EPA Delays Final Decision on Increasing Ethanol Blend Limits Until mid-2010 Posted on December 6th, 2009
In brief: The Environmental Protection Agency has delayed final decision-making on increasing ethanol blend limits until sometime next year, depending on further testing and results.
The word
The United States EPA says that they will delay a decision on increasing allowed blend limits of ethanol:gasolin from 10:90 to 15:85 (E10 to E15) until sometime next year.
In March, an advocacy group for ethanol and biofuels called Growth Energy petitioned the EPA to allow for the increase, relaxing current rules.
The EPA says they will not have a final decision on the waiver until mid-2010 at the earliest, citing the need for more testing.
The EPA’s letter to Growth Energy was encouraging, however, citing that tests so far have shown that later-model cars are capable of utilizing E15 without apparent detrimental effects.
In concert with the Department of Energy, the EPA has been undertaking studies to see how various vehicles handle increased ethanol mixes.
And so …
Questions about bio-based ethanol’s sources aside, the delay is probably beneficial overall, giving time for various interests to test the effects of these blends.
For more information on bio-fuels, click here, and for more information on bio-ethanol, click here.
Photo credits: EPA
Coskata’s Next-Gen Flex Ethanol (video) Posted on October 31st, 2009
Coskata and General Motors have gone operational with their first production-level flexible input ethanol plant. It makes ethanol out of just about anything with carbon in it: wood chips, old tires, agricultural waste, etc. Much better than corn-based ethanol, though no efficiency numbers are given outright.
This informative video shows how the setup works and what their future plans are. If for no other reason than to significantly reduce our land-fill dumping while cutting into our dependence on oil, this is a great thing.
The corn ethanol fiasco creates new opportunities Posted on October 24th, 2009
by Aaron Turpen, Cheyenne Green Living Examiner
Both corn and fuel prices have dropped and farmers are now looking at lower returns on their corn crops this year. The ethanol industry is staring at a glut of fuel on the market, driving down prices and putting many refineries out of business.
More than 120 ethanol refineries nationally are showing big losses and looking at failure, according to Citigroup analyst David Driscoll, despite the heavy price supporting and subsidizing from government.
Gevo, Inc., based in Engelwood, Colorado, is one of several companies stepping in to change the downturn. They’re buying up interest in failing ethanol refineries and converting them to butanol production. Several plants in Nebraska alone have seen this and next in line may be the Carleton, Nebraska plant (Altra).
Why butanol?
The market effects of government manipulation on state and local levels has had two major effects on ethanol and corn-based ethanol in particular. First, it has destroyed market forces and made it profitable for growers and sellers to produce corn for ethanol, but has done nothing to help the producers of ethanol itself. They still have to compete with petroleum-based fuels on the open market. Secondly, it has turned public opinion about ethanol to the negative in all but the corn-producing areas of the nation.
The market is almost never manipulated by government forces in a good way. Most government intervention causes rather than solves problems. This is especially true of things as complex as the fuels and transportation markets. No amount of price fixing, propping up, or tax incentives will make any one product better than another. Only more abundant.
Public opinion is largely on the correct side about ethanol, at least ethanol based on corn. Corn is a poor bio-ethanol base and requires almost as much energy to grow and refine as it supplies at the pump. Worse, ethanol is more heavily susceptible to temperature changes and how they affect its density than petroleum-based gasoline is. Both of these things make most consumers look askance at the product. Ad to that the food scare and higher grocery store prices attributed to ethanol (whether true or false) and it’s a public relations debacle to say the least.
Butanol, however, has few of these drawbacks. It’s a very common industrial alcohol used for everything from solvents to lubricants as well as fuels. Although it’s a byproduct of the petroleum refinery process, there is generally more call than available product, since butanol can be used in such a wide range of applications. Cheaper butanol would be even more valuable in still more uses.
Butanol can be made by fermenting just about any plant-based biomass, including corn, wheat, root crops like beets, and more. Most biobutanol made today comes from non-edible plants.
Butanol is also more complicated to make from a bio-fuel standpoint than ethanol, but it is much mroe energy dense than both ethanol and methanol and is still cheaper to make through large-scale biomass conversion than it is from petroleum. Ad to that the amount of market potential versus current supply and it’s a definite winner in many people’s books.
To put this into perspective, the average 87 octane gasoline has about 115,000 British Thermal Units (BTUs) per gallon, ethanol has about 75,700 BTUs per gallon, and butanol has 104,900 BTUs per gallon. This means the energy loss on ethanol is about 34% per volume while the loss from butanol is only about 8.75%.
There are a lot of other infrastructure advantages to butanol as well. It’s less corrosive to pipelines and internal combustion engines, for one thing, and it’s close enough to regular gasoline that most vehicles can use it in up to a 50-50 mix with petroleum gasoline without retrofitting. Experiments are showing that it may be able to totally replace gasoline without increasing engine wear or other problems, making it a 100% replacement.
So perhaps butanol is the key to righting the wrongs made by the corn-based ethanol face flop. The first step will be to begin replacing the ethanol with butanol. The second step will be to convince the boys in Washington to leave it alone and not meddle. It’s in the air which will be more difficult to achieve.
The TransAtlas – a New, Interactive Map For Alt Fuel Posted on September 19th, 2009
This is a very cool and much-needed idea. The National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) and the Department of Energy (DoE) have partnered on a project they’re calling TransAtlas (Transportation Atlas). It’s a Google Maps-based map for finding information on alternative fuels nationally.
So if you’re Neil Young cruising in your LincVolt and are wondering where you can get a recharge, you can use the TransAtlas to narrow your search by location and fuel type and BINGO! There’s a Big Jim’s Burger right over there that has a plug-in recharging station in their lot!
Right now, TransAtlas covers biodiesel (all grades), compressed or liquified natural gas (CNG/LNG), ethanol (all grades), electric vehicle charging stations, hydrogen, and propane. It lists both currently available/active fueling stations and future planned stations, delineated as such by color.
The EPA’s New Renewable Fuel Standards Lifecycle Analysis Debacle Posted on August 22nd, 2009
The EPA is required by the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 to make changes to the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS1) ratings. This is to account for “crop displacement” as part of the fuel’s overall efficiency rating.
When Congress passed the EISA, they had lots of feel-good reasons for doing so. Reasons that seemed to make sense, so long as you didn’t dig too deep to find out the background on their push for changes. The idea, in a nutshell, was to include the displacement of food crops into the equation for figuring the overall “cost of efficiency” in bio fuels.
All it really is, though, is a way to figure out the most esoteric way possible to make biofuels seem not-so-good when compared to petroleum-based fuels.
Even worse, the chief opponents to this new way of measuring things are… yep, corn ethanol producers. Some of the worst green washers in the bio fuels game. I’ve already discussed how useless corn ethanol is compared to its much more efficient counterparts.
In fact, if corn ethanol weren’t subsidized so heavily and were required to stand on its own two feet, it would fail in a short amount of time. Even soy, which isn’t a whole lot better, still beats out both corn and petroleum as a base for ethanol fuels.
But hey, the government pays farmers (more accurately: big agra) more money to grow corn than they do anything else, so corn is it until that changes. Now, back to the EPA.
The whole idea behind the EPA’s newly-released, peer-reviewed plan is to factor in the food displacement when calculating the “efficiency” of ethanol. So things like corn, soy, etc. that are also food crops would have the offset from their shift from food (or feed) use to ethanol use factored into their overall efficiency numbers. No wonder corn-for-ethanol producers are worried. This would make corn look even worse!
Of course, I’ve discussed before why bio fuels are important right now. For the foreseeable future, we’re going to have to have fuel-burning machines. In fact, I doubt they will ever go away entirely, unless we seriously revert our technologies back towards the 18th century. Too many machines (think beyond cars and trucks) are not likely to run on electricity or other known fuels in our lifetimes.
Current vehicle technology, machinery, etc. can all run on biologically-based fuels, however. So this is the interim until we find something else and make it happen. Now, back to the EPA again.
Some bio fuel bases, however, will come out smelling peachy if these new numbers from the EPA are used. Some of my favorites, like algae, will be more than rosy because there is literally no displacement (most of the time) in their production.
That doesn’t mean I endorse these new rules, however. They aren’t beneficial overall and have an underlying and somewhat sinister aspect. Namely, these new rules are there almost entirely to lessen the appeal of bio fuels in comparison to oil.
Just look at the peer-review panel and you’ll see what I’m talking about. The “independents” the EPA brought in to review these new procedures for commentary are almost all there with an ulterior motive.
The real issue here is with unsustainable and inefficient biofuel methods and, especially, with the promotion of those methods by government subsidy. If you live in a state near the plains or the midwest, you have likely noticed that getting gasoline that doesn’t have a biofuel additive is nearly impossible. Why?
Because that gasoline is made cheaper (at the pump) by adding government-subsidized corn-based ethanol. What you’re not seeing is the amount of money you put in via taxes to subsidize that “cheap” fuel.
The new EPA directive will accomplish nothing good, but it will do well as a distraction to keep us from seeing the real solution: allowing us (the people) to make our choice and the market (which we direct) to make the change for real change and real solutions. Instead, we’ll get a government boondoggle that benefits only those who control government (big corporations, including oil and agriculture).
We, of course, flip the bill, both environmentally and financially.
For more information on the EPA’s new guidelines, see this breakdown at Green Car Congress. See also the telling and poignant response to the EPA’s panel findings by Bob Dinneen of Growth Energy (who, admittedly, also has a vested interest in seeing these EPA guidelines shot down).
