Objectivity

Is the Ethanol Mandate Likely to be Repealed?

It's a fact of life, and will only get worse... the taxes on oil companies will only rise.

Someday soon, I fear that the US Gov will finally do the currently "unthinkable"... confiscate effectively all profits from public energy companies... with a 90%+ tax rate.

They will use their "Warts on Terriers" justification. It will be speechified that back during WWI & WWII there were "dollar a year men", and that nobody should profit while the "Wart" is on.

Of course, by then, marginal personal income tax rates will probably be over 75%, social sec taxes will be over 25%, unemployment will be 50%+ (except for government employee types)...

And smart Americans will already be living and working in Russia, sending care packages by DHL back to their unlucky brethren.

Is the Ethanol Mandate Likely to be Repealed?

From a Chemical Engineer with good knowledge of the process of distilling ethanol...

______________________...

"...The energy balance for ethanol production is a matter of some controversy. Typical energy input for a state-of-the-art process like the one I have described is about 34,000 BTU per gallon of fuel ethanol. Average ethanol input for actual plants in operation, most of which are older and not state of the art, is considerable higher at about 52,000 BTU/gal. Many plants are old or small and do not use molecular sieve dryers for ethanol purification, relying on a third distillation step that consumes more energy than the dryers. Older plants also do not feature all the energy recycling and can require 80,000 or more BTU to produce a gallon of fuel ethanol. As the energy content of ethanol is about 84,000 BTU/gallon, these old plants sometime consumed more energy to make the ethanol than what was contained in the product. Even the state-of-the art process requires energy equal to about 40% of the energy in the product to manufacture fuel ethanol. The effect of plant efficiency has affected the conclusions of studies looking at the total energy efficiency of corn to ethanol conversion..."

______________________...

I had stated over 30,000 btu per gallon ethanol as a good estimate of distillation EROEI input-quant... I also pointed out that those who did not well design systems (as state of the art here shows) would probably expend much more, witness the evidence of Mr. Miller's chosen study... it required roughly 3 times what state of the art systems described above use.... but, (and to you too, Mr. Miller) you see, these values as I at first projected and then teased from your chosen study data prove what is required...

And remember, this is simply the distillation step... all other processing inputs are ignored.

Giving Ethanol refiners tax credits encourages wasteful practices and bad engineering design justified by banker logic... money as the end all and be all.

Back in the late 70's, Smoky Yunick (who else alive reading SA besides me knows who Smoky even is, I wonder...) said that someday mankind would come to it's senses and use BTU's as a currency, instead of mythical electronic notional currency units, such as the unbacked dollar really is. He observed that it would change behavior, worldwide, for the better. Wasteful practices that "seemed smart by bankers" would be exposed for the fraud that it truly was.

Smoky was right. The hypesters and banksters are wrong.

Is the Ethanol Mandate Likely to be Repealed?

OJ's lawyer has left the building.

Is the Ethanol Mandate Likely to be Repealed?

Fireball...

Sorry about your father. Losing mine was the hardest day in my life.

You'll see him in the next world. Take care of your kids and he'll be the proudest. That will be your happiest day.

Is the Ethanol Mandate Likely to be Repealed?

Evidence... ahh... if only he would answer one time...

Do the EROEI calc on your own posted study. Just consider the natgas. Do it. And post it here. Then I'll go thru it all.

Can't do it? Or won't?

It's one or the other.

Is the Ethanol Mandate Likely to be Repealed?

Fireball...

Let me tell you a bit about where I'm coming from in telling you about my choice of Gazprom as a lifeboat for my children...

Since I was a boy (over 40 years ago) I was extremely concerned about energy issues, and it has guided my life all these years... school, work, lifestyle...

My concern for mankind's future was multiplied 100 fold with the birth of my first child... it has increased continually since...

If I could just wave a magic wand and make it all go away (our problems) believe me, I'd wave a telephone pole.

About 20 years ago, I had to turn down a chance to work on the Tokamak program at Princeton... I took a different job at the time to better help some friends of mine in Detroit who needed the work I could manage instead... I helped some friends and their families, but I've regretted every second not taking the other path...

Even when oil was cheap (foolishly priced) I lived as though it was dear... a gift from God (like a bank account buried) that would make possible billions of souls... waste was a real sin in my mind.

I worked in Russia, Germany, Poland, Italy, other eastern Europe and CIS countries... and learned first hand what physical poverty coupled with mental and spiritual richness looked like, first hand.

If you have kids, they will be among a generation that curses their forebears for the mess we hand them... all you can do is inflate a lifeboat for them... and get them tough enough mentally to deal with what is coming, without them losing their blessed souls in the process.

If people in this country had faced the unpleasant facts 30+ years ago, we would not be in this mess. Unfortunately, as you can see here at S-A, too many charlatans pretend THEY have the answers, even when they do not even know the basics of God's laws, or worse, they know them, but deceive in presenting "facts" that are not, for some personal gain.

Is the Ethanol Mandate Likely to be Repealed?

Fireball... do your own DD but here is my plan... for my children's sake...

Buy Gazprom ADR's...
Buy it when it's valued cheaply (every price it's ever sold at)...
Buy it when it's expensive (never has been yet)...
Buy it when they bash it in the West (it's a ploy)...
Buy it when Gazprom announces bad news (rare, but it happens)...

Hold it until the world realizes that N-G and Nuclear and Conservation and Wind is the best bridge we have until the fusion-tokamak boys actually achieve a workable reactor. Maybe 100 years from now... and pray they succeed...

Of course, the coming resource wars will probably wipe out 6 billion + before the tokamak boys succeed... so say your prayers and ask Christ to be merciful on you and your family, and be merciful to the doomed who will be starving while you wait for the end...

Is the Ethanol Mandate Likely to be Repealed?

Oh, by the way... burning that therm of nat-gas as CNG (used in Mr. Miller's site to make a gallon of cellulosic ethanol) in a Honda civic CNG around town gets you about 15 miles driven, over 20 on the highway... bet you can't do much better on pure ethanol in avehicle with the same weight and power.

Oh yeah, then you also don't need Angels to provide the other 80% of the work needed to make that fantasy happen.

Is the Ethanol Mandate Likely to be Repealed?

Mr. Miller, you are unfortunately quite wrong about my desires, and my objective view of the world we live in.

First of all, I am quite certain that our current low nat-gas prices are to rise substantially, and so will the cost of using nat-gas as a "input" to creating some other "fuel", which is what I was referring to. Using a prime fuel like nat-gas to distill ethanol is foolhardy in the extreme... but with current tax-credits and absurd accounting, this is exactly what happens.

It takes over 8 cubic feet of nat-gas to evaporate 1 gallon of water in an IDEAL system, unfortunately, if you understand Newton, you will realize that no such system would ever exist... the entire system, even if somehow placed in a vacuum (doing away with conductive losses) would still lose energy via infrared heat loss ... the most likely input of nat-gas in the current distillation of ethanol is estimated at 30 cubic feet nat-gas per gallon ethanol, the gas being valued calorically at over 30,000 btu. Unfortunately, ethanol contains less than 80,000 btu per gallon, so even if ALL OTHER INPUTS were provided by Angels with no human or resource inputs to consider, an EROEI of greater than 2.7 is IMPOSSIBLE if distillation techniques are anything "worldly".

I'll dose out some more after you chew on that one for awhile.

Is the Ethanol Mandate Likely to be Repealed?

Just a note about User 237607...

The idea that algae would be used as feedstock for alcohol is fairly puzzling for someone "so well versed" in his subject matter.

Algae can be nearly 40% kerogen type oil... it is a feedstock for synthetic diesel, not alcohol. The "green" remainder may be processed perhaps, but would be extraordinarily inefficient, IN COMPARISON TO THE BIODIESEL SO PRODUCED.

If algal oil ever becomes a large scale alternative fuel, the wasted energy used in converting the "green residue" into alcohol would already have been obviated by the better use of that energy and investment in greater algae production... for more biodiesel.

Think of it like scientific resource allocation, AFTER a breakthrough technology emerges... in this case large scales are needed for any solution to this overall fuel scarcity problem, but also if a large scale solution becomes a reality, other processes would now exist in a new paradigm.

One more reason that the car of the future will most likely be powered by hybrid turbodiesel-electrics.

Is the Ethanol Mandate Likely to be Repealed?

So much disinformation on ethanol that it just screams for some "Objectivity"...

First of all, corn (or other higher rank feedstock) ethanol's extremely energy intensive distillation phase make the nonsense of "we can make ethanol for $1 a gallon" nearly impossible if nat-gas or other heat source fuel is even remotely priced near market costs of the recent past. And you can Fuggediboutit at todays prices.

Secondly, pining away for "cellulosic" is missing some basic input costs likely to burst that particular bubble. The diesel fuel alone for transporting large volumes of "switchgrass" or other feedstock to a processing plant probably eats up any net end value as an energy source, and let's try not to forget the laborers, irrigation pumping, and land cost as realistic inputs to true cost...

The problem with all these "renewable" fuels is... they really aren't renewable. Without hydrocarbons as an accessory before the fact... or limitless fusion power, that is.

You simply cannot distill large amounts of alcohol without massive heat inputs... from... (drumroll) cheap (read: hydrocarbon) fuels. Better to just use the nat-gas in the car engine in the first place... and eat the corn. T-Boone ain't dumb.

I can hear the objections to this reasoning already... "Boy, it sure would be nice if something that didn't need massive distillation energy would be feasible", (and that is just what excited many about butanol)... or... "Boy, I'll bet some scientists already perfected this but the oil companies bought the patents"...

But the reality is... To make bio-butanol or other higher order alcohol fuel (from non-hydrocarbon source) isn't any piece of cake either... witness the extremely difficult tasks in solving the solubility concentration/toxicity... problems. If it was easy we would already see it... maybe in a decade there might be a breakthru making EROEI a non-issue, but knowing science and engineering, and remembering Newton's thermodynamic truths about TANSTAAFL, I have to doubt it.