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Gaffer Variety:
Ethanol V050:
By Willie Gaffer:
July 24, 2006:
What should we do about global warming? This is a dilemma we can no longer ignore. It is happening. Most of the scientific community is in agreement about this. It is happening and the cause is the burning of fossil fuels. That is the scientific community. In the general population, most still go along with King George and his millionaire buddies. They cling to the discredited theory that this warming is just part of a normal cycle of weather. For sure they can always find a maverick or pseudo scientist to support their denials. It's easier that way I suppose. It's classic politics. If you deny something exists, you don't have to get off your butt and do something real about it. By the time we all get our heads out of the sand, it may well be too late. The damage will be irreversible.
For further evidence we need look no further than Governor Schweitzer of Montana. He toured Stephanopolous around Glacier National Park in his official chopper. There is no doubt the Glaciers are melting. The gov said there used to be hundreds of them, now there are only a couple of dozen. The rest have melted. This, we are told, is the effect of global warming caused by the ongoing excessive use of fossil fuels. The carbon dioxide is screwing up the atmosphere and causing a so-called greenhouse effect.
What to do? The gov has a solution. He wants to convert Montana's coal to liquid fuel. It burns cleaner, he says. There is another guy in Virginia or West Virginia who also want to convert coal to liquid fuel. Then there are the windmill nuts. In Michigan the greedy farmers have a different solution. They want to convert corn and soybeans to fuel and burn it. Of course, or governor, Granholm and her opponent DeVos agree on this one. They both support using corn for fuel. However, Mrs. Gaffer agrees with me on this one. If there was a God, these guys would all go to hell for burning food when people are starving all over the world.
If it were not for harebrained solutions we would probably not have any solutions. Most of these solutions do not even address the real issue of global warming. For them, it is all about the high cost of oil and keeping business in America. It's about oil independence. They want to save American jobs and keep production in America. There is nothing wrong with that, but the main issue should be about our environment, not money or jobs. Think grandchildren. None of these so called solutions answer that issue. They will all cause additional global warming.
Let's look a bit closer at this ethanol solution. First we can get clear on what we are talking about. What is ethanol? Ethanol is an alternative fuel produced by fermenting and distilling starch crops. The crops used for this fuel conversion are usually corn, barley, and wheat. The product often made from this ethanol is a fuel called E85 which is a blend of gasoline and ethanol. The blend is 85% ethanol and 15 % gasoline.
Now, get this. You can usually buy E85 for considerably less than gasoline. Often up to 35% less per gallon. Well, what's the problem? The problems is government subsidies including no state taxes on this product. State taxes alone can add about half a buck to the price of regular unleaded gasoline. Of course, that is only part of it. There is also a federal tax exemption on this product. Good deal, huh? Who do you think will eventually pay the difference? Vehicles that run on E85 are called flexible fuel vehicles (FFVs). More and more vehicle models are being built with this capability. They are offered by several manufacturers. For those who do not have an FFV there is another fuel called E-10. This is a blend of 90% regular unleaded gasoline and 10% ethanol.
Okay, lets hear from another source. Professor David Pimentel of Cornell university weighs in with a serious criticism of the ethanol fad. This guy chaired the U.S. Department of Energy panel that investigated the economics and environmental aspects of ethanol. He also did his own research with another analysis of the process of producing ethanol. What he found was interesting. He concludes it takes more energy to produce ethanol that it can produce in combustion. That is a fatal flaw which government subsidies cannot fix. It seems the so-called ethanol solution is a net-loss con game. It is being perpetrated on the American public and fools in government by the agricultural industry.
Pimentel comes very close to my personal position on his criticism of this insanity. He says, "Abusing our precious croplands to grow corn for an energy-inefficient process that yields low-grade automobile fuel amounts to unsustainable, subsidized food burning."
Now Pimentel is not a blowhard. He has done the research. He
makes his case with some fairly simple math that would be easily
understood by any sixth grade school kid. Unfortunately, my experience
indicates most of our politicians are not up to that level in
basic arithmetic. To find the full report on Pimentel by Roger
Segelken you can follow this link:
http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Aug01/corn-basedethanol.hrs.html
For this essay, I'll just give you his bottom line.
Ethanol from corn costs about $1.74 per gallon to produce, compared
with about 95 cents to produce a gallon of gasoline from oil.
Simply put, ethanol is subsidized to the tune of almost a buck
a gallon to make it competitive. Pimentel also points out the
obvious. To produce enough ethanol to power all of our autos would
use more cropland than we have available. Where would we grow
our food?
In an attempt to be even handed, I will add some stuff from a so-called study done for the United States Department of Agriculture called Agricultural Economic Report Number 721. This was done in July 1995.
The title is "Estimating the Net Energy Balance of Corn Ethanol." By Hosein Shapouri, James A. Duffield, and Michael S. Graboski. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, Office of Energy and New Uses. Agricultural Economic Report No. 721.
The thing you should notice here is the use of the word estimating. I worked in industry and I was often associated with government projects. In that work, I found that estimating is really guessing, sometimes educated guessing and sometimes not. One guy I knew had an interesting method of estimating cost on government projects. His plan was to estimate the weight of the final produce and multiply that by the current price of gold. It turns out he usually came closer to the real final cost than those using more traditional methods.
Here is the Abstract of report 721:
Studies conducted since the late 1970's have estimated the net
energy value (NEV) of corn ethanol. However, variations in data
and assumptions used among the studies have resulted in a wide
range of estimates. This study identifies the factors causing
this wide variation and develops a more consistent estimate. We
conclude that the net energy value of corn ethanol has become
positive in recent years due to technological advances in ethanol
conversion and increased efficiency in farm production. We show
that corn ethanol is energy efficient as indicated by an energy
ratio of 1.24.
Here is their Conclusions:
We conclude that the NEV of corn ethanol is positive when fertilizers
are produced by modern processing plants, corn is converted in
modern ethanol facilities, farmers achieve normal corn yields,
and energy credits are allocated to coproducts. Our NEV estimate
of 16,193 Btu/gal can be considered conservative, since it was
derived using the replacement method for valuing coproducts, and
it does not include energy credits for plants that sell carbon
dioxide. Corn ethanol is energy efficient, as indicated by an
energy ratio of 1.24, that is, for every Btu dedicated to producing
ethanol, there is a 24-percent energy gain. Moreover, producing
ethanol from domestic corn stocks achieves a net gain in a more
desirable form of energy. Ethanol production utilizes abundant
domestic energy supplies of coal and natural gas to convert corn
into a premium liquid fuel that can replace petroleum imports
by a factor of 7 to 1.
Oh yeah?
The thing to notice in all of this is no research was done. These
were some people probably reading some secondhand reports and
sitting around a table to make some guesses based on what they
may have read, but not on what they may have missed. This is a
far cry for the meticulous work of Professor Pimentel.
Now, I will offer my own harebrained solution to the mess.
I still think we should be investing research dollars into learning
how to control nuclear fusion. Nuclear fission is inherently dirty.
We know that. Nuclear fusion is not. The problem is, a lot of
our funds are being wasted in silly nonsense about ethanol. Another
large portion is going to wealthy American oil barons to find
more oil to melt more glaciers and raise the water level of the
ocean. If we melt enough ice cover, we can forget about New Orleans.
We won't be able to build dykes high enough.
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