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Turning Soybeans Into Diesel Fuel Is Costing Us Billions (npr.org)
This year, trucks and other heavy-duty motors in America will burn some 3 billion gallons of diesel fuel that was made from soybean oil. They're doing it, though, not because it's cheaper or better, but because they're required to, by law. From a report: The law is the Renewable Fuel Standard, or RFS. For some, especially Midwestern farmers, it's the key to creating clean energy from American soil and sun. For others -- like many economists -- it's a wasteful misuse of resources. And the most wasteful part of the RFS, according to some, is biodiesel. It's different from ethanol, a fuel that's made from corn and mixed into gasoline, also as required by the RFS. In fact, gasoline companies probably would use ethanol even if there were no law requiring it, because ethanol is a useful fuel additive -- at least up to a point. That's not true of biodiesel. "This is an easy one, economically. Biodiesel is very expensive, relative to petroleum diesel," says Scott Irwin, an economist at the University of Illinois, who follows biofuel markets closely. He calculates that the extra cost for biodiesel comes to about $1.80 per gallon right now, meaning that the biofuel law is costing Americans about $5.4 billion a year.
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The plan with all these energy schemes is that once you allow businesses to come into existence around them, they may figure out how to do it efficiently enough to become profitable. Sometimes it works like in the case of solar or wind, sometimes not so much like with ethanol.
Way too many of you don't actually need to be driving every day but still are. I realize that's immaterial to food/resources shipping, but it's still the bulk of the weight of emissions and fuel waste. What we're looking at here isn't the real problem. The real problem is wasteful employers demanding their wage slaves jump through these unnecessary extra hoops just out of some blind devotion to an obsolete tradition, or else some sick psychotic enjoyment of the sense of control it provides them to be able to order them to do in some cases even hours of unpaid work before and after each shift.
But it's important to know that in 2020 a new low sulfur standard on bunker fuel is going to come into play. That's going to put shipping in direct competition with diesel for refinery output, and will likely create a significant crunch in that regard. The right time to have killed off biodiesel's subsidies is either "several years ago" or "after the market adjusts to the new low sulfur standards", not during the crunch / adaptation timeperiods.
I mean, you can make the diesel crunch worse if you want if you're willing to drive up commodities prices further in order to accelerate the transition to electric shipping. There's a logic there. But as far as timing goes, diesel is going to be in a tight spot as it is without taking a lot of alternative fuel off the market.
Santa Ana Winds: Like the Dustbowl, but with awards shows.
We need to get away from these 'mature' technologies in transportation sooner or later, so why not sooner? Fast-track it.
That might all be true, but has it occurred to any of those people that cost may not be the only factor that was considered when the law was created?
Omg, the sky is falling, run for the hills - somebody is thinking about something else than profit, profit, profit!
Stuff made from plants is renewable. Sooner or later we will have to switch to renewable, because - surprise - oil is only renewable on a scale of millions of years. So you can over a period of some decades slowly transition to renewables - with probably increased overall costs, definitely higher costs initially because everything is more expensive when you start it - or you can keep burning oil until it is actually over and then watch civilization crumble in the price shock.
The last numbers I could find in a quick search was biodiesel wholesale prices above $4 per gallon. That means with taxes, distribution and profits for the petrol station, it'll be somewhere in the $5-$6 range per gallon by my naive estimate.
Imagine the price of gas suddenly went up into that price range. I bet you know a lot of people who would have to make some hard life choices.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
How many more of these do we need before we reach a critical acceptance level that rural America is a complete albatross?
legislative agenda
members
Such a biased summary, doesn't say anything about the added pollution from straight diesel. At least TFA (yeah yeah, I know we're not supposed to RTFA but I did anyway) does briefly bring up that point, but just as quickly dismisses it as a non-starter. I contend that TFA has not provided enough info to determine whether or not the pollution aspect is a non-starter and I for one am curious to hear more from that side.
It's just as bad, if not worse than the tar sands. If we are going to insist on using biofuels, do it with algae ponds out in the middle of the ocean somewhere.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Another disastrous Bush policy we're still living with
The last thing we need is facts or logic to affect our actions. I feel good about myself when we do 'green' things. We're reducing carbon emissions, lower sea levels, and saving the planet. We're creating useless work for farmers too. Cost is irrelevant. What? It costs money and actually increases carbon emissions per unit or work delivered? What part of it sounds good and makes me feel good do you not understand? Move on!
While you are at it, get back into the Paris accord so we can spend trillions and hopefully reduce temps by thousandths of a degree Celsius. Our models have worked to predict future climate and we are quite sure of the thousandths of a degree reduction. See, the ice caps are gone.
I feel great! Thanks.
Yeah, Great Lakes is capitalized - just wanted to give someone a further chance to whine.
There is starvation occurring all over our world and we have no better idea than to convert food that could be saving lives into fuel to burn? At a higher cost than petroleum fuel? Starving individuals and families can't eat the less expensive petroleum product. Who makes these decisions about who eats and who does not - who lives and who dies? Particularly when there is a better alternative?
One has to ask if this is just ignorance or willful disregard.
The ethanol lobby beat Obama, Trump and all the congresses since enactment.
In what universe is it a reasonable expectation that the amount of energy required to produce a fuel will be less then them amount of energy it produced when burns? Answer none.
The question is , is scientifically _possible_ to create an efficient enough process that the energy in the plant material itself ( which is basically solar energy if you think about it) is more then the amount of energy needed to process the plant into food.
otherwise what you have is at best something like a battery. A way to store energy. We do need better batteries but this doesn't look like one.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Save the Soy?!
OK, biodiesel and ethanol for liquid fuels were interesting ideas but aren't panning out as planned. Ethanol pushes up corn prices, biodiesel is expensive, no one has a commercial viable process for creating alcohol from cellulose (the great hope around 2000).
At the same time, we have coal plants which are being shuttered in favor of natural gas and/or solar. No, wait, keep reading! I'm not going to advocate burning coal!
Thing is, we have lots of biological fuels, they're just solid instead of liquid. We have corn plants (the whole thing, not just the corn kernels), soybean plants (ditto, the whole plant), overgrown forests, all sorts of stuff. It all burns. So how 'bout we take the trees, brush, switchgrass, vote-buying...er...subsidized crop plants, everything, and just burn it in reconfigured coal plants? Dry the plants, grind them to powder and dump them in. Boom, done, and probably way much more efficient than trying to create liquid fuels.
I'm sure it's harder than I'm making it seem. I don't know if it's economical (but that hasn't stopped us so far). Gotta be better than what we're doing now.
The excitement over hydrogen started as soon as a technique was developed to separate it directly from petroleum. Fuel cells had been in use for decades, but were uninteresting until they became a petrol product.
Virgin 'anything' oil will be expensive for Biodiesel. I used to use biodiesel exclusively. I drove almost 2 years using > 20 gallons of regular diesel. I bought the biodiesel in bulk from a local producer who ws making it from waste oil. With the subsidy it was usually about the same price as diesel. I bought fuel in bulk (200 gallon sat a time) which would 'fix' my fuel cost for however long it took me to burn 200 gallons of fuel. At 40+ MPG, it took a while :).
I stopped using biodiesel after a diesel fill rendered my car un-drivable due to the injection pump leaking so bad. I sent the pump out for re-seal and it ended up costing $1000ish to repair the injection pump due to corrosion inside. The Root cause was deemed to be water in the biofuel.
Once fixed, I haven't touched the special sauce. In general I'm not sorry I tried it, but it did seem to cause or as least exacerbate an injection pump issue, it got about 5% worse fuel economy, and seemed to make slightly less power. On the plus side, it usually smelled like Chinese food vs diesel exhaust stink.
I still have the car but has since sold my home Biodiesel fuel station.
Sooo glad you guys won WW2. It's been a nice planet, but time to call an end to the human race..
Stuff made from plants is renewable.
On the other hand stuff made from plants is, well... made from plants.
And there are only so many that you can grow at the same time.
If you produce bio-fuels by finding a new use for waste (e.g.: fermenting *plants waste* into ethanol, as done is some countries), then that's not a problem. In fact it's an advantage, now you can get even more value from the plants that you grow.
If you produce bio-fuels by growing specific plants for that (e.g: I might remember that in the US you tend to do that ?), then your fuel production if going to compete with your food production.
Will you plant crops that you will use to sell food ? Will you plant crops that you will use to produce fuel ?
Bio fuel production in the latter case can have a bad impact on food production, even more so if the bio-fuels are exported for a premium to much richer countries, whereas the already starving population can barely buy enough to feed themselves : the local population won't be able to afford food a higher price to increase the incentive to produce more food, while the other richer countries will be able to pay slightly more money to make sure they'll receive the fuel they crave.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
They aren't starving because we don't have enough food. It's not like those soybeans would go to feed them if only it weren't turned into fuel.
The tar sands mining is the world's largest environmental clean-up operation. They take dirty sand, wash the oil out and put the cleaned sand back. What is wrong with that?
I would call that a deal for a habitable planet
Honestly, I think it's worth it to maintain the farming infrastructure and expertise. If something ever disrupted global supply chains, it's nice to know that we could replace the food we currently import from other countries with stuff we grow ourselves.
I see it more as a civil defense thing than anything else.
Converting soybeans to fuel is a lot better than putting those soybeans into the food chain. Eating them turns men into Soy Boys.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Burning food in your car or truck is stupid.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Quite seriously Ethanol barely breaks even energy wise... it is at best a corrosive additive that wears our cars out faster with a slight to neglegible reduction in emissions. Corn Ethanol is nothing but a useless subsidy for corn farmers (they should be farming something else as corn is detrimental to the land as well and requires large amounts of fertilizer to mitigate the removal of nutrients from the soil)
Soy Biodiesel on the other hand while expensive produces more much more fuel per acre (and denser fuel at that) as well as requires 5-10x less energy input to grow and harvest it. Canola oil is even better... it even burns cleaner than regular diesel.
Soy is also very good for the soil as it is a legume and acutally improves the nitrogen content of the soil where it is planted.
..if it's made from waste oil, left over from cooking
A typical human adult not excercising burns roughly somewhere between 70-140 American calories an hour. Burning one calorie per second gives you roughly 4.2 kwatts or 5.6 horsepower. So it takes 3600 calories per hour per 5.6 horsepower or 640 calories per hour per horsepower. Trucks get about 5.6 miles per gallon of diesel which has 30,000 calories or about 5,300 calories per mile. That's enough to keep two healthy adult males alive a day per mile, or maybe a small family could squeak by. forget that soybeans aren't the best biodiesel crop to begin with, then realize it increases human food prices, drastically worsens agricultural pollution, takes up tons of farmland, and isn't anywhere near as cheap or efficent, or fungible as just putting some damn solar cells up nearby but off the farmland or if you must have energy production AND crops use wind and leave this Rube Goldberg live disaster from getting worse.
Or.... Market forces will work the way they always do. High oil prices due to the shortage will create an environment conducive to the development of alternative fuels and technologies. I suggest that this is the ONLY way this problem is going to be solved. Creating false economies for alternative fuels only creates unnecessary expense for the consumers of those fuels. The market works especially well in the face of scarcity of a resource. Everyone wants to solve those problems due to the huge economic rewards for the solution.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-biodiesel/u-s-sets-antidumping-duties-on-argentine-indonesian-biodiesel-idUSKBN1CS2TT
I thought this was going to be an article about Turing Soybeans.
What a waste of clean drinking water to water all of these plants! They should be pumping all of that water to California Florida where water is tough to come by during droughts. Instead they are watering fields with taxpayer money!
The agriculture lobbyists are in the pockets of so many politicians its not even funny. These guys see dollar signs for the Ag business at the expense of consumers. Sort of ironic to sell people on fuels that burn with less energy then the fossil fuels they claim to replace. Yet are claimed to be so great, I know soybean based diesel is horrible in colder weather and requires more treatment to remain flowing and not gelling up. Made that mistake once in Minnesota a state that loves soybean diesel. Its such a racket anymore though you won't ever see it go away.
How about biodiesel from rape seed oil? There are a lot of sources for fuel that can be used in diesel engines in addition to soy.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
There is no free market in the petro industry. The governments (plural) control permitting for design, construction and operation of wells, pipelines and refineries. The perfect example is Obama's "war on coal." There was no war on coal, but the delay in applying due diligence to the permitting of coal plants levied a high enough economic cost that they were demonstrated to be nonviable.
Jim
The cost of fixing an issue will likely be less than continuing to pour more co2 into the air. While this does not reduct pollution it slows it.
Is biodiesel energy positive? Does it produce more available energy in terms of fuel than what goes into produce it? If it doesn't, it just seems like a short-sighted way to get farmers to produce a giant surplus.
Who is more foolish? The fool or the fool that follows it?
Obviously the latter. If it wasn't for them, we wouldn't have a vile piece of shit sitting in the White House right now.
If there are waste products that are pollute our environment but are relatively easy to convert to biodiesel, we should still use them and mix them in with petrodiesel. Even if only to avoid costly disposal of chicken and turkey fat.
Growing plants which means we're using chemical fertilizer and water. Then going through energy intensive processing. It's a bad deal, and it's what happens when we let bureaucrats codify our renewable market place.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
msMash still sucking cock for coke..
News at 11
the problem is this 'renewable' is not even a net zero return.
In many ways, that's not even the point. If we can create enough energy through other methods (Fission, Solar, Wind, Hydro -- even Fusion if it works out), then net zero is not as important as being able to convert the energy to a useful form. (The same applies for Hydrogen, for that matter).
Petroleum isn't going to last forever, and it's increasingly looking like we'll have supply problems by the middle of the century. That is a problem, and using biodiesel helps lengthen timeframe to develop something better.
Why do we care? Aerospace and shipping.
While there is some work for short-range electric jets, long flights at altitude are at a disadvantage compared to fuel-burning turbines (which are extremely efficient at operational altitude & speed). Jet fuel is very, very similar to diesel, and biodiesel is a possible replacement. Many of the large new ships are diesel powered - either piston or gas turbine. As you can imagine, militaries (especially America's) love the stuff because it's domestic, and it could power most of our Navy, our tanks, and our aircraft.
The primary fuel of booster rockets today is kerosene. Methane may work well in the future (and with a lower ISP).
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Homework:
1. How many acre years of soy does it take to provide enough fuel for a 777 at normal gross weight to fly across the US.
2. How many people would have been fed for a day instead?
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
How about methane from soy? I have a foolproof, easily scalable way to produce that. Or legumes in general.
Yet another reason for hooking up soyboys to The Matrix.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
> It's different from ethanol, a fuel that's made from corn and mixed into gasoline, also as required by the RFS.
Not the whole story: ethanol can be obtained from a variety of sources, usually some kind of fermentation of sugars or starches (e.g. in wine, beer, etc.)
Ethanol is produced from corn in the USA, which is not very efficient, but low temperatures in winter prevent the possibility of growing sugarcane -- a far better alternative. Perhaps Puerto Rico could be a viable source.
Now, that said, why isn't everybody using electric trucks? Differently from cars, trucks are already heavy, so batteries are _relatively_ less heavy. Also, trucks can be planned to be used with quick battery change stations -- at least on the road and to distribution centers, where smaller last-mile lighter vehicles could finish deliveries.
GMO soy? I'd rather burn it than eat it.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
If I understand correctly, soy oil is a byproduct. The primary use of soy is soy cake to feed cattle. Where will it go if not in biodiesel?
Of course we could give up soy cake feed for cattle, and use grass instead. It would make a healthier meat, but we would have to eat less.
Republicans in Congress didn't pass the Energy Policy Act of 2005 for President George W. Bush with the goal of making energy cheaper; they passed it to move the United States toward energy independence from Middle East imports and entanglements. That foreign policy goal was deepened with passage of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 by Democrats for President George W. Bush's "Twenty in Ten" initiative to reduce gasoline consumption by 20% in ten years. The presumption that concerns about fuel cost or thermodynamics should take primacy over other concerns, such as the number and cost of United States military personnel overseas, is myopic and revisionist.
Go out into the real world sometime. It just might surprise you. Or sit here making each other feel smart by exchange more and more complicated lies that other people wrote in books. Jesus.....how do you folks even breathe without your brains exploding?
$5.4b divided by 300m citizens =18 dollars per citizen for a self sufficient fuel source you can manufacture in-country.
Pretty sure most people would be fine keeping that money in the local economy instead of funding other countries, bring more environmentally friendly, etc
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