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Comment by Brendinooo | Hacker News Reader

Any legs left in the ethanol initiative? Could be a decent place to direct a glut of supply.

That's generally seen as a misguided attempt to maintain artificially high grain prices that ultimately yields almost zero benefit to farmers or consumers (serving only the ethanol producers and politicians).

Making ethanol from corn isn't a very efficient path. Using the land for PV arrays, and displacing petroleum with electricity instead of ethanol, is much more efficient.

I'm not well-educated in this stuff, so feel free to correct me.

My understanding is that artificially high grain prices are maintained so that factory farms don't completely run the family farms out of business. Is this correct?

If that is correct, and you are okay with artificially leveling the playing field, wouldn't it then make sense to find ways to actually put the product to use?

I don't think that assumption is correct. Why would subsidies help family farms over "factory farms"? In fact, Big Ag is one of the biggest advocates for the entire constellation of Ag subsidies.

It's not a good idea to artificially inflate prices. The article mentioned the food riots in third world a decade ago. There are real consequences to this sort of crony capitalism, and in this case very poor people actually can starve when the prices go up.

Not to mention that growing crops is incredibly energy intensive, so it turns out that ethanol really isn't good for the environment. In my opinion, terrible policy all around.

Edit: made my comment a little less confrontational :)

If that were correct, they'd limit the size of the subsidy to only the first N bushels of grain. Instead, the large farms get the vast majority of subsidies.

http://www.heritage.org/agriculture/report/how-farm-subsidie...

It seems to me that it serves no environmental or pragmatic purpose, and may increase the corrosiveness (and decrease the stability) of fuel.

Growing one acre of corn takes approximately 8 gallons of diesel fuel (directly) and produces enough corn for 485 gallons of ethanol.

The direct combustion emissions can be about half in the right powertrain, but ethanol fermentation produces CO₂ on its own, as does the distillation process, as does the machinery involved in cycling and drying (possibly actively, consuming more energy to heat them, or passively, consuming more energy to transport them) the molecular sieves used to separate the azeotrope of H₂0 and ethanol. Furthermore, Ethanol is, gallon for gallon, about half as energy dense as gasoline.

Not a fan of ethanol production, but CO2 released fermenting and burning bio fuels is carbon neutral - the CO2 was bound in the plant by photosynthesis, then released by these processes.

Some of it is, yes. But some of it depends on nitrogen fertilizer, which is made using energy from petroleum.

CH4 + H2O → CO + 3H2

CO + H2O → CO2 + H2

3H2 + N2 → 2NH3

As your homework shows, nitrogen fertilizer comes from hydrogen which comes from natural gas, not petroleum.

Maybe if we were all aware of this, we'd be setting up clean hydrogen to be converted into ammonia instead of just burning it in hydrogen cars.

> hydrogen which comes from natural gas, not petroleum

That's a rather subtle distinction ;)

I mean, natural gas is just a natural cracking product of petroleum, which gets captured under impermeable geological formations.

Not a subtle distinction as in the US, natural gas is essentially all domestic (and is starting to be exported as well). The decision to grow ethanol is geopolitical at least as much as it has anything to do about the environment (remember, serious ethanol mandates started under Bush II) as part of the effort for energy independence, so trading natural gas for gasoline through ethanol (even if we wrongly assume it's as bad as 1:1) is still desirable.

Also, gasoline (C8H18) has a carbon to hydrogen ratio of approximately 0.44, compared to 0.25 for natural gas (CH4) (and natural gas has a higher specific energy), so from a carbon emissions perspective is still superior.

Additionally, natural gas in not "just a natural cracking product of petroleum." There are other significant geological sources of natural gas, and it is produced through decay of just about any organic matter.

Wouldn't the CO2 be absorbed over a period of time, which the combustion would do it all at once, being a net positive as far as the environment is concerned?

Or perhaps I don't understand how CO2 harms the environment well.

Yes, but on a time scale of a year or more (disregarding corn reserves, which probably do exist but are probably too small to matter), we can only emit the CO2 from corn ethanol at the same speed we absorb it. This is unlike fossil fuels, which took millions of years to form but which can be used much faster.

Source? I'm more familiar with this info [1].

[1] http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2001/08/ethanol-corn-faulted...

My farm. 6 gallons in tractor fuel and 2 gallons in truck fuel. If we didn't raise corn, we'd raise wheat which has similar fertility requirements as corn. Maybe a bit more urea on corn, 50 pounds or .11 barrels of oil equivalent.

Good of you to have a grasp on the fuel inputs on your fertilizers. How much land do you tend? I'm interested to see what brings a farmer to HN.

We have a small North Dakota farm (500 acres) but I work with some larger farms (10,000+ acres). Farm management consulting and software is my full time gig

Awesome. Glad to have a first-hand source.

I'm curious how much fertilizer is used in that acre, and how much fuel was needed to crack the atmospheric Nitrogen to produce the fertilizer.

300 lbs of urea or .65 boe of NG (1 bbl of oil = 20 gallons of gas and 11 gallons of diesel). So let's just say 20 additional gallons of fuel to account for the N

Edit: the land would be planted to wheat if not planted to corn. Wheat uses approximately 80% of the N as corn. The land wouldn't sit idle.

How much fertiliser?

300 lbs of urea or .65 boe of NG (1 bbl of oil = 20 gallons of gas and 11 gallons of diesel)

I thought ethanol was an alternative to MTBE, which was a problem because it was contaminating groundwater in many places.

Right, but people are talking about replacing more of the fuel with Ethanol than would help as antiknock. I can understand this if you want race fuel, but it isn't an environmental endeavor in itself to operate vehicles on E85 (or simple denatured ethanol) vs. common gasoline with ethanol for antiknock.

I'd be for it if people were talking about it as an economic effort, because that's where it can shine.

Please take your pro-oil astroturfing elsewhere.

According to the chart on e85prices.com, it would appear that ethanol fuel prices are at a 5 year low. I'd be willing to bet that has something to do with low grain prices.

It’s barely cheaper than regular unleaded in my area. Like ten cents if that

And it has a lower energy density so you'll get significantly lower mileage with E85.(28% less!) Note that winter gas is only about 2% loss.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline_gallon_equivalent

Wow, I guess haters gonna hate, because E85 only has 71.94% of the energy of a standard gasoline gallon. Of course Diesel#2 has 114% and biodiesel B100 has only 104% of the equivalent mileage per gallon.

They're kind of like a facts... or is it mobile link hate?

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