First off, a couple of announcements. After being able to stay at home for the past two months, I have a very heavy travel schedule over the next two weeks. My participation here will probably be limited. I am off to Seattle tomorrow, on to the Netherlands from there, will visit Switzerland and Germany, back to the U.S. mainland, on to Canada, and then back to Hawaii. I have essentially piled up eight visits I need to make into one big, exhausting trip. My ability to post and respond to comments and e-mails will be spotty at best.
Second, my first essay went up yesterday at Forbes: The Price of Energy. My intention is to put something up there every week or two, and my primary goal is to be educational with the essays. I don’t plan to do any major debunking of company claims there, although I will still do that here occasionally. I will generally first post the stories targeted for Forbes on my blog, modify as appropriate based on the comments (in the case that something is incorrect or unclear), and then post it at Forbes.
Now, on to today’s story. Yesterday I saw a story on what is one of the silliest ideas I have ever heard from a politician. It isn’t the first time I have heard it mentioned, but I believe it is the first time one of our legislators actually announced they were going to take action on it:
Braley Announces Legislation to Require Country of Origin Labeling for Fuels
Washington, DC – In an address to the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association today, Rep. Bruce Braley (D-Iowa) announced he will introduce legislation to require country of origin labeling for fuels. Braley will introduce the bill, Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) for Fuels, tomorrow when he returns to Washington, DC.
The bill will require the Department of Energy to conduct a study and implement its recommendations to ensure American consumers have the ability to decide at the gas pump whether they want to purchase domestic fuel products, such as biofuels produced in Iowa, or gasoline produced in hostile nations that many terrorists call home.
“When we fill up our vehicles, there’s no existing method for us to know where the fuel we’re purchasing comes from and which nations are deriving the economic benefit from that purchase,” Braley said. “When we put food in our bodies or clothes on our backs, we know exactly where those products come from. Americans should have the same opportunity to vote with their wallets at the gas pump.
The intent of the bill is not the reason this is a dumb idea. I think most people would appreciate a choice of the country of origin for their fuel. We would ideally prefer that fuel to be sourced domestically (unless of course we have to pay a premium for it), and beyond that many would prefer to buy fuel from Mexico over Venezuela. So to be clear, I understand the spirit of the bill.
The silly part comes about in the attempted execution. The petroleum supply chain does not segregate products by country. Sure, a supertanker may leave Saudi Arabia with 100% Saudi crude, but once it arrives it gets mixed with whatever else may be left in the pipelines and crude tanks. Then, as it goes through the refinery, there are streams from many different sources. Finally, when it goes into the pipeline and on to the retailer it gets mixed with products from many different locations. In fact, in many places the fuel you put in your car has portions from many locations.
There are exceptions; the Billings Refinery I used to work at only got crude domestically or from Canada because no supertankers have access to the refinery. But then once product ships to Denver or toward the West Coast, it will inevitably mix with product derived from elsewhere (e.g., product coming up from Texas to Denver will probably contain some Venezuelan crude).
I wonder if one of our government leaders will figure out that essentially all of the corn ethanol produced in the U.S. today is enabled by petroleum, and that petroleum is inevitably sourced from imports. So I suppose the corn ethanol should be labeled as well: “This ethanol was enabled by Saudi/Venezuelan/Russian crude.” No, I suppose we will keep that skeleton in the closet.
The purpose of this bill from the Congressman from Iowa is of course to try to tilt the playing field in the direction of corn ethanol. That’s understandable, as that is his job. But the idea is either very poorly thought out, or it is just an example of him posturing for his constituents.
I don’t believe this bill has any chance of passing, but presuming for a moment that it did, the labels would all have to look like those food labels that say something like “This food was processed in a facility that also processed peanuts. It may have in fact touched peanuts at some point.”
Our product label would read like “This crude may have been sourced from the U.S. and/or one or more of the following 30 countries…” This would appear on every gasoline and diesel pump in the U.S., and would therefore be ignored by everyone. In other words, trying to pass such a bill is simply a waste of time and taxpayer money.
Note: This story was also characterized very well at Bnet by Kirsten Korosec:
Label My Crude: Iowa Congressman Wants Americans to Know Where Their Fuel Was Born
In that essay, Kirsten pointed out the impracticality of implementing such a plan, and also linked back to my essay on the Top 10 suppliers of crude to the U.S. to show readers where U.S. crude imports actually do come from.
It is remarkable that a politician from Iowa promoting ethanol. Politicians from Texas and Alaska are funny about promoting domestically produced oil. In North Carolina and Tennessee they are big on nukes.
What is remarkable is that promoting what your state does well is often not the case. The senator from Vermont promotes solar every chance while working to close down a well run, paid for nuke. The Speaker of the House is against increasing increasing domestic oil production especially in her home state.
There are lots of less obvious examples. I love the lame excuses for voting the party line when a bill would be good for that state. I would think has lots of other examples.
I don't get it. Doesn't the fungibility of oil mean that choosing whose oil you will buy is about as effective as choosing to only accept dollar coins from one particular branch of the mint.
Sadly, acknowledging reality has never been a requirement to serve in any elected position within our state or federal governments.
Many fine men and women do, but it is not a requirement.
By my count the US imports from no less than 118 different countries. That's some fine print, and can you imagine the logjams as patriotic customers attempt to figure out whether we're at war with Gabon, and have always been at war with Gabon? The mind boggles.
On the…brighter side, some of these people might have to learn about faraway places like Angola. If. Agree that this is stands little chance of making it very far.
Some small refiners could make this work, but it shouldn't be a Federal law. For example, the Marathon refinery south of Minneapolis gets most of its oil from Canada tar sands. The Marathon stations that refinery supplies could probably use the marketing scheme of saying, "No Middle East oil in our gas ~ we sell only the finest North American here."
The Murphy Refinery in Superior, WI likewise uses mostly Canadian oil and could do likewise.
But as a Federal law, the idea sucks and would never be voted into law. I'd say Bruce Braley is just angling for a bit of publicity.
Well, if you don't have the guts to call for a gasoline tax, then pass CAFE standards and labeling laws.
I still don't get it. How would this make a whit of difference to the amount of money American consumers spend on foreign oil, or the revenues of American oil producers?
Pete, in the very naive world of this politician, branding oil as coming from foreigners would cause people to turn to good old, homegrown ethanol. So in his mind, it helps create jobs in Iowa and push us along toward energy independence.
RR
This does not compute. The reason for labeling in other systems such as food, chemicals and electrical items etc. is health (nutrition), health (safety) and environment/health. Even cars have NCAP. In other words health or at least the option to control heath for the consumer is what drives these labels. Outside of this the consumer investigates and makes choices. There is little reason to do so here as investigating where each drop came from is impossible.
Hence labeling is not going to give the consumer extra info.
I'd rather see a warning label like we get on cigarette packs.
Warning: Purveyors of this noxious brew are known to finance terrorist activities. Portions of the proceeds of your purchase may help finance the next 9/11. Packed airliners colliding with crowded skyscrapers has been shown to cause death on a massive scale. Have a nice day!
That would be a good laugh! To see all the different warning labels placed on oil by different parties.
Though İ am sure they would all be complimentary to the US.
Would it be too big of a surprise to learn others don't like us than we like them? Others have similar names for us?
…would cause people to turn to good old, homegrown ethanol.
Robert~
That would be good old, homegrown ethanol made from corn that was probably grown from imported synthetic nitrogen fertilizer.
But I bet Representative Braley doesn't even know the country of origin* of most of the nitrogen his constituent farmers put on their corn.
Perhaps his Iowa farmers should have to put signs on their corn fields saying, "Grown with Ukrainian ammonia."
__________
* Trinidad and Tobago, Canada, Russia, and Ukraine.
I think the sad thing here is RR's comment that indicates that he accepts the idea that elected representatives really are whores whose only job is turning whatever tricks their constituents fetishize:
"The purpose of this bill from the Congressman from Iowa is of course to try to tilt the playing field in the direction of corn ethanol. That's understandable, as that is his job."
We are probably doomed no matter what, but we are certainly doomed to fail hard and fast if we stop even expecting representatives to struggle to overcome pressures to favor local industries that have a pernicious effect nationally and globally. Understanding that the whores face pressures to back the local favorites is far different than saying that "that's their job."
I think the sad thing here is RR's comment that indicates that he accepts the idea that elected representatives really are whores whose only job is turning whatever tricks their constituents fetishize:
I don't accept that this should be their job, but I have heard far too many state that their job was to bring money to their district.
My view of what a political leader should be is one who is looking to make decisions that are a net benefit to society as a whole. In reality, most will happily take X dollars from one district to put into their own districts.
Cheers, Robert
A general rule is that if consumers wanted COOL (country of origin labeling) and it can provide it in a profitable fashion, retailers and the marketing chain would already have done so.
The fact that it is not means that the demand for the information is not sufficient to warrant the supply of information. Period. That is the nature of free enterprise and competition.
The ironic fact is that while the honorable Rep. Bruce Braley (D-Iowa) may "buy" more votes from corn producers with this initiative, the nature of the economics behind it are such that it will actually cost them money. I suspect he is counting on their lack of economic literacy. Both he and any producer in favor of the initiative need to have a chat with their favorite agricultural economics professor. They need to do it soon and quietly deep six the bill.
elected representatives really are whores whose only job is turning whatever tricks their constituents fetishize…
Walker,
It is the job of representatives to represent the interests of their constituents. That's the way the Founding Fathers designed the constitution.
If you have a problem, issue, or concern with the Federal government, the representative from your district is supposed to be your representative and your champion at the seat of government.
I certainly don't think much of Braley's idea, but it's not for me to judge — the voter's in Iowa's First Congressional District get to do that, as well as the other 434 representatives if his bad idea were ever to get out of committee.
Part of the problem is that the number of people each representative represents has grown far beyond what was originally intended. The framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights intended that the total population of Congressional districts never exceed 50 to 60 thousand, and as the population of the country grew, the number of members in the House of Representatives was supposed to also increase, but it hasn't.
The hard truth: 435 Representatives Can Not Faithfully Represent 300 Million Americans!
@Wendell – so more idiots at the trough would make everyone OK?
İt is not for us to judge the representative of another area?
Come on – half the people in Washington are there on the 'get the idiot out of town' program.
A few have the interest of the country in mind but a small number only.
2004 was the high water mark for the use of crude oil in the US. The 5 year drop from that point is a first,although the recession of '81 came close. I'm at a loss for an explanation of these year/year improvements. You've got to love the annual graph. We've turned the clock back more than ten years. Now,if I could just figure out how we did it…..
http://tinyurl.com/yzb2smg
Well, as a firm supporter of country of origin labelling I think most of you have missed the point, and the way the system would (should) operate.
The main idea is that the buyers see where their petroleum is produced.
If Citgo is majority Colombian/ Venezuelan and that Chevron is majority locally produced, what is wrong with making that information known?
Secondly, it does not have to be a physical tracking of the oil and products. The electricity industry for years has operated without specific tracking. All you need to do is auction off the capacity, or volume, from various places. You can't buy more American oil than is produced, or refined. Similarly for Saudi or Venezuelan oil, or wherever.
Sure there are some minor details, bit it can be worked out, and what is wrong with country of origin labelling. It is done for every other commodity from pork bellies to steel, to coffee, why should oil be excluded?
If the corn farmer decides to buy local made diesel, then that same amount is not available to the motorist, or trucker, and, fairly quickly, the domestic v imported fuel market will work this out. Just look at the futures market for sugar, there is US and there is World grade,so we already have an operating system for country of origin labelling.
This is one decision that belongs in the hands of the customer, then let the Exxons and Chevrons decide whether they want to pursue domestic or offshore projects accordingly.
Let the buyers know where it is coming from, and let the retailers label it, and take their chances accordingly. In WWII, who would have wanted to buy German or Japanese fuel, at any price?
If it ends up that a premium is priced on local oil, what is wrong with that? Consumers actually get to, collectively, express their opinion for once.
I think that this would actually bring home how much oil is imported, and then customers can decide if they support imported or domestic oil – what can be fairer than that?
Well, as a firm supporter of country of origin labelling I think most of you have missed the point, and the way the system would (should) operate.
The main idea is that the buyers see where their petroleum is produced.
If Citgo is majority Colombian/ Venezuelan and that Chevron is majority locally produced, what is wrong with making that information known?
Secondly, it does not have to be a physical tracking of the oil and products. The electricity industry for years has operated without specific tracking. All you need to do is auction off the capacity, or volume, from various places. You can't buy more American oil than is produced, or refined. Similarly for Saudi or Venezuelan oil, or wherever.
Sure there are some minor details, bit it can be worked out, and what is wrong with country of origin labelling. It is done for every other commodity from pork bellies to steel, to coffee, why should oil be excluded?
If the corn farmer decides to buy local made diesel, then that same amount is not available to the motorist, or trucker, and, fairly quickly, the domestic v imported fuel market will work this out. Just look at the futures market for sugar, there is US and there is World grade,so we already have an operating system for country of origin labelling.
This is one decision that belongs in the hands of the customer, then let the Exxons and Chevrons decide whether they want to pursue domestic or offshore projects accordingly.
Let the buyers know where it is coming from, and let the retailers label it, and take their chances accordingly. In WWII, who would have wanted to buy German or Japanese fuel, at any price?
If it ends up that a premium is priced on local oil, what is wrong with that? Consumers actually get to, collectively, express their opinion for once.
I think that this would actually bring home how much oil is imported, and then customers can decide if they support imported or domestic oil – what can be fairer than that?
RR, if you are passing through (cold) Calgary or (rainy) Vancouver, let me know, let's get together.
Paul
RR, if you are passing through (cold) Calgary or (rainy) Vancouver, let me know, let's get together.
Paul, I am in Seattle tonight and tomorrow, make a brief connection in Vancouver on Saturday, and then on to Europe.
Are you the Paul with the pellet plant? If so, I have some questions for you. On the flight from Seattle, I was reading through some economics on pelletization, and jotted down half a dozen questions.
Cheers, Robert
It is done for every other commodity from pork bellies to steel, to coffee, why should oil be excluded?
Because oil is fungible. It gets mixed up with oil from other places. It would be virtually impossible to identify a specific country of origin for a final product; there will be many countries of origin.
RR
İ doubt that more than 0.5% of the population cares where the gas/diesel in their tank came from.
Spend more to get American origin oil when the total comes to the the same quantity anyway? What would be the logic to penalize ones self in this manner?
The total counts – that is all.
“In WWII, who would have wanted to buy German or Japanese fuel, at any price?
I think someone does not understand the concept of war. During WWII gasoline and many other things were rationed. German U-boats operated freely off the east coast.
With a little strong leadership, the US could be 100% energy independent and there would not longer be an air pollution problems in out cities. Ration the amount of transportation fuel to what we produce domestically. Ration the amount gasoline to the carrying capacity of a region for air pollution.
However, Americans do not like strong leadership. The cause of WWII strong leadership German or Japan. There was no German or Japanese fuel. German or Japan secured the supply of oil by invading counties with oil. Furthermore, the US allowed it to happened.
Paul wrote: "If it ends up that a premium is priced on local oil, what is wrong with that?"
Paul, you may misunderstand how the left-wing mind works.
Once, in the People's Republic of California, I heard a radio jingle for a low-calorie Dutch beer:
'25 calories never tasted so imported'.
'Imported' is a taste? Yet leftie Californians rushed to buy the stuff – because it was not Made in the USA.
(Stupidity is not an American monopoly. Later, in a European city, I found humble US Budweiser being marketed as a Premium Beer – and doing a brisk trade!).
Label oil as being produced in the USA and a whole bunch of Obama supporters will refuse to buy it. Thereby crippling the US oil production industry. And indirectly boosting demand for ethanol to make up the shortfall.
Devious, those left wing politicans!
Russ asked: It is not for us to judge the representative of another area?
Of course we can judge them, but even dumb people are entitled to have dumb representatives.
That's the beauty of a democratic republic, each district gets to decide who represents them in Congress ~ no matter how embarrassing the delegate they send might be. (And if I lived in Iowa's First District, I would be pretty embarrassed at Braley's wrong-headed proposal.)
Because oil is fungible. It gets mixed up with oil from other places. It would be virtually impossible to identify a specific country of origin for a final product.
Robert,
How about this for Representative Braley: Instead of country of origin, how about planet of origin? Label all oil as "Product of the Planet Earth."
Surely even those in Iowa's First District could stipulate we are all Earthlings.
Braley's proposal reminds me of a bumper sticker I once saw:
"How did our oil end up under their sand?"
(Almost) totally O/T: Kinuachdrach, you're gonna love this… among the newly digitised collection from your truly superb Library of Congress are the collected poems of Thomas Moore, a late-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth Anglo-Irish poet. In the preface to a collection of "American" poems, he writes (although in a later edition he apologises and confesses to being too much influenced by British navy officers and anti-Democratic Federalists):
"The rude familiarity of the lower orders, and indeed the unpolished state of society in general, would neither surprise nor disgust if they seemed to flow from that simplicity of character, that honest ignorance of the gloss of refinement which may be looked for in a new and inexperienced people. But, when we find them arrived at maturity in most of the vices, and all the pride of civilization, while they are still so far removed from its higher and better characteristics, it is impossible not to feel that this youthful decay, this crude anticipation of the natural period of corruption, must repress every sanguine hope of the future energy and greatness of America".
(Archive link)
Now you gotta admit relations have improved a tad since then! 🙂
… although let's hope he is not close to the mark about the "future energy" in the sense meant on this blog.
🙂
Hey Robert,
What do you make of this LS9 announcement?
http://earth2tech.com/2010/01/27/ls9-makes-%E2%80%9Cmajor-breakthrough%E2%80%9D-in-cellulosic-based-fuel-production/
Hope all is well, and you are enjoying life in Hawaii!
The Anti Doomer
Robert – Thanks for the link back to my post on country of origin labeling.
I've received a few interesting e-mails in response to my post from companies who say they have the technology to track multiple streams of oil and source it.
I'm still following up with this – no word on how cheap or expensive this would be to pull off. Or if this is just a claim or something they can really do.
Here's a question that has bothered me for sometime about this whole idea: Let's say country of origin labeling happens and someone pulls up to a gas station and sees the long list of countries that would likely follow.
This guy doesn't want to buy gas made from these foreign countries, so now fully informed he goes out in search of gas made domestically.
He's not going to find it. Which leaves us where, exactly? Ethanol? Yikes.
Even if some magical national movement occurred and everyone embraced this homegrown product, it's not as if we can dump 100 percent ethanol into our cars. Or even make enough of it to meet this country's transportation fuel needs.
I can think of far better ways for us to waste our money.
Sure, Kirsten, do the "Smart" thang. Send your money to the Sauds, and the Algerians.
After all, they, Almost, didn't have "enough" hi-jackers on 9-11.
Interesting stuff LS9 came up with. They had a little help from the DOE and UC Berkely though. Wonder how much those bugs are gonna cost.
http://tinyurl.com/ykcwav7
I'm amazed at people. My first car probably got about 12 – 13 mpg.
My Impala gets 21, and That's on E85. 21/.15 = 140 miles per gallon of gasoline. A better than 10-fold increase.
My 3 county area could EASILY produce enough ethanol to provide all of our transportation needs. Probably use about four, or five percent of the most marginal land doing it.
And, they say we can't get off foreign oil. Nuts.
About half of the miles driven are by cars 6 years old, or newer. If we mandated all cars next year be flexfuel (as Brazil did,) and that half of all cars be FF Hybrids within, say, Eight Years (increasing by 5% of fleet-sold/yr.
It would be Breath-takingly Easy.
Did you read the article on LS9 Rufus? If they can make that microbe for the right price,we won't be making ethanol anymore. We'll be able to make diesel,gasoline,lubricants,solvents etc etc. from just about any kind of plant waste. This could be it my man.
No fossil fuel inputs. No chemical process. Just plant waste and microbes. This could be sweet.
We'll be able to make diesel, gasoline, lubricants, solvent etc etc. from just about any kind of plant waste. This could be it my man.
Maury~
Big Ethanol and Big Corn wouldn't like that. They'll have their lobbyists out in force trying to get laws passed that would block any innovation like LS9's.
Ever the optimist, Maury. I have a much better solution to Rufus's conundrum.
My first car (25 years ago) got 40 to the gallon. My current (bigger) car gets 40 to the gallon. My next car will get 60 to the gallon.
Their lobbyists wouldn't stand a chance Wendell. And I think you're wrong anyway. Farmers will absolutely LOVE it. There's only so much plant waste available. We'll have to grow a lot more.
No, Maury; put up a clickable link, will you?
Actually, the corn farmers have been supporting all types of "cellulosic" production. They know it's a good way to get the ethanol "food for fuel" albatross from around their necks.
They have a 15 Billion Gallon Mandate, and they know that it's very unlikely any cellulosic process will come in cheaper than corn.
And I think you're wrong anyway. Farmers will absolutely LOVE it…
I said Big Ethanol and Big Corn wouldn't like it — I didn't say anything about farmers.
And, MY next car will, quite likely, be a Series Hybrid (like the Volt) with a flexfuel range extender.
Saudi oil is so "last year."
“Did you read the article on LS9 Rufus?”
Did you read it Maury? I missed the part where researchers disclosed the rate of converting VOC into biodiesel.
Reachers are always doing something interesting and publishing in the journal Nature.
“The JBEI team is now working on maximizing the efficiency and the speed by which their engineered strain of E. coli can directly convert biomass into biodiesel.”
Somebody is always doing something with glucose or clean wood chips but real world waste biomass is nasty stuff with all kinds of impurities including some very robust natural micro organisms.
So when something sounds too good to be true, do not hold your breath.
Here's an interesting thought: My Sweetie, and I, being fairly typical Americans, probably produce about 2 Tons of Waste/Yr.
That could translate into about 80 miles/week in my Flexfuel. That would just about do us. Jes Sayin.
Fiberight
But I bet Representative Braley doesn't even know the country of origin* of most of the nitrogen his constituent farmers put on their corn.
Perhaps his Iowa farmers should have to put signs on their corn fields saying, "Grown with Ukrainian ammonia."
What's ironic about this Rep., Iowa and ammonia is there's an effort to bring ammonia production to the US – Iowa specifically, by Iowa boy, Neal Rauhauser.
See strandedwind.org
RBM
PeteS wrote: "My first car (25 years ago) got 40 to the gallon."
Ha! My first car got 250 miles to the battery. Unfortunately, it was not an electric car. 🙂
Thanks, by the way, for that link to Thomas Moore. A few paragraphs later he wrote some words that may echo with a few of us who spend time on blogs:
"Few now have the leisure to read such trifles, and I most sincerely regret that I have had the leisure to write them."
Dupont, Danisco to team up on Corn Cob Cellulosic Plant
Now that everyone has beaten up on poor old Rep. Bruce Braley (D-Iowa), let's turn to economic news.
The US Bureau of Economic Analysis put out a report showing that the US economy expanded by 5.7% in the 4th Quarter of 2009.
Yeah! Recession over. Well, maybe — there are those who point out that basically the government printed a bunch of money, handed it out, and counted it as an expansion of the real economy.
However, there is some food for thought in the supporting numbers. See Table 3 in //tinyurl.com/BEA-Q4-2009.
US Gross Domestic Product in 2009 was $14,258 Billion. (Not quite as big as the EU – but the EU prefers to present figures by individual State, so that the EU's honking great footprint on the planet gets obscured).
Out of that $14,258 Billion GDP, $307.4 Billion is listed under Personal Consumption Expenditures as "Gasoline and other energy goods". That is 2.2% of the total GDP.
To put the $307.4 Billion "Gasoline and other energy goods" into perspective, "Food services & accommodations" amounted to $605.7 Billion. The residents of the US spent about twice as much on restaurants & hotels as on gasoline & other direct energy purchases.
A lot of words are expended on blogs like this on gasoline. Yet there has never been a satisfactory explanation of how EU governments could tax gasoline so highly and still not have prompted innovation in transportation fuels. Perhaps this BEA report provides a clue – maybe the cost of gasoline just doesn't matter in the big scheme of things.
If gasoline & other direct energy purchases in the US amount to only about 2% of GDP, then it may be that direct consumer energy purchases (in EU as well as US) just do not loom as large as the inhabitants of The Oil Drum like to think. If the cost of energy doubled in the US, people could adjust simply by eating out less often.
Of course, embedded energy costs may not be reflected properly in the BEA statistics. Still, these figures may suggest there is a lot of room for energy costs to rise before they become an economy-destroyer. Armageddon delayed.
That's about $1,000.00 for every Man, Woman, and Child.
Fifty Million Households make about $45,000.00/yr or less. I'm going to guess that 25 Million households get by on $32,000.00 or less. They're probably getting home with $25,000.00, or $480.00/wk.
And they're paying %57.00/wk for gasoline. It's tight, but manageable, I guess. But, what happens to that bottom 25% when the gasoline bill goes to $114.00?
That $480.00 is now $356.00 before they go to the grocery store, or pay their rent. Or buy school clothes for the kids, any doctor bills, car payments, insurance, emergencies, etc.
There's where you run into trouble, K. Gasoline is a "Regressive" tax. Hits the bottom fourth of the population hard.
Europe is in a lot different "place" when it comes to gasoline, I think.
I don't check in for 24 grs, and now the discussion has left me behind!
Kit P, I think I do understand the concept of war, and rationing etc, but I didn't explain my example well. I know that German and Japanese oil was never available here, or anywhere else.
The point I was trying to make is that people would not have wanted to buy German or Japanese anything during the war.
A more recent example is the reaction against France for their opposition to thee Iraq invasion in 2003, remember the "freedom fries"? Sales of French champagne, cheese, etc all plummeted at that time as consumers exercised their right to not buy French.
My point about the labelling of the retail fuel is that people can then participate, through their purchasing decisions, in supporting domestic fuel at the expense of imports. Oil is the only consumer good I can think of where the place of origin is not revealed.
To keep the system simple, the fuel could simply be in two categories, domestic and imported, or you could do it by continent of origin, and have the middle east as a "continent"
Agreed that to actually track the physical oil would be an onerous process, hence my suggestion of using the electricity industry's model. When you buy "green power", you are not getting the exact electrons sent in by the green producer, but you are buying an equal amount to what they put in. For retail fuel sales, the retailers could do the same thing. As long as the system is properly set up and managed, the retailers can only "bid" for as much domestic product as is available.
Look at what is happening with the food business, where people are demanding to know where the food comes from. One case I heard of, a yoghurt company was using fruit imported from China to flavour their yoghurt, which is sold as locally produced. I certainly would choose to buy a different yoghurt, and I would also choose to buy domestic fuel, given the choice.
At the very least, the same people who try too reduce their "food miles" would probably do so with their "fuel miles" too, but I think the movement would catch on fairly quickly.
It would be easy to do a trial in a limited area (a county or city, or an island like Hawaii) and see.
Here's a problem that's really muddying the waters:
Fuel Ethanol Rack Prices
Daily State Averages,
provided by DTN
January 28, 2010 Today Yesterday Change
Alabama 2.4250 2.4437 -0.0187
Arkansas 2.0757 2.0813 -0.0056
Colorado 2.1055 2.1055 0.0000
Florida 2.4915 2.5195 -0.0280
Georgia 2.1050 2.1125 -0.0075
Idaho 2.2770 2.2770 0.0000
Iowa 1.8587 1.8619 -0.0032
Illinois 1.9553 1.9706 -0.0153
Indiana 1.8860 1.9025 -0.0165
Kansas 1.9415 1.9434 -0.0019
Louisiana 2.5100 2.5380 -0.0280
Michigan 1.9120 1.9120 0.0000
Minnesota 1.9496 1.9560 -0.0064
Missouri 2.0161 2.0215 -0.0054
Montana 2.0603 2.0603 0.0000
North Dakota 1.9410 1.9414 -0.0004
Nebraska 1.8920 1.8935 -0.0015
North Carolina 2.0522 2.0614 -0.0092
Ohio 1.8597 1.8590 0.0007
Oklahoma 1.9768 1.9837 -0.0069
Oregon 2.0840 2.0840 0.0000
South Carolina 2.0583 2.0783 -0.0200
South Dakota 1.9742 1.9744 -0.0002
Tennessee 2.0400 2.0500 -0.0100
Texas 2.0500 2.0600 -0.0100
Virginia 2.0900 2.1000 -0.0100
Washington 2.1859 2.1859 0.0000
Wisconsin 1.9364 1.9623 -0.0259
Wyoming 2.1285 2.1285 0.0000
$0.57 difference between Iowa, and Alabama
Shipping might account for $0.10
Alabama doesn't need ethanol from Iowa. Alabama needs ethanol from Alabama. Then let the Jobbers try this.
“If the cost of energy doubled in the US, people could adjust simply by eating out less often.”
Or fixing a picnic lunch.
“honking great footprint on the planet”
This is another one of those 'ain't it awful' concept invented by the watermelons. It just depends on how you look at things. There is a group who want to tear out the hydroelectric facilitates that produce electricity irrigation and reduce floods. They talk about how nature has been scared. Well nature scared the landscape during the last ice age sending 1000 foot walls of water down the river periodically. The foot print is water being 30 foot deeper and vineyards and orchards.
The footprint of energy is very small if not insignificant. I am not suggesting wasting energy but enjoying the freedom and comfort that energy provides should be guilt free. The planet is doing fine.
“I think the movement would catch on fairly quickly. “
Paul I have a solution to woo woo hair brained ideas. When I lived in California my teenage daughter informed me that I could no longer enjoy my favorite fast food burger because of where the meat came from. Next morning she informed me that the hot water heater was not working. I told her that I had turned if off so she could help save the planet. This was before AGW.
It only takes one cold shower to have a reasonable discussion about how to solve a problem and dispense latest junk science fad.
My point is that I have a solution that will work but most would rather pay lip service to political solutions that make them feel good.
Good numbers Kinu, Rufus.
I think there is no doubt that people can adjust to higher gasoline prices. Not painlessly, but they can do it, as the Europeans have.
And, as Kinu points out, even a doubling of the fuel cost has not fostered any major innovation. the big advantage in Europe is that their cities developed rail transit systems before the auto age, so that was fortunate, but is not a current innovation.
The innovation that will occur is to find ways to use less fuel and transport, and that is happening, slowly.
Kit, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree here. I think that pursuing "oil independence" is a worthwhile goal for the US, and a part of that, is for people to know where their oil is coming from, and having the ability to decide which they will buy. To do otherwise disconnects the consumer from the process, leaving it entirely in the hands of government and energy companies. Not to say they can't do it, but I think it's better if the public is engaged, and has a mechanism to participate.
Everyone was encouraged to do their part in WWII, but right now they don't have a means to "do their part". The people have been literally transformed from producers (WWII era) to consumers today. And I'm sure we'll all agree that we can't consume our way out of this.
I've received a few interesting e-mails in response to my post from companies who say they have the technology to track multiple streams of oil and source it.
Hi Kirsten,
They could only ever approximate this due to the fungible nature of oil. You might be able to say "most of that oil came from Saudi."
But what they can never do is assure that you aren't buying oil with components from multiple other countries. They may be able to grossly track streams, but they can't track molecules. At the end of the day, a gas pump would still have to have a disclaimer indicating that the oil may have come from any of dozens of countries. After all, what are they going to do – change the label every time a new batch comes in?
RR
Actually, the high taxes in Europe work against innovation. Let me explain.
If gasoline goes from $1.50 (the price just a couple of years, ago (and, last year) to $3.00, that's a 100% Increase. THAT will get Joe Sixpack's attention in a hurry.
But, if the price of gasoline goes from $6.00 to $7.50, That's just a 25% increase. Irritating, but Not a Doubling.
Also, add in the fact that Diesel gets more favorable tax treatment than gasoline, and that Europeans started moving toward small, diesel engines several years, ago, and it's not a favorable environment for the main "renewable," ethanol.
That should have been "Diesel gets more favorable tax treatment than gasoline" In Europe.
A diesel in Europe easily achieves 50 mpg – but that is not innovation? Actually it is regulation more than anything İ suppose.
For once İ have to agree with Kit P – the green mafia ruining power generation and water storage/use in the western rivers is a crying shame.
The fish runs are a thing of the past and İ really don't care. Same with the spotted owl in Oregon – the little beggars have created far more problems than they are worth.
Here's another data point for the big taxing brotherhood to consider — CNBC has put up a list of the 12 biggest gas guzzlers of 2010.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/34955983?slide=1
As would be expected from leftist EUrophiliacs, CNBC ranked the vehicles by some rinky-dink "Green Score". If we instead (and more appropriately) rank by City MPG, the 8 biggest gas guzzlers are all European, and all get less than 10 miles per gallon. (>10 MPG!)
One could argue that, except for Mercedes Benz, these are all high-end vehicles. Still, one has to wonder – if European-style high gasoline taxes are such a great thing, why does Europe have a monopoly on the 10 MPG-or-less gas guzzler?
Paul, it seems that you do not know the difference between public relations and action:
“and has a mechanism to participate.”
There is a mechanism, use less. You do not need to know where it came from or anything else from the government at all. That is called taking action. Please do not tell me what mpg your POV gets tell me how many gallons yous use unless you are trying to prove the Jevons paradox.
The PNW and BC are examples of how stupid source labeling is. For example, the City of Seattle claims to not get any electricity from coal. Yet the coal plant just down the at Centralia is making as much electricity as it ever has. The city electric utility in Richland gets 50% of its electricity from coal but is has nuke and hydro but no coal plant. The City of Seattle has a budget for PR but no budget to build a power plant to close the coal plant. All talk and no action.
My point Paul is to have a useful mechanism. If you want to replace a coal power plant like Centralia you need one nuke plant or 300 typical biomass plants. If you want to replace imported oil biofuels, you have to build the production infrastructure at the same time you are building the POV that will use it.
PR is about making people feel good about that they consume and usually has no basis in fact.
Hence, my idea of putting a 30 Million gpy ethanol refinery in Every Congressional District, to start.
And, throw in 20 "Blender" Pumps.
“The fish runs are a thing of the past and İ really don't care.”
Not really Russ. I have listened to the fish dam debate for many years. When returning fish are up, the cause is favorable ocean conditions. When runs are down, man is the blame.
The lesson of the spotted owl in Oregon is that putting Americans out of work just means that the production will go someplace else with very lax environmental regulations.
The 'green mafia' are not interested in protecting the environment and jobs. I have canoed the free flowing part of the river and sailed in the man made lake. I want both. The problem I have is with people who drive 400 miles to have a protest. These people are totally ignorant of the local environment.
It is human nature to resist change. However, change is the only constant in nature. A young medical technician recently expressed to me her worries about the awful place she was raising her children because of terrorism in the world. I asked if sh was worried about polio, or small pox, or whooping cough (pertussis), or nuclear bombs. No was the answer. So one of the changes is that parents worry about different things.
The 'green mafia' is in the awful business. If you are in the energy business, we celebrate that snow in now white while looking for better ways of doing things.
Why do those who work in the 'green mafia' business think life so awful? They work in big cities.
Taking Kinu's CNBC story I traced it back to ACEEE press release that generated it. Thanks to a very unusual name I was able to map the commute. The 'green mafia' in this case has office in down DC and lives in West Virginia for a 160 mile commute. I have been to DC on business and what a mess the commute is. I also took the route from DC to WV for pleasure recently. It would appear from the roads that a lot of people make this daily commute. If you are looking for examples of ugly urban sprawl this is it. This is not some modest house tucked in the woods (like my house that is barely detectable in a satellite image), it is a big house in a subdivision of big houses bull dosed out of the woods. Not one big old tree left standing to shade 35 houses (observation not hyperbole).
I suspect it would be difficult to find a group of people less productive than the ACEEE STAFF.
If I had to commute in DC, I would be worried about the planet too.
I was thinking about that cellulosic plant in Vonore, Tn that just started production, and about how BP is teaming up with Dupont to build one like it up in Iowa, and about Poet's Cobs to Ethanol deal (Project Liberty) that they'll start building for real, this year, and I posted this over at the elephant bar.
Vonore, Tn lies right in the middle of Monroe, Blount, and Loudon Counties. The three counties have a combined population of about 200,000, and a land area of 1,600 sq. miles. The populace probably uses about 100 Million Gallons of gasoline, annually.
Of course, over half of the oil to supply that gasoline is imported. Let's make a couple of reasonable assumptions. There's every reason in the world to assume that increased fuel efficiency of the new cars will reduce that gasoline usage by 20% in the next two decades. Maybe more, maybe sooner.
Also, 200,000 people will produce 200,000 Tons of Waste. This waste will yield 100 gallons of ethanol/ton. This is being done by a company called Syntec (also, I think Bluefire is somewhere in this range.)
SO, they are going to need 40 Million gpy of fuel, and MSW will provide 20 mgpy of it. We've, almost, eliminated foreign oil, already. But, what if we wanted to cut another 10 mgpy off our oil needs? After all, Prudhoe Bay is running low, you know.
That area should yield 10 tons of dry mass (switch grass, poplar, etc) per acre. That's 1,000 gallons per acre per year.
10,000 acres (basically, two good-sized corn farms,) or an area 4 miles, by 4 miles.
That would be 1% of the land area of the 3 counties. And, it doesn't have to be the "good" land, either.
You can see that even if I'm being wildly optimistic in one area, or another, it doesn't matter. This is just insanely easy. It even boggles MY mind.
post script: Now, it's true that I didn't make allowances for btu content between ethanol, and gasoline (we know the new engines will use ethanol more efficiently, we're not for sure just how much,) but even if you added in another ten, or fifteen percent for that it's really negligable.
And, of course, we'll have to do something about "diesel," but with the new Ricardo-type engines that could be as simple as planting another 1% of the land area in switchgrass.
On the other hand, I didn't even touch on the massive amounts of forestry/sawmill waste in that area.
This is just a concept; your mileage may vary.
Also, 200,000 people will produce 200,000 Tons of Waste. This waste will yield 100 gallons of ethanol/ton.
Your ability to always take the most optimistic press releases and spin them into a story of easy energy independence is pretty close to delusional. POET gets 90 gallons from corn cobs – a pretty straightforward thing to convert – on a good day. Yet you actually believe not only that these guys are really beating them, but that this is all broadly applicable across many different feedstocks.
Don't be too shocked if things don't work out that way.
RR
That's the point, Robert; what does it matter? 90? 100?
16 sq mi or 17.6 sq mi? Heck, if I'm off somewhere by a factor of two it doesn't really matter. That old crappy land that they'll use for switchgrass, or trees, or whatnot isn't good for much more than growing bushes, and weeds, anyway.
And, like I said, I didn't even touch on forestry waste, sawmill waste, or corn stove/cobs.
By the way, this compact, easy to read EIA Data plays havoc with your "ethanol hasn't affected imports" theme.
2006 We produced 5,102,000 bbl oil/day, and (net) imported 12,390,000 bbl/day
2009 We produced 5,315 bbl/day, and (net) imported 9,729,000 bbl/day.
SO, in 2009 we processed 2,448,000 less barrels of oil than we did in 2006, BUT, IIRC we only supplied about 8% less gasoline to the consumer. Gasoline, in this casee, of course, is gasoline plus ethanol.
We processed 14% less oil, but only cut our deliveries of gas to the consumer by about 7, or 8% (at one time or another during the year I think we were anywhere from 5% to 10%.)
I'm not saying this is definitive since there are, also, gasoline imports to consider; but I'm thinking those are probably down, also.
hmmm
'm not saying this is definitive since there are, also, gasoline imports to consider; but I'm thinking those are probably down, also.
Sitting in an airport in Vancouver, about to catch a flight to Amsterdam. No time to address this I am afraid, but instead of saying "I haven't yet looked at this or that" yet still making conclusions is not really a very responsible way to conduct your argument. But then this is what I have come to expect from you.
On the switchgrass, I am afraid that you still do not get it. The net may very well be 0 gallons per ton. POET can piggyback on the corn infrastructure, but if you had to charge all of the energy inputs to the switchgrass (which does have to be irrigated and fertilized for those high yields that are claimed) then your net could easily drop to zero.
Unfortunately for me, I don't get to live in the fantasy world of make-believe that you inhabit. For me these are real issues that I have to deal with. I can't conjure up ethanol from thin air.
RR
Maybe we need more information as to whether those farmers in Vonore are irrigating, and how much they're fertilizing their switchgrass.
Maybe someone can find out for us if gasoline imports are up, down, or flat since 2006.
Well, I tracked this much down. The first four weeks of 2006 we imported 970,000 barrels of gasoline. This year the number is 823,000 barrels.
So, in Jan to Jan, at least, we're importing 147,000 barrels less gasoline/day. Bout what I wuz expecting.
So, we replaced MTBE, imported a whole heck of a lot less oil, and less gasoline. Hmmm.
I sympathise. Nothing worse than being stuck in the "real" world with a broken, or ineffective "Conjurer."
Been there many times.
That old crappy land that they'll use for switchgrass…
Rufus~
Just how much switchgrass can a farmer get out of "old crappy land?"
Growing switchgrass and converting it to fuel means the switchgrass represents energy and that energy has to come from somehwere. "Old crappy land" may grow one or at most two crops of switchgrass, but at some point it will need fertilizer to put energy back into that old crappy soil, just as the soil in which corn grows needs constant injection of energy from synthetic fertilizer.
I suspect "old crappy land" will mostly produce a crappy switchgrass crop ~ at least after the first year's crop has sucked out whatever energy there was in the soil to start with.
The switchgrass advocates who are selling the dream of harvesting switchgrass from the same piece of land year after year after without renewing the energy and nutrients in the soil are nothing more than charlatans.
The "energy" pretty much comes from the Sun, the Rain, the Soil, and the Microbes, within, Mercantile.
I seem to remember that it's a nitrogen fixer, so they won't have to add nitrogen. I think I remember that they'll probably use a little PK. I doubt they'll do much irrigating. Not in the SE.
They're raising it now, at Vonore; so maybe we can get some answers fairly soon.
I don't think there are "too" many Charlatans involved. Mostly hard-working folk, I imagine. Who knows, they might end up using hybrid poplar, or something else.
However, that farmer did say he was planting some more switchgrass, so there must be something to it. We'll see.
Switchgrass
Correction: It fixes CO2, not nitrogen. However, you only replant about every ten years, so I doubt there's a whole lot of fertilizing going on after planting.
Also, it's roots go extremely deep. I still haven't read anything about irrigating.
The 80 million ares we use to feed chickens and cows was once used to feed horses and mules. It fed millions of buffalo before that. Now,it feeds a few million cars as well.
Switchgrass uses 10% as much fertilizer and water. It's a perrenial crop with a deep root system. Ideally,farmers would use it on peripheries to aid in erosion control. If it never makes it as cellulol,there's always the pellet fuel market. Utilities are also burning it with coal.
A much more informative article on farming Switchgrass from The Univ of Tennessee.
Looks like about 7 tons/acre in Eastern Tennessee, and about $40.00 to $50.00/yr for fertilizer on severely degraded land. Maybe, $15.00 or $20.00 on better land.
Good article – no reference to any irrigation.
It's a weed Rufus. It won't need watering unless you're in the desert.
Well, Maury, the critics keep saying, "Yeah, but you're going to have to irrigate it."
That's why I keep bringing up that there's no mention of irrigation.
It's natural range is the Great Plains (dry) where it can use its deep roots to outcompete the other grasses.
Evidently it grows great in the wetter climates, but it needs help getting started due to its inability to, initially, outcompete the faster growing wet climate grasses.
ufus – check on jatophra and any of the other miracle plants – without irrigating and fertilization they produce X while with irrigation the produce very much more. Growing them as natural you get minimum – same as anything else.
All estimates İ see are on maximums and not minimums.
As soon as the natural ecology of the plains (or central Oregon where İ grew up) started to support grazing herds the natural grasses were gone. They were not made to compete.
Any plant/soil requires fertilization to do more than the natural average.
Correction for Kit P – the fish runs are a very small portion of what they were years back – they will not return as there is no place for them today. İ have listened to the same debates between the various groups for a lifetime. To suggest they are even a fraction of years back is pure unadulterated stuff.
Life and life style changes – the old nature that many of us grew up close to – not quite finished but close. İt is the natural progression of things (life).
Switchgrass uses 10% as much fertilizer and water. It's a perrenial crop with a deep root system.
Maury~
But one can't just keep harvesting switch grass every year without replacing the energy and nutrients it sucks out of the soil.
It's a perennial, but the reason it has needed little care and no fertilizer is that people haven't been harvesting it. They just let it die at the end of the year, decay, and let its nutrients go back into the earth.
If we are going to take energy out of the soil in the form of switch grass to make fuel, at some point we have to return that energy into the soil.
Plenty of farmers on the Great Plains and Upper Midwest quickly discovered that in the later part of the 19th century, and first three decades of the 20th. Just look at all the abandoned farms and ghost towns in Montana where the rich, virgin soil enabled farmers to raise fantastic wheat crops for a couple of cycles using the energy and nutrients that had been stored over thousands of years. But once those nutrients had been sucked out, those fields could no longer support an economical crop.
That Univ of Tn link I posted above gives the actual fertilizer regime for E. Ten. This is what, actually, Works.
Why blather on when you can read the facts.
"This waste will yield 100 gallons of ethanol/ton. This is being done by a company called Syntec "
Rufus,
That yield was a laboratory yield, from pure biomass. They made this announcement in June 08 and since then their press releases are things like a new development partnership with a university, moving to make fuels from natural gas, etc.
In short, they still do not have a commercial waste to alcohol process.
Ethanol is 89MJ/gal, so 110 gallons is 9800MJ, which they got from one ton of biomass. Assuming 20MJ/kg for dry biomass, their energy yield is 50%, under ideal conditions.
Municipal solid waste has 11.3MJ/kg, so if, and it's a big if, they can still get 50% yield from MSW, then they would get about 63 gal/ton. But using MSW is not that simple, you use a lot of energy separating and/or heating "ash", and water, and then your syngas needs lots of cleaning (siloxanes, etc) and still does not have the right CO/H2 ratio.
Your 200,000 tons of MSW would yield, at best 10mgpy of alcohol (50% conversion), and I think the real world yield would probably be half that.
As always with these companies, the press releases are very optimistic, and I can't think of any where their "commercial" plants have matched "predicted" yields.
For Syntec, based here in BC, the beetle kill wood capital of the world, they would be much better to get their process going on wood waste, of which we have over a billion tons standing around.
The fact that they have "applied to change its name to �Synthenol,� Inc.� in order to differentiate the Company from a conventional biofuel business" and they highlight that their "technology is based on a simple process of converting syngas, generated from biomass, natural gas or coal, "
I'll take a wild guess and say that the economics of using nat gas and coal are much better than cellulose, which is itself much better than MSW. Looks to me like they'll make their money from NG and coal while continuing to highlight the biomass/MSW part. They'll still be happy to do a biomass/MSW plant, of course, as long as someone (i.e. taxpayers) will pay them to do so.
Russ did your father's river ever catch fire?
“Correction for Kit P – the fish runs are a very small portion of what they were years back – they will not return as there is no place for them today.”
Is that a very small portion?
Or is that a very, very small portion?
Or is that a very, very, very, very, very small portion?
“To suggest they are even a fraction of years back is pure unadulterated stuff.”
Of course the are a fraction, maybe Russ you could look up that fraction and we can have a rational instead of an emotional one. I do not know how long since you have been back to Oregon but the little fixes are working. Every year there is another story of irrigation canals being clogged with returning salmon.
My great grandfather's family homestead in northern Ohio was confiscated to build a sewage treatment system. My father's boyhood river caught fire. There was even a time when I could not swim or fish Lake Erie but my children. My dad took my younger brothers back to meet his cousin. His grandfather's family homestead is not a national recreation area.
My point Russ is that we can use a rational approach to minimize the environmental impact of a modern lifestyle.
And, again, Paul, It doesn't matter. If they only get 10mgpy from MSW, then they use 2% of land for cellulose. If I'm greatly overestimating the efficiency of the cellulose project, then they use 4% of land area. It doesn't matter. The numbers are too small to make a difference.
I'll tell you what I think Does make a difference. A couple of years, ago, we were using 4.5 million bpd of diesel. During the recession we've been using a touch more than 3.5 mbpd.
To get back to where we were we will have to use another Million bpd of Diesel. To do that we would have to process about 3 Million bpd More Oil than we're processing, Today.
To get that oil we're going to have to outbid China, India, Europe, Japan, Korea, and the rest of the world.
You can't haul freight thousands of miles on batteries.
Novazymes, and Poet say they can produce cellulosic (including Capital expense) for around $2.30. Even if it's $3.30 the only question will be, "When can we get it?"
Rufus,
I think it does matter. Not in relation to the total amount produced, but in that their processess are not efficient, and not economic. When Poet or Novazymes, or anyone else is prepared to refuse the ethanol subsidy, because they are economic without it, then power to them, and they will start taking market share. If they are profitable then they would just be getting on with it, instead of always hyping themselves.
As for 1 mbd diesel, that is probably a reflection reduced industrial activity (mining, railroads, trucking etc), rather than conservation. To produce an extra 1mbd does not require three mbd of oil, it just requires adjusting the refining process to favour diesel fractions over gasoline, or in some cases, operating a different fractionating column. Not as simple as flicking a switch, to be sure, but they can and do adjust their output product mix according to demand.
Also, there is a small, but increasing trend, for replacing diesel with natural gas where possible. This has happened for many stationary diesel engines, and is slowly making inroads into buses.
There has also been some shifting of freight from road to rail (more intermodal shipping) so that uses less diesel per ton mile too. Probably only a small fraction of the 1mbd decrease, but that part is definitely "demand destruction", that does not have to be replaced.
"we can use a rational approach to minimize the environmental impact of a modern lifestyle."
KIt, I couldn't agree with you more on this. You can (almost) always engineer solutions to environmental/industrial issues, though there may have to be some compromises. Problem is, successful solutions are generally not sexy, and just don't get much press. The greenies will always find another doom and gloom story to push, because their agenda is to not have the modern lifestyle at all (other than their ipods)
Misdirection, Paul. Jeff Broin is putting up a couple of hundred million of his own money on the bet that, after running pilot, and demonstration plants, he can produce cellulosic ethanol for $2.35/gal. I'll bet he comes in "under" that.
BP, and Dupont are betting $300 Million that they can, also.
Oil costs $74.00/barrel. It doesn't matter whether we subsidized them to the tune of $70 Billion in the last decade, or not. It still costs $74.00/barrel.
Your true colors are coming out.
And, actually, 3 Million barrels of oil will get you about 36 million gallons of diesel, at present. It will be a tough job to get it up to 42 million gallons, or One million barrels of diesel.
As for nat gas for Semis? Ain't gonna hoppen, GI. The infrastructure costs would be Enormous; and, you would still be dependent on a fossil fuel of uncertain supply, and, thus, price.
What if "fraccin" fluids end up being the next MTBE? It's very possible, you know.
No, when the toys are put away, and the boy steps out into the real world, it will have to be ethanol. We can produce it, we'll need it, and the infrastructure supports it.
Everything else is just "misdirection," and "buying time."
Any evidence Broin is putting up $200 mil of his own money?? Why does he need $80 mil DoE grant and $20 million from state of Iowa and has applied for federal loan guarantees etc?? That looks a lot more like other peoples money to me! And I'm still not sure he's got the dough to get his project going. Broin's project is a good one, and might work out, but who the heck knows that right now.
BP and DuPont are also taking huge federal $$ as well right now for their projects, not only using their own money. Maybe that's what it takes to get this stuff off the ground, but don't tell me it's their own money when it isn't.
Dupont said this week they can currently produce corncob cellulosic for $2 at their new TN plant, everybody says they can do it (Coskata, Bluefire, etc etc etc), but all them still cling to having to have a subsidy. And they want it for next 12 years! If DuPont can do corn cobs $0.50 cheaper than Broin, should we continue to subsidize both??
Rufus, my true colours are that any, and all fuels, should have to stand on their own feet, without specific subsidy.
If those folks have invested that much money, then I truly hope it works for them, and they get a profitable business out of it.
If the gasification path is the way to go for ethanol, then I would not be surprised to find, very quickly, that coal and natural gas become the feedstocks of choice, as you'll get more gallons for your dollar that way.
The fact that Syntec Biofuel is changing their name to Synthenol, to get rid of the "biofuel" tag, is a good indication of exactly that.
I have no problem with ethanol, I just have a problem with ethanol (or any other) subsidies.
As for NG for trucks, well, we'll see. UPS has just bought 245 CNG trucks. I expect other urban fleet operators will follow soon. For the semis, well, it's up the CNG folks to compete with diesel, and ethanol. If the truckstops think there's money in it, they'll set it up soon enough, same as they will for ethanol.
Agreed about the frac fluids – they have to show their production is environmentally benign, as does anyone else. And, finally, NG is not just a fossil fuel, it can be produced as a biofuel, from ANY biomass.
So, NG is another option, and in the energy game diversity = security – I'm sure you can agree with that.
I'd feel better about the possible success of MSW ethanol if there was more evidence of success using another commonly collected waste at a central processing point – human sewage. That is a huge source of biomass that should be much lower fruit to pick than MSW conversion, but it's not clear to me that has shown to be viable yet??
Also, I'm aware of a half-dozen or more proposed projects all around the US where vendors are trying to get municipalities (i.e, taxpayers) to spring for MSW ethanol plants, but nobody has any solid evidence it will work at scale? Seems there should be at least one success before you try build a half-dozen.
"he can produce cellulosic ethanol for $2.35/gal."
So what? Then he will have to add distribution costs and taxes (lots & lots of taxes) to that. Product will end up way more expensive than gasoline.
What's that you say? Ethanol gets subsidized, not taxed?
Yeah, right! If ethanol starts to eat into the fossil fuel tax base, you can bet that all those granolas are going to start whining about Big Booze, and all those politicians are going to start slapping on taxes instead of subsidies. You know its true!
Anon,
Your are right on. MSW, and sewage sludge, are just about the worst feedstocks you can get for ethanol. You can't use either for the biological route (sludge is, after all, what all the bugs couldn't eat) and if you are doing gasification, both contain lots of moisture and other stuff, requiring a lot of syngas cleanup.
Better off to use them just as heat fuel for electricity generation, or process heat, or as a feedstock for anaerobic digestion to methane (proven technology, in commercial use).
Better to use the cleaner feedstocks, like wood and agricultural waste, or coal or NG for ethanol, and they are still having trouble doing that, even with all these grants and subsidies.
We just gave the oil companies $13 Billion a couple of years, ago, for "deep water" exploration/research. This is the U.S. We subsidize Everything. We subsidize peanuts, and sugar, and oil, and hybrids, and solar, and windmills, bows and arrows, and just about any danged thing you can imagine.
You can drive your tanker truck up to just about any ethanol refinery in the country, that doesn't have their production contracted out, and fill it up for $1.70 gal.
Or, you can fill up at the oil terminal for, maybe, $1.90 gal.
The question is: What will those prices be this summer? Next summer? Will the spread be $0.20? Or, $1.20? $2.20?
Will there be Less Ethanol, and More Gasoline? Or, More Ethanol, and Less Gasoline? Which way would you bet?
Remember, on top of everything else, we're drawing down that "floating" storage by about a million barrels/day, as we speak. There are probably about 120 Million Barrels, or 4 months, left.
Along about June we'll be trying to come out of recession, buy another couple of million barrels of oil/ day, and outbid a non-OECD world that's steadily increasing their oil consumption (pretty sportily, too) all at the same time the "floating" storage is going away.
I'm thinking the spread might "widen."
Rufus – I am betting that the Political Class worldwide is close to running out of Other People's Money. From Greece to Japan, and most points in between, politicians are borrowing money and gambling on export-led recovery. Obviously not going to happen, and the ability of governments to borrow money is going to be reduced.
Net result of that — we have not seen the worst of the recession yet. Obama's 5.7% GDP growth in the US last Quarter is ridiculous on its face — just counting borrowed money as growth. When the next leg of the recession bites, oil demand will decline. And so will oil prices.
Most importantly, so will the the ability of the US Government to subsidize things — like ethanol. The ethanol/gasoline spread is not going to favor ethanol for a very long time, if ever.
Ethanol is a niche fuel, that's all. It is a great niche fuel, but that's it. Limited. Capiche?
What will put an end to the coming recession? I like to think that in the US it will be be a focus on re-industrialization, leading to large numbers of nuclear power plants driving large-scale Coal-to-Liquids and Gas-to-Liquids for domestically-produced transportation fuels. But I am just a raging optimist.
This outfit has been running its pilot plant since 2003. They signed a contract with Edmonton for 100,000 tons/yr. They seem to be predicting 90 gallons per ton.
Enerkem
You're not paying attention, K.
Oil is "Limited."
Coal is "Limited."
Nat Gas is "Limited."
Ethanol is NOT "Limited."
As long as we have sunshine, and rain, ethanol is NOT limited.
Fossil Fuels were the "niche" fuels. Alcohol is Forever.
And, recessions mean different things to different people. YOU might have to pay a lot for gas.
I can buy a couple of bushels of corn, and drive all I want.
As was mentioned already, electricity is just as fungible if not more so than oil, and what passes for source of origin labeling is already well underway for power from renewable sources. Some sort of origin certificate could be put up for auction upon delivery to the United States for every gallon of liquid fuel. Delivery to every end user would of course occur as it does now, but gas stations for example, could choose to buy origin certificates based on what their customers might want. I imagine the price for domestically sourced gasoline might push higher in some locales than that of say, Saudi Arabia.
I don't know if the cost to set up run this scheme is worth it. Also verifying authenticity of certificates might be a problem. And how many gas station operators are going to want to sort through that in addition to buying fuel?
“Ethanol is NOT "Limited."”
Rufus the engineers to design and build are limited.
Pual wrote,
“Rufus, my true colours are that any, and all fuels, should have to stand on their own feet, without specific subsidy.”
Really, want to bet? The problem with boring solutions is that they cost money. The best example I can give the the western hydroelectric system and the 104 operating US nukes. A few decades after they were too expensive they are the backbone of low cost electricity.
If a technology is paying taxes and producing low cost energy it was a good investment.
It takes thinking on a 60 years scale. So if an ethanol plant produces for 60 years, at some point it becomes boring. We have enough engineers do design things that that last 60 years.
Not much is still around from the Jimmy Carter era. A few biomass plants and of course the nuke plants that the anti-nukes were against.
"Alcohol is Forever."
I don't want to downplay the cultural significance of alcohol, Rufus.
The late 'Buz' Ivanhoe – who did so much to keep Hubbert's theories of peak oil alive – developed a theory that civilization is a direct consequence of man's desire for a nice cold beer.
Think about it! Our ancestors after the last Ice Age were living the life of Riley, hunting & fishing while the women-folk did all the hard work around the camp. Why would any man ever give up that life?
Ivanhoe's theory is it was the chance discovery that stored wet grass seeds (collected by the women, of course) would under certain circumstances ferment and produce alcohol. The demand for more alcohol led to the need for more grass seeds, which led to agriculture.
Now farming is hard work, which led to the basic form of renewable energy — slavery. It was easier to capture a guy from some other tribe and make him do the hard labor.
So, using renewable energy, life pretty much sucked for most people for the next 6 thousand years, despite the availability of alcohol. Until the discovery of fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels became the bridge to nuclear energy – clean, compact, very large scale supply, and almost inexhaustible.
We need to go forward, Rufus. Forward to nuclear power. Not backward to the engine of slavery.
Hopefully some day we can have a cold beer together and agree on this.
Bill H
Many utilities have 'greenpower' programs. This is one I like.
http://www.chelanpud.org/snap.html
But Bill if you are interested in a certificate, send me some money and I will send you a certificate.
Kit P: "If a technology is paying taxes and producing low cost energy it was a good investment… So if an ethanol plant produces for 60 years, at some point it becomes boring."
That doesn't follow. If the process does not have an EROEI of greater than unity it will be loss-making. The jury is still out on ethanol. You are getting confused between subsidising a profit-making enterprise that happens to have high capital costs with one which without subsidies may be loss-making now and in future.
I always figured agriculture was about making booze, and giving it to your "future" girlfriend.
I'm all for more Nuclear, K. The only problem with nuclear is it has limited utility (at least, for the medium-future) in transportation.
Of course, if this oil deal goes like it looks like it could the next couple of years Nothing is going to be there to save us.
Pete, a lot of these ethanol plants have a better EROEI than you probably think. And, as nat gas gets more expensive, and Ca with their CARB starts to wear on them they will find other ways of using biomass, waste heat, and landfill gas, etc. to improve their efficiency.
Cellulosic, of course, should have a very good EROEI. It's not all as simple as the hyperbolators (from either side) would have you believe.
Rufus — an ethanol plant doesn't have an EROEI; I think maybe that's where you're going wrong. The whole process from land maintenance to growing corn, to harvesting and fermentation, and subsequent distribution, has an EROEI. The devil may be in the accounting details, but at the 10,000 foot level it really is that simple.
I've read the "hyperbolators" as you call them, so yes there are two sides to the story. But on balance the pessimists seem to me to be the ones who have their story straight. The optimists are the ones who seem to quote the absolute theoretically highest yields, without accounting for all of the inputs, the usability of all of the outputs (e.g. DDGS in vast quantities), or the fact of irrigation and fossil fuel inputs on marginal land.
For instance, where is the land in the south west to support 12 million cars in Los Angeles. Where's the water even?
That's why I'm inclined to agree with Kinu about the niche-ness of ethanol.
Guave
next
Guave, Haiti?
Guave, Grenada?
I Guave up trying to find any other Guaves!
I should have used the more common spelling Agave to Ethanol
Sorry
agave – cactus
Guave – evidently a totally fictitious, plant invented by a drunken, hillbilly from Ms.
Bill, Kit, here is the best example I have seen for trading green electricity – there is a tightly defined procedure for creating. tracking and retiring the REC's, and it doesn't seem onerous.
http://www.orer.gov.au/recs/#what
Rufus, I will say again the natural gas is NOT limited. There thousands of landfills and sewage plants producing and capturing methane today (and a rapidly increasing number of dairy farms, and cattle and pig feedlots). I'd have to do a lot of digging for the data, but I'd be prepared to bet that more btu's of methane are produced today than ethanol. Any feedstock for ethanol can be a methane feedstock too, and sometimes with far less expense and equipment.
Kit, I have no problem with "expensive" investments like hydro and nuclear (I have built a micro hydro system myself), because the long term value is there, as evidenced by the utilities wanting to build them. I watch in frustration on a daily basis here in BC as the greenies paint run of the river hydro (or any hydro) as being the biggest evil ever, even though reliable hydro has kept the lights on and the electricity cost low here for decades.
But isn't value the whole point? As you have pointed out before, there is value in extending the life of nukes, hydro etc. But when the ethanol, or biodiesel industry (or pulp industry for that matter)cries that the end of a subsidy will be the end of them, how much value are they really creating?
For any transport fuel, as long as it is prepared to;
a) not be blatantly subsidised, and
b) cop its share of taxes same as gasoline diesel do,
then it has earned it's right to exist – it just has to win over the customers.
I would have thought the first customer for the biodiesel industry would have been the agricultural sector itself, which consumes many times more diesel than available biodiesel. But if the farmers aren't buying their own fuel, then why should anyone else?
For one thing, Paul. John Deere only in the last couple of years agreed to warrantee their tractors for a whole 5% biodiesel.
When a used tractor sells for $90,000.00, and your family depends on the warrantee you've got no choice.
How about this? A few days ago the "rack" price for ethanol in Iowa was $1.85 IIRC. In Alabama it was $2.42. At the same time, I read that refineries in W. Iowa were selling ethanol FOB Omaha for $1.73.
Even allowing for an extra $0.10 shipping to Alabama, some Major, or Super-Jobber was making a cool $0.60/gal.
It's Great to own the Distribution System. The mandate, and the subsidy is the only thing that has prevented the Big Oil Cos from crushing ethanol in its cradle.
Meanwhile, I get a kick out of guys with a tax deductible mortgage, driving a hybrid with a $7,500.00 Subsidy, to his office where he has a before-tax $15,000.00 health insurance benefit knocking the four and a half cent subsidy in a gallon of e10.
And then, cheering the Pres on when he spends $240 Billion Yr defending the oil supply of the country that gave us 15 hijackers on 9-11.
Would you like to know how much ethanol I could have produced with the $1,000,000,000,000.00 we've spent over there since 2003?
"For any transport fuel, as long as it is prepared to;
a) not be blatantly subsidised, and
b) cop its share of taxes same as gasoline diesel do"
Paul,the best guestimates I can find suggest at least half the military budget goes toward securing Mideast oil. That translates to a $3.00 per gallon subsidy for gas and diesel. The .45 per gallon blenders credit is peanuts compared to that. If Americans paid the true cost of gasoline at the pump,biofuels wouldn't NEED any subsidies.
And, btw, ethanol pays the same federal tax as gasoline, and diesel. And, also the same state taxes in all but a couple of states.
According to these guys,the true cost of gasoline is an additional $8.35 per gallon. Almost 20X more than the blenders credit that takes so much heat.
http://www.setamericafree.org/saf_hiddencostofoil010507.pdf
Rufus/Maury,
I guess that despite whatever we may say, we have no influence over what the Political Class does.
I will say that I think to put all the mideast costs onto oil is not quite right, or if it is, then Uncle Sam is the world's worst investor. Given that the US gets more oil from Canada and Mexico than all mideast countries combined, to spend all that money just for mid east oil is the world's worst investment, ever. That's why I don't think it is that simple.
Rufus, the John Deere warranty thing is an example of why I think much of this is ass-backwards.
Before the US gov spent $$$ on biodiesel production subsides, I would have though it prudent to spend the money with the John Deeres, Cummins and Caterpillars to do whatever development is required to make the engines compatible with 100% biodiesel. This would also have made them world leaders in that field, but obviously this is not a priority for the gov't, the engine mfrs or even the biodiesel companies themselves.
They did at least do that with the cars and E85, and we will see E100 with Ricardo.
And your example of the Prius driver does confirm your earlier post about the US subsidising everything (or perhaps more accurately, every well heeled lobby group).
That $0.65/gal difference is $6500 to send a 10,000 gal trailer down the interstate – where can I get paid that much.
For that price difference, you could import suagr and make the ethanol in Alabama, even giving up the $0.45 credit, and still come out ahead.
Seems to me the best bet for the "ethanol" industry is to diversify it's feedstock, so that it is available at a similar price everywhere. The more it's available, the more E85 cars get sold. Of course, the "corn" industry may not agree, and they seem to control the "ethanol" industry. And therein lies the problem, in my opinion.
I do support the alternative feedstock ethanol producers, and even though I don't support the subsidies, I am not living in the country that pays them, so I am merely an interested observer. At least, until I try to import some ethanol, that is.
That $0.65/gal difference is $6500 to send a 10,000 gal trailer down the interstate – where can I get paid that much.
That's what I said. Mindboggling.
The Ricardo will use, primarily E85 if it ever gets built. You can buy "some" e85 up and down the highway. You can't buy Any e100.
The corn industry is, surprisingly, very supportive of cellulosic (really.) They figure Cellulosic will take the heat off the perceived "food to fuel" problem.
They really want the Good PR.
They, also, figure corn cobs will be in the mix, somewhere.
"and even though I don't support the subsidies, I am not living in the country that pays them, so I am merely an interested observer."
Aren't you in Canada Paul? Canada is the world's 5th leading producer of ethanol. And yeah,it's subsidised up there too.
Cellulosic, of course, should have a very good EROEI.
What do you base that on? I say just the opposite: Due to the nature of the process, the EROEI of cellulosic will always be marginal at best.
I spent a good deal of time with a cellulosic expert last week. I saw a lot of mass and energy balances. The bottom line is that even though that process was supposedly one of the best, the energy balance was probably going to end up being pretty close to 1.0 once the farming and logistics inputs were put in. As it was, just the process balance was less than 2, because you simply can't distill off a whole lot of water without consuming a lot of energy.
This is where your ethanol conjuring falls down. You don't have to deal with such realities. You can just say "Pretend we can get 100 gallons per ton of municipal solid waste. Voila! Problem solved." Some of us have to deal with reality, though, and not optimistic press releases.
RR
a lot of these ethanol plants have a better EROEI than you probably think.
Rufus~
An ethanol plant will always have an EROEI less than one, just as an oil refinery always has an EROEI less than one.
The entire field-to-wheels EROEI of corn ethanol is probably slightly over one.
The entire well-to-wheels EROEI of oil is probably in the range of 5 to 1 to 12 to 1 depending on the source of the oil, how far it has to be transported, and whether it is sweet or sour crude.
What happens at an ethanol plant or an oil refinery is called process efficiency, and a processing plant will always consume energy in the process — getting less energy out than went in. For example, at an oil refinery, the process efficiency is about 85%.
Don't confuse process efficiency at the still or refinery with field-to-wheels or well-to-wheels EROEI.
"Due to the nature of the process, the EROEI of cellulosic will always be marginal at best."
What do we call what LS9 is trying to do Robert? It's not exactly cellulosic. They did a dozen different modifications to a strain of e-coli. Mix it with plant waste,and out comes diesel,gasoline,or a number of other things it can be designed for. No chemical process or water to get out. If I understand what they're saying,they just need to get the right system and scale down to go commercial. E-coli can be made dirt cheap. If these guys get a mechanized system that works,forget ethanol and biodiesel. And say good-bye to that stinky old crude.
Ruufs, Rufus, Rufus!
If ethanol were as easy as you imply, why have you not become the Bill Gates of Big Ethanol? After all, you can see a truth which escapes most of us, which gives you a huge economic advantage.
Let's go back to the end of the 19th Century, when the gasoline-fueled internal combustion engine won the competition for ascendancy.
The majority of the US population in those days lived on farms. This was before we had decided that the right way to make any technical decision was to get a political hack with a Harvard law degree to write a complex regulation. Individuals in those days assessed the evidence and made their own decisions.
Those sturdy farmers had a need for a power source to pump wells and drive the small sawmills they used. They knew about externally-fueled steam engines. They knew about internal combustion engines fueled by gas, gasoline, diesel, ethanol. Hell, they even knew about electricity.
They knew how to make ethanol, and they had lots of time. No TV or internet to waste their evenings. They made ethanol – for personal consumption. They had more biomass than they could use.
Yet they chose to harness up the horses and ride miles into town to get cans of gasoline for their small engines, instead of using ethanol.
There was a huge experiment involving the choice between ethanol and gasoline. Gasoline won hands down.
Now has anything significant changed? Or are you just refusing to accept the obvious.
There was a huge experiment involving the choice between ethanol and gasoline. Gasoline won hands down.
Kinu~
And that happened because in the early days of the oil business, the well-to-wheels EROEI of fuel from petroleum was on the order of 100 to 1, while the EROEI of corn likker, was less than one. (The EROEI of corn ethanol today is still only slightly better than the white lightnin' days — now perhaps 1.2 to 1.)
The EROEI of fuel from oil has decreased to somewhere in the range of 5:1 to 12:1, but it is still a factor of five better than the EROEI of corn ethanol.
The EROEI of fuel from oil will continue to drop as oil becomes harder to find and must be extracted from deeper depths, but ethanol won't be more economical w/o subsidies until the EROEI of oil drops below that of ethanol, or the EROEI of corn ethanol climbs above that of oil.
Surely Rufus has to be able to understand that.
Well, for one thing, Ol' John D. Rockefeller managed to get prohibition passed.
K, if you'll read up on the moonshine wars, you'll find that the first thing George Washington did as President was saddle up his big white horsie and lead an Army of 6,000 men out to W. Penn to enforce our first tax. A tax on small farmers that were distilling their own whiskey. It was called "The Whiskey Rebellion."
The tax didn't apply equally to "Large Eastern Refiners," of which George Washington was one of the biggest, by the way.
Gasoline used to be cheap. That's the bottom-line difference.
The main thing I understand, Mercantile, is that the anti-ethanol lobby continues to misrepresent the EROEI of Corn ethanol.
They continue to refuse to admit that Poet gets 3 Gallons of ethanol from a bushel of corn.
They continue to claim there is a lot of "Petroleum" used in the growing of corn.
They continue to overlook the energy efficiency improvements of the growing process,
and they continue to ignore that amount of utility returned by DDGS, and Corn oil.
It's just a delaying tactic while they try to figure out their next step. Valero, and Murphy Oil have figured it out; they're out trying to find more ethanol plants to buy.
RR,
The last I looked Poet was claiming that burning the lignin would distill all of the cellulosic, and most of the corn.
Are we counting burning the lignin against the "energy balance?"
You mean the warranty on tractors is good forever Rufus? Farmers don't ever try anything different?
Kit P – İ would talk to power plant operators about fish runs – someone close enough to the topic to know something about it. PG&E for one has spent a fortune on fuzzy headed ideas to make green types happy with little to no success.
They will continue to do so just to keep the peace.
When a company like Ricardo works on something in silence it is possible they have something. When they make an announcement about 2 whole engines operating it sounds like publicity and little else.
Gasoline used to be cheap. That's the bottom-line difference.
Of course gasoline was cheap — in the early days oil was easy to find at shallow depths, and spurted out of the ground under its own pressure. (Ever heard of Spindletop in East Texas?)
The well-to-wheels of oil to gasoline in those days was 100:1. That's why it was a lot cheaper than using alcohol as fuel, when the field-to-wheels EROEI of corn alcohol was < 1:1.
It had nothing to do with George Washington or John D. Rockefeller. It was a question of thermodynamic efficiency.
Mother Nature gave us — for free — a huge pool of of energy-dense liquid made from Sunlight that bio-organisms captured over the last 300 million years.
No matter what you do today, you have to spend resources and energy making up for the fact that nature made oil for us with free heat and pressure.
We were just foolish for burning in 120 years what it took nature 300 millions to make.
And, reading through the UT Ag Extension Report that I linked to above, I didn't see much "farming" going on from years 2 through (on average) 15.
I've said since Day One that the key to cellulosic would be small refineries close to the feedstock source. Two gallons of gasoline for a round-trip, carrying 15 tons/trip wouldn't be much gasoline.
I don't believe the "experts" much any more. Everyone has an agenda. I believe facts, from real companies, operating under "best practices."
I believe Jeff Broin when he hands his stockholders a bill for X amount of nat gas used, and a receipt for X amount of ethanol sold.
I don't pay any attention to "experts" like Pimental who try to pad the "energy budget" with Sunlight that fell on the crops, and the water budget with natural rainfall.
And, although I will probably buy a PHEV someday, you can't convince me that electricity, and liquids have the same utility for moving vehicles. Or, CNG and liquids, for that matter.
But, burn it we did, Mercantile; and, now, we don't have enough to go around (or, won't have, shortly.)
Now, we're rummaging around out in the Deep, deep Ocean; drilling under Two miles of water, a mile of salt, and a couple of miles of rock to get the dregs.
We're bulldozing up tarsands to melt into something we can use. Just holding our breath until one of those dirt dams up there breaches.
Meanwhile, the folks over in Vonore, Tn are going to raise a few acres of switchgrass, and laugh like hell at us. Well, you guys, actually. I'll be burning their product. Until I can burn my own.
Everyone has an agenda.
And what's yours?
I'm an old fart that likes to hear himself talk.
Corn is $3.58/bu for the front-month contract, today. Still a tisch over $0.06 lb.
You see, the problem with "experts" is they are, by and large, the same guys that were telling you two years ago that it would take all the corn in the United States just to replace 10% of our gasoline, and that all the kids in Bangladesh would starve to death if we didn't quit using corn ethanol, "Immediately."
Today, somewhere over 8% of the stuff in your gas tank is ethanol, and corn is still six cents/lb (and dropping.)
Oh, and you can fill up as many tanker trucks as you want for about $1.75 gal. And, that's before any tax credits have kicked in.
They were full of bullhockey then, and they're probably full of bullhockey now.
Rufus-
"I am an old fart who likes to himself talk."
Ditto.
To answer my own question,LS9 is trying to do microbial fermentation. The regular cellulosic process works like this:
A "pretreatment" phase, to make the lignocellulosic material such as wood or straw amenable to hydrolysis,
Cellulose hydrolysis (cellulolysis), to break down the molecules into sugars;
Separation of the sugar solution from the residual materials, notably lignin;
Microbial fermentation of the sugar solution;
Distillation to produce roughly 95% pure alcohol.
Dehydration by molecular sieves to bring the ethanol concentration to over 99.5%
With microbial fermentation,you mix e-coli with the feedstock and you're done. The feedstock is waste of one kind or another. Something tells me the EROI will be a lot better than 1:1.
"Distillation to produce roughly 95% pure alcohol."
Now there's a low energy input process!
Guys – The Oil Drum was once a great site, now ruined by the usual dismal suspects who think the only future is everyone growing vegetables in their window boxes to barter with their neighbors.
Every topic on meeting the huge & growing human demand for power is worth exploring. But these endless repetitions of half-truths & mis-statements & exaggerations & outright stupidity about ethanol are going to send RR's fine blog down the same sorry path. You really don't want to do that.
Maury,
I don't think it will be quite that simple. You still have to collect, separate and refine the product.
Doesn't mean they may not be onto something, but lets be clear – the E coli have to use part of the feedstock for their own energy and growth (same as yeast do), so you will immediately lose some of the feedstock energy value. You then have some external energy inputs into the process, so the overall return is heading south.
HOWEVER, what we are really interested in is transport fuels, so if we input 1 MBTU of biomass ( non transport fuel) and 0.2 MBTU of electricity or NG, to get 0.6 MBTU of liquid fuel, then we have succeeded in turning a low value product (biomass) into a high value one (liquid fuel). This is the same game as Kit P has pointed out many times for making electricity from coal. A corn ethanol producer can achieve the same thing by burning garbage to run their distillation process
The question just becomes one of profitability, and there is no hard information from LS9 on that, except that "they will will now jointly work on optimizing the efficiency by which their engineered microbe can convert cellulosic biomass into advanced biofuels."
So, they have something, that is not yet ready for commercial application, but power to them if they can.
You are also correct both in that I am in Canada, and that ethanol is subsidised here. What you may not know is current Canadian gov't basically does whatever the US does. They matched the subsidy/import tariff for ethanol (they also matched the ridiculous pulp industry black liquor subsidy).
So, to be really accurate, I am paying for it the same as you, but I since I don't get to vote in the US, where the decisions do (or don't) get made, I am indeed just an observer!
The Oil Drum drove away every commentor that disagreed with Leanan's point of view. It turned into an echo chamber.
This blog is just the opposite.
Kinu – "The Oil Drum was once a great site, now ruined by the usual dismal suspects who think the only future is everyone growing vegetables in their window boxes to barter with their neighbors."
Hey, when did they become so optimistic? Last time I looked the only thing being exchanged in future was high-speed bullets.
Last time I looked the only thing being exchanged in future was high-speed bullets.
What's the EROEI of a high-speed bullet? 🙂
I suppose if it nets you your neighbour's window box it could be quite high!
🙂
[Me]: … where is the land in the south west to support 12 million cars in Los Angeles. Where's the water even?
[Rufus]: Guave. next.
So, now that we've established that it's Agave (and that the moonshine is gone to your head), I read that:
"After 30 years of continuous research, Chapingo Autonomous University generated a new improved cultivar of Agave mezcalero (Agave Angustifolia Haw), which is a very high yield cultivar." Water needs are "very low, no need to irrigate in places where there are about 500 mm of precipitation."
But the Mojave gets 80 to 250 mm of rain with a long term average of under 140 mm, and the Sonaran gets 80 to 200 mm. I've been all around there, and it's as dry a witch's tit. So dry, it gave me nose bleeds in my poor Irish moisture-accustomed nostrils. And the main cultivable bits of south and central California all looked to me like they were taken for fruit orchards etc. So I ain't buyin' it.
RE Small cellulosic refineries near the feedstock – great idea, and that's what DuPont and UT have at Vonore. But that tiny 250,000 gal/yr facility cost them $50 million! CapEx at $20 / annual gallon seems to be problematic for small scale . . . or even at $10 if they can reduce the cost of the next one by 50%.
RE LS9- They say "We are at about 10 percent of the theoretical maximum yield from sugar. We would like to be at 80 to 90 percent to make this commercially viable." So they need to up their current miracle by 8x to get to viability? Not sure that can be done very fast if at all – even just doubling efficiency can be a huge chore, even for the Nobel-type gene-benders.
I wish both of these groups the best of luck, but I am not holding my breath.
Pete, in areas like that I'm sure they would have to use a "drip" irrigation scheme. Such a plan should work pretty well with a big-ticket item like Agave Cactii.
You're right, though; I might be "Misdirecting" a little too much of that stuff. 🙂
Oxy, if we give it a year, or two, we'll probably see Broin, and ICM settle on a cookie-cutter type design, and have capital costs drop fairly severely. I think they're figuring on two, or three times the capital cost of corn refineries, but a lower feedstock cost.
Having said that, cellulosic is, almost surely, going to be more expensive than corn. However, corn is limited, to some extent, by mandates, and it looks like gasoline will continue to get more expensive. It would be an "unsettling" proposition to get All your money tied up in cellulosic, though.
"You then have some external energy inputs into the process, so the overall return is heading south."
From what I understand,there're no energy inputs Paul,unless you mean the energy it takes to make the bacteria. The end product is supposed to be as good as anything that comes from a refinery. We know a barrel of wood chips is almost free. So,if the e-coli used to ferment the wood chips costs less than $80,the diesel it puts out wouldn't need any subsidies.
Hopefully,this stuff doesn't need to age like Kentucky Bourbon. Imagine how many fermentation tanks we'd need for 20M bpd even if the process were relatively quick.
From what I understand,there're no energy inputs Paul,unless you mean the energy it takes to make the bacteria.
Maury~
If they can get energy out with no energy in, they will have indeed made a major breakthrough — in fact, they will have repealed the Laws of Thermodynamics and will be guests of the Swedish king in Stockholm to receive a triple Nobel Prize — simultaneously for chemistry, physics, and economics. 😉
Yeah,we know it takes energy to grow all that waste that goes to waste every year Wendell. Something like a billion tons of biomass goes to waste each year in the US. Still,this process doesn't use any natural gas that I know of. It will take energy to make the e-coli. What do you figure,50 cents of electricity per barrel? What would that make the EROI if a barrel of diesel is going for $80?
It will take energy to make the e-coli.
I thought you said no energy inputs.
"From what I understand,there're no energy inputs Paul,unless you mean the energy it takes to make the bacteria."
I know what I said Wendell.
This EROEI stuff gets carried to an extreme when biofuels are discussed. When I worked on a drilling rig,I had to drive 200 miles to get to work sometimes. So did the other 50 guys on the rig. Sometimes we could drill for weeks without finding anything. Not once did anyone bring up the EROEI.
Maury, I would guess the cost of exploration traditionally can be ignored as a rounding error compared to the EROEI once wells are in production. If that weren't the case — and it may well not be now — then yes, it would have to be taken into account. It doesn't mean EROEI is being carried to an extreme … it just means that the significance of some of the factors changes over time as resources get more scarce.
Re: E. coli … it is a gut bacterium so I would be surprised if its optimum (plural optima 😉 temperature wasn't somewhere around the 37 Centigrade mark. That means the process, whatever it is, needs heat as an input.
Most biological processes work best at around that temperature, but at least you can use low grade waste heat to supply it, so that shouldn't be a big deal.
What gets me though is how they get the "biodiesel" to be the only output? E Coli is a bug, and eats food and drinks water. It needs to burn some of that food for energy, so at least two "waste" products are CO2 and H2O. The oil is presumably contained in the waste secreted by the E.Coli, and that's fine, but I find it hard to believe they have engineered a bacteria to secrete pure oil, and no other waste. And like any other bug, it can't live in a pure pool of it's own waste. Assuming the bacteria are in suspension/solution, the oil could phase out to the surface and be skimmed off, and that would be a major advance – but they aren't telling.
Overall, this sounds very similar to what we hear from the algae folks, or even the fuel cell people. When the staff of this company are driving around, fuelled by their own product, then, and only then, will I be convinced.
All of these xx to liquids schemes have substantial energy losses along the way. It seems to me that the effort to take the square peg (solid fuel) and force it through the round hole (liquid fuel) is just not worth it.
I think Kinu said it best a few threads ago in that " major innovation in transportation is required". I think that innovation would be to move away from the gasoline internal combustion engine to one that can run(efficiently) off any fuel, solid, liquid or gas. Then all of this inefficient conversion is not required, and we have maximum fuel diversity.
Now, I just have to invent it…
Let start again Russ. When you said you grew up in central Oregon, I assumed you meant someplace like Bend not some sissified place on the left coast. I am talking about the Columbia and Snake Rivers. The hydroelectric systems are operated by the US Corp of Engineers, Grant PUD, Chelan PUD and other PUDs.
“someone close enough to the topic to know something about it. PG&E for one”
Do you mean PGE? Portland General Electric who makes electricity mostly with fossil fuel.
http://www.portlandgeneral.com/our_company/corporate_info/power_plants.aspx
In any case, here is the data on fish runs
http://www.portlandgeneral.com/community_environment/initiatives/protecting_fish/deschutes_river/deschutes_fish_runs.aspx
Farther up the the Columbia:
http://www.chelanpud.org/departments/yourPUD/RRAnnualFishCount.pdf
It sure looks to me like progress in the right direction.
Fish counts up in the Columbia basin, ozone down in the LA basin. It is easy to be an optimist about the future.
Paul said: "I think Kinu said it best a few threads ago in that " major innovation in transportation is required"… Now, I just have to invent it…"
Maybe the major innovation doesn't have to be in technology. Who was it (Rufus?) was talking about improving the efficiency of some 6.2 litre car a while back? How about NOT DRIVING TO THE GROCERY SHOP IN A 6.2 LITRE CAR for innovation? Stunningly simple! I know folks like Kinu don't count it as innovation, but the great thing about this particular innovation is that you don't have to do anything to make it happen. You don't have to want it, like it, or even believe in it. You can just watch it happen as gasoline prices go up.
“How about NOT …”
PeteS, let me know when you plan to start. I will introduce you to the Amish life style. Maybe you prefer subsistence farming in Africa? Your children suffering from things like malaria is just part of the experince.
I have been hearing ideas like yours for 30 years, nothing innovative about suggesting how others should live. It is not that I have a problem with conservation but just those who preach it like a religion.
This is how my rationing plan would work. I would start rationing with folks like PeteS. Your allotment of energy would be the same as Amish family.
Sometimes we could drill for weeks without finding anything. Not once did anyone bring up the EROEI.
Maury~
Well they should have. Believe me, someone in the your company had to have been worried about it.
Disregarding anomalies and artificial distortions such as subsidies and tax credits, an energy or fuel business could not be proftable unless it generates more than it consumes.
Wendell, that is not strictly true. As Kit has said numerous times, any electric energy company, by definition, puts out less energy than goes in, it just happens to be using more of a lower cost energy to produce less of a higher priced one.
But, certainly someone in the company was looking at $RO$I, and that is still true today. Offshore wells are about $100m a throw, but fuel cost is only a small part of that.
Even the oilsands, the most energy intensive oil currently produced, only uses about 1/3 of a barrel to produce a barrel, but at massive equipment and manpower cost. And the EROEI for oilsands does not change one iota with the price of oil, but the profitability sure does. Companies will happily take a negative EROEI if it means positive $ROI – you can't pay a dividend in energy.
"How about NOT DRIVING .."
PeteS, I'm with Kit on this one. While there are many people, mainly in downtown urban areas, who can and do get by without vehicles, and there are many who live elsewhere and need them – we can't all move downtown. Even in Europe, where fuel is double the price here and cities are dense and transit is way better, they still use 2/3 the fuel we do, so "not driving" is, quite simply "not the answer".
Less driving, more intelligent driving, more transit, electrified rail are all fair game, and are happening to various degrees, but "not driving" is simply not going to happen. We can come up with better ideas than that.
Paul,
An electric company is an energy carrier, not an energy producer or fuel company. They take coal, NG, enriched uranium, water or wind turbines, or solar panels, and convert those other forms of energy into electricity, and then transport that to a final user.
Electric companies will always send out less energy in the form of electricity than they started with because of the process efficiency losses of the conversion process.
Best regards~
Quite so, but isn't that really what the oil, coal NG companies are doing too. They all "use" some energy to create or harvest the energy they are selling.
Perhaps I'm just being pedantic here – your point holds true that any company that uses more of it's own product (oil, in your example) than it sells, will go broke. But my point is they will go broke long before they ever get to that point – their other costs will send them under first. They will can the effort when it has cost too much for what they have/haven't found, not when they have used too much fuel.
But what we can both agree on, is that if the exploration/production is inefficient, then they will not be in business for long.
And presently, I would put all solid to ethanol or solid to liquid companies in that category – none of them currently are efficient enough to operate unsupported.
We'll know when one is, because instead of Vinod Khosla being behind it, it will be Warren Buffet.
Well, right now, Pete, we've got Shell, BP, Valero, Murphy Oil, Sunoco buying into ethanol as fast as they can. Shell just popped for $6 Billion, or so, down in Brazil. BP, and Dupont are doing a $300 Millin deal. Valero, and Murphy both announced this week that they were looking for more Corn Ethanol refineries to buy.
What can I say?
Kit P and Paul — you are misinterpreting me. I did not mention rationing. I did not mention Amish lifestyles or subsistence farming. I DID mention not driving a ridiculously outsized engine unnecessarily. In other words I am an advocate of conservation. Kit P, you don't have to threaten me with a dose of my own medicine, I already practice it. And really my only point was that if you don't conserve voluntarily, you will eventually do so involuntarily. And if you don't agree with THAT, then you must have erased 2008 from your brain (not to mention the 1970s). By all means, bring on the new technology that will let us all drive and fly unlimited miles without fear of shortage or environmental impact. In the mean time, I'm just reflecting that in the real world, and Rolling Stones songs, "you can't always get what you want".
@Kit P – İ said talk to the operators/people on their dams (nothing about thermal mentioned) – not to the corporate office. A different story for political reasons.
İn Oregon you have to kiss the green backside to survive. The good part about it is that the greens are not smart enough to know when they are getting smoked.
Chelan – has anything to do with Oregon?
Russ
“ridiculously outsized engine unnecessarily”
Who is to say what is over sized and unnecessarily? I had a sports car with a huge horse power to weight ratio. It was a very economical commuter car because it was light and aerodynamic but not very good at hauling the family. Also had a mini-van that got half the mileage but it could not be beat per passenger mile when loaded with the kids and mother in law.
We certainly have a difference about what is necessary. All the energy that I use is necessary and all the energy you use is not.
“you will eventually do so involuntarily”
I have no fear of that but the people who produce energy can not be cut off. I am not say that PeteS is an unproductive person, but it is the unproductive of that think conservation is 'innovative'. When you produce something you are more careful about using stuff.
It is real nice that a college professor can walk to class and write books from the study of his big house. I just think they have a clue when they suggest how to use less energy. EROI is just a silly concept in a business where customers demands energy when and where they need it.
Quite so, but isn't that really what the oil, coal NG companies are doing too. They all "use" some energy to create or harvest the energy they are selling.
Good point Paul. Those companies (oil, coal, NG, uranium, et al) are really extraction industries. They do have to use energy for the extraction, but if they don't get back more energy than they invested, they won't stay in business long.
I guess for Rufus' benefit, we could also say farmers are in the extraction business, whether corn, sugar cane, or switch grass. They extract resources from the soil*, water, and the Sun, and the ethanol stills then convert that resource to fuel where they undergo a thermodynamic process efficiency loss.
___________________
* Although they do regularly have to return some of those resources in the form of fertilizer.
http://greendom.weebly.com/
"What gets me though is how they get the "biodiesel" to be the only output?"
Only the plant sugars are converted Paul,just like other cellulosic processes. Sugarcane would still produce more fuel than corn. What's different here is you can make any hydrocarbon you like,instead of just ethanol. Plus,the amount of energy saved by going from five steps to one. And the fuel has 80% fewer greenhouse emissions. Now,if they can just scale it up.
http://tinyurl.com/lk9nt5
Kit P said: "Who is to say what is over sized and unnecessarily?
Well, you had a stab at it for yourself just there. I'm not suggesting there is a single universally applicable metric. But it wasn't me that introduced the criterion of weaning yourself off oil imports. That was Rufus and Benny et al. I'm stating what would seem on the face of it like a fairly obvious solution to THAT — if you want to import less, then use less. Or you can hope for "more innovative" solutions whereby you get to use as much transportation fuel as you want without having to import any. Of course everybody would like that, but for now those solutions seem to exist only in the realm of fiction.
"it is the unproductive of that think conservation is 'innovative'"
I think a more reasonable statement would be one that relates productivity to units of consumption (e.g. GDP per capita per barrel of oil). One thing I'm quite sure of — it is only the delusional who believe they can have their cake and eat it.
"EROI is just a silly concept in a business where customers demands energy when and where they need it."
I would agree up to the point where availability constrains supply, regardless of demand. (And to the response that the price mechanism will look after balancing supply and demand, I'd point to 2008-style price volatility as being unacceptably disruptive).
I can't believe Obama is proposing another record deficit for the coming year. Damned near half the spending will be borrowed. That's insane. No doubt he'll continue trying to pawn off the spending on the former administration. If I hear him say he inherited these problems one more time I think I'll barf. The recession is over. The 4th quarter saw robust economic growth. $1.6 TRILLION in deficit spending in a single year with a growing economy is ridiculous. It almost makes me wistful of the Bush years….LOL.
You know, we Are, actually, slowly weaning ourselves off oil. My car gets twice the mileage as my first car, and when I go out to the casino I see more, and more cars that look a lot like "my" car. Basically, midsize, with a fairly fuel efficient "6."
And, remember, almost half IIRC of miles are driven by cars that are six years old, or newer.
Oil refineries are running at the lowest "capacity utilization" since the numbers were begun to be kept. Then you have the Murphies, and Valeros, and Sunocos of the world that are busily closing oil refineries, and buying ethanol refineries.
We're getting there. Just a little too slowly, I'm afraid.
It's a trap for the Pubs, Maury. The only way we could have a $1.6T deficit would be if gas prices spiked, tremendously, again, and pushed us back into an even more serious recession.
2011 deficit will probably come in between $600B, and $800B. Still way too high, but not $1.6T.
And, yes, I do have a good track record on these things.
…buying ethanol refineries.
Rufus~
Why do you keep saying "ethanol refineries?" They are ethanol stills. They distill alcohol to separate it from water after the mash has fermented.
Is "refinery" now the Big Ethanol, officially approved, consumer- and media-friendly word for distillery? Distillery is a perfectly fine word and describes very well the process.
I believe it was Confucius who once said the beginning of wisdom is calling things their proper names.
Maury,
Thanks for the link, that's a good little video. The fact that it is a one step (production) process is a definite advantage, though there is still the product cleanup to be done. At least they don't have to distill it.
They will face the usual problems of a monoculture process – keeping the feedstock clean, so you don't get other bugs in there and competing. So they'll be OK with switchgrass etc, but MSW would be very challenging. All sorts of stuff and bugs in the input, more material to be handled, and more product cleaning afterwards.
I'll be truly impressed when they can do it with woody waste. Even so, if they can only use the cellulose fraction, they immediately give up more than 50% of the feedstock energy, so they are back to the same question about the co products as an ethanol plant.
But, if they have cracked the cellulose barrier, and can produce diesel that can be mixed in any quantity with petroleum diesel, and the engine mfrs will keep their warranties, then they may have a winner, if they can operate profitably.
The next challenge is then getting Americans to drive diesel cars, but in the meantime, there are lots of trains, trucks, and tractors to fuel.
These little buggers can also produce gasoline or any other hydrocarbon Pete. Top quality stuff. LS9 should make a fortune with them,even if the one step process doesn't pan out. I'm sure the ethanol guys would prefer to make diesel or gas. No need for blenders….or blenders credits that way. And it could be trucked straight to gas stations.
"These little buggers can also produce gasoline or any other hydrocarbon Pete."
PAUL, Maury, PAUL!!! I appreciate getting confused for someone who actually knows his stuff, but it wasn't me you meant.
🙂
But I appreciated the video too. Also followed some links to another Californian company (Amyris) also doing stuff with GM microbes, and claiming to be able to produce hydrocarbons requiring even less processing for use as fuel. Interesting.
Pete,
My apologies – your response reminds me of a saying an old boss of mine had "you must have mistaken me for someone who actually gives a s*%$"
Interesting stuff nonetheless, Amyris are going along similar lines, but with yeast instead of bacteria. They still seem dependent upon sugar as the feedstock, which leaves them at a disadvantage. But I wish them well.
I don't quite understand why folks get so impressed by the GM bugs – LS9 says they need to improve their current wonderbug efficiency by 8x-9x – that seems like a pretty steep hill to climb to me. Just because you can make a bug do 2x doesn't mean you can eventually make it do 10x or 20x. Four years ago uber-genebender Craig Venter said he solve the cellulosic ethanol problems – not much out of him since. Venter claimed he'd have a CO2 to octane worked out Keasling is a very smart dude, but not sure his LS9 will do any better than Venter.
And what do you do with all the tons of dead bugs – hopefully not flush them down the sewer, and doubt they'd make good mulch. It seems the catalytic processes like Virent might be easier to tweak to commerciality? Overall it seems pretty clear that ethanol will be on the ash heap of history before long – too many other better biofuels out there.
Who doesn't want to improve efficiencies anonymous? LS9 says they can make money with crude priced under $50. The e-coli doesn't die during fermentation either. I like Virent too. I like any process that can make replacement fuels. It's just a matter of which can scale up and be competitive enough. I agree with you that ethanol won't be around long. One of these companies will develop a cost-effective yeast or microbe to replace the yeast being used to make ethanol today. Corn ethanol will become corn gasoline or corn jet fuel.
Sorry Pete. I don't know why I keep doing that. The wife says I have sometimers. Thankfully,I get her name right almost every time.
Virent? Well, lets see, their process can only use "sugar water" and glycerol, hardly waste products in themselves. They started in 2002, have succeeded only in producing a medium BTU fuel gas that could be had equally as easily by gasification of said sugar and glycerol. They talk about producing jet fuel, but have yet to report any results about producing a liquid fuel.
And they "expect to build our first fully commercial scale facility by the end of 2015', this after probably $50m of funding from Uncle Sam and a few others (including Shell).
I am not excited about LS9, but I wish them well in their efforts. I am certainly less enthused about Virent, though I wish them well too, and am glad it is not my money they are using.
If they can only use highly refined feedstocks, I don't hold out much hope. Their source for glycerol is from biodiesel production, so I hold out even less hope. They say "sugar is a cost effective feedstock", which hardly helps the food v fuel debate.
And as for your claim about "too many other better biofuels out there",well, do tell – give us something to get really excited about.
"If they can only use highly refined feedstocks, I don't hold out much hope."
This is where Amyris and LS9 differ Paul. Amyris just makes a drop-in replacement for yeast currently being used to make ethanol. Their plan is to sell the yeast and transport the diesel. It can work with corn,or any other feedstock,such as switchgrass. But,the feedstock with the highest sugar content at the lowest cost will be the most profitable. Right now,that's sugarcane.
LS9 is trying a whole new approach. They're attempting to cut the energy used in the process by more than 60%. To increase the EROEI so to speak. Their microbes also work on any sugars,so sugarcane would once again SEEM to be the most profitable feedstock. Except,sawdust is a whole lot cheaper than sugarcane. And if cellular walls don't need to be broken,or lignin seperated,and no distillation is required,who knows which would win out.
Is there any evidence of biological processes being able to scale up sufficiently to make a commodity like gasoline? Besides corn ethanol, maybe milk production (with its organic bioreactor), which I think is maybe close to 90 million gallons / day, but is there anything else? Aren't most bioreactor production methods mostly for niche markets with high value / low volume products?
Just wondering if some of the process engineers out there might have some thoughts about scaling systems that rely on bioreactors. Stuff like Amyris and LS9 (and BP-DuPont's butanol/Butamax) has tremendous "gee whiz" factor that the media love, but can it really work at the scale we're talking about here? Clearly it can if it has an awesome coproduct that is even more valuable than DDGs are for ethanol?
Is there any evidence of biological processes being able to scale up sufficiently to make a commodity like gasoline?
Anon,
When I was a kid, a fiend of my Dad's had a bush in his yard he called a "gasoline bush." If you took one of those leaves off and held a match to it, it would burn as though it had been dipped in gasoline or kerosene. If you brushed up against the bush, you would also get a skin rash.
That was 55 years ago and I was seven years old then. At the time, gasoline at the filling station my Dad owned sold for 17 cents/gallon, so there wasn't much concern about knowing what that plant was.
I have no idea now what that "gasoline bush" was, but I've always wondered.
Rufus and others-
I know there are some LS9 fans out there.
This ran on GreenCarCongress today.
LS9 Purchases Florida Site to Manufacture Renewable Diesel; Commercial-Scale Demonstration
3 February 2010
The new Renewable Petroleum Facility. Click to enlarge.
LS9, a synthetic biology company developing fermentation-derived drop-in renewable fuels and chemicals (earlier post), has acquired an existing production facility in Okeechobee, Florida. LS9 will retrofit the facility to accommodate its proprietary one-step fermentation process.
The new “Renewable Petroleum Facility” (RPF) is designed to enable the production of 50,000-100,000 gallons of UltraClean Diesel by late 2010—a level of production that will validate the commercial viability of its UltraClean Diesel technology, according to the company. Once the demonstration scale testing is completed, LS9 expects to quickly transition the facility into commercial production.
For me, the Big Q is this: Is this just theatrics to get more venture capital, or the real deal?
Energy Quiz: What renewable fuel delivers the most net energy?
Interesting — no mention though of pelletizing.
Maury, my refined feedstock comment was actually about Virent, though it seems all these (biological) cellulosic process need a pre-treatment to break the cellulose into sugars
LS9 does promise the most benefits, IF they can make it profitable.
I suspect the success of any of these cellulosic processes will be determined by what value they can get for the coproducts, as your liquid fuel will contain only 30-40%, at best, of the original energy of the lignocellulosic feedstock.
I would almost take the view of doing an electricity generation business (using the lignin and residuals) that just happens to produce some liquid fuel on the side. And from that point of view, I think a better route is to do dry distillation, collect the methanol, burn the non condensable gases as fuel and then you are left with charcoal, which is an energy dense product with a multitude of uses.
BUt since I'm not in the biofuel business (yet) that's just my opinion. AS long as the price of diesel etc keeps going up, then LS9 is in the game, but the jury is out as to whether they will win – but I will watch their progress.
L.H. I saw a plant like that on a documentary about North Africa. It might be Dictamnus
Wendell, it does mention pelletizing in there, at an EROEI of 13:1.
The most interesting thing there is the huge decline in oil EROEI over the last century.
One caveat on these comparisons, is, of course, that some fuels, like wood/pellets may have a great EROEI, but you can't use them as transport fuels. If you group all the transport fuels together, including NG, there is not much difference, except for biodiesel and ethanol, at the bottom of the heap.
I will still maintain that using total EROEI is deceptive, as using low grade energy input to produce high grade energy output is a good business. A better indicator is useful (or saleable) energy returned on useful energy invested. Better still, is product invested on product returned. For oilsands, it's about 30%, conventional oil, about 10%. For a biodiesel operation, this would be an interesting number, as presumably the farmer would use his own product to power his equipment, and if it was less than one, he'd be out of that business pretty soon.
Ethanol is variable depending on what you use to provide the heat, and even with NG, you are still not using a transport fuel.
BUt yes, wood has a great EROEI, the trick is to turn it into a transport fuel without giving up too much of that EROEI. That will be exciting..
One caveat on these comparisons, is, of course, that some fuels, like wood/pellets may have a great EROEI, but you can't use them as transport fuels.
Paul,
You're right about the wood pellets. I missed that.
You could use either firewood or pellets for transportation fuel. Many did that in Germany — and even Sweden — in WW II, and our FEMA has published a booklet on how to do that here in an emergency: Construction of a Simplified Wood Gas Generator for Fueling Internal Combustion Engines in a Petroleum Emergency
You could also put the firewood or pellets into a gasifier to make syngas, which in turn could be transformed into several different liquid motor fuels, although the overall EROEI would drop substantially.
Wendell,
Way ahead of you here… Have been looking at the gasifiers for quite some time. Researched all about the WWII experience, the FEMA, etc. For a brilliant description about developing a gasifier, have a read of this:
http://www.hotel.ymex.net/~s-20222/gengas/kg_eng.html
There are actually two small gasifiers being produced, and sold in the US today, they can run a 10-20kW engine.
http://www.woodygasifier.com
http://www.gekgasifier.com
There are a few people who have set up cars and trucks to run on woodgas,best examples I have seen are people in Sweden and Finland.
http://www.ekomobiili.fi/Tekstit/woodgas_as_fuel.htm
But it would be next to impossible, except in another war, to get people to put up with the "inconvenience" of it.
It would work well for tractors and trains though. I did work out that Canadian Pacific Railroad, using all the land along their lines, could grow about 20% of the fuel they use!
I have been looking at setting up a gasifier/ engine to burn wood waste (unlimited amounts available here) and sell the electricity. But, it turns out a better business is to process that same wood into pellets and sell those! Can make about twice the $ per ton of wood.
This is why sawmills in BC are now adding on pellet mills instead of cogeneration plants. In fact, the wholesale price of pellets, per ton, is close to that of 2×4's, per ton, and much cheaper to make.
But, to use wood as a transport fuel,my preference would be an external combustion engine, (steam engine, Organic Rankine Cycle, etc) as these can burn any fuel.
Here is a modern day, high tech steam engine, that can get beat gasoline engine efficiency. Still in development, of course, but if they can get it right you have a true multi fuel engine. Not surprisingly, the US military is interested, as you have an engine that you can fuel with garbage, or collected wood, if need be – great for field camps, etc.
http://www.cyclonepower.com
Agreed about the horrific conversion losses to liquid fuel, typically 50-60% and great expense. Hence, my preference to gasify it or burn it directly in an external combustion engine, round trip efficiency is much better. But, if the price of liquid fuels reaches European levels, there would be a business there – just ask RR.
And with a billion tons of beetle killed wood in BC, there's money in them thar hills!
Lester, could it have been a Diesel Tree?
I have heard of a few of these growing around the south.
Rufus,
No, he called it a "gasoline bush" and it was definitely a bush, not a tree. Looked nothing like the image at that link.
This was in N Illinois, and the link for the diesel tree says it doesn't grow well outside the tropics. This bush seemed to be thriving.
System for Homemade Cellulosic
All it really boils down to is, soaking the feedstock in acid, I guess.
As a "pre-treatment," of course.
Lester, the gasoline bush is Dictamnus albus.
Rufus,
Interesting link to those modular systems. I would go out and buy one if I had access to sugary waste. I like their approach of using off the shelf instead of always custom designed, may be very handy for farmers wanting to get into the business.
I came across an extract from a book called "driving without gas", about running cars on alcohol that you might find interesting.
http://www.green-trust.org/2000/biofuel/dwg/dwgintro.htm
It was written in 1980, but, except for the prices, nothing much has changed from then to now.
It included this gem;
"The Department of Energy predicts that the feedstocks for alcohol fuels in the 1980s will probably be wastes from agricultural distressed products and by-products. Cellulose materials not useful as food, and coal and peat could be processed in the future to produce ethanol and methanol, respectively."
And this;
"One reason Gasohol (modern day E10) remains competitive is that the price of gasoline is increasing and Gasohol is getting help from Uncle Sam in the meantime. Ethanol costs nearly twice as much as unleaded gasoline at the wholesale level. But by the time the ethanol-gasoline blend reaches the gas pump, it costs only a few cents more than the traditional fuel. The government exempts the sale of Gasohol from the four-cent-a-gallon federal gasoline tax. And several states have tax reductions in effect for alcohol fuels."
The more things change…
Lester, the gasoline bush is Dictamnus albus.
PeteS,
That could be it. Thanks.
Paul, Ethanol is selling for $1.80 in Chicago. That is before any tax credits have been applied.
Gasoline is $2.00, wholesale,
and the last I looked that "efficient" Brazilian ethanol was selling (in Brazil) for $3.26 gallon, wholesale.
Things are, actually, changing quite a bit. 🙂
Rufus, as I said, the prices have changed, but I don't think much else has (except for the development of E85 and Flex Fuel Vehicles).
The DoE is still supporting cellulosic, and it is still a few years away from commercial production, and the price of ethanol (retail) is still getting help from Uncle Sam.
The book excerpt is actually fully supportive of alcohol, but it illustrates that many (not all) of the obstacles, both real and perceived, still remain.