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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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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.
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.
In Argentina, we produce biofuel as a byproduct, so our cost is close to zero. Trump put a blockade (50% tax) to our fuel because he "thinks" it's subsidized and "Argentina is dumping!" It's not. It's VERY cheap for us to make it, and USA will never be able to produce it so cheap
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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Taking random stuff and burning it is harder to keep clean than a known. That's why it is easier to burn natural gas in a clean way than coal.
Yeah, anywhere that uses these straight cost estimates are used tends to completely ignore the societal, environmental, and economic costs of the pollution that the rules and regulations were put in place to cut down on.
Even if we have enough oil reserves in the planet to last us until entire next millennium, if we keep polluting as we are currently we're not going to have a place left to live any more. If people want to keep using oil and gas, then find a way to obtain it, refine it, and use it without any pollution byproduct (which probably doesn't exist in any cost effective way. And no, "clean" coal's answer of scrubbing the pollution from the exhaust and shoving it into the ground isn't an acceptable answer. All that does is end up leeching the poison into the soil and water supplies instead of in the air. It's as bad as our continual lack of a permanent solution to nuclear waste.)
I think it's important to have strategic plans in place on the off chance Saudi Arabia, Iraq etc decide to pull up roots and side with the Russians and our external (we produce ~98%+ of our own needs) oil supplies dry up. I don't think we need a whole lot of ethanol fuel, biodiesel plants around to do this, but 0.5-1% capacity ensures that we at least have a backup plan in case we lose access to some or all of our oil fields. Never rely on a single source for anything. We have strategic oil reserves but just like running your replicated aws database in multiple availability zones gives greater reliability at the expense of additional cost, it's a good idea to diversify something as critical as fuel. Pray you never need it, but plan for the worst (within reason).
moox. for a new generation.
How about methane from soy? I have a foolproof, easily scalable way to produce that. Or legumes in general.