of agriculture - have you ever tried to grow anything organically?

And worst of all you are assuming you have some other form of energy to produce the ethanol - show us your math assuming you have to produce the ethanol just from corn (which will have to happen eventually - probably sooner than you think.)

Corn Plus, in Winnebago, Mn(?) is producing half of their energy by burning the leftover syrup. The Future, however, is probably something like this:

http://www.poetenergy.com/news/showRelease.asp?id=96&year=2007&categoryid=0

They will produce virtually All of their process energy from the shell of the kernels, and the lignin left over from the corn cobs.

SUVS? Did I say anything about SUVS?

QED - Robert is correct - you just cherry picked which of my questions you wanted to answer.

SUVs are what are being driven NOW - ethanol from corn is being produced unprofitably NOW. The cattle can't be fed all waste so they must be fed something else as well - effectively, that 'something else' is being used to fuel the SUVs - hence the prices of the 'something elses' like wheat and soya are rising just to keep the SUVs fed NOW.

Cellulosic ethanol or seawater algae etc are research ideas - they are NOT solutions - we are still consuming lots of expensive crude oil.

No, it's not nonsense; it's just saying something you don't want to hear.

LOL! I am not you. I don't have an agenda here. The numbers are what they are; they aren't something I do or don't want to hear. But if you know the first thing about dimensional analysis, you know that your calculation is completely meaningless because the answer does not have the units you are assigning to it.

I understand what you are trying to do, you just aren't doing it correctly and are therefore coming up with an inflated answer. But that's what you do. You stretch the truth. I am definitely in favor of finding some solutions. What I am not interested in - and what you are doing - is presenting an inaccurate picture of one possible solution. You are embellishing the benefits and handwaving away the negatives. That is NOT a good way to go about evaluating solutions. That's how I know you have an agenda; you don't behave as someone who is merely looking for the right answer. You behave as a lawyer who is defending a client, and therefore you only search for evidence in one direction. I don't suspect it is a coincidence that you and majorian - two of the biggest ethanol boosters on the board - just happened to register here within a couple of days of one another.

Yours has not been an honest evaluation of ethanol from your first post here. Never has been, and I suspect it never will be. It's exaggerate, exaggerate, pull numbers out of thin air, make up claims, and handwave away criticisms. You have shown that you are perfectly willing to accept at face value non-peer-reviewed studies paid for by a lobby - only in the case that they support ethanol. On the other hand you reject independent peer-reviewed studies if they have something negative to say about ethanol. Your standards are very, very different depending upon what the study says.

It was THIS test, Robert. I published a link to the original SAE paper that showed ethanol reaching 41% thermal efficiency in a 1.9 liter, turbocharged, VW engine. You disputed the number, saying you thought it would in the "real world" be more like 37%

http://www.sae.org/servlets/productDetail?PROD_TYP=PAPER&PROD_CD=2002-01...

First, it is methanol that they mention in the abstract that got over 40% efficiency. Second, I honestly don't recall discussing this. Do you have a link to the discussion? I don't know why I would have said it would be more like 37%. Maybe you are thinking of someone else?

They went on to say that ethanol is similar with slightly higher bsfc. I can no longer find the original sae paper of the test. But, the abstract on this synopsis says, this:

Ongoing work with methanol- and ethanol-fueled engines at the EPA's National Vehicle and Fuel Emissions Laboratory has demonstrated improved brake thermal efficiencies over the baseline diesel engine and low steady-state NOx, HC and CO, along with inherently low PM emissions.

Well, when I ask for a reference, I am typically looking for one that backs the specific claim being made. It looks to me like another case of embellishment on your part. You took a number for methanol - "41%" - and than said it was ethanol. I suspect if ethanol had the same demonstrated efficiency, then they would have mentioned ethanol instead of methanol.

I am not disputing the general concept, but your particular claim seems to be consistent with a pattern of embellishment.

Have you found a reference yet to support your claim of 30,000 BTUs to make ethanol? I have asked for this several times now, and in the meantime you have repeated the claim several times.

kdolliso,

Let's accept your figures for the sake of argument.

But if biofuel production is so smart, why aren't the producers rich? Why are they still holding out the beggar's bowl seeking government subsidies?

No doubt some day petroleum will become so expensive that biofuels produced in EU countries may become competitive --- but then there will be no need for government aid, since market forces will prevail. Children may starve in Gwondonaland but if it is profitable for EU farmers to switch to biofuel crops they will do so -- that's the way of the world.

The point is that government supports biofuels chiefly on the grounds that their currently higher costs are compensated for by the alleged reduction in negative externalities (fewer greenhouse gases). If that premise is false, the whole environmental case for biofuels collapses. And it's precisely that premise that has been challenged by the scientific community.

Carolus,

Let me address, primarily, the U.S.

the question of "subsidies," etc is, obviously, very complex. Don't forget, they're competing with the most subsidized industry in the history of the world - an industry that controls the distribution network, has limitless resources, and hates them vehemently - Oil.

I think it's interesting to note that, both the EU, and the U.S. is paying farmers vast amounts of money to keep grain-producing land Out of Production.

It's, also, interesting, I think, that the U.S. was paying grain producers about $12 Billion/yr in Price Support Subsidies for Corn, Wheat, Soybeans, etc; and, now, they're NOT.

This building a whole new industry out of whole cloth in the face of Powerful, and established, competition is a "tricky" deal; and, it will undoubtably take several more years before everything reaches some sort of stasis.

As for the poor in Africa, Don't Worry. They're not eating the beef that's being fed with field corn. Rich people in the E.U., U.S., and Japan are the ones doing that. The most important development is that the 70 + % of those poor that are subsistence farmers will now be able to "Profitably" grow, and sell corn to those "Rich" People.

I understand that these U.S. solutions don't, necessarily, translate to the E.U. You have a high preponderance of diesels, and, quite honestly, Rapeseed IS a terrible solution. Soybeans are even worse. If you can't do something with Algae, it looks like you will be pretty much stuck with petroleum, or Importing biodiesel from the Tropics. Your oil companies are going to keep this option pretty well beat down for the near future, it seems.

I think a large part of the Scientific Community are very dubious of the rather bizarre scenarios laid out by the last couple of articles commissioned by the Exxon/Conoco financed "Nature Conservancy."

Do keep in mind that, both, U.S Corn, and Soybean exports were Way Up this year. If you add in the export of Distillers Grains U.S. cattle feed exports were Way, Way Up.

kdolliso, you write:

the question of "subsidies," etc is, obviously, very complex. Don't forget, they're competing with the most subsidized industry in the history of the world - an industry that controls the distribution network, has limitless resources, and hates them vehemently - Oil.

Don't reify 'Oil' -- it's not a natural person and so it doesn't go round hating anybody, vehemently or otherwise.

If 'Oil' thought there was a profit in unsubsidised production of biofuels, 'Oil' would have bought up those 'theys' with whom it is competing and would now be running the farming industry.

If big oil companies haven't invested much in biofuels, it's because they don't want to throw money down the drain unless the taxpayer foots the bill. And I don't grasp your logic -- first you say there's gold in them there biofuel hills, then you say you're not so sure at all, and that Europe is a biofuel basket case anyhow.

With which I agree.

Carolus,

I'm sure that ethanol is a good solution for the U.S., and most of the world in the short to medium term. I'm not so sure about Europe because of the proliferation of Diesel engines, and the fact that most of Germany's corn crop might go to biogas for the nat gas pipeline.

As for the long-term, I haven't a clue. I know Bio-gas is a more efficient fuel, in all aspects, than ethanol. Whether we will end up making the changes to the distribution system necessary for biogas/nat gas, or go straight to something else? Time will tell, I suppose.

As for Exxon running a few hundred million farming operation? It would be worth the price of admission, I'd think.

That's why recent tests, such as the one performed by N.Dakota Univ, and Mn State, show that, when burned in newer vehicles, E20 gave slightly better mileage than straight gasoline in three of four cars tested.

I just checked that link you posted previously on this:

http://www.rhapsodyingreen.com/rhapsody_in_green/files/optimal_ethanol_b...

Again, paid for by the ethanol lobby, an unbiased source for sure. If there is anything that shows your agenda, it is the fact that you embrace pro-ethanol studies done by the ethanol lobby while trying to smear negative studies with Big Oil associations. You are just too transparent.

But, back to the study, again this is your penchant for cherry picking. What the study showed was that 3 out of 4 performed worse on an E20 blend versus straight gasoline. See Figure ES-1. On E30, 2 out of 4 showed a drop versus E0, and the other 2 showed a 1% increase. But this is not at all the spin you have applied to the results. What we have heard from you is that 3 out of 4 showed better performance on an ethanol blend. But by that same spin, we can say that 0 out of 4 showed better performance. In other words, all 4 showed a drop in mileage versus E0 with either an E20 or E30 blend. This is the kind of spin you constantly provide.

What I say to these studies is that there appears to be something worth investigating. These studies, all of which are funded by ethanol lobbies, are intriguing. But pardon me if I await independent confirmation.

You really are an ethanol lobbyist, aren't you? Unbiased people simply aren't as over the top as you consistently are. It is crystal clear that I can't trust you to accurately present data.

THAT is the silliest thing you've ever written.

Figure 14 shows that 2 of the 4 get better mileage with an E30 blend than they do with straight gasoline. One of the four, the flex-fuel chevy, got better mileage (15%) with E20 than with gasoline.

The Study was Sponsored by the U.S. Dept. of Energy, and ACE.

Spinning? I think your freak'in head's about to come off.

I'm not a lobbyist for anything, or anyone. I do worry that my country, and, thus my family, can be harmed by those who would, through dishonesty, and misrepresentation, cause us to turn away from a positive solution to our coming crisis.

Figure 14 shows that 2 of the 4 get better mileage with an E30 blend than they do with straight gasoline.

Correct. And those 2 both got worse gas mileage on E20. Furthermore, the flex-fuel Chevy got worse gas mileage on E30. So, 3 out of 4 got worse gas mileage on an ethanol blend. (This is the sort of spin that you have become famous for; that was the point).

I do worry that my country, and, thus my family, can be harmed by those who would, through dishonesty, and misrepresentation, cause us to turn away from a positive solution to our coming crisis.

You see, that's exactly what I see you doing. You are not being honest at all in these analyses. You spin and make authoritative statements even when the evidence is very questionable (unless of course it is anti-ethanol; then you easily hand-wave away studies from Science in favor of studies funded by the ethanol lobby). You are not looking at this objectively, thus it is impossible for you to tell whether this is really a positive solution.

There is nothing so telling about a person's agenda as how they select their evidence. If the evidence is selected on the basis of the conclusion, that person has an agenda. And that is exactly what you have done, time and time again.

Horse Hockey!

You're the one Spinning. Let's make this perfectly simple. If I had one of these three cars, and access to a blender pump, like they do in areas of S Dakota, Mn, Ia, and Wi, I could choose an ethanol product that would give me better mileage than straight gasoline.

If you can take any other conclusion out of that study You're not being honest.

You're the one Spinning.

Must I dumb this down any more? Of course I was. That was the whole point. I was being YOU.

Now, what I would say about the study - but again, this is the objective view - is "That's an interesting finding. Let's replicate it in an independent lab that isn't paid for by the ethanol lobby." You? You just run with the result, taking it as gospel.

Let's make this perfectly simple. If I had one of these three cars, and access to a blender pump, like they do in areas of S Dakota, Mn, Ia, and Wi, I could choose an ethanol product that would give me better mileage than straight gasoline.

If you can take any other conclusion out of that study You're not being honest.

I took some time to review this paper again. I think you are grasping here. Without a doubt, you are embellishing the results. This is what I see from the ethanol tests. Look at Figures 10-13. Here is the reality of the tests:

Figure 10. 2007 Toyota Camry, 2.4-L engine - 6 of 7 tests show worse fuel efficiency on an ethanol blend. There is one apparent outlier, which was the basis for the claims. (And it looks like a classic outlier, with almost all of the other points falling as predicted).

Figure 11. 2007 Chevrolet Impala (non-flex fuel), 3.5-L engine - 5 of 5 tests show worse fuel efficiency on an ethanol blend.

Figure 12. 2007 Chevrolet Impala (flex fuel), 3.5-L engine - 8 tests, 2 show better fuel efficiency, 2 show the same, and 3 show worse fuel efficiency on an ethanol blend.

Figure 13. 2007 Ford Fusion, 2.3-L engine - 4 of 5 tests show worse fuel efficiency on an ethanol blend. There is one apparent outlier.

So, what can we conclude? Of 25 data points, 18 confirm that the fuel economy is worse on an ethanol blend. That is 72% of the tests, and these tests were paid for by the ethanol lobby (which is why I suspect the results were spun as they were). The outliers are interesting enough for further investigation, but you have vastly overstated the test results. In reality, if you pulled the results out of a bag, you have only a 28% chance of improving your fuel efficiency on the basis of any particular test. Further, the outlier didn't always occur at the same percentage, which would be quite problematic even if the result is confirmed.

Apparently for you, this is like pass/fail. If we have 4 data sets, and in each set 1 of 10 points showed a positive result, you claim 100% positive results. I won't say that's dishonest, but it is definitely putting the best possible spin on the situation. And while it seems that the matter is settled for you, what I would do as a next step is hone in on those outliers and see if they can be consistently replicated. Unless they are, you may be banking your claims on nothing more than experimental error, as the tests showing the desired result were in the minority.

Of course, I linked THIS:

http://www.ethanol.org/pdf/contentmgmt/Press_Release_12507-1.pdf

as well as the study if references. You're getting behind, Robert. Any links for us, yet? From sometime, recent?

By the way; did you notice that even Ol' "too many people in N. America" Pimental has come around to my numbers on fossil fuel inputs?

Oops, I meant to post this under RR's comment. Sorry.

You're getting behind, Robert.

No, I am not getting behind. I recall your study paid for by the American Coalition for Ethanol. Don't you recall what I wrote about that? Since I am not pushing a particular agenda, I am content to await an unbiased confirmation of results. As I said before, it should be theoretically possible to up compression ratio and improve upon the efficiency when using ethanol. But the study you posted used the same vehicles and showed only a slight drop when using E20 (11.9 mpg with E0 versus 11.8 with E20). But the standard deviation was huge, indicating a large bit of uncertainty. Yet that has never stopped you from presenting these results without any caveats.

Any links for us, yet? From sometime, recent?

None of the ones I posted were as old as the 1999 you posted above. Double-standards? I am shocked!

By the way; did you notice that even Ol' "too many people in N. America" Pimental has come around to my numbers on fossil fuel inputs?

I have no idea what you are talking about. A reference would be helpful.

Pimental's admission is a couple of paragraphs down in this obnoxious, and inaccurate screed.

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/editorialcommentary/st...

Given that this appeared to be a huge shift in position from his earlier position, I wrote to Professor Pimentel for confirmation of this shift. Sorry, there is no admission:

Hi Robert:

I have not had a major shift. It was a typographical error.
It should read that it takes more than 1.4 gallons of fossil energy
kcal to produce 1 gallon of ethanol kcal.

Sorry for the error.
David

Let me say that while I think his assessment is overly pessimistic, he hasn't changed his position.

But I do await your reference of 30,000 BTUs to produce a gallon of ethanol.

Robert;

Here's a company whose wtw ethanol would be well below 30,000; and, they've been doing it for a couple of years. They are now selling their process to other companies.

http://www.connectbiz.com/stories/moonshine.html

Poet posted several months, ago, I believe, that they were in the process of achieving 22,000 - 24,000 btus of nat gas in; but, they have become very closed-mough, it seems, about all of their specific inputs/outputs. I'm still looking.

Of course, their Chancellors plant will be run entirely on wood chips; but since that operation isn't running yet I won't make a big thing out of it.

BTW, I've NEVER called YOU a Liar. I wish you would extend the same courtesy to me. Although, if you don't it only speaks to your character; Not Mine.

Here's a company whose wtw ethanol would be well below 30,000; and, they've been doing it for a couple of years.

We have a vague claim from a company trying to sell their technology. They give no actual numbers, and in fact write "Our technology appears to be one unit in and six out." It appears to be? Is that good enough for you? What is this by-product they are burning? And if they are burning a by-product, it comes off of the output side of their energy balance. In other words, I could burn DDGS and make steam. But now I no longer have DDGS as a BTU output. But I can claim that I reduced my energy input. It's just that I also reduced my energy output.

Furthermore, your claim has been for the entire process - including growing and harvesting the corn, etc. That was your exact claim. Yet that piece alone takes a large chunk of the BTUs. I have seen nothing - zip - from you to support your claim of 30,000 BTUs.

BTW, I've NEVER called YOU a Liar.

I never called you a liar either. But, it is true that I don't think you are simply a retired insurance salesmen. Your behavior is not of a concerned citizen interested in getting to the right answer. So in that case, I don't think you are being completely honest. Maybe you are a retired insurance salesmen. But I suspect you have ethanol ties that you have not confessed.

Furthermore, you have shown a tendency to run with half-baked claims. Your standards are very low if the news is good for ethanol, but impossibly high if the news is bad. You have exaggerated evidence in favor of ethanol on a number of occasions.

"You've never called me a liar;" then, you call me a . . .liar.

beautiful.

That article was written a couple of years, ago, right after they started up. I think that all I've read since is that they've cut their fossil fuels by a little over half.

"half baked" - I post tests, and scientific articles dealing with Observed Results; and you post . . . . what? . . . Insults?

Siouxland - 24,000 btus gas per gallon

http://www.organicconsumers.org/Politics/ethanol060214.cfm

Siouxland - 24,000 btus gas per gallon

Just the ethanol plant piece. That's not what you have been claiming. The story also says "This calculation does not count the electricity the plant uses, or the diesel fuel used to haul the ethanol to a filling station."

So, you have yet to back up the claim you have made repeatedly. Despite having to grasp for evidence, you have stated this as fact again and again. This is why I take everything you write with a big grain of salt.

Yep, 24,000 at the plant, a bit less than 6,000 in the fertilizer, and about 1,000 in diesel to grow the crop. Where does THAT put us? 31,000?

They don't use diesel fuel to haul gasoline to the filling station?

Call me silly; but, I will continue to put more credence in actual observable results (such as CARB's figures on the dramatic drop in bad air days following the adoption of 6.7% ethanol) than suppositions based on very iffy computer modeling like Isaakson's, peer reviewed, or not.

And, at least I'm honest about my advocacy; but, you sir, are not. You pretend to be "open minded," yet, every single thing you write is anti-ethanol. I post a test conducted by two fine Universities, and you denigrate the students, and professors who conducted the tests (using the EPA cycle) as Biased. I post a test done by the State of Minnesota, at Taxpayer expense, and "Ditto." According to you, the USDA, AND EPA "Phony up their Numbers." I a quote a source that has been using a particular technology for over two years, and it's "half-baked.)

You keep claiming I'm a "Lobbyist," or some such. Hell, sir; Why would I deny it if I were? In all honesty, Robert, you're starting to sound hysterical. Like maybe the game is slipping away, or something.

I posted about KL Process Partners, and the fact that they are, now, producing cellulosic ethanol commercially. What's the first thing you said? "I Guarantee you they're Not making a Profit." How would you know? Tell us.

I posted an SAE paper in which it states that Ethanol can achieve 41% Thermal Efficiency. You disputed it. Where did that incredible knowledge come from? Now the paper is gone, as far as I can find, and you dispute ever discussing it.

Just for your info (I know you, really, don't want it; but, here it is, anyway) Outlaw, over at planete85, says he has had many customers tell him that they achieve better mileage with e20 than with gasoline. Yes, he's in the business. He operates Renew Stations which have Blenders Pumps. Of course, he's lying, also, right?

Enough. You attack; I'll defend. I've got plenty of time.

Yep, 24,000 at the plant, a bit less than 6,000 in the fertilizer, and about 1,000 in diesel to grow the crop. Where does THAT put us? 31,000?

There you go again pulling numbers out of thin air. Is there an honest bone in your body? First, we have an uncritical acceptance of the 24,000 number. Second, you have just thrown the electricity consumption right out the window in your “analysis.” Third, the 2004 USDA paper written by Shapouri, et al. on the energy inputs put the farm inputs at 49,753 BTUs/bushel. That's from actual data from corn farms. Your numbers aren't supported by any actual plant surveys. They are merely people making claims, but that's good enough for you. Your agenda is showing, as you are once again caught making false claims to exaggerate ethanol. You do this again and again.

They don't use diesel fuel to haul gasoline to the filling station?

Gasoline makes the bulk of the trip via pipeline, which does take a lot less energy. You should know this.

Call me silly; but, I will continue to put more credence in actual observable results (such as CARB's figures on the dramatic drop in bad air days following the adoption of 6.7% ethanol)

I just posted an observable result of bad air days increasing following that same adoption. It is an observable result that when you mix gasoline with ethanol, the vapor pressure goes up. Again, this is why the EPA has to grant an RVP waiver for ethanol blends. Here is Senator Feinstein on the matter:

The Secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency quantified the impact of ethanol on air quality in a letter to me dated August 1, 2003:

"...our current best estimate is that the increase in the use of ethanol-blended gasoline has likely resulted in about a one percent increase in emissions of volatile organic gases (VOC) in the SCAQMD [South Coast Air Quality Management District] in the summer of 2003. Given the very poor air quality in the region and the great difficulty of reaching the current federal ozone standard by the required attainment date of 2010, an increase of this magnitude is of great concern. Clearly, these emission increases have resulted in higher ozone levels this year that what would have otherwise occurred, and are responsible for at least some of the rise in ozone levels that have been observed."

Source: http://www.senate.gov/~feinstein/05releases/r-epa-oxygenate030905.htm

Furthermore, it is an observable result that food inflation is skyrocketing, on the back of much higher corn prices. It is an observable result that natural gas prices are increasing on the back of higher demand from the ethanol industry, that the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is increasing, etc. etc. Yet you put no credence at all in any of those results. You hand-wave them away or ignore them.

And, at least I'm honest about my advocacy; but, you sir, are not. You pretend to be "open minded," yet, every single thing you write is anti-ethanol.

You are now, without a doubt, a liar. Everyone on the board knows that. Everyone has seen me write favorable ethanol articles. You can find some in my list of essays. But you have been spreading nothing but misinformation. I have been addressing your misinformation. Since most every thing you write is pro-ethanol and misinformation, it might seem to you that all my writings are anti-ethanol. But they certainly are not. You, on the other hand, are projecting, because everything you have written about ethanol – including a great deal of junk, or merely fabricated claims – is supportive of ethanol. You know, sort of like an ethanol lobbyist might do.

I post a test conducted by two fine Universities, and you denigrate the students, and professors who conducted the tests (using the EPA cycle) as Biased.

Liar. I said they were paid for by vested interests. That is true. I said I would wait for independent confirmation. You have no such need, since they supported your viewpoint. However, had they not supported your views, you would not have accepted the results and the universities wouldn’t have been “fine.” Your history on this matter is clear.

Furthermore, I showed that the raw data is actually pretty weak. When 6 of 7 tests show lower fuel efficiency from an ethanol blend, it is disingenuous to take the 1 and say an ethanol blend improved gas mileage. The possibility may be there, but lots of confirmation needs to be done. But a person with an agenda – like yourself – will take that one result and run with it. If you had no agenda, you would probably call for more investigation instead of promoting a result that could very well be an outlier.

According to you, the USDA, AND EPA "Phony up their Numbers."

I didn't just say it. I have shown the USDA doing creative accounting by dumping their energy inputs into the co-products. Anyone but vested ethanol interests can see that.

You keep claiming I'm a "Lobbyist," or some such. Hell, sir; Why would I deny it if I were?

Are you for real? The same reason all of these Creationists keep claiming to have come to Creationism on the basis of the evidence. It makes them seem like unbiased observers, which they feel strengthens their claims. If you admit to being a vested ethanol interest, then your motives are clear. But it doesn't matter at this point if you admit to it or not. Your actions speak loudly.

By the way, that isn’t the only thing you have in common with the Creationists. Like you, they will embrace a favorable essay written by an author with absolutely no relevant expertise over peer-reviewed literature. They select their experts on the basis of their opinions, not their qualifications. This is what you have consistently done.

In all honesty, Robert, you're starting to sound hysterical. Like maybe the game is slipping away, or something.

What game would that be? I long ago gave up on the political game. With a powerful farm and ethanol lobby, we are going to be in the ethanol business right up until we starve a lot of people. What we are doing is going to be disastrous in the long run, and I believe we will look back on this period of time as a wasted opportunity. We could have been working harder on real solutions instead of embracing false ones that boil down to recycled fossil fuel with a number of serious negative consequences thrown in.

However, we are winning the science battle now. People are starting to wake up to what's going on. So much so that when a dedicated ethanol defender like yourself comes riding onto the scene, eyebrows are immediately raised and motives are questioned.

I posted about KL Process Partners, and the fact that they are, now, producing cellulosic ethanol commercially. What's the first thing you said? "I Guarantee you they're Not making a Profit." How would you know? Tell us.

Because I have been around cellulosic ethanol for over 15 years. I know what the economics look like. Do you? Or do you just crib comments from the Internet and run with them? What exactly are your qualifications to tell us which studies are good and which aren’t? After all, aren’t you just a retired insurance salesman? Shouldn’t we therefore treat your opinion for what it is: An uninformed opinion? I have been working in this area for over 15 years, and continue to do so.

I posted an SAE paper in which it states that Ethanol can achieve 41% Thermal Efficiency.

Again, you are a liar. You are just demolishing your credibility, and becoming more transparent with each post. You posted an abstract saying that methanol achieved over 40% efficiency. You claimed it was ethanol, I asked for evidence, and you posted a link that said nothing about ethanol achieving that efficiency. You are simply dishonest. You are not posting the evidence you say you are. You are now trying to rewrite history.

Just for your info...

Outlaw wrote that, did he? Well, we all know Outlaw. Isn't he a respected researcher at UCLA? It is hard for me to believe that you are for real. You grasp at straws. Any claim by anyone - so long as it supports ethanol - is something you are quite willing to latch onto. Anecdotes are evidence for you. Observable? Hell, you must think making a claim is an observation. Your standards are ridiculously low when the claim is pro-ethanol. If it’s anti-ethanol, your standards suddenly become ridiculously high. Why must you resort to that behavior, if ethanol is all you say it is?

Of course, he's lying, also, right?

When you are dealing with anonymous posters, you can never be sure about their motives. Do you think the ethanol lobby doesn't have anonymous hacks like yourself out defending the industry? Of course they do. But I am supposed to trust “Outlaw” or “kdolliso.” Sorry, I have no reason to trust any anonymous poster because I don’t know who you are or what your agenda may be. But I have seen enough to know that you have an agenda.

Enough. You attack; I'll defend. I've got plenty of time.

I am sure you do. By all indications, this is your job. But you aren't doing it very well. When you post links that don't support your arguments, pull numbers out of thin air, and willingly embrace anecdotes only as long as they are favorable, you just demolish your credibility.

FOUND IT!

Read'em and Weep, Bubba.

THIS is the original SAE paper I referenced, and you pooh-poohed.

http://www.methanol.org/pdf/ISAF-XV-EPA.pdf

If you will read it carefully, both Ethanol, and Methanol give 40 +% Efficiency across a wide range of RPMs.

Methanol is approx. 1/2 of 1% more efficient.

Do I have to embarress you further by going through all the posts to find our conversation over this link? Now, who's lying?

Third, the 2004 USDA paper written by Shapouri, et al. on the energy inputs put the farm inputs at 49,753 BTUs/bushel.

Post that puppy, and let's have a look at it. Let's see how much is directly connected to corn production. I'm not interested in adding up all of the btus used by the hundreds of thousands of people involved in oil production, and I'm not interested in what the farmer ate for breakfast. The U.N. stated that approx. 8 gallons of diesel are used to raise an acre of corn. THAT is what I'm using.

You made reference to ONE Station. Who knows what moved in next to that ONE Station. I, on the other hand, published CARB's numbers for the ENTIRE SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA AREA. Which, do you suppose, are the more telling.

Read'em and Weep, Bubba.

THIS is the original SAE paper I referenced, and you pooh-poohed.

I think you are confused. I asked you for a reference. You have finally provided it. Isn't that what you are supposed to do when making a claim? What I pooh-poohed above was that fact that you provided an abstract that didn't say what you have been claiming. And that was a fact. I did tell you above that I didn't dispute the concept - only that the abstract you posted didn't support what you were saying.

Do I have to embarress you further by going through all the posts to find our conversation over this link? Now, who's lying?

Further embarrass me? You are truly a piece of work. Asking for a reference, and then pointing out that you didn't give the proper reference, and finally having you give it, is not embarrassing. It's what is expected. This isn't some game for me in which I trash ethanol at every opportunity, but it does appear to be a game for you in which you embellish it at every opportunity. So I am glad that you got so much satisfaction out of finally supporting 1 of the claims you have been making. So that leaves what, a dozen more that are still just claims. But I am sure with your penchant for embellishment, you feel that this one now gives you a free pass for all of your other claims - like 30,000 BTUs to raise corn AND produce ethanol out of it.

But I did find the link to when you posted it before:

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3591

I never said anything about 37%, so unless you have another link you are still wrong on that point. Looking at the original, though, it was E100 that got the best efficiency. It could have been that I pointed out that E85 would have been at 37%, but again, I can't find any reference to that.

As far as who is lying, I have demonstrated a number of occasions in which you have lied or embellished. Finally coming through with a single reference doesn't change that. There are situations in which you have been mistaken (all ethanol gets the subsidies) but other situations in which you are flatly lying (above, "denigrating students and professors and calling tests biased", when in fact I pointed out, correctly, that they were paid for by the ethanol lobby and warrant repeating by a 3rd party).

Post that puppy, and let's have a look at it. Let's see how much is directly connected to corn production.

I gave you the reference. It's a PDF by the USDA and it's quite easy to Google. All of those inputs are directly connected to corn production. That's what the inputs were - corn farming inputs. Quite a different story from the numbers you have been claiming.

You made reference to ONE Station. Who knows what moved in next to that ONE Station. I, on the other hand, published CARB's numbers for the ENTIRE SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA AREA. Which, do you suppose, are the more telling.

No, I didn't. I have now posted two stations, chosen entirely at random, both of which showed the air quality getting worse. I also posted CARBs comments to Senator Feinstein.

Now, look at the link you previously posted:

http://www.ethanol.org/pdf/contentmgmt/Clearing_the_Air_with_Ethanol_200...

Here is what I pointed out. There are numerous different sampling stations. I can find data to support any point I wish to make. The report you cited was again written by a pro-ethanol organization. It is not surprising to me that this organization was able to find data points to support the particular point they are arguing, because there are numerous permutations. An honest and objective person might recognize this, instead of claiming that the air quality has been shown to have improved for the entire state. That report said no such thing. They picked one particular test out of dozens of possibilities. Again, I have picked two at random, both of which were consistent with what I have previously posted - including reports from CARB - that ozone increased as ethanol ramped up. The science of this is well-understood.

Further, if you look at the site to which your link refers - the South Coast Basin - and go back to CARB and check the data, here is what you will see. There was a downward trend from 2003 to 2005, and then 2006 went up for the number of days exceeding the state standard. But for all practical purposes, 2004-2006 are all the same. But if you look at the national standard for the same basin, you see an increase each year from 2004 through 2006, and 2006 is over 20% higher than for 2004. And in the Sacramento Valley Basin, ozone increased for both the state and national standards for 3 years in a row. 2006 was 50% higher than 2004.

That's what I mean about being able to find the data points to support whatever agenda you are pushing. (I have no idea why the national and state trends are different for the South Coast, unless one or both of them changed during the sampling period). This is why I don't trust papers that are written by a vested interest. I am much more trusting of independent papers, particularly those that are peer-reviewed.

"You've never called me a liar;" then, you call me a . . .liar.

There is a difference between lying and withholding information. I think you are withholding information about your ethanol ties.

That article was written a couple of years, ago, right after they started up. I think that all I've read since is that they've cut their fossil fuels by a little over half.

I guess you didn't follow. It is possible to cut fossil fuel usage without improving your energy balance. Just start burning your products. Since there is little information on what they are actually doing, then all you are doing is taking their word for it. You apply vastly different standards depending on whether you like what you are hearing. In that case, how on earth can you possibly know whether ethanol is a good idea? You only consider one side, and ignore everything else.

"half baked" - I post tests, and scientific articles dealing with Observed Results

This is an example of your exaggerations. I have posted peer-reviewed scientific studies that you hand-waved away in favor of non-peer-reviewed stuff done by people with a vested interest. There's quite a big difference, you know.

There's something all of you are missing. It's not government, bankers, or agribusiness that determine what we farmers grow or where we sell it. In countries where farmers have private property rights, those determinations are reserved for the owners and operators of the land. Crop choice and marketing is a highly complex, interconnected phenomenon, but ultimately, it's the farmer who has the power of choice.

There is no question that biofuels have increased profitability of farming and have benefited the rural economy, in general, through the process of value-added conversion of the crop into a commodity of higher value. Ethanol and biodiesel plants have created a lot of rural jobs, have increased the amount of cash flowing through rural communities, and have kept that money cycling through our rural economies instead of sending it overseas to oil producing countries. Unless biofuels are banned through legislation, they are here to stay.

In general, rural communities have not benefited from boom times during the past two generations. Rural flight is still going on, population keeps dropping, communities are dying because farming is such a high-risk low-profit endeavor. The amount of money now flowing into farms and rural communities has not been seen since 1973. That's 35 years since the last boom. We know it won't last. It never does. Biofuels give us a way to increase our profitability and cash flow and reduce marketing risk. Biofuels give us a way to convert damaged grain, that can't be fed to people or animals, into a useful product.

Hello,

I am certainly no authority on ethanol (and an economist to boot, which will not help raise my credibility on TOD), but I am also a Brazilian and would like to share some thoughts on biofuels and ethanol from the point of view of someone who is not an European or American.

First, tropical climates are better for biofuels (at least better for ethanol) - the area growing sugarcane in Brazil is 7 million ha, with a production of 21 billion litres (aproximately 45% of the sugarcane was used to make actual sugar, so there is room increases at the expense of sugar...). In Brazil it is also done without subsidies. The industry estimates that ethanol would be competitive even with oil around US$ 40 a barrel.

I expect that many other developing countries could reach similar numbers, experiments are underway in Africa and the Caribbean, this would actually help the poor in the 3rd world (check the Oxfam quote posted above, as well as the DG of FAO, who amended his comments about biofuels to exclude criticism about sugarcane). Hunger in poor countries derives from a lack of income rather than a lack of food: a study in Scientific American recently showed that there are more obese people in the world (1.8 billion), than underweight (800 million). (here is the link: http://www.sciam.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=8DFF8662-E7F2-99DF-38E67664A...)

In a way, it also helps that biofuels reduce the need for American and European subsidies to agriculture, something that really do hurt the poor in developing countries.

However, even in Brazil where we have been using ethanol for a long time, we know that is not THE magic bullet for PO. Here it substitutes around 35% of gasoline, and this number will grow, but some experts estimate that at best, with 3rd generation ethanol and its dissemination to other countries, it could replace around 20% of current oil used in transportation worldwide. Of course with an emphasis on supplying tropical countries themselves, but there would most certainly be enough to export.

This might be not be THE solution, but could certainly be part of A solution, which involves, IMHO, all the renewables we can scrounge up, nuclear, recycling, and deep cultural changes regarding the way we travel, commute, work and spend. I am definitely not a “doomer”, but think the future holds hardship ahead, especially because we are focusing too late on renewable and countries like US and in Europe are still more interested in pandering to their agricultural lobby than to actually invest in biofuels (mainly ethanol) where it could benefit more people the most.

I didn't realize that biofuel manufacturers in Europe and Australia are looking at producing large amounts of ethanol fuel from wheat.
That's a direct conflict between grain and fuel and I find that much more questionable(nobody eats sugarcane and very few people directly consume corn as a staple).

EU wheat production is 120 million tons and if it were all converted to ethanol
at 88 gallons per ton(less efficient than corn) it would produce 10.5 billion gallons, 22% of EU-15 gasoline demand of 47 billion gallons.

Majorian, I THINK the European "wheat-to-ethanol" thing is about dead (for all the reasons you mentioned.) I know Abengoa has closed a couple of plants, and they were, I believe, the main player.

They may, eventually, get a little action out of wheat STRAW. I don't know anything about Europe; but, I'm going to guess that if they end up doing any ethanol it'll follow Sweden's lead, and look mostly to forestry products.

Unless, MAYBE, they get the Algae thing working. An algae pond Might render almost as much biomass for ethanol, as it does algael Oil. This May Not be as big a longshot as it sounds at first blush.

BTW, I think you Might be underestimating Russia's potential as a cellulosic producer. Just because they're only producing a certain amount of lumber, at present, doesn't mean that's the Max they could do. It's an awfully big Country, with a whole lotta trees, bushes, etc.

Actually, hundreds of million people consume corn as a staple. Ever hear of tortillas? That and beans...

Corn flour used to make various breads is definitely a staple of many people.

If you look at the most recent World Food Outlook, what you find is that,

Wheat
Production, 602.1Mt
Food, 448.4Mt
Feed, 107.0Mt
Other, 63.3Mt
Total use, 618.7Mt, leading to a decline in wheat stocks of 16.6Mt
In all, 18% goes to livestock, and 74% to people directly.

Coarse grains (including maize)
Production, 1,077.5Mt
Food, 181.8Mt
Feed, 624.5Mt
Other, 250.7Mt
Total use, 1,051.7Mt, leading to a increase in coarse grain stocks of 20.4Mt
In all, 58% goes to livestock, and 17% to people directly.

Rice
Production, 429.3Mt
Food, 377.6Mt
In all, ?% goes to livestock, and 88% to people directly.

While the end stocks are 0.8Mt higher, it's unclear where there other 50.9Mt of rice has gone to, the FAO doesn't tell us. Though they do say "the volumes of rice consumed as feed or for other purposes (seed, industrial use or waste), are estimated to fall, overall."

Anyway, we see that the coarse grains, 17% are consumed directly by people, and on the basis of 1 tonne feeding 4 people enough calories for manual labour, the 181.4Mt will feed 726 million people.

As wikipedia describes it,

Human consumption of corn and cornmeal constitutes a staple food in many regions of the world. Corn meal is made into a thick porridge in many cultures: from the polenta of Italy, the angu of Brazil, the mămăligă of Romania, to mush in the U.S. or the food called sadza, nshima, ugali and mealie pap in Africa. It is the main ingredient for tortillas, atole and many other dishes of Mexican food, and for chicha, a fermented beverage of Central and South America.

On the whole it does not seem an exaggeration to say that maize is the staple for something on the order of 300 million people.

Actually, Tortillas are made from White Sweet Corn.

The "Tortilla Crisis" was a, purely, Mexican Thang. It had nothing, whatsoever, to do with the U.S. In fact, the Mexican farmers were protesting just the other day over the Jan 1st relaxation of import duties that allowed Cheap U.S. Corn to be imported into Mexico.

I think you'll find, if you dig down into it, that the problem for poor Africaners is Not the $0.10/lb our farmers are getting for their corn, but, rather, the very large Import Tariffs their governments are putting on them (not to mention the horrible rent-seeking behavior of the gov/elites in those countries setting up monopolies in distribution, etc.

Right,
They use white corn which is grown in Mexico. I agree that little corn or sugar cane ends up as food, except in the form of meat and dairy and DDGS is a reasonable substitute for cattle. But while the large quantities of potential cropland maybe availible in the Western Hemisphere (with 900 million people in it), the Eastern Hemisphere is tapped out.
It's really disturbing thinking about
Australia or the UK producing ethanol from wheat itself, which has been reported recently. I even saw an article that Chavez is starting an ethanol program.

Cellulosic is another matter but progress is slow and development money for CE is just not there, if Hofmeister is right it will be a couple decades before CE contributes decent amount of biofuel.
Meanwhile high food prices are hurting ethanol refiners. If we can't do CE, biofuels aren't going to work. Then we have to go after unconventional oil and that really blows up GW. Hofmeister(Shell USA) is still supporting coal/oil-to-hydrogen WITH CCS, but says that is a couple decades away also. But Europe is out of fossil fuels and Russia looks tapped out from a practical point of view. BMW is thinking hydrogen-maybe from wind and nukes?

It's an incredibly bad situation.

I think there must be some deep seated biophysical principle behind biofuel EROEI. Lipids are generally from pampered plants and animals like cornfed chicken fat or high water and NPK demanding plants like canola. Easier feedstocks have a flipside like poisonous jatropha nut, with the jury still out on algae. Same goes for starches and sugars like corn and cane, but without energy sapping distillation the useful components stay out of reach.

Cellulose on the other hand (so I read) is the most abundant organic molecule on Earth, unusable by most except termites and the occasional axeman. It is heavy to carry and even harder to liquify. Mother Nature is playing a cruel joke on us, having given us half a billion year's accumulation of fossil fuels which we've now squandered. She is saying 'you should've seen this coming'.

On Corn Based Ethanol

My position is that:

1) ALL subsidies for corn based ethanol should be wound down to zero in a reasonable time frame. If ethanol cannot compete with $105+ oil, so be it. There are a number of other areas that can use those subsidy dollars *FAR* better than ethanol.

2) In those polluted areas that require oxygenates (and let science determine where those areas are, not politics), let ethanol replace MTBE.

3) Phase out duties on imported ethanol, probably over the same time frame as #1.

4) Label at the pump so consumers can know when they are buying diluted gasoline.

We have built enough (likely too many) ethanol plants, there is no reason to keep the subsidies going and waste more capital & resources on more new ethanol plants.

Best Hopes for Logical Public Policies,

Alan

Alan,
Ethanol cleans up gasoline which is why it is put into gasoline. You are getting something for your subsidy-cleaner air! In 2006 the price of gasoline was $2.58 per gallon and 150 billion gallons were produced for which $7 billion dollars in subsidies were paid. That amounted to 2 cents per dollar or 5 cents per gallon for cleaner air. The alternate, MTBE is poisoning groundwater all over the country which is why it was banned.

OTH, Alan be honest! For your electrified rail we will be burning lots of dirty, dirty coal. By your logic we should remove requirements to scrub sulfur out of coal because it favors low sulfur Western coal over high sulfur coal. Let's remove that 'subsidy' and give the consumer back his money.

Ethanol cleans up gasoline

Not any more, it doesn't.

  • At one time, oxygenates helped to reduce cold-start carbon monoxide emissions by promoting more complete combustion.  Modern engine systems no longer get an improvement from ethanol.
  • Today, the higher vapor pressure of ethanol causes greater evaporative emissions and more smog.

For your electrified rail we will be burning lots of dirty, dirty coal. By your logic we should remove requirements to scrub sulfur out of coal because it favors low sulfur Western coal over high sulfur coal.

You have it backwards; we are currently paying ADM and the corn-growers to dirty our air (like giving a preference to Illinois coal to boost employment in east-of-the-Mississippi mining areas).

Un-blended ethanol (even 190 proof) could be used very productively in highly boosted engines to reduce required engine size and friction/pumping losses.  Using about 2% ethanol via direct-cylinder injection as a knock preventer, gasoline consumption could be cut as much as 30%.  But gasohol isn't an improvement.

Modern engine systems no longer get an improvement from ethanol.

LOL!
I did a search for the origin of this story which sounds a lot like an 'urban-legend' and the source was.... 'The Oil Drum'. Please post a study supporting your contention.
I wonder how many urban legends get spawned here?

It's nonsense of course. All countries with lots of cars end up using ethanol or ether oxygenates.

http://www.efoa.org/EFOA_Pages/06_Q&A/06d_RegionTXT.html

Today, the higher vapor pressure of ethanol causes greater evaporative emissions and more smog.

LOL, again.

Google traces this back to TOD! And a 4/15/2007 report by Mark Z Jacobsen.
If you have a report backing up Jacobsen I'd like to see it. Here is a criticism of Jacobsen's science.

http://www.ethanolrfa.org/objects/documents/1071/reapresponse_jacobsone8...

You have it backwards; we are currently paying ADM and the corn-growers to dirty our air (like giving a preference to Illinois coal to boost employment in east-of-the-Mississippi mining areas).

I was making an analogy. If ADM is using high sulfur Illinois coal without scubbers
which is your insinuation, they are breaking the law. Do you have a reference that actually supports your contention?

I did a search for the origin of this story which sounds a lot like an 'urban-legend' and the source was.... 'The Oil Drum'. Please post a study supporting your contention.

Please post your link indicating that the origin was TOD. That sounds like an urban-legend itself.

Google traces this back to TOD! And a 4/15/2007 report by Mark Z Jacobsen.

So it didn't actually originate with TOD then? Why did you say that it did?

The Mark Jacobson case is an interesting study regarding what can happen when you criticize ethanol. People immediately tried to assassinate his character. Vinod Khosla falsely accused him of being funded by Big Oil.

Here is a criticism of Jacobsen's science.

Did you read that criticism carefully? Did you notice how they don't always address what Jacobson wrote? When one of these critiques passes the peer review involved in the initial report, let me know. Until then, I view them as hatchet jobs by the ethanol lobby. (And I have had exchanges with one of the people cited in the report; he is pure ethanol lobby).

Ooooh, ooooh, can I be character-assassinated too?

why biofuels are bad for climate change

:D

Ooooh, ooooh, can I be character-assassinated too?

I don't see why not. :-~

I take it is your blog.

You're exaggerating the influence of nitrous oxide on global warming. Its atmospheric concentration is 314 parts per BILLION versus 380 parts per million of CO2. Only 25% of Greenhouse warming comes from agriculture, land use change and waste disposal. A lot of methane and CO2 comes from decaying vegetation, which with cellulosic ethanol would be processed into fuel. CO2 from distillation could be buried rather than released.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas

Switchgrass requires very little fertilizer to grow.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switchgrass

A big contributor to N20 is manure and urine, from livestock and humans. You can best limit that by cutting out animal products.

You don't need natural gas to make ammonia. You can do that with renewable electricity. Some knucklehead here at TOD was raving about it but it failed to attract any attention from the various energy pundits who were too busy anathemizing ethanol. It's a wonderful idea.

http://www.ea2020.org/drupal/files/BioFertilizer%20Production%20Act.pdf

OTOH, somebody else was suggesting we burn ammonia for energy which would produce much more N20.

The truth is that there is no way to keep +6.5 billion people alive without fertilizer and industrial agriculture.

As your blog is called 'green with a gun' you may want to use 'green guns' to reduce
the ultimate cause all of GHGs. By eliminating 90% of world population we may be able to eliminate as high as 90% of global warming gases and save the planet!

Unfortunately this solution to GW has never even been broached.(Really, it would solve SO MANY problems.)

HA-HA :->

Using excess renewable energy (say late night wind) to create ammonia has been generally accepted on TOD as "a good idea". Some quibbles about the details, but no one has attacked the basic premise.

ALan

I'm sorry, but that was a critique more or less scientific in nature, it wasn't a character assassination. I'm disappointed.

It's not me exaggerating the effect of nitrous oxide, it's the IPCC's 177 different reviewed studies and scenarios describing it. It may be parts per billion, but it has a greater per unit effect on warming than does carbon dioxide. You don't like that, go argue with 1,000 climate scientists.

Switchgrass may require little fertiliser to grow, but switchgrass is not used commercially to make biofuels. Let's talk about what is, not what might be some day in the distant future perhaps if we can make it work and the technology fairy wipes away all our tears and troubles.

You may not need natural gas to make ammonia, but that's how it's made today. Again, let's focus on what is.

The truth is that the world produces twice as much food as is actually needed to nourish people; but in the West we throw away about 25% of it, and we consume 50% more calories than we need, and divert lots of food to livestock and biofuels. And about half of all food is produced without any fossil fuel and derivative inputs at all, in subsistence farming and market gardens around the world.

So if we produce twice the food we need, and half of it is without fossil fuel and derivative inputs, well, 2x 1/2 = 1. Thus, we can indeed feed our 6.65 billion people without any fossil fuel and derivatives inputs at all. The fossil fuels and derivatives just make it a lot easier.

Population isn't the problem, it's our wasteful lifestyle. Population is one of those things where it's not how big it is, it's what you do with it.

I did a search for the origin of this story which sounds a lot like an 'urban-legend' and the source was.... 'The Oil Drum'.

You must be very poor at using a search engine.  I just did a Scroogle search using the terms "ethanol emissions modern" and TOD didn't appear anywhere in the first 100 results (and R-Squared only appeared once).  Among the results:

  • A news item about an Environment Canada report which claims that ethanol increases hydrocarbon emissions under some conditions.
  • New Zealand found that "Exhaust emissions from modern vehicles do not differ significantly when using ethanol blends."
  • This page makes the claim "Several U.S.-based studies conclude that the overall ozone forming potential of ethanol-gasoline blends (with their higher volatility) is about the same as gasoline." (no cites, unfortunately, but this is consistent with other reports).

Whatever the improvements, they aren't worth 51¢/gallon and higher food prices too.

Today, the higher vapor pressure of ethanol causes greater evaporative emissions and more smog.

LOL, again.

You're a really lousy researcher, because a search for "ethanol evaporative emissions turned up this Toyota report to the California ARB which says exactly what I did... five years before TOD was established.  This is seconded by the SAE.

Or maybe you're just a troll.

Do you have a reference that actually supports your contention?

That wasn't a contention, it was an analogy (but given Obama's connection to the Illinois coal industry, I wouldn't be too surprised if it actually came to pass).

EP,
LOL,
an 'unpublished study' from 'Newsbusters'?

Emily Rudkin's 'final report' links to an EECA web page with nothing on it about this 'final report' study.

Yes, several studies ..what are they?
Maybe they are talking about Mark Z Jacobsen which I was the first to mention on this thread.

It's nonsense of course. All countries with lots of cars end up using ethanol or ether oxygenates.

The Toyota article proves exactly what I was saying--the article compares E10 to MTBE, an ether oxygenate which is added to fuel to reduce emissions.

It's clear that anyone who challenges you is a troll in your mind.(I find that to be rather pathetic.)

Don't worry, I don't bluff easy.
:)

1) I do not need cleaner air. New Orleans is a Clean Air attainment area.

1b) As noted below, ethanol; does not clean up the exhaust except in the very oldest car. And it adds evaporates.

2) All this extra corn growing and fertilizer use will only expand the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, reducing the food I do like to eat, and negatively impacting the economy.

3) The total electrical demand for transportation today in the USA is 0.19%. In France (with all those high speed electricity gobbling TGVs, which I do not support for the USA), used 2.39% of their electricity in 2005.

My dreams (maximum) for electrified rail could be supplied by about 4% of current US electrical demand. That % could be easily conserved, and more than that can come from wind power alone faster than we can build the electrified rail.

$7 billion dollars in subsidies

ETHANOL SUBSIDIES ARE A WASTE OF MONEY

AND SHOULD BE STOPPED ASAP !

Best Hopes for scrapping ethanol plants,

Alan

PS: Just mandate ethanol where oxygenates are required WITHOUT SUBSIDIES. If Brazilian sugar cane ethanol is cheaper, use it. Let the motorist pay for it at the pump, NOT FROM GOV"T SUBSIDIES FOR CHEAPER GASOLINE

My dreams (maximum) for electrified rail could be supplied by about 4% of current US electrical demand.

In 2004 total us energy use was 100.6 quads. Transportation energy use excluding aviation (which I assume will shrink to a small fraction of its current size in a post-FF world) was 23% of the total. Electricty consumption (4.07*10^12kWh) multiplied by 3 (this is a standard energy accounting practice) and converted to quads constitutes 41% of the total energy use. 4% of 41% is 1.6%. Therefore your proposal would reduce transportation energy use by a factor of 14 which is quite impressive. Can you give some more details on the assumption that went into this calculation? Hall et all in Energy and Resource Quality claim that diesel trains are 4.2 time more efficient than trucks with respect to freight transportation (185 ton-miles/gallon compared to 44 ton-miles/gallon). They claim that a 10 car subway train with 100 passengers per car can obtain 150 passenger mile per gallon. These numbers do not add up to a factor of 14 improvement. Are you assuming substantially reduced transportation volumes? And if so by how much?

Double stack containers are significantly more efficient than 4.2 to 1. And double stack is more efficient than single stack (better aerodynamics, lower rolling resistance/container, less car weight as a % of payload).

From memory, 4.2 to 1 is the savings from rolling on a truck trailer to a flat bed car (a shrinking market BTW). Poor aerodynamics, extra weight (tires, frame, axle, etc.), more rolling resistance/container. The market is moving away from that model.

An earlier response I wrote that I was going to cut and paste was a detailed answer to a question on the ASPO website. I just found that the Q & A was deleted ! ARGHH !

http://www.aspo-usa.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=168&It...

To quickly recreate:

Former head of FRA quotes 300 car, double stack containers as using 1/9th the diesel of heavy trucks. I discount that down to 1/8th to 1/7th (circuity, not every train is ideal, slower trucks today). Supported by deltas in rolling resistance, aerodynamics.

Note also recent CSX ads claiming 422 ton-miles/gallon.

I then apply a 2.5 to 3 to one conversion of end use diesel BTUs to end use electricity BTUs. Supported by a few MW diesel power plant conversion.

Roughly 17 to 20 to one savings by conversion of heavy trucks to electrified rail.

I also assume that some trucking would remain (perhaps 15%) so no electricity required for that %.

Some good real world #s

http://strickland.ca/efficiency.html

Currently, labor is more expensive than energy and most subway systems run empty cars between rush hours instead of downsizing trains. That can be adjusted easily.

In an Urban Rail format, yes I do assume dramatic drops in VMT in TOD neighborhoods (good evidence for that). And more VMT with bicycles and shoe leather.

30% of US population now wants to move to TOD, satisfy that unmeet market need first. Then, in an oil constrained future, the demand should increase from there. But the modeling assumes 30% rely upon non-oil transportation entirely and another 30% in part.

Again, I assume that some oil use remains, which does not require electricity.

You may enjoy my vision of the USA in 2034.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3140#comments

Best Hopes,

Alan

Even my best dreams have an element of realism in them :-)

85% of truck traffic > electrified rail, not 100%
No significant change in water demand (no electricity)
30% of Americans 100% Non-Oil Transportation, another 30% partially Non-Oil Transportation.
Price driven reduction in demand for oil based transportation, and remaining oil based transportation more efficient.

If we do that in 25 or 30 years, I will be satisfied.

Alan,

Thanks for the detailed reply.

Feeding whom? People or cars?

"Wheat inflation in Pakistan has been aggravated by drought in Australia, one of the top three exporters of the grain, driving up global prices for the commodity by as much as 40% last year as the world's stockpiles fell towards a 26-year low. Oil prices that have risen to $100 a barrel, higher transportation costs and growing security concerns in the region are also fueling higher prices. In neighboring Afghanistan, the price of flour shot up to 40 cents a kilogram in December last year from 28 cents a kilogram in January 2007. "
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/JA18Df01.html

The Choice between Food and Fuel
A simple calculation points out biofuel's less-than-stellar potential. To fill the roughly 100-liter (26-gallon) tank of an SUV, an ethanol producer has to process about a quarter of a ton of wheat. This is enough wheat for a baker to bake about 460 kilograms of bread, which has a total nutritional value of about a million kilocalories -- enough to feed one person for a year.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,530791,00.html

The Day China Runs Dry
http://www.eeo.com.cn/ens/Observer/2008/02/29/92990.html

Peak water in Saudi Arabia
According to recent news from Reuters (2008) the Saudi government has decided to stop all subsidies to agriculture. It means abandoning a policy that had obtained self sufficiency in food production and that had allowed Saudi Arabia to be a major food exporter in the past. According to Reuters, "The kingdom aims to rely entirely on imports by 2016". The desert is going to win back the land it had ceded to agriculture.
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/3520