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Corn Shortage Hampers US Ethanol Production
drdread66 writes "A nationwide corn shortage brought on by last year's drought has started to curtail ethanol production. While this shouldn't be surprising to anyone, it raises public policy issues regarding ethanol usage requirements in motor fuel. Given that the energy efficiency of ethanol fuel is questionable at best, is it time to lift the mandate for ethanol in our gasoline?"
... As long as we can drive around cars! Cleaner burning cars too!
Short answer: Yes.
Long answer: No, it is, in fact, way past time.
Next question?
Least efficient way of making the stuff. The tractors burn more diesel harvesting the stuff than the energy it will produce. Greenwashing at its finest. There are better ways of producing ethanol like from legitimate byproducts with the help of industrial waste heat but that's not what they're doing in the USA. Far too many people on the ethanol subsidy gravy train over there.
Kill the corn subsidies, period. They prop up the house of cards that hold the corth ethanol and HFCS industries that would otherwise not exist because they can't survive in a real capital market.
The sooner these tax-payer-subsidized industries get the rug pulled from under them, the sooner things like cellulosic ethanol and other *real* technological innovations can come to fruition.
Corn ethanol is and probably always will be a handout to the farming states. It takes more oil to grow the corn for ethanol than we save from blending ethanol into our engines.
The rest of us are screwed over by this. It would be better for the economy and the environment to just calculate out how much profit the farmers are getting and just hand out yearly checks for that amount. But that would be socialism and we can't have any of that.
Like 99.9% of government laws and regulations, we never should have had a mandate of ethanol in gas. Its bad for cars, makes no economic sense, and is actually less green (you've got to use more oil to make corn-based ethanol than it will save)
If we are going to use ethanol, it makes sense to use sugar like Brazil. Unfortunately the US has a pretty terrible climate for growing sugar except in a few key areas, and those few key areas have lobbied for massive tariffs on the importation of sugar, making it cost-prohibitive to import sugar from the areas of the world where it makes sense to grow sugar.
The US farming industry is a mess. Honestly, unless you are a factory farm, you're almost better off to buy an unproductive piece of ground, make a half-assed effort of farming it, take out crop insurance and live off the proceeds of that.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
While the overwhelming majority of corn turned into fuel ethanol is not human consumable, it is used as feed for livestock. The economic implications have already hit. Food prices are rising, as producers get squeezed. End consumers don't want more expensive meat. This goes the entire way up the stack, with pricing accordingly.
Not only that, but every acre of ethanol production corn is one less acre of food for human or animal consumption. So, veggies and starches go up as well. Not as much as livestock feed prices, but quite a bit.
Gets better. You need to grow the corn in advance of pouring it into a gas tank. Makes sense, right? Which means you'll have a minimum of one year of higher food prices across the board, as that is how far in advance (minimum) that corn production is locked in. It would be more intelligent to scale things back down slowly, but I doubt it'll happen. Worse, the EPA wants to move to 15% ethanol. Which is VERY bad for small engines not built for it. That's a couple billion dollars of motorcycles, lawn mowers, leaf blowers, generators, etc that may be damaged by higher ethanol rates. This sort of thing needs to be planned out a decade in advance, ideally.
Only the corn lobby, politicians accepting campaign donations and "environmentalists" made out on this one. Yes, some less bright environmentalists pushed for it as increasing "renewable" energy. Just because something is technically renewable doesn't mean we should do it. Burning food in our cars isn't the ideal solution. The environment and everyone in the US buying food took the hit for them. Thanks guys.
I'd rant about synthetic hydrocarbon fuels pulled from atmospheric carbon and cracked water (to provide hydrogen and oxygen), but I honestly don't feel like it at the moment. Back to programming the firewall.
Should be 'A nationwide corn shortage brought on by ethanol mandates, as designed by the people who imposed them'.
The concept was that by establishing a market for ethanol as a fuel, it would then justify investment in other technologies to generate ethanol. The bootstrap would significantly reduce the risk of developing those technologies. Now is the time to cut the subsidies for Corn based ethanol production and to push the alternatives.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
The people that really care about fuel quality -- the hot rodders -- like ethanol. The following quote is about E85 (85% ethanol) -- "When it comes to using E85 I can’t tell you enough how nice it is to tune for cars with this fuel. Burn temperatures are lower, initial octane rating is much higher than gasoline at ~105, and it’s not uncommon at all to gain 40bhp+ by using E85 alone with no other changes aside from tuning." This is from a professional tuner's article on a popular Volvo site (http://www.matthewsvolvosite.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=54435). Both ethanol and methanol are very high octane fuels which burn extremely well in piston engines. They don't have as much energy per gallon as gasoline but for power output in an engine tuned for them they are better.