Archives

Ethanol a Pork Barrel?

To try to save you the time of reading a small novel, I'll excerpt several paragraphs from the Dallas Observer.

I'll admit to skimming the article, meaning I my conclusions could be wrong, but my impressions:

Detroit is using ethanol/Flex-Fuel to dodge CAFE standards and dodge gas guzzler taxes.
Ethanol could be a good thing if the people involved are truly interested in less pollution and foreign oil.Flex vehicles, it turns out, are sweet for U.S. automakers. They've manufactured more than 5 million of them since the late 1990s (6 million flex vehicles are currently rolling on U.S. roads, according to the National Ethanol Vehicle Coalition). The reason? Automakers collect fuel economy credits good toward calculating federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) fleet standards (27.5 mpg for cars, 21.6 mpg for light trucks).

The flex fuel trucks are awarded a higher mileage rating so the automakers don't get penalized for heavily weighing their light truck fleet with large SUVs—the theory being that putting more ethanol vehicles on the road will be a good thing vis-à-vis oil consumption and the environment. (Automakers are penalized if the average fuel economy of vehicles they sell dips below the federal standards.) These credits roughly translate into a fuel economy rating 1 2/3 times the actual gasoline rating—a calculation based on the assumption a flex vehicle will run gasoline half the time with the remaining half run on E85. So, as Consumer Reports notes, a conventional Tahoe rated at 21 mpg is rated at 35 mpg for the flex vehicle, even though the vast majority of these vehicles will never burn a drop of E85. Essentially, automakers can manufacture a surplus of guzzling, high-profit SUVs and market them as fuel sippers.

Consumer Reports' findings were sobering. They discovered that while a vehicle fueled by E85 created fewer emissions than one running gasoline, it suffered dramatic losses in fuel economy: from 21 to 15 miles per gallon on the highway and from 9 to 7 miles per gallon in the city. The Tahoe's range dropped from 440 miles per tank of gasoline to 300 miles for E85.

While the flex fuel vehicle running on E85 didn't suffer significant losses in acceleration, it was more costly to operate because of the mileage losses. Consumer Reports calculated that the average August 2006 E85 pump price of $2.91 per gallon translated to $3.99 when compensating for the mileage loss—if you can find E85, that is. At the time of the report there were just 800 out of 176,000 gas stations nationwide selling the fuel (the National Ethanol Vehicle Coalition reports that number now exceeds 1,000) with most located in the upper Midwest close to where corn is grown and most ethanol is refined. According to the Renewable Fuels Association, there are 106 ethanol refineries with a total production capacity of 5.1 billion gallons, with another 45 plants and 3.5 billion gallons of capacity under construction. Plants like those being built by Panda Energy and White Energy could dramatically change the availability, but probably not the cost.

Simply put, ethanol is an expensive fuel to produce and distribute. To offset these costs, taxpayers kick in a 51-cent-per-gallon tax credit that, along with various state tax incentive programs, runs up a national tab of more than $2 billion per year, according to The Wall Street Journal. That's on top of the $3.6 billion per year taxpayers cough up to subsidize corn growers, who in 2005 unloaded 14.4 percent of their crop to ethanol refiners.



Dallas Observer Story (http://www.dallasobserver.com/Issues/2006-10-26/news/feature.html) (long)

There's been an almighty load of hype here about E85. And virtually none about biodiesel which apparently costs less to make, is more powerful and cleaner. Conspiracy? You decide!

Yeah, the CAFE loophole for E85 needs to be closed or at least tightened significantly. I believe there may well have been good intentions behind it, but the automakers exploited it by almost exclusively offering flex-fuel options on trucks and SUVs instead of passenger cars (I think most E85-capable passenger cars were primarily sold as fleet vehicles).

Too bad the energy payoff for using ethanol is so poor. I don't believe that you get less energy out than you put in, though it's a low enough amount that most of the fuel you get out is offsetting the fuel you put in. However, the worst thing about current ethanol production is that you need to use huge amounts of water. Even efficient plants are using over two gallons of water to produce one gallon of ethanol, while the average is closer to 4 or 5.

Hmm, I'm not sure if biodiesel is a whole lot better, but some Googling makes me feel a little better. I guess you need about 1/4 to 1/2 a gallon of water (http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_bubblewash.html) to "wash" gallon of biodiesel, but you need to do it 3 or 4 times. Fortunately, most of that wash water is clean enough to be reused in subsequent batches.

DF, I think you hit the nail on the head. Detroit is going crazy over flex fuel vehicles only because they are exempt from CAFE requirements. That's probably why GM is making more of an effort to get Flex-Fuel Tahoes into the marketplace than Flex-Fuel Cobalts and Aveos.

vtec-e, you'll be happy to know that here in the US Pacific Northwest there's been a lot more attention around biodiesel than ethanol. Lots of people run biodiesel (my wife included) and proudly advertise the fact with bumper stickers; it's available at the pump in major cities (Seattle, Portland, Vancouver, even Spokane and Eugene) for only a small premium over petrodiesel; and major fleets (including public transit, electric utilities and city owned vehicles) are starting to use it too. My city (Portland) has an ordinance that will require all diesel sold within the city limits to have a minimum biodiesel content once our regional production capacity has reached a certain threshold, expected to happen later this year. Although we now have farmers on the eastern side of the state signing up to grow canola (rapeseed) for our little regional effort at gaining a tiny bit of energy independence, most of our bio-d currently comes from waste oil. We also have a major new biodiesel facility about to come online (in Salem, OR, 50 miles from here) that is co-located with and fed by the Kettle Foods plant which produces potato chips.

And, since we don't grow corn or soybeans in this region there's virtually nothing going on with ethanol except the (unused) "flex fuel" badge you see on newer Chevy Tahoes. I do not believe pure ethanol is available commercially at the pump anywhere in the region.

Biodiesel works well, burns far cleaner than petrodiesel, produces comparable fuel economy, and unlike ethanol requires no modification or redesign of existing vehicles except upgrading older fuel pumps and lines. Couple hundred dollars covers the conversion, and you don't even need to do it right away. My wife's ancient Volvo is a flex fuel vehicle! Only big downside is that it gels at temperatures around freezing, which even in our mild climate means it must be mixed 50% with petrodiesel in wintertime. There is major research being done locally on solving that problem. Biodiesel isn't environmentally perfect, and ultimately could also compete with our food supply, but that's a lot further off than it is with ethanol.

There's been an almighty load of hype here about E85. And virtually none about biodiesel which apparently costs less to make, is more powerful and cleaner. Conspiracy? You decide!

You made me curious. So I googled around and read some. Long story short, it looks like special interests are pretty influential in this field, but an important part of what is driving the chosen approach to biofuels is the per acre fuel yields of different crops and fuels.

This review seemed concise and understandable to me: http://www.theglobalist.com/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=5077

What I took out of my googling and reading is that biodiesel is cheaper than ethanol when made from waste animal and vegetable oils, but per acre biodiesel yields are generally enough lower than those for ethanol (given current technology) that large scale bio-diesel seems less likely to be a major alternative to the use of petroleum in transportation. The authors that seemed the most accurate did not treat it as an either/or proposition. Serious authors also noted that both products were made from feedstocks have other uses, so we may want to consider other consequences of their production.

And, since we don't grow corn or soybeans in this region there's virtually nothing going on with ethanol except the (unused) "flex fuel" badge you see on newer Chevy Tahoes. I do not believe pure ethanol is available commercially at the pump anywhere in the region.Ha! Just a couple hours after I wrote that, on the way home from work I saw a contractor's Ford pickup with a "BIOETHANOL" (redundant?) bumper sticker plastered across the back. Sequential Biofuels (http://www.sqbiofuels.com/) produces the stuff (along with most of our local biodiesel) and has a solar-powerd biofuels retail outlet down in Eugene. Also theNational Ethanol Vehicle Coalition (http://www.e85refueling.com/) says there are 3 stations in my area selling E85.