For the E85 owners out there

[JohnnyG]

Jason

OK, so maybe you're a Scientolegist or something, I don't know. If you choose to see the world through rose colored glasses, you must not be paying the bills.

And I have read the posting rules, I'm doing my best to be kind. I just cannot, for the life of me, figure out who's agenda you're preaching.

I urge you to look at some of the links I have posted. Add up the numbers. I really don't think you have ANY idea of the amount of fuel, in gallons, we as Americans use each month.

No matter, we're working on getting the E85 Ethanol online around 2010 if that makes you feel better. That $1.4 million wasn't spent for nothing! By then the vehicles should be more commonplace that can take advantage of the "new" fuel. Meanwhile, ethanol blending is gradually going by the wayside until it becomes more economical for the consumer. If you don't believe me, find somebody from Cincinatti to talk with. In a month, maybe less, they will be back to good old 100% petrol.

Bruce,

Those are some of the best ideas I have heard in a long time. It's funny how everybody wants to engineer a system that leaves out the most critical part....the human brain!

[PAUL T]

I just heard a news report that Walmart will be offering E85 at their gas stations very soon. E85 may catch on faster if Walmart gets behind it. I agree with JohnnyG though about the price. If Gasoline suddenly drops in price, not likely, E85 will go by the wayside due to being unprofitable without government subsities. I also recognize that if the technology in manufacturing E85 becomes better and makes it more profitable, pure gasoline maybe on its way out. One thing is for sure it is going to take several years for this to occur. There has to be a start somewhere and hopefully the momentum will be there to develope new and better technologies. It took Brazil 30 years.

[JasonA]

JohnnyG, I have never disagreed with you regarding the economics of it. It's more expensive to use, plain and simple. As Paul T said above, if gasoline suddenly becomes cheap again, no doubt, ethanol will drop, as it did years ago. Maybe you see some cheap gas coming down the road, I don't know. I don't see it. In the long term, I can't possibly see defending our current way of fueling our transportation sector, because the economics and politics of petroleum are unstable. As we all know, early machines were designed to use renewable fuels. Cheap petroleum was available, and we chose cheap (as we always do). The days of cheap petroleum are, as far as I see it, gone. So what to do? Stay the course? I prefer to look at different ways to move forward.

What's the life cycle cost of using cheap petroleum? More tailpipe emissions? More soldiers overseas protecting the source of our black gold? Having our nation fall to its feet when OPEC decides to pad the coffers, and shut oil production? What a deal. The long-term price we pay for using cheap materials up front is so much more. If you want to label me as having an agenda, then that's it. As a country, we need to look past the initial cost, and consider the life cycle cost.

Our state DOT pays hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to patch a section of road that was paved over a cell of an old landfill. Hundreds of thousands a year. It'd cost them a few million to build a bridge over it and be done with it. Did they consider the life cycle cost when they paved that road? No, they took the cheap way out, and they're ending up paying more in the end.

The concept of life cycle costing is (or should be) dear to our hearts as fans of General Motors products. We all know it's cheaper (up front) to export jobs and have parts and supplies made in China or wherever. It's cheaper up front to have a Japanese car maker come in here, setup shop in the southeast, and crank out cars cheaper than we can. And we all KNOW that in the end, a LOT of people are going to pay for it, through failing auto industry economies and failing support of retired auto workers, etc. We all KNOW the concept of life cycle costing, but often don't apply it when it's most critical.

If my glasses are colored, as you say, they sure aren't rosy. I see a much darker picture ahead, and that's the very reason I support looking at other ways to do business. It's folks who want to keep the status-quo who I think have rose-colored glasses on. I've said before that I know E85 isn't the golden goose. I don't own stock in any ethanol company (or oil company), and I don't stand to gain any financial rewards by anyone using it.

I don't expect to "convert" you or anyone else here at this point. I accept your "agenda" comment, and I want to spell out exactly what it is (above), and disspell what you may or may not have thought it was.

The last post from me on this topic,

[thu]

This showed up in today's Wall Street Journal. Basically it's a debate about how much energy does it take to produce ethanol.

"Detractors say that it takes more fuel to make ethanol -- growing the corn, bringing it to a processing plant and converting it to fuel -- than would be saved by using it."

FYI....

THE NUMBERS GUY

By CARL BIALIK

Digging Into the Ethanol Debate

June 9, 2006

President Bush announced in his State of the Union address in January that he backed funding for research into producing ethanol from corn and other farm products, with the goal of making a viable fuel alternative to gasoline for automobiles. Since then, Congress has wrangled over how to implement the idea.

Critics, meanwhile, have blasted the viability of ethanol. A central argument is that corn-based ethanol, the most-common form today, is literally a waste of energy. Detractors say that it takes more fuel to make ethanol -- growing the corn, bringing it to a processing plant and converting it to fuel -- than would be saved by using it.

That criticism has received attention in articles in the Washington Post, the Louisville Courier-Journal and Cox News Service (all of which also included the pro-ethanol side). In April, Larry Kudlow said on his CNBC show, "So many experts believe it costs more energy to turn corn into ethanol-related gasoline than [is] actually produced."

Two prominent researchers are chiefly responsible for the energy-efficiency claim: Cornell University's David Pimentel and Tad Patzek of the University of California, Berkeley. In a co-written paper published last year in Natural Resources Research, Profs. Pimentel and Patzek wrote, "Ethanol production using corn grain required 29% more fossil energy than the ethanol fuel produced." By comparison, production of gasoline or diesel uses about 20% more fossil energy than the fuels produce. (For automobiles, ethanol is generally blended with gasoline in either 90-10 or 85-15 proportions, but the studies focused on the energy content of the ethanol itself.)

But the analysis stacks the deck against ethanol in a number of ways. Perhaps most important: The researchers attributed a wide array of energy costs to ethanol production, including the energy required to produce tractors used in cornfields and even all forms of energy consumed by workers for things such as food, transportation and police protection. Equivalent factors generally aren't included in comparable analyses of rival fuels like gasoline. Also, researchers didn't take into consideration the value of ethanol by-products, which can be used in cattle feed.

What's more, the skeptical analysis was based on all technology in use at the time, including old plants. Ethanol has become a hot business and a target of venture capitalists. There is reason to believe that ethanol production is only going to become more efficient, possibly at a faster rate than the more-mature petroleum industry. The newest plants incorporate technology to streamline the process and save energy and money. Researchers are also looking at methods to get ethanol from sugar cane and switchgrass, which appear to be more energy-efficient than those for corn. "There are a lot of new technologies," said Hosein Shapouri, an agricultural economist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. "It's going to continue to improve the yield, and also lower the energy."

The Bush administration says ethanol is more energy efficient than the critics claim. Department of Energy spokesman Craig Stevens told me in an email, "Based on the vast majority of research and analysis, the department believes that the energy delivered by ethanol is greater than the fossil energy put into its production."

Other researchers have disagreed with Profs. Pimentel and Patzek. Michael Wang, a vehicle fuel-system analyst at Argonne National Laboratories in Lemont, Ill., calculates numbers that are frequently cited for the efficiency of producing petroleum and diesel fuel. He said those numbers don't include the energy needed for labor and to produce the equipment -- in large part because there aren't reliable, up-to-date estimates for that energy -- and therefore, neither should the ethanol numbers.

By his reckoning, it takes 0.74 BTU of fossil fuel to create 1 BTU of ethanol fuel, compared with a ratio of 1.23 BTUs to 1 BTU for gasoline -- that's 66% more than ethanol. (Dr. Wang's calculations are contained in a rather dense set of appendices to this report; the conclusions are presented in a more user-friendly format in this brochure.)

Prof. Pimentel defended his work in an interview. "I don't see how you could or should eliminate the labor of the farmer," he said. "He eats, sleeps, uses the highways, depends on the police force, fireman, and so forth."

Prof. Pimentel added that he's studied the issue for over 20 years, and has no bias against ethanol -- quite the contrary: "I'd really like to support ethanol being a viable solution for our liquid-fuel needs, because I am an agriculturalist and a biologist. But I'm a scientist first."

His co-author on the study, Prof. Patzek, didn't respond to my requests for an interview.

There remain major challenges for ethanol. Among them: The high price of natural gas may force some plants to switch to coal, harming their environmental profile; the fuel has yet to prove its market viability for cars without subsidies; and the costs to revamp fuel stations for ethanol blends is steep.

When prompted by their students to investigate biofuels, Berkeley energy and resources professors Dan Kammen and Alex Farrell discovered the sharp disagreements among researchers. "It became pretty clear to us, as we were getting up to speed on ethanol, that there are a large number of divergent studies in literature, and it's not clear why they are divergent," Prof. Farrell told me. They attempted to reconcile disputing studies by comparing them side by side, tracing the numbers back to their original sources and converting everything to standard units. Their conclusion, published in Science in January, was largely in line with Dr. Wang's. (So was an analysis of published studies that appeared in March in Environmental Science & Technology, and funded in part by the environmental organization Natural Resources Defense Council.)

It can be disorienting to discover that reputable researchers can so seriously disagree on a single number. In an article last month, the Toledo Blade counted studies, as if that might help settle things. The newspaper noted Prof. Pimentel's work, and added, "Five other researchers have done studies and agree. Thirteen other studies, including one paid for by the Department of Energy, show the opposite."

A drawback of all the commonly cited numbers is that they generally rely on data from USDA surveys of farmers and ethanol producers. Such surveys are a few years old. That's not an unusual lag time for federal government surveys, but they don't capture the impact of new plants in the fast-evolving ethanol industry.

Broin Cos., based in Sioux Falls, S.D., has pioneered a method to convert corn to ethanol at 90 degrees, rather than the previous 230 to 250 degrees, improving energy efficiency by 10% to 12%, according to co-founder and Chief Executive Jeff Broin. And E3 Biofuels LLC is finding ways to get more out of all parts of the corn, by building plants near dairy farms and feeding cows the byproducts of ethanol processing, then using energy from the animal waste to help power the plants. "Wastes are converted to valuable products, such as biogas and biofertilizers, which replace fossil fuels and their derivatives," David Hallberg, president and chief executive of Omaha-based E3, wrote me in an email.

Vinod Khosla, a partner in the Menlo Park, Calif., venture-capital firm Khosla Ventures, has invested in several ethanol technologies and is an advocate for their promise. He said arguments against ethanol focus unjustly on older plants. "It's like saying, a power plant built in the '50s is very polluting, so all power plants are very polluting," Mr. Khosla told me.

[JohnnyG]

Of course all of this leaves out the "price gouging" taking place in the ethanol production industry. If it is less expensive to make than gasoline, then why (in February 2006, a few weeks after the State of the Union Message was aired.) do the ethanol producers charge more per gallon than gasoline? By the way this DISREGARDS the federal susidies of $.51/gal. The June Ethanol cost per gallon has not been corrected to my knowledge.

OPIS news, circa. Feb 2006.

[MAC]

From what I understand, the U.S. has enough oil (billions of barrels) to last hundreds of years, particularly oil derived from shale in Colorado.

In 2002, Shell Oil stated that it believes it could extract oil from shale at approximately $25-$30 per barrel. As of the beginning of this month, oil companies are again looking at shale. I suspect with oil prices at $60 and above a barrel there will finally be the breakthrough needed to create a commercial market for shale oil. But then again, I suspect environmental activist will not make it easy.

If oil can be extracted from shale for a sufficient profit then it may change the dynamics associated with producing E85, perhaps more so with respect to corn E85, which costs more to produce than sugarcane E85. However, obviously in order to create a commercial market for shale oil the necessary machinery must be in place to produce it. Since this is likely to take several years there may end up being a race of sorts to produce both—I suppose this would be a good thing.

But either way, we must decrease our dependence on foreign oil. It's a national security issue that cannot be ignored.

[JimD]

Another baby step....