Corn Ethanol Is Of No Use | Hacker News Reader

Corn Ethanol Is Of No Use

forbes.com

67 pointsch4s340 comments

First off, let's take a moment to appreciate what we've got. Gasoline is fantastically dense in energy. Approximately 46 MJ/kg! Ethanol is about half as energy dense, which is why it is usually mixed with petroleum gasoline. Engines must be specifically designed to operate on pure ethanol. Going from the numbers quoted on Tesla's site, their Roadster's lithium ion battery packs have an energy density of 0.456 MJ/kg. If you want to have the same range, electric vehicles have to devote over a hundred times more weight to batteries than gas-guzzlers do to their tank contents. To make matters worse, spent gasoline weighs nothing while spent batteries weigh the same as full batteries. Electric motors are mechanically simpler/lighter and innovative design can carve even more weight off of new vehicle designs, but there is a very good reason why cheap, long-range pure electric vehicles are still a ways off. Lithium ion batteries are also pretty nasty things to produce in terms of environmental impact. It's debatable if a plug-in electric vehicle run off of solar/wind/etc. power actually has less impact than a small gasoline car does at present. If the power used comes from coal then an electric car is actually a huge step in the wrong direction. Also note that the U.S. is not a major producer of Lithium, so dependency on foreign nations is not broken by switching to electric cars.

If corn derived ethanol is worse for the environment than petroleum derived gasoline, the only reasons to use it are economic. If it's cheaper, people will likely use it. (Nevermind that so-called "biofuels" often command a premium because people think they're environmentally friendly!). However, if biofuels are bad for the environment, electric cars are bad for the environment, and other alternatives are not yet commercially viable, what does that leave? Well, sadly, it means stop driving so much! Use public transit. Bike. Walk. Carpool. Stop throwing irrational hissy fits about pipelines meant for safely transporting petroleum if it's the least harmful option that's currently available.

Hopefully better electrical storage technologies will become available before too long. Nanomaterials do potentially offer ways to make capacitors powerful enough to eclipse current chemical battery technologies. This is years or decades off into the future unfortunately. I'm not saying all this to be a drag, but most people really think battery technology has come a lot further than it actually has. Gasoline is still pretty darned useful stuff.

The whole corn ethanol thing amazes me. How they can throw $30bn a year into a program than makes the environment worse is surprising. I realise the recipients of the cash they pay a proportion back to the politicians to keep the thing going. But really - a $300bn or so cost over the life plus producing hunger in poor countries by burning the food? I'm surprised the political system is actually quite that bad. On the plus side I'm optimistic about algae produced ethanol that companies like Algenol are trying to produce.

As someone who grows corn (in a country where the crop is not subsidized, I might add), the way I see it is that we're going to grow the corn anyway, so turning it into fuel is better than letting it rot away as was happening before the ethanol program was put into effect.

The problem is that our crops need to be rotated. Corn seems to be the only crop that fills the gaps that is also compatible with the equipment we use to grow other grains. The market doesn't give us incentive to shell out millions more for equipment to grow crops that are a radical departure from what we're already growing (grains and oilseeds for human and animal consumption).

It's far from perfect and is really a stopgap measure, but I'm not sure what the alternative to growing corn is. That is the problem that needs to be solved. It's not simply a matter of no ethanol = no corn grown. The corn is going onto the market regardless. At least ethanol can recapture some of that energy.

If it's really the case that this corn would be produced anyway, then why do we need subsidies?

Well, like I mentioned, we don't have the subsidies where I farm. But in the US, it is about farm stabilization. Corn, historically, has received the most funding because the crop had the least economic value. The money was intended to keep the farm solvent through those growing years.

As to why corn continues to receive the funding it does even when ethanol has created a use for the crop? That just seems like poor policy making. I don't think the subsides are necessary at all.

I'm curious about corn rotting.

I live in a country that produces quite a lot of corn. Some is sold as fresh produce, but any surplus ends up on the rooves of farmers' houses, dried, consumed during the winter as the major starch. The husks are used for fuel - quick and hot burn stir fry. There is no need to let corn rot.

Why let it rot?

We certainly didn't let it rot in the US before this debacle. The corn is dried using propane or maybe natural gas if the farm is lucky enough to have a hookup, the husks, or sometimes the whole plant, are used for silage and fed to animals, as is most of the corn, although that's generally sold to middlemen and bought by feedlots for cattle, and those who specialize in feeding other animals.

Perhaps I didn't fully characterize the situation. Certainly we had other uses for corn, but around the year 2005-2006 there was so much corn being grown it started to exceed the storage capacity and immediate need for the crop, so it was being dumped outside because there was nowhere else to put it. Exposure to the elements started the process of decay. The ethanol programs came in to use up those excesses.

I do remember that, but it was a temporary problem.

E.g. right now at least my part of the Midwest is suffering from 3 years of drought, and we haven't had even 1 inch total of rain this spring since snow stopped. Save during the fat years, consume during the lean years and all that.

Which technically should be sorted out through the market price. Ethanol is only viable when corn is cheap, which is only reached when supply greatly exceeds demand. However, then you run into people not liking their jobs tied to the random fluctuations of the corn market. The whole situation is kind of a big market failure full of small patches trying to stop the leaks.

I don't think it's a "market failure" so much as people not being willing to accept that "Sorry, today the value for the corn you painstakingly grew is close to $0", and they've been told since at least the '30s that the Federal government will take care of them (well, back then, it would if they were Democrats).

The New Deal policies, BTW, both raised food prices while the same USDA (US Department of Agriculture) estimated 25% of the population was malnourished, which was confirmed by the WWII draft. Which lead to the Federal school lunch program, which was eventually widely extended to breakfast, and now even dinner I hear in some places.

The government needing to take care of you seems like a pretty big market failure to me. And those attempts to take care, instead of solving the root of the problem, is what has ultimately lead to the need for ethanol.

Well, the problem is, how does a society address the issue of steadily decreasing commodity prices as science and engineering produce them?

The New Deal helped farmers, back then a much larger percentage of the population, at the expense of everyone else. The real solution was to move people from farming to industry, or as it turned out, the US military and industrial production to support it for WWII (and per the WWI song, "How 'Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm? (After They've Seen Paree)" (Paris), between that, the "GI Bill" subsidizing college education, learning all sorts of useful skills, etc. I gather many if not most didn't return).

The New Deal, as I've pointed out above, didn't really solve the problem when it's policies damaged so large a portion of the population. No Holodomor, but just as deliberate. I've seen a newsreel of this: http://www.livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe30s/crops_17.ht... ; you can imagine what hungry people back then thought when they saw it.

Lack of storage capacity was the problem. Even more capacity wouldn't really have solved the problem though. There was still more coming in that was needed to be used.

Because as with most things related to the environment, if you disagree with their assessment your a oil company shill. If the environmentalist claim something is you are not allowed to say otherwise.

that and Congress loves the farm lobby, Congress guarantees them income and they in turn feed it back into approved groups.

How did these laws pass (besides lobbying from people growing corn)? I wasn't following too closely at the time.

That's the only reason they passed.

The only other excuse is that once we have cars that consumer corn ethanol, its easier to move to other types of ethanol.

Leading up to that time we had corn coming out of our ears and elevators were quite literally leaving it out to rot. The energy was already spent, ethanol was just a plan to recapture it. It wasn't completely misguided.

There was a good bit of uncritical, emotion driven thinking as well. Corn == bio == green != oil thus must be good.

One detail is that the EPA's excessively stringent smog metrics require the addition of oxygenates (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygenate) during the summer (when the US gasoline market Balkanates into close to 20? separate regions, each with its own blend). Refiners used to use methyl tert-butyl ether (MTBE) but that was declared icky in comparison to ethanol.

In 2000, over 90% of the U.S. corn crop went to feed people and livestock, many in undeveloped countries, with less than 5% used to produce ethanol. In 2013, however, 40% went to produce ethanol, 45% was used to feed livestock, and only 15% was used for food and beverage (AgMRC).

Why the heck would they state the comparison this way? That just seems unprofessional.

Because a journalist quoted someone from the Agricultural Marketing Resource Center. Journalists aren't good at math and marketing people pretend not to be.

The raw date is here (see table 5):

http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/us-bioenergy-statistic...

I wouldn't say no use.

Instead I'd say no current use.

Some power uses cannot be electrified ( nuclear powered airplanes ? )

David Mackay estimated[1] that if there was no fossil fuel left / consumed we'd need to use 12% of our arable land for biofuel as:

"There are a few essential vehicles that can’t be easily electrified"

[1] http://www.withouthotair.com/c27/page_204.shtml

> "There are a few essential vehicles that can’t be easily electrified"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-119

Specifically the Tupolev Tu-95LAL is a nuclear powered aircraft. Only one was ever made. I love the Soviet tech programs.

There are reasons besides environmental ones to encourage use of biofuels (hopefully made from more than corn). One is that ~10% less oil has to be imported during production shortages.

It's not a complete solution, but a minor part of one.

My wife started using E85 fuel her gas mileage went from 22mpg to 17mpg. Even though there was a subsidy on the fuel she ended up having to purchase more. She has since switched back to regular fuel.

The math is a bit more complex than 10% and why I put the ~ there.

Yeah, I did a project on this sort of thing in Uni with E10. We found that the few cents less it costs per litre at the pump was not enough to pay for the extra fuel you had to buy to make up for the fact that there is less energy in the fuel (this is in Australia - pretty sure that we have subsidies here too).

It was a few years ago, but I remember looking at research saying something like it not being really sustaiable (despite being renewable) because it requires too much energy to produce it for what you get out of it.

Biofuels simply aren't scalable to any appreciable fraction of present-day petroleum utilization in advanced industrial nations. For crop-based fuels such as ethanol, productivity is well below 100 gallon/acre. Scale that to the billions of barrels of oil consumed annually, and you'd need several times the present-day arable land of the US to produce the fuel used now.

Looking at primary productivity worldwide, humans already consume 14% of all plant growth. Our fossil fuel utilization would be another 21% of this, according to Jeffrey Dukes in "Burning Buried Sunshine", a 2003 paper (http://globalecology.stanford.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_ClimChange...)

I see some promise in the US Navy Research Lab's electricity-to-fuels project, using seawater as a feedstock for both hydrogen and carbon. That could scale to national levels of production with only a few square km of plant, and about 40,000 km^2 of solar arrays (about 200 km on a side). Given alternative proposals for fossil fuel replacements, it's vastly further into the plausible space.

For some ballpark numbers:

• Conventional crop biodiesel or alcohol typically cite about 100 gallons/acre-year

• Typical algae biodiesel yields are 10x that, or around 1,000 gal/acre-yr

• I've seen claims of 10x that, for 10,000 gal/acre-yr

Assuming that last is possible, you'd need 124,000 km^2 (350 km on a side), or 30 million acres (about 7% of present US cropland) to supply all present petroleum use. That's a very highly engineered 350km square, mind, with a bunch of goop that needs to be fertilized, wastes removed, protected from pests, harvested, dewatered, and processed.

Some incidental biofuels utilization? Sure. Most of our fuel from it at present volumes? Not gonna happen.

Most new cars will be electric in 10 years. Then instead of oil, coal or nuclear (power plants) will be the primary power source and ethanol for automobile fuel will be a minor issue.

I agree with you, but battery technology has some pretty serious problems for cars that can't be ignored.

How do you deal with the replacement cost and lemon risk (battery leasing and warranties).

For me, cars are for road trips. How is that usage addressed (open question, aside from putting superchargers everywhere usable for all electric cars).

How do you deal with the power grid costs? Power mains aren't build to handle the kind of scale that rapidly charging electric cars needs (???).

Your other into aside, which certainly are important questions;

>> for me, cars are for road trips...

It's probable that many people have taken a road-trip holiday at some point in their lives. Some percentage of people do it regularly.

However anecdotally I would suggest most people have not. Outside the US conditions for the road-trip holiday are not as prevalent. In high-density Europe for instance there are easier ways to travel (train for example). In Asia "most" people don't own a car and driving for fun is almost unheard of.

The perfect conditions for a road-trip exist in large countries with lots of open spaces, good roads, good places to stay interesting places to get to and so on. USA, Australia, South Africa and so on.

A motoring holiday in the UK is brilliant, but the short distances would work fine with simple recharge points. It's hard to drive for 4 days solid in the UK without just going around in circles.

Of course the idea of the road trip is more fun than the road trip itself, and we end up doing a trip maybe once every few years. I use my car every day to commute.

It's the idea that I could do a road trip that seems to be the logic against electric, but in practice I don't actually do one all that often. (some people do, but they're a tiny minority)

Heres my point. Do the math. Simply hire a petrol car when you want to do a road-trip. For most people that will be never, for others it might be every few years - for a tiny fraction it will be often. The tiny fraction can continue to drive petrol. The price of oil isn't coming down, so that will be more and more expensive.

On the up side every road-tripper should lobby for electric cars all day long. Using petrol for commuting is a terrible waste, and when it runs out its the road tripper who will be hurt.

Frankly electric cars today have more than enough range for daily use for 360+ days in the year. As the price of oil rises over the next 10 years the economics for electric make a lot more sense.

>some people do, but they're a tiny minority

Do you have any citations for that? I do a trip once a year or so of about 1000 miles and it never really surprises anyone when I tell them that so it must not be that uncommon.

For road trips, rent a suitable car. The idea that you should modify your purchase of a daily driver to accommodate an activity you do once or twice a year is common, but strange.

In those ten years the US will spend ~100 billion on ethanol subsidies [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_the_United_Stat...

Given the size of Big Oil, Big Agriculture, and Big Auto, I don't think you'll see a major shift to electric in 10 years.

And don't forget infrastructure. We have a very well developed one for gasoline and diesel, we'd have to spend massively to enhance the electric grids to accommodate this new usage, right down to neighborhood transformers, which are sized to heat up in summer days and cool down at night.

California is already dealing with this problem, where the addition of as little as 2 electric cars in a neighborhood could cause the transformer feeding it to blow.

And right now the anti-coal jihad is focusing our new power plant creation on replacing coal fired plants with natural gas ones quickly enough so that we don't suffer brownouts and blackouts. The really serious net increases in power generation would take some time to accomplish ... might be possible in "10 years", but I think it'll be demand driven vs. proactive for something that might never happen, so again I think that timetable is wildly optimistic.

And renewables, which you casually dismiss. Solar panels are becoming on par with coal, and there are many other types of renewable energy as well.

I intentionally dismissed them because renewable energy is still a minor percentage of the total power produced in the world. Not counting biomass it is 6% according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy

Don't forget the "growing rapidly" part. Sure, if we decide not to use renewables, we won't use renewables. But if we do, we will. We're talking about future plans here (in your words, what will power cars in 10 years).

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