Corn Shortage Hampers US Ethanol Production 419
drdread66 writes "A nationwide corn shortage brought on by last year's drought has started to curtail ethanol production. While this shouldn't be surprising to anyone, it raises public policy issues regarding ethanol usage requirements in motor fuel. Given that the energy efficiency of ethanol fuel is questionable at best, is it time to lift the mandate for ethanol in our gasoline?"
Re:Who cares if we are hungry... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Ethanol from corn is height of stupidity (Score:5, Informative)
This is one of those topics where there are a lot of conflicting studies on the exact numbers (on how much energy you get compared to what you put in), but it seems that everyone agrees that corn ethanol is particularly bad: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_energy_balance [wikipedia.org].
Re:Ethanol from corn is height of stupidity (Score:5, Informative)
Brazil doesn't make ethanol from maize- they make it from sugar cane.
Re:Ethanol from corn is height of stupidity (Score:5, Informative)
Since WW2 Brazil has been using home grown ethanol as a fuel because they either couldn't get oil (I'm told this is what diesel is made from) or didn't want to pay high prices for it.
Brazil AFAIK made ethanol from sugar cane. Sugar cane is an excellent choice for ethanol production; it is one of the most efficient plants when it comes to photosynthesis and it produces lots of sugar which is easy to turn into ethanol. Ethanol from sugar cane should have no problem producing more energy than is consumed.
Corn is just fairly crap all around when it comes to ethanol production.
Re:Ethanol from corn is height of stupidity (Score:2, Informative)
Still the article points out corn ethanol produces 1.2 unit for every 1 unit put, so the original claim is wrong.
Re:Kill Corn Subsidies! (Score:3, Informative)
Under the guise of protecting jobs, the sugar lobby bribed congress and congress instituted a sugar import quota system. The result is sugar prices are twice what they are in Mexico or Canada. The result is also that candy manufacturing has now largely moved to Mexico and Canada. Net result: a loss of jobs. Good job.
Re:Kill Corn Subsidies! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Not good for vehicles! (Score:5, Informative)
It doesn't "waste fuel". Ethanol is less energy-dense than gasoline. Your vehicle was extracting the same percentage of energy from the ethanol as it was from gasoline (more or less, and a piss poor fraction it is, too). There's just less energy to be had per gallon. So yes, you get better mileage from pure gasoline. It has better energy density.
You can't get pure alcohol that way (Score:4, Informative)
In the olden days, if you wanted nearly pure ethanol, you would first use simple distillation it to remove most of the water. Arguably, this is boiling the ethanol from the water. This gets you to about 96% purity, but it is impossible to remove the last 4% of the water with simple distillation. To get to nearly pure alcohol, you would add benzene or cyclohexane to the 96% pure mixture and continue boiling. The benzene from a three-way azeotrope and removes the last of the water by boiling. In this procedure, the pure alcohol is what is left over after the water, benzene and some of the alcohol is boiled away. You literally do "boil the water from it".
These days, molecular sieves are employed to remove the last of the water.
Re:Ethanol from corn is height of stupidity (Score:4, Informative)
Still the article points out corn ethanol produces 1.2 unit for every 1 unit put, so the original claim is wrong.
True, the wiki article suggest that you get slightly more energy out than you put in. We'd get a lot more out with cellulose based production such as switch grass.
But, the production side is only half of the picture. The other side is any inefficiencies when actually using the ethanol as a fuel. Chemical analysis of the PRODUCTION side does not always translate into real world use.
You also have the USE side. According to the US Department of Energy [fueleconomy.gov] E85 (85% ethanol - so-called FlexFuel) gives 25 to 30% less mileage. My car's manual (2012 Chrysler product) just flat out states 30% less miles per gallon, and it further states don't ever use it unless your car has a FlexFuel badge. (which my car does not).
E10 (10% ethanol), makes only a 3 to 4% drop in mileage (according to DOE). There are some stations in my area that have E15 (15% ethanol), reduces milage by 7.7% according to the DOE referenced study [ornl.gov]. My owners manual specifically warns against that as well. Essentially, the report indicated the reduction in miles per gallon continued as a linear trend with increasing ethanol content.
Further there appears to be little pollution benefit from using ethanol, contrary to the claims of some people.
Regulated tailpipe emissions remained largely unaffected by the ethanol content of the fuel.
As ethanol content increased,
oxides of nitrogen (NOX) and non-methane organic gases (NMOG) showed no significant
change;
non-methane hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide (CO) emissions declined on average for
all ethanol blend levels tested. Neither pollutant changed appreciably from E10 to E20;
ethanol emissions increased;
acetaldehyde emissions increased;
formaldehyde emissions increased slightly; and
benzene and 1,3-butadiene were expected to decrease due to dilution, but measurements
were conducted on only a subset of the vehicles and have not been thoroughly analyzed
to date.
Ethanol is an *additive* replacing carcinogens (Score:5, Informative)
The article is ignorant or a troll, and most of the comments prove that democracy doesn't work. Most people are lazy and do not find out beyond the talking points what ethanol is even used for. So here, for the lazy masses,
1. ethanol (eg. from corn) as fuel is pretty stupid. E85 gas is stupid.
2. ethanol as gas additive replaces MTBE - a persistent carcinogenic pollutant. You need 5% ethanol to replace MTBE.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methyl_tert-butyl_ether [wikipedia.org]
So what do you want? MTBE? Leaded gasoline? Or ethanol which is clean burning??
So yes, I'll support 5% ethanol gasoline. It is the better of two evils. And if some greenies don't like that, then why don't they start protesting to ban fossil fuel cars and only allow electrics on the roads?
70% of corn grown in the USA goes to be feed for livestock
This *includes* the "waste" from ethanol plants, which is full of proteins. Feedlots (where most cheap meat comes from) rely on ethanol plants for their cheap feed.
And no, ethanol does NOT receive subsidies anymore, not for a few years. Ethanol plants use corn because they can sell fermented "waste" as feed. If they used other stuff, they would have to pay for disposal of waste.
So, if you have a problem with ethanol plants from corn, you certainly have a problem with meat in the first place. If you have a problem with ethanol and no problem with meat, then you are quite ignorant of the issues.
HFCS soda tastes worse than sucrose soda.
Well, duh! HFCS is thanks to corn production subsidies and because USA places large import duties on cane sugar. So USA gets shit HFCS while rest of the world gets cheaper cane sugar.
Re:Who cares if we are hungry... (Score:5, Informative)
E10 has no effect on automotive engines except an imperceptable power reduction, and cleaner exhaust emissions. Small engines are more finicky on E10, especially the low compression flat-head designs. It helps to keep fresh fuel in the tank because it absorbs moisture from the atmosphere and wet alcohol can turn into acid, vinegar actually.
Re:Ethanol is an *additive* replacing carcinogens (Score:4, Informative)
Wish I had some mod points because this is spot on.
Subsidies are pretty much gone, but the issue is the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) has rules that can go wrong. It requires the refineries to consume a certain amount of alternative fuels. Each year they ratchet up the bio-mass, cellulosic and other "advanced" fuels. One would assume to wein the nation off petroleum. One of the problems you run into is what happens when there is a draught (like in 2012). You end up with a bunch of regulations created the year before that have unexpected effects on corn market. Such as having yields so low it forced 37% of the corn on the Chicago board was required to go to ethanol producers. Thus jacked prices that were already high. Even worse, the Ethanol producers don't want market corn. They want corn from inside their corn shadow they can attest the real quality of. They do not trust corn sold by the railcar on the open market.
All that being said, plenty of distillers would like to get out of corn. You can convert corn based to cellulose base with an added pre-stage. But the capital isn't there, and the way things are right now there's a lot of money to be made by keeping the system going as-is.
Re:Who cares if we are hungry... (Score:5, Informative)
Suburbs don't get developed where there isn't already good access. (Read about Robert Moses and Long Island.) Developers generally have to put in the roads that are in their development; taxes fund their maintenance.
Most suburbs are areas that were independent towns long before they were considered suburbs. Southwestern Connecticut is considered a suburb of New York City, yet consists of towns dating from about 1640, before there were even bridges out of Manhattan. Better roads, and railroads, made them more economically viable so that they grew: not developers colluding with government to put a highway through farmland.
Re:shortage? what shortage? (Score:4, Informative)
Corn is not the only producer of ethanol.
Yes, but we have significant tariffs [dartmouthb...ournal.com] on imported sugar into the US. Beyond a small quota, imported sugar has a tariff of 150% of the sugar's value. The artificially high sugar prices due to tariffs cost the American economy $1.9 billion of deadweight loss a year, to "protect" about 3600 US jobs.
Another place where the market should be allowed to work instead of anti-trade protectionist regulation backed by a small number of fat-cat agribusinesses.