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Lawmakers Out To Kill the Corn-Based Ethanol Mandate
mdsolar tips this report:
"Teams of lawmakers are working hard on bills to cut corn-based ethanol out of the country's biofuel mandate entirely, according to National Journal. It's the latest twist in America's fraught relationship with biofuels, which started in 2005 when Congress first mandated that a certain amount of biofuel be mixed into the country's fuel supply. The Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) was then expanded in 2007, with separate requirements for standard biofuel on the one hand and cellulosic and advanced biofuels on the other. The latter are produced from non-food products like cornstalks, agricultural waste, and timber industry cuttings. The RFS originally called for 100 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol in 2010, 250 million in 2011, and 500 million in 2012. Instead, the cellulosic industry failed to get off the ground. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was forced to revise the mandate down to 6.5 million in 2010, and all the way down to zero in 2012. The cellulosic mandate has started to slowly creep back up, and 2014 may be the year when domestic production of cellulosic ethanol finally takes off. But then last month EPA did something else for the first time: it cut down the 2014 mandate for standard biofuel, produced mainly from corn. And now Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) and Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) have teamed up on legislation that would eliminate the standard biofuel mandate entirely."
Maybe this corn used for ethanol can be used for food again?
Or, at the least animal feed, so the price at the grocery store isn't as bad, and farmers/ranchers are not as pinched as before.
Congress mandated technology that doesn't exist and it didn't magically materialize?
Full disclosure: I know people who own a large, politically-connected cellulosic ethanol company and am roughly familiar with the challenges of scaling the technology. It's coming, some day; these things are hard.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Probably a good thing. Using corn or other edible crops has been linked to rising food prices that have been painful in the third world, the US, and Europe.
Record Food Prices Linked to Biofuels
How biofuels contribute to the food crisis
Biofuel rule puts turkey farmers in fret over corn costs
EU votes on crucial cap on biofuels made from food crops
There are other ways to do it.
'Biofuel from non-food crops within 15 years'
U.S. to Pay Farmers for Non-Food Crops for Biofuels, Vilsack Says
Quest for cheap, nonfood biofuel starts with a brewery
Of course it may not be popular is some states.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
GrumpyCatGood.jpg
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
It also damages two-stroke engines.
Diesel engines are twice as efficient at extracting energy from fuel as are gas engines. The US should do what Europe has done and basically fully embrace diesel fueled vehicles for their efficiency.
No, you won't be breaking any 0-60 records, which might make it difficult for the MURKA! FUCK YEAH! crowd to accept, but when you can drive from Bakersfield to Baltimore on 100 gallons of diesel, it's worthy of serious consideration.
I am dismayed that this administration is so openly hostile towards diesel technology when it would seem to be a very simple, very clean, very cheap, and very easy solution both in the short and long term. You can buy a Jetta TDI cheap and get 55mpg on the highway. That beats the snot out of any Hybrid in overall cost.
This NEVER made sense environmentally, economically or technically.
Technically, we hit the "blend wall" at about 10%. Above that amount, gasoline engines start to have issues with Ethanol. Rubber seals, hoses and plastic parts in fuel systems start having reduced lifespan. Above 10% some engines start having other internal issues. Gas mileage is reduced because Ethanol has a lower energy density. Ethanol is a water magnet, it mixes with water easily and is hard to keep "dry" so rusting and corrosion becomes more common in fuel systems.
Environmentally, the production of ethanol doesn't really reduce emissions of C02 when you count the whole process of growing, harvesting, storing, transporting, processing into ethanol, transporting, blending and transporting the product again. It was at best a wash. Then when you consider how much more fertilizer, pesticides and tilling add to the environmental impact it clearly becomes a negative.
Economically, the case is even worse. The whole process of producing ethanol is both labor and capital expensive. It is obviously more expensive as a motor fuel. Then when you consider what has happened to food prices as corn (a base part of much of what we eat as well as feed for animals we use for food) prices have gone up.
But what about or dependance on foreign Oil imports? It helped, but was it worth it? T Boon Pickens has the answer to that. He thinks that we are stupid to convert food into fuel when we could be using abundant Natural Gas for a motor fuel. Converting gasoline engines to use natural gas is not that hard (albeit harder than 10% Ethanol) it works great with reduced range due to energy density. Refueling times can be comparable to gasoline and a large distribution network already exists in much of the nation.
It's time. Do away with this mistake.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I looked at several ethanol proposals back in the 2000's, every single one I took a pass on investing in because it was obvious that I would loose my shirt the second the government pulled the rug. These things, just like wind, have never been or never could be profitable without the subsidy. Anyone who was dumb enough to invest in these things deserves to lose their shirt. I completely gave up on renewable energy in 2008 when it was clear to me that no one wanted real solutions, just government handouts. I saw several technologies and processes never built because they were profitable on their own and everyone wanted something with a government handout attached.
Another major issue is with renewable power generation that isn't wind or solar. I can list off 10 projects that the utilities conspired to kill because they would be able to drive down the price of electricity in an area forcing them to shut down their legacy generation due to oversupply. The wind/solar mandate is the culprit in many of these cases as they have no choice but to buy X amount of wind/solar and they have to buy at the public market (electricity is traded electricity on a market based system in regional markets) so anything other than what they have and the feds require is a major threat for them.
Change the Volt to a Hybrid VW TDI and I would run down to the dealership right now screaming "TAKE MY MONEY!"
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
In his new book "Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity" Lester Brown writes: "Between 2005 and 2011, the grain used to produce fuel for cars climbed from 41 million to 127 million tons—nearly a third of the U.S. grain harvest. (See Figure 4–1.) The United States is trying to replace oil fields with corn fields to meet part of its automotive fuel needs. The massive diversion of grain to fuel cars has helped drive up food prices, leaving low-income consumers everywhere to suffer some of the most severe food price inflation in history. As of mid-2012, world wheat, corn, and soybean prices were roughly double their historical levels."
He is pessimistic about cellulosic ethanol: "The unfortunate reality is that the road to this ambitious cellulosic biofuel goal is littered with bankrupt firms that tried and failed to develop a process that would produce an economically viable fuel. Despite having the advantage of not being directly part of the food supply, cellulosic ethanol has strong intrinsic characteristics that put it at a basic disadvantage compared with grain ethanol, so it may never become economically viable." http://www.earthpolicy.org/books/fpep/fpepch4
Switchgrass, Sugar Cane, and Hemp all provide more sustainable, easier-to-convert alternatives to creating ethanol, which, even with the subsidy, was more expensive per mile to operate vehicles with when made using corn.
These alternatives cost about 30% less to convert and are easier to grow.
That's a problem with emissions controls, not with two-stroke vs four-stroke vs rotary engine design. Two-stroke engines are lighter for the same power, so they're common in tools, as is the lack of emissions controls of any sort, but the latter is the real problem.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
lets turn all that ethanol producing infrastructure in to booze making infrastructure, that should keep the cost of booze down, and the liquor stores well stocked
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Remember, that ethanol is present as an oxygenate to prevent carbon monoxide and soot. The discontinuation of the use of MBTE (methyl tert-butyl ether) left ethanol the primary one. Methanol is even worse for engines than ethanol. Whatever the shortcomings of ethanol from an engineering basis, it is non-toxic in reasonable quantities.
US diesel fuel has been "low sulfur" (500 PPM) for quite a while now. Recently -- and by "recently" I mean since 2006, not "a few years" -- the US switched from "low sulfur" to "ultra-low sulfur" (15 PPM).
By the way, you know biodiesel? 0 PPM sulfur.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
So what's news, the OIL lobby pays politicians to shutdown ethanol production as this would cut into their profits.
.. said at a lunch hosted by the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry's top lobbying group`. ref
'"This issue affects chainsaws and chain restaurants," Rob Green
Lets see...
There was the 100MPG carburetor,
the water-powered dune buggy,
the overunity generator,
cold fusion,
and at least 6 of Tesla's inventions.
Cellulose is the only way to go
To borrow an old joke: Cellulosic Ethanol is the fuel of the future -- and always will be.
From a chemistry or molecular biology perspective the concept looks great -- similar Hexose sugar units are in Sugar / Starch / Cellulose, so why not use the most abundant and cheapest material? The problem looks different from the perspective of evolutionary biology, however. Naturally occurring Cellulase enzymes, sourced from a wide range of different organisms, have each undergone a long process of optimization through evolutionary history. Yet every enzyme remains extremely slow and inefficient (compared to enzymes that process sugars and starches). Why is that?
I believe the reason is that Cellulose (or rather, the Cellulose-in-Lignin composite matrix that plants use) is the end result of a very long evolutionary arms race between plants and their consumers. It has evolved to be resistant to microbial degradation -- never totally resistant, but just tough enough to ensure no critter gets a free lunch out of digesting it.
Of course, not all Cellulosic Ethanol need be derived from purely microbial techniques; chemical and chemical/biological hybrid processes might break the evolutionary deadlock. Others have suggested engineering the starting material itself, starting with plants designed to produce more easily digestible Cellulose (which brings up the problem of how well they would defend themselves against insects and pathogens). Unfortunately, in each of these alternate solutions, the amount of work needed is enormous, and it is possible we are simply out of time, with regards to the funding for this sort of research.