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The Great Ethanol Scam
theodp writes "Over at BusinessWeek, Ed Wallace is creating quite a stir, reporting that not only is ethanol proving to be a dud as a fuel substitute, but there is increasing evidence that it is destroying engines in large numbers. Before lobbyists convince the government to increase the allowable amount of ethanol in fuel to 15%, Wallace suggests it's time to look at ethanol's effect on smog, fuel efficiency, global warming emissions, and food prices. Wallace concedes there will be some winners if the government moves the ethanol mandate to 15% — auto mechanics, for whom he says it will be the dawn of a new golden age."
Instead of using corn (worse than sugar cane), soy beans and bio diesel would be beter. I always thought that diesel engines get better mileage.
"Does the average citizen understand what this means?" No. Does the average /.er?
More than anything, this cartoon puts me off the whole ethanol idea. It still creeps me out seeing it again now.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Stop the subsidies, tax carbon to account for externalities, and then let the market decide. The negative effects of biofuels have been on display ever since the Dutch dropped palm oil. Instead of the government pushing this obviously failed product, they should make sure that consumers bear the entire cost of their decisions and let companies develop a way to reduce fossil fuel consumption. And less biofuels means the price of my beer goes down, dammit! Won't someone think of my beer?
http://bgcommonsense.blogspot.com
it's not ethanol itself, it's just the way US produce it... none of those arguments would apply to sugar cane. about the engines, brazil is using pure ethanol for quite sometime and it just doesn't destroy the engines the way tfa implies. if it's happening on US, maybe you should take another look at the auto industries.
Everything I've been reading suggests that ethanol has no advantages, other than for the subsidized corn producers. It takes more energy to grow the corn to be converted to ethanol than what you get out. You get lower mileage from running on a gasoline-ethanol mix than on pure gasoline. You produce less quantity of pollutants per amount of fuel burned, but this is pretty close to offset by the larger amount of fuel that you have to burn to go the same distance.
Maybe I'm wrong. I drive a diesel car that I run on biodiesel made from used restaurant oil, so I'm definitely not against biofuels in principle, but everything I've ever heard or read makes it seem like ethanol does not actually do anybody any good. Its only purpose is to make it SEEM like somebody is doing something, to make us feel good. But it raises the price of corn, and now, it appears, it destroys your car's engine as well.
It doesn't have to be a linear curve, dude. It could be 30% at 15%, and 50% at 90%.
Not saying anything about the veracity of the article, just sayin'.
It doesn't matter that bio-ethanol always was so utterly bone-headed from a thermo-dynamic and food-price point of view (and now this as well) - utterly wrong, right from the start, with back of the envelope calculations.
Some people can make vast amounts of money out of it under cover of doing the "right thing" morally (much like the war on drugs), and hence it gets government support.
Azural - instrumentals
Not of ethanol, I'm really skeptical of it. It takes so much energy to make, I'm not sure what the point is.
I'm more skeptical of the other things listed. An E85 vehicle typically will run on E100 with no damage. The only real issue is that if you let the engine cool down, it won't start since ethanol won't vaporize properly in a room temperature engine. But it won't cause any damage, and merely putting 100% gas in the tank (assuming there is room, pumping out ethanol if necessary) until the percentage gets high enough to start the engine is all that is needed.
Also, ethanol doesn't reduce "gas mileage" (the words used in the article) 40-60%, it reduces FUEL mileage 40-60% by volume. This is because ethanol contains less energy per gallon. So consumption goes up, but what you really want to measure is energy efficiency, and burning ethanol isn't significantly less energy efficient (note, I'm not speaking of the energy required to make the ethanol, merely the combustion in the engine). So as long as the fuel is priced correctly and you have the space for the ethanol needed, it isn't an efficiency issue.
I do have problems with E10 ("standard gas") more than E85. With E85 at least you know what you're getting into. With E10, we are made to pay regular rates (or even more!) per gallon for the fuel even though it contains 4% less energy than straight gas.
For the record, I'm against a move to E15. We'll end up paying the same amount again (per gallon), while getting another 2% worse economy (per gallon). And it doesn't seem to decrease our dependence on foreign oil, since the corn used to make it is generally grown using nitrogen fertilizers made from petroleum.
I still like the idea of flex-fuel, but we need to find better wats to make alternative fuels before they represent a real viable alternative.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
It would not be a problem if the government were not messing with the economics of it all. I have no problem with a corn farmer selling his crop to the highest bidder.
In this case the highest bidder should be the food industry not the energy+government industry.
Obama should know better than most what the high price of food is doing to Africa. (I lived for any years in Africa myself)
That is not exactly true. The power output of an internal combustion depends not only on the energy content of the fuel but on on other factors as well, such as, *VERY IMPORTANT* compression ratio. The higher the better and ethanol allows the use of considerably higher compression ratios without detonation. It doesn't compensate the lower calorific power of the ethanol (25% less mileage) but for the same engine, ethanol usually has a little higher rated power (it can operate on higher RPMs).
I think our society needs to begin to understand that all of the dense, useful energy they are pulling out of the ground took hundreds of millions of years to create. Wasting such a valuable finite resource is useful if and only if it is used to transition to an energy system that uses that day's sun energy to do that day's tasks.
The energy problem is quite simple. Stop zoning cities for cars. As soon as the economy is back in swing, slowly raise the gas tax and funnel all of that money directly into solar and battery technology research. Raise electric consumption taxes for all fossil fuel burning power plants to fund the construction of solar and wind. Build some trains that run off of solar energy sources on main highways. Connect those to neighborhoods with short range electric buses, bikes, and small sugar cane burning scooters.
Aspiration to and the living of Western styles of life are a much bigger problem than over population. America uses much more energy than the 5% of global consumption that would be more reasonable if you want to make population the biggest problem.
That doesn't make population growth a non problem.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
The ad hom aside, I've never met an "enviro wacko" who supported corn ethanol.
In fact, anyone who's given any thought to it at all, and subscribes to the wacko idea that our civilization can't handle environmental upheaval of the scale predicted by real scientists... is against the idea of using our topsoil to power our craptacular personal transport. No "enviro wacko" supports an energy infrastructure that damages topsoil that is already in trouble (guess what black gooey stuff is the raw material for organics re-introduced to soil overworked to sterility?) and probably makes the GHG problem worse. And what functional human being wants to use food resources to power Cadillac Escalades?
In other words, you can't blame those of us who think the biosphere of our planet is required for our continued survival (wacky, right?). However, feel free to blame jingoists who marketed this monstrosity as "energy security".
We Brazilians use ethanol since some 30 years. Our engines are doing well, thanks. /.ers should know better and /. should not carry such misinformation.
Google "history brazil ethanol" and "ethanol octane".
Ethanol is better. End of story.
Unless you're involved with oil trade, then it's bad for you.
If the goal is to stop importing energy then we need to start drilling for more oil here in the USA. The article points out how ethanol can destroy an engine not designed for it, which is a good reason to not put ethanol in an engine not designed for it but a bad reason to stop putting so much ethanol in our gas tanks.
A good reason to not use ethanol as a fuel is because it has a very poor return on energy invested. The fact that people are debating whether or not one actually gets a net energy gain is a good enough sign for me. Even poor performers like solar power has a energy return on investment (EROI) of 5 to 1. Most energy sources in common use have an EROI somewhere around 10 to 1, such as coal, nuclear, hydroelectric, wind, and geothermal. Petro-fuels like gasoline and natural gas have an EROI that is even higher on average, it varies from well to well and will go down over time as the good wells are used up but still remains well above 10 to 1.
Fuels like diesel fuel, gasoline, and kerosene are very useful because they remain liquid over a wide range of temperatures at atmospheric pressure, have a relatively high energy density, are able to lubricate the pumps and engines they run through, and most of all it is cheap and plentiful.
The USA can be energy independent. If the yahoos in California would allow drilling off of its coast and the yahoos in DC would allow drilling in Alaska we would have a good start. Then those yahoos in DC need to stop holding up the building of more nuclear power plants. We need coal, uranium, natural gas and oil. We have it we just need the politicians to stop changing the rules and get out of the way so capitalism and commerce can meet the supply and demand naturally.
The meat of all this is that this is a problem of politics. We can't drill for oil because some tree hugger would rather think of the fish than people freezing to death. This is also ignoring the fact that the oil is seeping out of the ground and washing up onto California beaches. If we drill for that oil the it won't end up killing the fish. The majority of oil spills have been from oil shipped over the sea. There has been very little lost when pumped through pipes and shipped over land. If the tree huggers want to see fewer oil spills then we need to stop shipping it from other nations.
Some of those tree huggers might just rather we not use any oil at all. That's fine while your riding your bike through southern California but those of us in the Midwest need diesel fuel to harvest the corn and wheat those tree huggers like to eat. Those bike tires had to come from somewhere you know, like perhaps crude oil shipped on diesel trains and trucks.
There may come a time when the EROI of drilled oil might not make it worthwhile to use for fuel any more. We will still need oil for chain oil and bicycle tires. At that point it may make sense to synthesize hydrocarbons. The energy to synthesize those hydrocarbons has to come from somewhere. At that time, likely many decades from now, we will have to use things like nuclear power to create the hydrocarbons we need. Given the many desirable properties of hydrocarbons as a fuel we may still use hydrocarbons as a means to store and transport energy.
Ethanol is a scam. We have better alternatives. We need to stop subsidizing ethanol and put our efforts into something sustainable for our energy needs. In fact the federal government should stop subsidizing all energy and let the market figure things out. If you think the government is the solution then you do not recognize the problem.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Oh, so using a fuel different from the fuel specified by the manufacturer can destroy your engine. I don't think that's news. Ethanol is corrosive to plastic and rubber.
There is a general assumption that if you go to a gas station and purchase gas from a pump labeled "gas", it will not damage your vehicle.
If the pumps are spitting out higher than 10% ethanol, the chain of responsibility is pretty damn clear. Sue the gas seller.
True. But how often do you test the gas you buy? The damage can occur some time after purchase, not to mention tracking down which gas station is the culprit.
While there are many reason's why the US approach to ethanol as a fuel is misguided, I'm hesitant to jump on this bandwagon yet. I'd like to see some independent research on the issue. Ethanol collects water which can cause all kinds of problems in a vehicle where the fuels just sits (read isn't used often). But I wonder how Brazil has managed to use Ethanol for so long without all of the fuel pumps dieing if this problem hasn't been solved somewhere.
Think Deeply.
I think there might be some truth to "Ethanol ruins engines not designed to burn ethanol", but since most cars built in the last 10 years or so are designed around at least partial ethanol fuels, that's only going to affect a (fairly small) subset of people. Whether it's entirely fair to screw around with the people who have older cars is another question, as is how much damage ethanol fuels actually do to those engines.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
E10 costs the same per gallon as straight gasoline, sometimes more - yet I get at least a 10% drop in fuel economy.
The station closest to my house switched from Mobil to Sunoco a couple months ago. My "winter mileage" never recovered (always get worse mileage in the winter; in April, it comes back up about 20%). Then I quit that station and started filling up at Hess. Immediately gained 2 MPG, because I didn't get E10.
We always hear stories about all gas stations getting "the same gas" but the gas at this station most definitely changed when it went from Mobil to Sunoco - my gas mileage this spring at that station was definitely lower than at the same station last spring.
Sunoco in my area always sells E10. Mobil & Hess don't.
I just find your wording quite fascinating.
"The only thing wrong with ethanol is that big corporate farms are subsidized" really means... GOVERNMENT is the problem for subsidizing
"If the U.S. just allowed the importation of sugar cane "... really means GOVERNMENT is the problem for preventing free trade.
Yet somehow you manage to make your point without using the name of the entity to blame.
After reading all the articles linked to, I noticed not one mentioned one part of the scam. Business Week and Chicago Tribune said the ethanol was corn based. However the same amount of land would produce more ethanol if sugarcane was used instead. With the world's largest biofuels program Brazil uses sugarcane. And switchgrass produces even more. Another benefit of using switchgrass to make ethanol is that it will grow on marginal land other crops aren't grown on.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Apparently there is some difficult understanding here; allow me to provide the information that you seemed to neglect.
95% ethanol doesn't ruin cars designed to run it. However, 15% ethanol will ruin cars designed to run 10%.
See the difference here? If we go all ethanol, fine, do it. This wishy washy crap is just horrible and suckling up to the gas needs of countries which hold us by the balls due to gas dependency.
Brazillians seem to have a good climate for cane sugar, some of the US may or may not as well. I am not an agricultural specialist.
Do you know how labor intensive sugar cane is? Or what kind of soil/weather conditions are required?
It might be viable in Brazil, but it isn't really an option in the US.
Honda doesn't build inefficient engines, which is why they haven't built a flex fuel vehicle. Since you can't dynamically change the compression ratio of a motor depending on the octane of the fuel in the tank, there is no way to make an efficient "flex fuel" engine.
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Of course, to do this today a farmer would need to file applications with the government for the 'right' to distill fuel for his own use from his own crops. To distill alcohol for personal use without a fuel permit or to, gasp! drink it , would be a federal offense.
Brazil has been deforesting to grow food because already-cleared land has been converted to sugar cane production for Ethanol. The Amazon may already be past the point of collapse. Ethanol is a major source of ecological destruction in Brazil.
The big problem with corn is that most corn is grown continuously without crop rotation. That means that not only is it fertilized with oil (so any energy not coming from sunlight is coming from dino juice anyway, and it has a carbon debt) but it also destroys the soil. So it's all bad. Also, many people depend on that corn for food. Making corn fuel feedstocks raises the price of corn for food, because less food corn is produced.
IF you RTFA you'd see that it's not engines being ruined by ethanol, it's fuel pumps and pickup lines. Running alcohol requires a major refit, and many of those vehicles no longer even have their original engines.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
yeah, and you got it completely backwards, what he says is that all cars run on some degree of ethanol mixed gasoline, but some cars run on pure ethanol. Nowhere does the wiki article refute his claim.
i find your lack of faith in science disturbing!
Could the concept of overpopulation be too closely tied to illegal immigration?
That's where you lost me. Illegal immigration may make us look bad on paper, but the environment doesn't care if a Hispanic is driving a car in Texas or Mexico.
And, if you're using that reasoning, then why stop at illegal immigration? Granted, we probably couldn't revoke green cards and work visas from people already here, but, if you think that illegal immigrants are harming America by increasing its' numbers, then why would someone who filled out the correct paperwork be any more eco-friendly?
Personally, I can agree with your assessment that the world needs a lower population. All the food in the world won't help as much as a few crates full of condoms, well distributed.
As for why effective birth control plans are never mentioned, you can blame the religious right for that.
One would expect that Brazil's poorest and most exploited people - agricultural workers and sugar cane cutters - would be among the first to benefit from the new wealth sugar cane production has brought to Brazil
Um, why would anyone expect that? It's not that there is no demand for workers to cut cane... it's that any idiot can cut sugar cane all day. THAT'S why they still make dirt money... because they have no skill whatsoever and are easily replaced.
Funny you should say that. The evidence seems to suggest that you are wrong. Mere access to health services for women seems to go a long way towards stabilizing population (and reduces horrible deaths from witch-doctor abortions). No draconian, gender-balance-altering, infanticide-encouraging policy needed.
And as for any sort of "selection" regarding humanity: That horse left the barn 12,000 years ago. We're all human, and astonishingly similar. The "weakest" of us have made huge contributions to our civilization. We tend to see the difference between a 130 IQ and a 90 IQ as vast, but it's a matter of perspective. An alien new to our planet probably wouldn't immediately make such a distinction.
My original point stands, I think. Rapid population growth is largely an artifact of ethnic and religious conflict, and responds well to public policy. In context, "being fruitful" isn't even dumb; up until this last century, it was perfectly rational for a group to multiply as much as possible (with some exceptions, for local resource constraints).
Personally, I think the raw intelligence of any given human being is indistinguishable from others, barring a condition like cretinism or Down's Syndrome. And even with such a condition, our decision to take care of members of our groups who couldn't survive on their own has paid off in a huge way; it may be one of the most successful adaptations in our planet's history.
Take any human being, give them nutrition and access to health care, a little math and logic, some history; add a dash of rhetoric to give them immunity to marketing, PR, propaganda (which was the real culprit in Idiocracy, not genetics). Et voila, another "genius".