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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.
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.
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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!”
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.
I like food.
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Save the Soy?!
You can buy it from elsewhere, cheaper, massively so, after accounting for the rural subsidies the US provides. The US deficit would vaporize and turn into a massive surplus if we dropped the rural communities and only had the urban and suburban areas.
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.
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.
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 ]
How is it with a multi-hundred-billion-dollar deficit, people always look at something that costs $6Bn or even like $0.040Bn and say, "Hey, if we got rid of that, that $600Bn deficit would go away!"?
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Nevertheless, getting rid of the biocrap would most likely push the domestic prices lower.
Ezekiel 23:20
Not single handily but given the the complexities of our modern economy if there are individual examples of waste that add up to 1% of the deficit that is actually massive deal and a strong indicator the region as a whole is a source of massive waste. If you need a clear cut example of this, there is plenty of public information about how rural states contribute at most 70% of the tax dollars they take out it is easy to see how the a 600 billion dollar deficit would turn into a surplus on a 4 trillion dollar budget.
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"
"Isn't it urban america that pushed for biodiesel." No.
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
The answer is mainly because they've never looked at a graph or chart showing where our spending goes. (Incidentally Ross Perot tried to use charts in his presidential campaign and got mocked for it).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
I thought this was going to be an article about Turing Soybeans.
Because the alternative is to actually start cutting entitlements and military spending and that would be political suicide because every voter in this country is all in favor of getting theirs at the expense of all the other tax payers (yes, they're so stupid that they don't realize they themselves are also paying and are about to pay even more once the whole thing collapses).
Short of an actual violent revolution or a sub-violent overthrow of the political caste in this country we're heading directly for bankruptcy and a failed state just like the USSR and Venezuela and every other socialist or socialist-lite country. The only question is "when will it happen?"
The US deficit would vaporize and turn into a massive surplus if we dropped the rural communities...
...which we would then use to buy food at outrageous prices from these same rural communities. So, in this scenario: Everybody wins? What do you think?
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
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!
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.
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.
Actually, there's a workable alternative, but it's complex. You can actually get the tax burden to go down over time by structuring around a universal dividend. This takes a portion of all income, passes it out to all adults equally, and thus creates an equitable system. The dividend is structured in such a way as to reduce top-tier taxes as well.
Because the buying power of the individual benefit trends with GDP-per-capita, the poor become progressively less-poor over time, reducing their eligibility for welfare benefits. Think about it: at $27,000, a 2-adult, 3-child household in Baltimore passes the HUD income limit. In 2016, a 14% dividend (my target is 10%, but I have to start a bit higher and work down) would have paid $7,500/year per adult. At $23k income, the difference is about $12k: your household income is $35k (earned and unearned), and you get no HUD subsidy.
The first effect is that housing assistance (and SNAP, TANF, etc.) reaches further. HUD puts 75% of all eligible households on a waiting list. With everyone bumped up, the many no longer eligible have their benefits passed down; and those still eligible receive a smaller benefit, passing the difference down. HUD should actually end up with around half of its budget unspent, but I accounted for only reducing the cost by 1/4 initially. As the Dividend becomes stronger, it cuts into this further.
Middle-class tax rates go up based on how I built this; middle-class tax burdens go down because the Dividend pays out. Think about being given $7,500/year, paid $313 on the 1st and 15th of each month, and paying e.g. $5,000 more in taxes because you make a high middle-class salary. You're ... ahead by $2,500, not by $7,500. Still ahead. That tax hike (the $5,000) is a big part of the funding source.
Because it grows with GDP-per-capita, the middle-class impact actually shrinks. Eventually, nobody earning under $100k is actually paying taxes. Eventually, the 39.6% top tax rate (I'm repealing the tax cuts and jobs act) falls to about 33%, too, when the dividend is only a 10% dividend. That takes a couple decades: I'm cutting it back less than growth, and stopping at 10%.
The other part of the funding source is Social Security. Instead of paying OASDI from the retirement and disability trust, I also restructured Social Security to pay the Dividend to everyone over age 18 (target is 16), and to pay the same total benefit in retirement and disability. That means if you're getting e.g. $700/year from the Dividend and you retire with Social Security paying you $1,500, your retirement payment is $800. $700 + $800 = $1,500. The Dividend grows faster than Social Security's benefits (it's faster than COLA), so it unloads the trusts, makes Social Security solvent (permanently), and causes the FICA tax (which is all payroll at this point) to come down over time.
That rebasing of FICA to the Dividend provides about a third of the funding stream. The rest is restructured from existing income taxes.
The initial impact is similar to more than half a trillion tax cut. Getting healthcare to all Americans with better affordable care plus a public option to cover those who can't get affordable care would cost $200 billion. You can actually do both and come out ahead.
Incidentally, getting HUD and SNAP to accomplish their missions directly would require several hundred billion PER YEAR of additional government spending. The tax rates would need to come way up. This approach causes the tax burden to come down instead, and creates jobs by more middle- and lower-class spending (about 8%-10% growth), further reducing the number of households in need of benefits and, thus, Federal spending. I want to see if I can achieve an outright trillion-dollar (2016 dollars) tax burden reduction. Note that the amount of dollars received in excess of your taxes are the burden: a middle-classer paying $12k in ta
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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.
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
The wall is only $20 billion, chump change. Compare that to the six trillion dollars that's been spent on foreign wars by our globalist elites, that have made America more hated than ever. Puts it into perspective.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
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;
Because they like medicare and/or the military and don't want to significantly reduce either. Sadly those are the only two areas that would move the needle.
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.
"The market" is not a modern equivalent to Abracadabra, even though it is often used in that way.
There are market failures, that is a reality. "The market" might sort things out too late and too painfully. Giving an incentive to people to start now, before there is market pressure, so that they already moved some way when the market pressure hits, is not a bad thing.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Nope we can buy it from elsewhere for even lower prices! Food prices are higher here due to protective import restrictions. If we stopped giving preference to the US rural production the cost of food would actually go down from increased competition with other sources.
I'll just re-post this.
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This is an interesting idea.
But it seems complex to me in comparison to something like this:
1. 10% income tax for all citizens. (If you really want to wangle, then maybe make a second, higher, bracket for the 1%).
2. No corporate income tax (because that's just an inefficient, indirect, individual tax). (There's some wangle room here for me, but you'd have to make your case)
3. Citizens making less than a certain amount (poor people) don't pay taxes. (Much more straight forward than government hand-outs)
4. Cut all entitlements. (We won't need them because the poor are already keeping what they earn... and yes, if you don't work you don't eat)
5. Cut "defense" spending heavily until it fits inside the budget. (This shouldn't be controversial)
6. Cut all other government functions to fit within the budget. (Considering how well private companies like SpaceX are doing where government stuff is sucking this should also be uncontroversial)
Obviously such a simplistic plan would fall apart once it hits reality. But isn't it sort of the right direction? Where am I going wrong here?
10% income tax for all citizens. (If you really want to wangle, then maybe make a second, higher, bracket for the 1%).
It'd be more like 30%. Direct income taxes are like 19%, then you have a bunch of other revenue.
No corporate income tax (because that's just an inefficient, indirect, individual tax). (There's some wangle room here for me, but you'd have to make your case)
It is a poor revenue source. I tag it with the Dividend tax because that's the only way to keep the benefit tied to productivity; eliminating the general fund part of the corporate income tax isn't unreasonable, but needs to happen in a fiscally- and socially-responsible manner.
Citizens making less than a certain amount (poor people) don't pay taxes. (Much more straight forward than government hand-outs)
You lose out on job-creating impacts. Likewise, there aren't enough jobs to carry all job-seekers, so you have people who are willing to work but can't. You also have things like people living in Baltimore City's poorer neighborhoods with two full-time jobs, pulling $54k, still unable to afford healthcare for their two kids, mortgage, food, car insurance, etc.
Obviously such a simplistic plan would fall apart once it hits reality. But isn't it sort of the right direction? Where am I going wrong here?
The same place the current system is going wrong: no automatic self-healing function. The Dividend is, in part, designed to repair localized and non-localized economic damage: poor families, collapsed industry cities, and recessions.
Baltimore is a good case study: the city was a major trade hub, had corporate headquarters for things like the Tide Detergent Company, and had major industry to build ships and planes and even just make steel and brick. Trade went away, many of those corporate HQs merged with Proctor and Gamble out of state, and the major industry flat out collapsed. A city that supported over a million jobs now can't handle a population of half a million, more than half of whom are children or secondary householders who don't have jobs.
Baltimore creates an enormous draw for housing assistance, food stamps, small business administration loans (another Federal function to drive economic growth by injecting tax-source money into poor economies), State and Federal aid, and so forth. Over a billion in Federal spending goes there, and it's not enough.
With the Dividend, the Federal taxes actually come down. At the same time, $2Bn extra get shoved into Baltimore in the year 2016 model (Maryland gets $30bn--over 8% of its GDP). Two-adult households get $15k if they're unemployed; at the $50k level it's $10k. That money isn't taxed as income, but registers as unearned income for computing welfare eligibility: HUD and SNAP spending are spread out, and even reduced. At the same time, these struggling households now have money to spend, and spend it on needs--and then on wants. Middle-class households get a boost, too, and spend that on additional luxury.
That spending creates a need for local trucking, retail, and other service and supporting jobs. Jobs mean these poor households can work and become less-poor; and their income, representing productive labor, is taxable, and feeds (thus increasing) the Dividend, the Federal revenue ledger, and the State and Local revenue ledgers. With more income from working, these households also spend more. It hits equilibrium eventually, probably around a 5% GDP boost, although I don't have sufficient data to calculate it out fully.
So the burned-out, collapsed industry city that has been unable to recover in over 50 years experiences a sudden renaissance. It recovers in a few months, and is booming in a year or three. Less-poor cities across America won't see such a dramatic effect: if they're at about the national average income-per-capita, they'll see only a relatively-smal
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