U.S. corn-based ethanol worse for the climate than gasoline, study finds
reuters.com
reuters.com
Similar analysis has been done on other crop feed-stocks (switch grass, etc.) and none of the analysis has shown that crop derived ethanol is a good idea.
I'm not a leading expert on this subject by any means, but I am a PhD chemical engineer and did a lot of research into alternative fuels science and economics about ten years ago. I'm not up on the latest research and analysis but the fundamental thermodynamics and carbon cycles of crop-based ethanol have not changed much in the past ten years or so.
No American politician or political party can afford to offend corn farmers. We should count ourselves lucky that our gasoline is only 10% corn.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_production_in_the_United_...
Iowa no longer first; Democrats reorder the presidential primary calendar for 2024
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/2022/1...
It wasn’t because they care about offending farmers or removing ethanol subsidies, it was so that Biden can lock down some early primary wins in 2024 with States with a higher percentage of black voters.
him saying they're doing it to lock in Biden (their mainstream/establishment frontrunner) in large early primaries in 2024 (the next election) is not really different from saying they're doing it to lock in their mainstream/establishment frontrunner in large early primaries in future elections to avoid the kind of "self destructive" internecine primary battles with fringe candidates like Bernie Sanders--yes, he was very popular, but his views are to one side of the Democratic party which is to one side of the Republican party which makes his views part of the fringe in the uniform tapestry of views--which have taken place for many years.
Not saying it's right or wrong, just saying GP's analysis holds together as part of the larger analysis everybody here seems to be basing their thinking on.
Yes, it is.
Because it refers to specific geographic strengths that Biden had as a candidate, not strengths that are uniformly typical of establishment-preferred Democratic candidates.
(Now if, instead of referring to Biden’s particular and unique strengths that correlate with the change, they had said that it was to lock in estanlishment candidates by moving some larger, more expensive states to campaign in forward, and that that establishment support was more key in campaigning in those states – a weak but at least superficially plausible argument – that would be different. But “states with a higner percentage of black voters” are…a different thing.
South Carolina Democrats, black and white, are much more toward the center of the overall electorate, which is where the national campaigns shift their focus after running left and right in their respective D and R primaries. It is not Biden's specific strength that matters, because it was also the reason "Super Tuesday" was created many years ago to benefit the establishment candidate (Walter Mondale at the time)* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Tuesday#1984:_Beginnings...
And black voters are (or have been) reliably Democrat, which benefits all Democrat candidates, not particular to do with Biden (or Bill Clinton) though they did enjoy outsized black support. Saying the first primary is being moved "to make the electorate look like America" is designed to shut up the Left, who would scream bloody murder if they said "putting this state first is an establishment move because SC is not so left wing" It takes an "establishment move" to change the primaries because the state parties have to change it in the local places with cooperation or opposition from the other party in those states.
* a much younger Biden was a candidate back then too but when, as an English coalminer's great-grandson, Biden's support was centered in the UK so nobody in the US was doing him huge political favors)**
**this is a tongue-in-cheek reference to Biden plagiarizing Niel Kinnock's speech which knocked him out of the 1992 race https://archive.ph/idkaA
E.G. 5 Primary waves (Tuesdays/weeks/months) sorted by the 10 states with the least population to the most population.
Why? It's a better rough approximation for a representative sample over an increasingly large window of voters than the current process, and still keeps any benefit of ramping up from smaller to larger populations to narrow overall selection in the field. Plus the algorithm is so simple that it can be outlined in a sentence.
It is not true that “every other country” has parties select their presidential (or nearest equivalent, whether as head of state or head of government, other countries frequently divorcing those roles) candidate by simultaneous national elections. Sometimes, they don’t even (in a legal sense) choose a candidate at all, though the party may have its own process of deciding and announcing who its members responsible for the leadership election (e.g., MPs in Westminster-style system) will vote for should they secure the necessary majority to decide the outcome on their own.
In fact, I couldn’t off the top of my head name even a single country that uses a national simultaneous primary to select party nominees for election head of government or head of state, can you?
Assuming parties could pick the primary border, I think it’d be most advantageous to pick the States sorted by the absolute value of the win/loss percentage for a given state. That way highly contested States get an earlier say in the process and presumably a candidate that is more favorable in those markets comes out ahead earlier in the process.
I think an established rotation would be better, and at least a medium sized state rotating in the "first wave".
It was payback to Jim Clyburn for the stunt he pulled in 2020 re: Bernie.
Biden is unlikely to face a primary challenge if he runs. Bernie already said he won't. https://www.axios.com/2022/06/14/bernie-sanders-2024-primary...
Don't forget that the 2020 Iowa caucus was a complete mess, totally botched, and the chair of the Iowa Democratic Party had to resign soon afterward.
I’ve clarified the grandparent: I was referring to the nominating contest (the aggregate of primary elections and caucuses that are addressed by the schedule change being discussed), not the general election.
The volume for 2024 is also so low compared to 2020 so I don't think you can use the current 2024 predictions as evidence.
[1]: https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/3698/Who-will-win-t...
I think that has more to do with getting away from Iowa and New Hampshire since those states have shown a surprising level of support for candidates outside of the preferred establishment picks.
On the other hand if a primary chooses a candidate that ultimately produces a winner in the general election, they probably should go first the next time. Iowa didn't vote for Bill Clinton in 1992. But as it was for Biden, it was after Iowa where Clinton got momentum (in Clinton's case Georgia). [2]
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/05/biden-campaign-staf...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Democratic_Party_presiden...
What caused that?
Or do the US subsidies on corn make it cost effective for Canadians to burn ethanol? If so, where’s my cheap E85? I’d run it in my old Corolla and see what happens.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/taxpayers-ontario-can...
Go ahead: your old Corolla will become a dead Corolla.
https://blog.raleighclassic.com/is-it-safe-to-use-ethanol-in...
Money and corruption to be more precise.
The market price is destabilized and undercut by government subsidies who put most farmers in the unenviable position of taking corporate welfare in order to make a living.
If the government got out of the business of picking winners and losers, and deciding who to rain money on and who to starve, the corn would be more expensive and sugar cane would be cheaper.
Really fun to pull into a gas station and accidentally fill your tank with gas it can't handle.
It's really just more mundane: BigAg is powerful and our representatives take their money.
The one thing the Iowa caucus did was make it easier for grassroots candidates. If they hadn't bungled the caucus so badly in 2020 for example, Pete Buttigieg would have had a better shot at it like Obama in '08 (he won the caucus, but we didn't find out for weeks!).
Which other crops have sufficient margin given commodity prices?
Can solar and goats and wind and IDK algae+co2 make up the difference?
Is solar laser weeding a more sustainable approach?
What rotations improve the compost and soil situation?
Can row covers etc be made from corn; from cellulose and what other sustainable inputs (ideally that are waste outputs)?
Compostable thermoformable biopolymers for food packaging
FWIU transparent wood "windows" are made out of treated cellulose? How do they compare with glass and plastic in terms of transparency for full spectrum UV for e.g. plant growth, sanitization, and vitamin D?
> Is solar laser weeding a more sustainable approach?
From "Solar-Powered Plant Protection Equipment: Perspective and Prospects" (2022) https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/15/19/7379 :
>> The unmanned system (robot) is well suited for weeding operations, and it helps to minimize the required workforce and herbicide usage while weeding. Two solar-powered weeders, EcoRobot and AVO robot models, are developed by Ecorobotix, Switzerland (Figure 2). These models work more effectively in row crops based on the detection of weeds (>85%), and a herbicides is applied precisely on the weeds to destroy them. The solar power used in EcoRobot and AVO models is 380 W and 1150 W, respectively, and they have a working time of 8 and 12 h once fully charged by solar panels [64].
> What rotations improve the compost and soil situation?
Crop rotation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_rotation
If we didn't subsidize food, we'd be importing a lot of food. In the event of war, famine, plague, etc, we don't want to be without a supply of food, fuel and now electronics.
I'm not sure this is the case. The vast majority of corn is field corn grown for silage anyway. The ethanol extraction process leaves a mash which is then fed to cows. Given the soil conditions, corn and soybeans will likely remain the most profitable cash crops so unless subsidies are created for other crop types not much would change. My perspective from living in Iowa for 2/3rds of my life.
Do analyses typically factor this sort of thing in, or do they assume corn is grown solely for the purpose of ethanol extraction?
Part 1:
My statement you quoted above was super 'hand wavy', but it is a mass & energy balance situation.
Ethanol production from corn, corn stover, or whatever (you can tell I'm not a farmer), removes carbon & energy from the "farm field system" that would otherwise stay in/on the field, be tilled or decompose into soil, and end up in next years' corn (or the year after that, etc.). It makes the farming cycle less efficient from a carbon management perspective and, as others have mentioned, that means more fertilizer, etc. to make up for the carbon loss. Without increased fertilizer use and general land management... crop production would decline year over year as result of removing plant material for ethanol production.
Also... one could imagine corn breeding and propagation scenarios in a 'field corn' field where (a) silage is maximized for feeding cows and (b) a trade off between silage and stover is made to maximize overall profit.
So there does end up being a competition between (1) optimizing for efficient food production and soil management and (1) optimizing for maximum profit. The second option does diminish food production unless made up for by there means.
Still not a great explanation. I don't have any references to share but there are some good review articles out there that talk about this in detail.
Part 2:
I was "sort-of" conflating corn with other crops for biofuel production. I should not have done that. My statement that ethanol production from corn "places additional competitive demand on our food supply" might not be completely true in a high-impact sense. But ethanol production from corn does still impact food production and land-use as described in part 1.
In the case where a crop like switch grass is cultivated specifically for biofuel production... here we would definitely have a case where there is competition for use of arable land, a finite resource, between biofuel production and food production.
If you have 85 gasoline and need to get it to 87, you blend it with an appropriate quantity of ethanol (octane rating 108.6, thanks for the correction).
Reference: https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/ethanol_fuel_basics.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octane_rating#Examples
and for people not familiar with the subject, the purpose of an octane booster is to make your fuel less explosive (even though the point of your fuel is to be exploded to release it's energy) The problem with low octane fuels is not that they have lower energy, but that when you compress them they can explode prematurely (before you're ready to collect the energy) and compressing them is a way to get more energy out of an engine. Ethanol is less explodey, and so is tetraethyl lead.
Carbons are the little black spheres with 4 equidistant holes, and hydrogens are the smaller white ones with a single hole.
And you've got all the little somewhat-flexible rods to act as chemical bonds and connect the different carbon and hydrogen atoms in any combination you like.
Octane is a generic name for most any combination you can legitimately make out of C8H18. Any of these is referred to as an octane isomer.
If you put all 8 carbons in a straight row and "saturate" the remaing holes with the 18 hydrogens, this straight-chain form in particular is referred to as Octane proper, or more descriptively to avoid confusion, normal-octane since it is a straight-chain isomer.
This normal- or n-octane is not the stuff that burns with a very good antiknock rating at all.
The one particular branched-chain C8H18 isomer having the proper name 2,2,4-trimethylpentane is the one that serves as a calibration fluid for laboratory antinock determination. Even though there are many other branched-chain C8H18 isomers possible, this one is the most commonly obtainable and carries the generic name "Iso-octane".
Runs smooth as butter.
Goes well with vintage MTBE.
How would auto manufacturers manage their cars' fuel systems if every station could potentially have a different octane booster? How do all those cars switch over to an entirely different formula when a bunch of those octane boosters are found to have issues?
Personally, I think the industry needs an R&D consortium to look into better technologies that all shareholders can use. Federal input and regulation, but the companies are free to work together to find better solutions for the environment and our health.
Dunno how the complaints about ethanol = bad because it’s hygroscopic really are. Yeah, 100% ethanol will pull in atmospheric h2o, but in a gasoline+ethanol mix?
If anything, a small bit of ethanol helps “break the phase” and at least runs any moisture through your engine instead of a separate layer which is surely worse. Dunno if any unscrupulous gas stations/suppliers deliberately water down their ethanol laden gas just to earn some extra margin.
Even 90% ethanol is fine for any injection petrol engine. You just need to mix it with something that burns with a visible flame and some detergents.
Some conventional wisdom about not putting alcohol into your gasoline does go way back to the Model T days, it was widely regarded as safest just to not do it, since you can't be sure how much water is in the alcohol.
Various things will always be done to prop up commodity prices for American farmers, if not ethanol then something else.
I went through the math a few years ago from the perspective of "micro power plants" for powering BTC mining. Coal is the winner from a cost perspective; but terribly dirty obviously. And capital intensive. Burning corn as fuel to a high efficiency boiler is actually more efficient than ethanol.
One of the things humanity has done as it has industrialized agriculture (to deal with the time issue of that "eventually") is that it has industrialized "the Nitrogen Cycle" as much as it can, and in so doing added a lot of additional Carbon inefficiencies to how we fixate Nitrogen for use by our crops. Modern crops couldn't grow at the same industrial scales without modern fertilizers, but modern fertilizers generally don't exist without massive carbon subsidies.
Corn is just not the best plant for the purpose. Soy or hemp are two better examples, especially for biodiesel.
If the USA suddenly had a food crisis, the ethanol production could be stopped.
Could it? 99% of corn grown (including that used for ethanol) isn’t the sweet corn for eatin. Would take a while to switch and I’m guessing there isn’t much excess capacity for turning it all into corn syrup and such.
COVID couldn’t even figure out how to redirect institutional toilet paper into consumer toilet paper. And that’s the same product!
The real buffer for a “food crisis” (whatever that is) is the amount of crop fed to livestock and food exported, not ethanol.
Did the TP "shortage" actually get bad enough that a non-negligible portion of the population had nothing to wipe their bums with? Regardless, starving is much more dire than having nothing to wipe with. If people were actually starving, I'm sure they would have no issues eating field corn intended for animal consumption.
As the basis of a fuel supply, it's a very poor idea.
I monitor other engine vitals with an OBD reader while towing and my engine cycles through thermals faster when running Ethanol as well - the engine gets hotter faster because Ethanol burns hotter, but the BTU output is less - leaving me with that less efficient power cycle.
Overall Ethanol is a complete detriment to any and all IC operations. And don't even think about using Ethanol in any 2 stroke motor. Not only will it basically destroy your motor in record time but it's the worst type of fuel for fuel delivery systems that may not be used on a daily basis.
Ethanol and all the ridiculous subsidies tied to it are one of the biggest rackets out there. It's been known from the beginning that the only thing it's good for is wasting valuable crop land. If it were actually useful we wouldn't need to continue to subsidize corn production for its use decades later.
Ethanol is a joke.
The past alternative was tetraethyllead, which had catastrophic environmental impact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#Antiknock_agent
Wikipedia has an interesting article on the subject @
Unleaded E0 is still available in some places in the US with octane numbers on par with E10 and E15 blends
https://stillwaterassociates.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/...
But if water is getting into your fuel (focus on fixing that, not your fuel choice), isn’t it better if the ethanol can carry it through the engine instead of just accumulating as a separate layer?
I wish my gaskets would swell a bit. All of my auto seal/gasket problems were on the intake manifold or oil system interfaces.
But they're still higher octane fuels. E85 is specifically sought out for this purpose in the gearhead scene, so they can run high boost getting something alcohol-like at the pump.
Lots of theoretical concerns “omg, you’re not following the owner’s manual, god is going to blow up your engine and kill 4 kittens”, but either nobody has blown an engine or hasn’t admitted to it.
Plenty of parts of the world where E85 is substantially cheaper than E10 (e.g. France where it’s ~43% cheaper) where I’m sure lots of people are running it or various mixes.
This, of course, assumes that the car is even capable of running higher ethanol blends.
The performance benefits are mostly from turbocharged engines. Though, Chevy V8s can see solid torque gains over 4000 RPMs.
Once you get into the E50+ blends, you should have seen a huge mileage reduction. 10-20% for E50 and 25+% on E85. There's so much less energy density in ethanol.
You're not going to see the insane power gains possible on E85 from the factory though because the E85 map needs to be conservative enough to no blow up if someone suddenly fills up with regular.
Engines with knock sensors and advanced valve timing + phasing can do that. Source: mine does, stock '08 K20 engine, which has a very wide operational RPM range, so these things matter.
The gains will come in well before that
Like, compared to even worse carbon chains than octane?
Edit: Never mind got the scale backwards. I'll keep the comment here to shame myself.
You can go below 0 or above 100 if you find some other molecule/mix that acts worse/better, though how you extrapolate beyond the 0-100 range is subject to debate, confusion and deception. Ethanol is clearly better than pure octane, though how much depends on how you choose to extend the scale.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-iowa-biofuel...
Can't imagine there's any conflict of interest there.
> ethanol is likely at least 24% more carbon-intensive than gasoline due to emissions resulting from land use changes to grow corn, along with processing and combustion.
The nice thing about words like "likely" is that it leaves the door open for the other thing. Did the study find that ethanol is more carbon-intensive, or is it someone's opinion that it's more intensive?
I don't see how this adds up. As the article mentions, the carbon atoms in ethanol came from the atmosphere to which it returns. Yet not all of the carbon even makes it back. But the mere tilling of the soil puts ethanol somewhere worse than fossil fuels?
By that logic, we'd better stop farming crops all together.
> Tilling fields releases carbon stored in soil, while other farming activities, like applying nitrogen fertilizers, also produce emissions.
And we're to assume that, without the production of fuel ethanol, the same land wouldn't be tilled and used for other crops?
What is the nature of the carbon in that soil? Is it carbon that is constantly making its way up through the soil and into the atmosphere? Does stable isotope testing corroborate that it's a meaningful contributor to the global increase in atmospheric CO2?
The above is also why GMO crops are so great for the environment: by using a little roundup (just a little - not only is it a mist sprayed, but that mist is mostly water) much less fuel is used vs cultivating (think mechanical hoe).
Thats just not true. Plenty of farmers still plough. There has been some movement to lower disturbance low-till/ minimum-till systems for commodity crops, but we're still seeing soil carbon losses in agricultural soils in general. Number isn't going up and to the right, its still going down and to the left. I appreciate the importance of these kinds of systems, but I also appreciate that its not nearly as well adopted as one would think based on a survey of youtube videos. There is a very real departure from the Internets vision of farming and real-life farming in terms of practice.
I do agree however that carbon in the soils is the answer to most problems. The closest thing I came to witnessing a fist fight at work was between two 50+ yo scientists regarding aluminium/ alumina ions and their relationship with soil carbon. If geriatric scientsits are willing to raise fisticuffs over it, you should wonder why they care so much.
> Substituting our empirically derived domestic emissions for those modeled in the RFS RIA would raise ethanol’s projected life cycle GHG emissions for 2022 to 115.7 g CO2e MJ−1—a value 24% above baseline gasoline (93.1 g CO2e MJ−1). The RIA estimate, however, includes improvements in feedstock and ethanol production efficiency that were projected to occur by 2022, such that the GHG intensity of ethanol produced at earlier time periods and over the life of the RFS to date is likely much higher [...].
My understanding is that they took the model used in the RFS RIA (when the RFS was first introduced), and plugged in what they've seen over the past few years to that model. Take that with what you will.
> And we're to assume that, without the production of fuel ethanol, the same land wouldn't be tilled and used for other crops?
With the increase in demand for corn for fuel usage, more fields are needed to plant the corn. Because the corn is for fuel, not food, food wouldn't have been planted in place of the corn had there not been fuel demand.
Spent corn used in ethanol production becomes livestock feed. Good quality feed, actually. Even with a surplus of spent corn, it can be dried and kept around until needed. Point being that it actually is food, just by proxy. More fields may be needed to scale for demand, but it wouldn't be linear. For all we know, the scale of corn production has a modest relationship with ethanol or is correlative and weakly causative.
> Can't imagine there's any conflict of interest there.
Pro-nuclear bias you figure? Does the DoE have another reason to dislike corn?
I was doing reviews of at least a half dozen studies of this that dated back to the mid '00s, back then the most optimistic studies were around 1.3 joules of ethanol for 1 joule for extraction (which excludes the sunlight). Meaning you're burning 1 joule of gasoline to farm and transport and manufacture 1.3 joules of ethanol. But the pessimistic estimates from then were also below 1, meaning that you literally use more petrochemicals to support growing the crop than the crop produces in finished fuel.
Whether it's breakeven, a little positive, or a little negative we've known for a long time that it's marginal at best, thus the interest in cellulosic ethanol. Whether it's 0.7 joules out or 1.3 joules out per joule in depends on assumptions like how far you need to transport things and how dry the crops start. There's no way to avoid that uncertainty.
That whether it's positive, unity, or negative is sensitive to these variables is a statement of just how marginal it is. It should just be positive, always, or what are we doing? Confusingly, some oil wells are barely breakeven because they use so much energy to build the well and process the fuel.
You can follow the citations inside this article, but, for instance:
> Resulting EROI is typically around 1.4-1.5 [for shale oil].
So every 1.4-1.5 joules of shale oil you burn required 1 joule of other energy to extract. Net it produces only 0.4-0.5 joules of free energy after extraction, and that's... well, arguably not actually enough to operate a civilization but let's not go there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment#Sh...
Corn ethanol has been a scam and known to be one for a very long time. Shale oil is marginally less of a scam, but is truly hard to justify compared to PV solar or wind which both easily exceed 4 and 34 depending on the details.
But no, variation in the estimated EROEI is entirely normal and expected because different sites have different details.
There's something like 12+ PH.ds who are working in this field and create papers consistently. 11 of them agree, and then Dr. Lark comes out and disagrees.
Every couple of years, Dr. Lark comes out with a new set of studies that contradicts everyone else. And then the news organizations / hacker news around here focuses on what Dr. Lark says rather than what the other 11 guys say.
----------
I don't necessarily want to demean Dr. Lark or his work. But people need to have context here. This guy is anti-Biofuel, and has been since the early 00s (maybe earlier).
I'm not 100% sure what to do about this problem per se. Contrarian professors are important parts of the scientific process. Someone like Dr. Lark is very important to making sure that everyone's i's are dotted and t's are crossed.
But the general "media" picks up on the contrarian, and uses that as "Entire field is wrong, everybody is wrong" and shouts it from the rooftops. Rather than... you know... rightfully pointing out that they're focused on the contrarian.
--------------
We need contrarians like Dr. Lark. But we don't need media overly focusing upon contrarians and highlighting their specific research as if its the mainstream in the field.
See yall in 2 years when Dr. Lark publishes another contradictory paper, like he always does.
Who is funding who here? Is Dr. Lark being funded by the fossil fuel industry? Are the 11 other scientists being funded by 'big corn' or the USDA itself? Does the USDA/'big corn' have a revolving door situation where the USDA scientists have come from and maintain ties to industry?
Dr. Lark's contribution, is that he has correctly identified holes in everyone else's research on a somewhat consistent basis. Sometimes you need an outsider to see the flaws in your methodology.
Dr. Lark in particular brought up the issue of land use changes: how forests get cut down, release a lot of carbon, and then farmland is made over the forests. He has legitimate points, and releases calculations and research to show how it changes the biofuels numbers.
Yes, its exaggerated at times and then the counter-points come out, but the push back-and-forth is necessary to advance the field. And we actually have technology that answers questions that Dr. Lark poses. IIRC, Argonne National Labs took satellite photos over the USA, measured how many forests got converted into farms using AIs, and ran the numbers.
The discussion going on is very high level and sophisticated, modern, and high tech. This is a field (and discussion) to be proud of as an American.
---------
What I'm cynical about is how the media treats these discussions. They want to invent problems where there are no problems. Instead of pointing out what most of the researchers agree on, today's media focuses on what the singular, most extreme member of a group disagrees with everyone else about.
Texas and North Carolina produce them for export. Under perfect conditions, waste sawdust becomes pellets but it’s understood in those states that old-growth timber is used.
Shelled corn burns hotter than wood, and biomass pellet stoves make up a marginal part of the domestic heating market. For export, where heating and power generation are disrupted by war, shipping that corn seems a good transitional step without the harm associated with somehow discovering new sources of wood pellets.
In Brazil, burning rainforest for ag use looks very bad abroad. Should be similar on the American prairie.
It's not hard to see 100 bushel per acre swings in corn yield between growing years even within normal growing parameters, never mind times of crop catastrophes. While everyone hopes for a good year every year, you can't plan for a good year. As such, there will always be times where there is way more corn than we can handle.
Which is what happened in 2006. A lot of corn, having busted the bins and having no home, was left out to rot. Ethanol subsidies were introduced in 2007 to build out more ethanol plants to provide a greater buffer in excess times when the regular corn market can't absorb it all so that we aren't both burning gasoline and letting the corn rot away to nothing.
I don't recall ethanol ever being considered better for the climate in a vacuum. It was only ever thought to be when you take reality into account.
Citation needed
Furthermore, good faith participation seeks to provide equal value to the participants. "Citation needed" offers nothing to other parties.
Apparently, according to another comment, "Citation needed" is some kind of Wikipedia slang, but a website that attempts to document knowledge is very different to a casual conversation and to try and conflate them, again, can only be done so in bad faith.
The trouble is that it's unpredictable how big the crop will be before planting. As mentioned before, yields can vary quite significantly from year to year. As such, you will have periods of excess where we don't have enough storage for it all. Ethanol was promoted as a way to clean up those excesses before they turn to waste, recapturing some of fuel that was put into its growth initially.
[1] - https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn-and-other-feed-gr...
(The expression is not to be read literally. 'Citation needed', widespread after Wikipedia, rhetorically points to that idea in a generalized intention including "foundation needed". I.e.: "You need grounds to write that".)
To me at least, not being an agricultural economist, the statement that the corn would be grown anyway wasn’t obvious on the surface; I too would have liked to have seen some further justification for the claim.
"Citation needed" is a purposeful attempt to dead end a conversation. It fundamentally cannot be replied to in a reasonable way. What would even be cited? There was no quote in which to cite. Maybe if I scour Google hard enough I'll find someone else saying the same thing and then I can pretend that I quoted it instead of using my own words, but what would that gain?
The ethanol situation is an interesting topic that is worthy of continued discussion, I agree. It's unfortunate that the bad actor steered discussion away from it. Oh well.
As for pollution during manufacturing, EVs cause more, but then they break even in pollution terms in comparison to gasoline vehicles after less than three years, and are a net environment win each year after that.
That's exactly my point. Would it be possible to design an engine from the ground up for very high octane fuels?
Stock cars generally don't take full advantage of the octane benefits of E85 because they will blow up if someone fills the tank with E15. But in the aftermarket world, "corn powered" cars make substantially more power, especially turbocharged ones. They have the benefit of owners that understand to manually switch maps when changing fuels.
The more typical way to do this is have a turbocharger (supercharger... I can never remember the difference and which you want when). You and run more boost which increases the compression ratio. However this requires an expensive turbo and so isn't a popular option.
I'm not sure why turbo cars have not made these modifications though. There are probably other trade offs I'm not aware of.
Now... I've got a small car/engine. The MPG might be markedly worse on a bigger car. Don't know. But at least in my case, cents/mile is about the same.
With my typical city/town driving, I get 32-35 mpg with 87 octane, and typically 26-30 with E85.
Regular 87 octane is $3.12 around me here, and E85 is $2.71. E85 works out around 12% cheaper.
Fuel blending for optimal combustion characteristics is a complicated business, most of what people claim about this issue is not very reliable.
As expected, the press distorted the study's conclusions to the point of actually lying:
"we find that the production of corn-based ethanol in the United States has failed to meet the policy’s own greenhouse gas emissions targets and negatively affected water quality, the area of land used for conservation, and other ecosystem processes"
Bet we can't get rid of those regulations for years to come too, especially since new regs seem to be heading in the direction of banning all new gas cars. So probably after that, if at all.
My brother-in-law has a farm, and claims that if you look at the amount of energy used and produced by farms, agriculture hasn't been economically viable for more than half a century. We pump fuel out of the ground, have farms turn it into food, and we eat that. It works because the energy from fossil fuels is already there, and eating is important. But if farms turn fuel into more fuel, those farms need to be a lot more efficient, or we're just burning fuel for nothing.
https://aei.ag/corn-saves-america/
Cliffs:
- Farmers were over producing corn and needed new markets.
- Americans, sick of importing oil from conflict zones, desired a US produced fuel
- Americans desired a renewable fuel source.
- Brewers grain, a by-product of ethanol process could be marketed to dairy & beef producers as a less expensive feed source.I don't see how this is anything but good. Having a single crop for so many things, makes the replicator go brrr. Yes it's a single point of failure, but it's efficient to use food production to scale everything else and it's not a dead-end if corn were to have problems (ie Interstellar)
Would corn syrup be such common ingredient without corn being so heavily subsidized.
Would animals be kept in feedlots and filled with corn if it wasn't subsidized.
Govt subsidizes of corn hurt our bodies, out environment, and our tax returns.
Sugar cane is good, and used quite successfully in Brazil, but of course only grows in sub/tropical climates. Sugar beet is used in Europe to some extent, as well as staple crops like wheat and rye – not sure how they compare to corn.
As far as whether we will or should use other crops, I doubt it. The whole thing with corn mostly came from the US having a large surplus of corn and needing something to do with it. Since we're operating on the false belief that the carbon cycle itself is a bad thing, and because we're trying to move to electric (theoretically), I don't think society is going to invest itself into more ethanol.
Democrats especially shouldn’t put up with Iowa considering how it hasn’t voted D anytime recently. Not to mention the completely FUBAR 2020 primary.
Make GA or NH first contest.
Then a lot less pressure for this losing ethanol boondoggle.
The DNC already voted to make SC first in 2024 (the early – pre-Super Tuesday – order in the new rule being SC => NH & NV => GA => MI)
For now I can't see how we can just stop fossil fuels without starving half the world (as we need them for fertilizer production). Never mind cement, plastics and steel.
Cutting corn/food prices would bankrupt some overextended corporate/new entrant farmers (and their lenders), but it’s not like the fields would become unharvested.
Experienced my local station switch to 10% and saw my milage go from 28 to 24. Pretty positive no other factors changed.
The rule has already passed. It can defy the rule and keep its early date, but then it will lose half its delegates under the rule.
> Michigan which plants 2 million acres of corn will be 5th
Fifth isn't second, and two million acres of corn in a state with a $473B GDP is not the same significance as thirteen million acres in a state with a $180B GDP
> Iowa still might be on Super Tuesday.
Most of the country that isn’t on the early calendar is on Super Tuesday
behind the search for alternative fuels, there is the notion that reserves for fossil fuels may deplete.
It's not a total myth per se, because it once was and sometimes still can be true for engine components that are simply not designed to handle ethanol.
Such is not the case for pretty much every car built after the year 2000, roughly speaking. Every soft component in modern cars is designed to handle at least 10% ethanol, and effectively handle 100% ethanol.
Corrosion is not really an issue either. The E85 you get from a pump is anhydrous, and the only way you'll get things like phase separation is if water is added deliberately. Ethanol doesn't pull water into gasoline. That's a myth. It's not a dessicant. This topic has been studied and it's simply not worth worrying about.
Most cars on the road today, including those that aren't Flex Fuel, can run somewhere between E30 and E50 with no problems whatsoever. They can even run on E85 or E100 with either a software update or a piggyback device between the ECU and the fuel injectors, everything else remaining OEM.
A car running on ethanol won't rust, fall apart, or blow up. If anything, ethanol can be better for engines given that it burns cooler and leaves way less carbon deposits.
If a small engine today has seal failures or other issues, it's more likely to be the BTX (benzene, toluene, xylene) in gasoline and not the ethanol component.
By the way, I'm speaking from direct experience. Not only have I converted small engines to run on ethanol, but I converted my 2013 Hyundai to be a flex fuel vehicle.
[1] Because that's what's available around me, not because that's what they should be getting.
> Most cars on the road today, including those that aren't Flex Fuel, can run somewhere between E30 and E50 with no problems whatsoever.
That's straight up not true if we define "run" as "run as well as on E10" (granted I wish it was so I could save money on having to upgrade fueling for my cars).
With the huge focus on MPG manufacturers generally aren't overbuilding their fueling systems: My 4 series will "run" on E30 with a stock tune, but logging AFRs and fuel rail pressure will show it's a dangerous game where the ECU is pulling a ton of timing as the fuel system struggles to keep up.
Even with a tune, E20 is the maximum the fueling system can maintain without straight up running out of fueling and going into limp mode under heavy load
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The more balanced truth is: ethanol for vehicles is a complicated topic, because modern ICEs are complicated beasts.
Cars are designed to not break down on E10, but you will find some people argue (imo validly) that part of why car reliability dipped around the turn of the century was all the changes needed to support that kind of flexibility. Materials changed, engine management got more complicated (the fact that a car will run at all on E30 while clearly exceeding its fueling limits is a testament to that), etc.
Ethanol can be better for sure, my car is a million times more enjoyable on a simple E20 blend than California's awful 91 blend, but at the end of the day, ethanol fuel is a bit of a farce (and again, I'm someone who'd have a terrible day if we actually stopped producing it).
We're having the public pay to prop up our energy independence, and producing more emissions along the way. E85 prices don't reflect the difference in energy content, and the cost at the production side to make E10 blends. Gas would be cheaper for most people if we didn't have that requirement, hence why in times of economic need we've suspended the requirement.
Ironically the people who I personally see benefit most from E85 are people who are well off enough to use it for a performance boost, or businesses taking advantage of how much artificially cheaper E85 is. Average people get the short end of the stick and few to none of the benefits.
Variances between vehicles will always be a factor. This doesn't mean that most of them won't run sufficiently or even well with a higher ethanol ratio. Your experience with your 4 Series is interesting, and you seem to know a lot about ICEs, but all the research I conducted before I even considered trying E20 convinced me that the possibility of engine failure or damage is extremely remote.
I'll have to find them when I get home, but there were at least 2 studies I came across where researchers tested (I think) E20 on several vehicles from different years and manufacturers to see what would happen. The only issues the vehicles encountered were ones that had nothing to do with the fuel system.
In any case, it is a nuanced topic, though I struggle to say it's quite as complicated as your perspective.
> Even with a tune, E20 is the maximum the fueling system can maintain without straight up running out of fueling and going into limp mode under heavy load
That's very interesting. With my vehicle, it ran almost identically to E10 on E50 (yes I made sure that was roughly the ratio present in the tank), and on E60 it started to run rough and showed a lean condition code but was still perfectly driveable.
> Ethanol can be better for sure, my car is a million times more enjoyable on a simple E20 blend than California's awful 91 blend, but at the end of the day, ethanol fuel is a bit of a farce (and again, I'm someone who'd have a terrible day if we actually stopped producing it).
In any case, I find it an amazing fuel. Although my vehicle isn't optimized for the higher octane rating of ethanol, I experienced an obvious performance improvement on even E20 in terms of power. My bias was low in that case because at the time I was certain I wouldn't see greater power.
> Ironically the people who I personally see benefit most from E85 are people who are well off enough to use it for a performance boost, or businesses taking advantage of how much artificially cheaper E85 is. Average people get the short end of the stick and few to none of the benefits.
Do you think that's a limitation based on the availability of Flex Fuel vehicles, or the price of the fuel itself? Even when adjusting for the energy-per-volume using the most pessimistic calculation, E85 shouldn't be more expensive than gasoline. At current prices, E85 should be ~$0.50 less per gallon than regular gas when adjusted. At least that's how it is for the fuel prices near me.
But let's say that E85 and gasoline cost exactly the same per joule. All that would mean is that E85 has less range. If EVs have taught us anything, it's that many people don't mind having less range.
But modern engines will happily run like that for a long with no outward issue (especially if you're not someone that strains them), so some might argue that it's "running just as well".
I strain my engine, so it's not what I'd consider running well.
(Also all that is about E20-E30. "technically it's running well" won't continue all the way until E50 when at E30 you're already seeing the ECU needing to cope in the logs, and that's across many cars, not just my 4 series) -
And when I say ethanol as a fuel is a farce, I mean zooming out at the whole exercise, not on a personal level. It's amazing in my tank, easily providing as much of a performance boost as much more drastic options like messing with emissions equipment. Even adjusting for energy, it is still cheaper than 91...
But again, zooming out, for most people the performance difference is negligible because for them it'd be E10 vs E0, not E10 vs E30+. And they're paying a lot of money into the ethanol system for this marginal benefit:
- Ethanol is heavily subsidized by taxpayers at production, at its "natural cost" the energy difference would make it more expensive gasoline: https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/laws/ETH?state=US
- Ethanol is subsidized again when its blended into E85 instead of E10, but most consumers are only even able to get E10. Even the physical pump dispensing E85 gets an additional rebate!
- Because some of the subsides are only for fuel over 10% ethanol, E10 which most people have no choice in taking actually ends up more expensive than both E0 and E85! In times of need we end up dropping the E10 requirement because of that: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/12/biden-waiving-ethanol-rule-i...
- The food that they do need, regardless of what they drive, competes with biofuel for farmland which is absolutely insane:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2011/03/23/196198/ethanol-b... https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/exclusive-britai...
- And then as this article shows, we're not even getting an environment
So at the end of the day, regular people using E10 are seriously getting nothing positive from it, but paying into it in multiple ways.
Overall I'm happy I can fill up my tank with E85, but the machinery around it is the literal definition of a frace.
If the produced food isn't actually being eaten, it's just a highly inefficient energy conversion Rube Goldberg machine.
Now to answer your question, food production unlocks plenty of carbon underground through natural gas.
The bone of contention among researchers seems to be: whether the inclusion of biomass in its production has any discernible benefit.
Worst-case for standard gasoline vs Best-case for corn ethanol:
A) Gasoline produced from Alberta tar sands syncrude (which has to be melted and partially hydrogenated using natural gas piped in from Northern Canada/Alaska) shipped by oil tanker (burning dirty bunker fuel) to California refineries for conversion to gasoline by distillation/cracking (with high CO2 emissions related to use of fuel to drive the require heating of the heavy crude oil);
B) Ethanol produced from corn grown with ammonia fertilizer made by splitting water with sun/wind energy, planted and harvested with renewable-powered electric equipment, and fermented and distilled into 95% pure ethanol (the eutectic limit of distillation) using only solar and wind power and in facilities right next to the farmer's fields;
And, conversely, the best case for gasoline and the worst case for ethanol:
C) Gasoline produced from regionally-produced light sweet crude with a minimal need for transport, hydrogenation or extensive processing, meaning much lower emissions from transportation and refining (we could even have electrolytic hydrogenation from water using sunlight to produce the hydrogen);
D) Corn produced in Kansas with large amounts of natural-gas-manufactured ammonia fertilizer, lots of natural-gas-derived synthetic pesticides and herbicides, planted and managed with diesel-powered equipment, then shipped overseas to China for fermentation and conversion to ethanol in a coal-fired ethanol distillery.
So if you break those spreads down you get a ridiculously wide range of estimates. Hence any specific number presented ('at least 25%' in this case) doesn't really tell you that much, other than if you dig through the specific methods used (which are generally hard to find, sometimes they'll put the methods in another paper hidden behind a paywall) you can tell what interest was backing this particular study. Some will even include things like the carbon emissions needed to feed the workers who grow the crops, or who work in the refinery, and so on, which is just nonsense. (The emissions of the restaurant workers who feed the oil refinery workers and the field hands have to be accounted for...?)
Personally, I think artificial photosynthesis is the vastly superior solution relative to either corn ethanol or crude oil gasoline, as you could plausibly run it anywhere with access to seawater and sunlight, saving agricultural land for food production (and conserving ever-scarcer potable water as well). It does however make sense to be able to convert excess agricultural production into useful products, although just composting it back into the soil might be wiser in the long run.