So much for the biofuel plan

t-vicky · February 08, 2008, 07:33:55 PM

Man, does the carnut know how to stir up a pot?

tomslik · February 08, 2008, 07:46:56 PM

Quote from: "Uncle Bob"
Quote from: "Carnut"Uncle Bob, I totally agree with your explanation of the situation.

Any chance you can run for Pres?

Thank you..............................I think? :oops:

I don't think I could get elected though, got a problem with liking to tell the truth as I see it. But I was born in Solomon, so I might get the Kansas vote.

i'd be ok with vice.....
president, i mean...

river1 · February 08, 2008, 08:47:15 PM

while i don't agree or disagree with any of you 100%

i will say we have some smart mudders here :!: :!: :!:

later jim

Bruce Dorsi · February 09, 2008, 01:37:33 AM

My brother-in-law has done work in Providence, Rhode Island, Baltimore, Maryland, New York and New Jersey.

The construction is in preparation for ethanol storage facilities in those areas.

The ethanol will be coming from Brazil, not our country!

So, we may cut our dependence on foreign oil, but we will become dependent on foreign ethanol.

B.O.H.I.C.A. !!!

tomslik · February 09, 2008, 06:58:57 AM

Quote from: "Uncle Bob""SOME RODDER YOU ARE!!!!!
bonneville....... "

Now!!! That's creative thinking and problem solving!!

Think I can get a government subsidy to buy a fleet of trucks to haul it from Malibu to B'ville?

well, if there's a truck that's deadheading back from there(socal), they could have a load THAT far....

Crosley.In.AZ · February 09, 2008, 07:17:50 AM

in this whole fuel situation on whom or what fuel we use or the development of new fuels...... follow the money.

Entoman · February 09, 2008, 11:23:21 PM

I gotta reply again on this.....

Quote from: "tomslik"
Quote from: "Entoman"Guys I gotta disagree with a lot of the crud being spouted by the liberal media about ethanol being bad...
First I work in the industry (Univ. of Ill Extension) and have studied many of the projections and outright non truths about ethanol.
First:
There is a net sum gain when ethanol is brewed from corn. If you use figures from the way ethanol was distilled in 1900 then it takes about 5 quarts of ethanol to get 4....That is simply not true today. The exact net gain depends greatly on the process. but in most cases it borders on a 2:1 ratio, very competitive with oil.

it takes 2 quarts to make 1!?!?!
don't sound like progress to me......

That would be 2 parts of Etoh produced for every 1 part used....Your response is typical of somebody who is trying to nitpick because they don't have a good grasp on the topic

Second:
I just read a study about the mileage that is derived from etoh/gas mixtures. contrary to popular belief there is a net gain in mpg in etoh/gas mixtures up to E-30 mixes in non-flex fueled autos. this is mostly due to etoh being an oxidizer that promotes more complete combustion of the mix. Above E-30 the lower energy content of Etoh comes into play and mileage suffers.

tell it to my truck, it's dropped 3 mpg since we've been on this "oxygenated" crap

Your drop in mileage may be very real, but there are always exceptions to any study. Is yours carbureted or FI? The study focused on FI, non-flex fuel vehicles because that is the predominant auto being used today

Third.
Ethanol production will cause the planet to warm significantly.......What are these guys smoking? Etoh is produced from carbon that is easily accessible on the surface of the planet. And every bit of it has been and will be again released once the source plant dies. FACT! Petroleum is large quantities of hydrocarbons that are sequestered deep within the earth that aren't released until they are pumped up and burned....HOW CAN ANYBODY SUGGEST WITH A STRAIGHT FACE THAT BURNING A SEQUESTERED CARBON SOURCE IS BETTER THAN RUNNING A CIRCUITOUS SOURCE SUCH AS PLANT MATERIAL??
What happens when corn, sugar, switchgrass, miscanthus, or whatever is harvested? it is replanted and the successive crop removes the Carbon that was released. Simplistic? yes, but it works, Reference everyother life cycle on the earth.

ever ask a farmer why he doesn't plant the same crop year after year on the same plot of ground?
what happens with a drought?
disease?
bugs?
hail?
you want me to go on?
i grew up in nebraska, i know where corn comes from...

Did I say the same crop??? I did not! However all of the things you say are real problems that occur from time to time. Simple crop rotation doesn't always work, the Northern corn rootworm has figgured out that if it lays its eggs in soybean fields, the farmer is likely to plant corn the next year....its favorite food....GMOs are now the predominantly grown crops in the US. 3 out of every 4 acres planted in corn is GMO corn, while 9 out of every 10 acres of soybeans are GMO. A new corn on the horizon is a 8 gene insertion corn that essentially takes most insects and weeds out of the equation. Monsanto is currently testing several events of drought tolerent and water conservative corn....The corn of your past is not the same corn of today.... Oh and Etoh can be made from virtually any biological source. Corn is easy, so that is what is being used now. On the horizon are other sources such as sugar beets, sweet sorghum for the traditional type of sugar fermentation processes, yet as cellulostic Etoh processes are improved, then Etoh can be made from virtually anything that has cellulose. Additionally lignin can also be broken down and converted into Etoh. These sources could improve possible yield of Etoh from an acre of cropland 3-5 fold. One other point. Nebraska grows corn that is rotated with grain sorghum, soybeans and alfalfa. But as a state Nebraska is not the only state to grow crops...last time I checked, crops in some form or another were grown in every state. Each has its own unique principles, needs and potentials....

Finally, what would you have us do? Continue to be dependent on the Middle East and their oil? Or develop home grown solutions? As an aside, because of the Etoh push and other factors, farmers are enjoying one of the most optimistic periods in US history.

Can ethanol completely replace oil? with current technology NO, but as a part of the answer, Yes.

Oh and how to increase the mileage from Etoh, bump the compression a bunch and its efficiency will increase and make it closer to gas....
Doug

Quote from: "wayne petty"i have been thinking about fuel economy....

current engines are running at fuel mixtures to feed the cat... too lean and it does not heat enough to work... too rich and it melts....

ethanol is a great idea to reduce fuel imports... except it reduces fuel economy.... so we are burning more fuel per mile with the 10%+ blends...

the makes the refiners more money ... the goverment more money in collected taxes per mile driven... and we get to pay both...

somebody is going to have to come up wiith an electricly heated or microwave heated cat.... something that does not require a constant amount of unburned hydrocarbons to heat... it is probably not possable now that i think about it as you have to create enough electricity to power it... so i guess we are just stuck.,.....until someone has a brainstorm...

CQQL33 · February 10, 2008, 09:12:00 AM

Is it not a fact that it takes more energy to produce one gallon of ethanol than exists in the one gallon of ethanol

?? Is it also true that E=mC2, we cannot destroy energy but only change it from one form to another (?)

As far as Hydrogen as a fuel (you can make it from tap water also)........how are we going to pump it, convert our automobiles, get it to the end user....... When I was a little kid growing up, when I needed air in my bike tires, I had two options, one use the hand pump (if it worked) or take it to the gas station and use their air hose (compressor). Now, how many of us have our own air compressor in their shop

Would it be that difficult to have a hydrogen compressor in your shop (somewhere in the future) ? Who would have thought (50 years ago) so many of us would have air compressors in our personal shops.

Money is the motivator. Also, way back when, a bushel of corn cost 2 dollars and a barrel of oil also cost 2 dollars.........I suggest we notify the world that our accountant has made a mistake over the years and we just discovered it. To correct this mistake the new price for a bushel of corn is the same as a barrel of oil (97 dollars).... I am sure this would level the playing field. You cannot grow much corn in the desert !!!

My truck MPG fell off 2 to 3 miles per gallon using the wonderful fuel blend.....it IS fuel injected.

We need "out of the box" thinking. It is going to take a lot of time for this issue to be resolved. It took us a hundred years to get here it may take that much time to get out of this mess, who knows. These things may not happen in our life time....

Uncle Bob · February 10, 2008, 10:43:01 AM

Entoman, you have embraced the cult like dialogue of the pro-ethanol faction, even to charging that a liberal media tells lies about it's benefits. I would contend that the media does a fairly poor job of disclosing the realities of the discussion in an organized and concise way and are therefore supporting the "the cult".

Your comment about ethanol yielding two units of energy for one input is at the optomistic end of most estimates, but let's go with it since it's close. However, gasoline is not a 4 to ! ratio as you stated, it's actually 15 to 1 ; ref, http://whyfiles.org/253ethanol/index.php?g=2.txt (see chart and text mid page). But again, maybe that's nitpicking.

Personally I don't care if we run our vehicles on perfume or chow chips (well, maybe a mix of the two would be a better idea for obvious reasons), what I do want is the most economical energy we can get because our modern society depends on it. We're no more "addicted" to oil (or energy per se) than our bodies are addicted to blood. In today's modern society it's essential for life as we know it. And I don't want us to cripple our economy by pricing the energy we use out of the range of our competitor's energy costs. Ethanol doesn't do that on the two fronts we have already mentioned and are nearly always avoided by the pro-ethanol crowd. We can go back and forth about all the little yield points and the emotional flag waving stuff, but the bottom line is, it's poor policy to cannibalize your food stream for motor fuel, and if ethanol were inherently cost effective it wouldn't need subsidizing with tax payer dollars.

Argument given; Producing ethanol for motor fuel is a young industry and needs help getting off the ground. Untrue! It's been around almost as long as gasoline. Henry Ford had ethanol in mind as one of the fuel streams for the Model T (he was also big in promoting soy beans as a source for fuel and plastics). The above linked article has a picture of a station selling ethanol blen in the '30s. Ethanol never "caught on" because it never made economic sense...................until the government mandated it AND threw a bunch of our tax dollars at it. Back to my earlier comment about which pocket we pay from. Increased comparative energy cost without increased productivity puts us at an economic disadvantage.

Argument given; It helps the farmer. The older one gets the more certain types of catch phrases become red flags. When a politician says "it's for the children", bend over you're about to get a lesson in guilt driven piracy. Or when the human caused global warming fanatics say "the debate is over", that means they don't want to discuss their losing cause because they can't really prove their point. So it is with holding up the farmer as someone to be "supported". First of all, farmers usually aren't that dumb. The ones that are should go into something else if they can't figure out a profitable crop to grow. Second, if a crop is made profitable by artificially proping up it's price through subsidies, then helping the farmer is hurting the consumer. That's not win win. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your view), the idea that all the farmers helped are Ma and Pa operations is no longer valid. The single biggest beneficiary of tax payer largesse is the Archer Daniels Midland conglomerate, a politically connected company convicted of price fixing; http://www.bankrate.com/brm/news/investing/20001221c.asp?prodtype=grn At this point some might be tempted to start attacking oil companies for the same thing. While I can find lots to be frustrated about with the oil industry this isn't one of their problems. The feds have made more than a dozen attempts to take down the oil industry due to congressional pressure, but no evidence was ever found as was with ADM, the tobacco industry, and countless other enterprises. It wasn't for the lack of trying. But back to the point, as the attached article points out, the tax payer has been taken to the cleaners by "poor farmers" like ADM.

Last one next because I doubt I can sway any "true believers" in ethanol, only help arm my fellow rodders with the other side of the story that doesn't get much exposure.

Argument given; Would you have us continue to be dependent on the middle east for our oil? (or some variation on that theme) About 2/3 the way down this page; http://www.gravmag.com/oil.html is a chart showing 2005 import spreads from which sources, 2007 (link under the map) are somewhat similar. We get a much lower percentage of our imports from the middle east than most people have been mislead to believe. However, to a degree, that doesn't really matter. Let's say we get all wound up and refuse to import any more oil from then thar a-rabs. Great. So we go somewhere else and buy oil that, oh say France and Japan are buying from. What will those guys do? They'll go to where we just left and buy their oil there. Net net? Nothing has fundamentally changed except the routing of tankers. Some when seeing this example will then say, "That's why we need to stop using crude oil!" Yeah, great idea. What have you got to offer that's price competitive per unit of energy? So far none of the answers has penciled out. We've seen here, and elsewhere, statements like "it's about the money". Yeah, it is. (althought I'd bet some of the folks who say that interpret it differently than I do) It's about us as consumers wanting to get the most for the least. And given today's technology that means fuel from crude oil. There are lots of alternatives mentioned; electricity, hydrogen, water, wind, solar, and so on. They all exist, they all provide output, but none of them can compete with oil price wise on a large scale..............by a long shot. If we in the U.S. want to adopt a different source of energy for whatever noble sounding reason, that's great. First we need to figure out what else we're going to give up, which convenience or necessity, what market segment, and which associated jobs because we make a decision to divert capital to a source that's not viable on it's own merits. Second, we need to force the rest of the world that we have to compete with to adopt the same higher cost energy source, or just cut our own throat.

Your choice.

Crosley.In.AZ · February 10, 2008, 11:26:28 AM

one local fellow I chatted with thinks these products for ethanol production could be grown in the medians and along side the freeways / roads.

that would be interesting getting the farm equipment out in the middle of roadways

enjenjo · February 10, 2008, 12:18:17 PM

Quote from: "Crosley"one local fellow I chatted with thinks these products for ethanol production could be grown in the medians and along side the freeways / roads.

that would be interesting getting the farm equipment out in the middle of roadways

Actually here in Ohio, there are places where they plant soybeans on the highway right of way, the state gets a share of the profits.

Entoman · February 10, 2008, 12:19:23 PM

Uncle Bob, I realize that I am probably preaching out in the wilderness here, but I will make a couple of rebuttals...
First I haven't embraced the cult like dialoge of anything, but have rather studied the subject and work in the agricultural field.

You stated
" I would contend that the media does a fairly poor job of disclosing the realities of the discussion in an organized and concise way and are therefore supporting the "the cult". "

I agree, the media does a poor job of reporting most everything. When I see them grossly misrepresent a subject I know, I am very suspicious of the subjects that I have less knowledge of. I contend that the media is overall not bright enough to support a cult or any other entity, but simply reports things that make news....rather if it bleeds, it leads....

The website you referenced makes compelling arguments, but much of its data is very old. The study that it referenced about energy output of ethanol was a 1991 study. Things have changed greatly since then.
The entire process of distilling Etoh is very different since then. Its assumptions were probably close then, However just picking on corn, its yield per acre has increased dramatically since 1991 (average increase is just under 4.5 bushels per year).

Petroleum output versus input. That is a very variable rate. If you look at easy to reach oil such as middle east oil that has few impurities and could almost be put directly into your fuel tank (preferred since the ROI is very good) the rate is probably 15:1 or maybe even better. But lets just look at the Sinclair plant in Tulsa. They do not refine sweet crude. I have a friend who works there and has described the process to some degree. They buy a very thick heavily sulphur laden crude for 20-30 percent less than the light sweet crude price that is tossed about (about 92$ a barrel on Friday) Oklahoma Sour is first pumped from the ground mostly from stripper wells (yield <15 barrels per day) that have to be reworked every 2-12 months (Cleaned, because the high parrafin oil gums the plumbing up. At the refinery it is boiled, fractionated, catylized or cracked, reboiled refractionated etc.) While I don't have good input to yield figures for that particular plant, I doubt that they are anywhere near 15:1.
Next if you look at world oil, who controls it? For the most part we don't. Venezuela has much, but Chavez is playing dictator and controls all they have. Mexico produces a lot, but it is a country while stable now, has little history of stability. the middle east has a lot, but not stable nor ever was, North sea, probably one of the most stable areas, but Europe has dibs there. Russia? Emerging as a producer, but once again has dibs. Anwar, lots of oil probably, but still would only suffice for 10-15 years in concert with other sources. Gulf of Mexico, being developed and produces most of our domestic production, (shuts down in hurricanes) California coast, might help, but it too will be depleated in only a few years etc. etc.
The whole problem with the fossil fuel argument is that it is not being replenished. Etoh is not new, never said it was. it faltered in the early 1900's because it was not economical....oil was cheap. oil is still cheap, but its economy is disappearing.
I want cheap fuel as much as the next person, but rational reasoning and examining demand, reserves and a little common sense tells me that unless we make everybody else stop using it, it will not be cheap much longer. Just try to tell China to stop development. They are close to our heals in petroleum consumption and have 4 -5 times our population. India wants what we have too. Essentially the economics are changing and if we are not developing new sources, then what?

Oh one other thing with respect to H2. It would be great, but you have to produce it first. Inputs could be solar, wind, hydroelectric geothermal nuclear or ?? but it does require more energy to produce than you get from it. You can make H2 by hydrolysis, water plasma conversion or through a catalytic conversion of natural gas/petroleum.

Personal observation: My car TBI gets abut 1 mpg better on E-10 than on straight gas. Another thing, most fuel already has some Etoh in it as an anti-smog additive. (less problems that using MTBE).

Quote "the bottom line is, it's poor policy to cannibalize your food stream for motor fuel, and if ethanol were inherently cost effective it wouldn't need subsidizing with tax payer dollars."

You are right that there is a subsidy currently for Etoh. IIRC it is about 54 cents per gallon. But the pressures on grain prices are not being driven by fuel production alone. China is a very big driving force nowdays. They are net importers of massive quantities of grain after having been exporters for the last 20 years. This is driving the price up. Soybeans are high due to crop production problems in Brazil. Wheat is over 10$ due to a world wide shortage. Currently Farmers are snapping up land for prices up to 7K/acre because the profit potential works at that price. I say that they wouldn't be doing that if they weren't making money. These guys are not dummies as the media has suggested. Most of the farmers I work with are very shrewd businessmen who are very in touch with reality.

Argument given; Producing ethanol for motor fuel is a young industry and needs help getting off the ground. Untrue! It's been around almost as long as gasoline. Henry Ford had ethanol in mind as one of the fuel streams for the Model T (he was also big in promoting soy beans as a source for fuel and plastics). The above linked article has a picture of a station selling ethanol blen in the '30s. Ethanol never "caught on" because it never made economic sense...................until the government mandated it AND threw a bunch of our tax dollars at it. Back to my earlier comment about which pocket we pay from. Increased comparative energy cost without increased productivity puts us at an economic disadvantage.

That was then, this is now, the future will be the future....things change......

Argument given; It helps the farmer. The older one gets the more certain types of catch phrases become red flags. When a politician says "it's for the children", bend over you're about to get a lesson in guilt driven piracy. Or when the human caused global warming fanatics say "the debate is over", that means they don't want to discuss their losing cause because they can't really prove their point.

I agree with you about global warming....when somebody says the debate is over, then I glaze over knowing that the debate is never over. I won't go into my diatribe about the falicies of global warming except to say that the enviornment is not stable, is in constant change and that change should not be feared but rather embraced

I won't argue benefits of farm subsidies, due to my limited experience with them...

Last one next because I doubt I can sway any "true believers" in ethanol, only help arm my fellow rodders with the other side of the story that doesn't get much exposure.

Actually I am not an exclusive Etoh advocate, but rather I am a supporter of alternatives. Butanol is another biologically based substance that has merit. H2 in certain forms has merit. Nuclear? I don't know enough to say. Others? I'm open to suggestions. Staying only with petroleum? Describe to me how petroleum is being replenished at even close to the rate it is being removed and I will support it.

Argument given; Would you have us continue to be dependent on the middle east for our oil? (or some variation on that theme) About 2/3 the way down this page; "link deleted "is a chart showing 2005 import spreads from which sources, 2007 (link under the map) are somewhat similar. We get a much lower percentage of our imports from the middle east than most people have been mislead to believe. However, to a degree, that doesn't really matter. Let's say we get all wound up and refuse to import any more oil from then thar a-rabs. Great. So we go somewhere else and buy oil that, oh say France and Japan are buying from. What will those guys do? They'll go to where we just left and buy their oil there. Net net? Nothing has fundamentally changed except the routing of tankers. Some when seeing this example will then say, "That's why we need to stop using crude oil!" Yeah, great idea. What have you got to offer that's price competitive per unit of energy?

Problem with buying oil from the next guy is that oil price is determined globally. Where it comes from doesn't matter, but cut off production one place and the price spikes everyplace. Case in point On Thursday it was announced late that Brent sea production was to decline by 15% in March. the price of crude jumped on Friday from ~86$/barrel to
~92$/barrel for sweet crude in New York, Cushing, and Brent spot.
Additionally, only the zealots have said stop using oil completely. I say that we should diversify our energy sources so that if supplies are curtailed, cut, or whatever, we are not sucker punched by the shock and new price.

There are lots of alternatives mentioned; electricity, hydrogen, water, wind, solar, and so on. They all exist, they all provide output, but none of them can compete with oil price wise on a large scale..............by a long shot.

With oil at 20-30$ per barrel, these don't compete. however Etoh competes well when oil goes above 70$/barrel and corn stays below 5$/bu Remove the subsidy and it requires corn to be below ~$4.50/bu when oil is above 70$/barrel change the inputs and the equlibriums change. Wind, must be economical now, have you seen the number of turbines being erected? A factory that produces wind turbines south of me is backlogged about 2 years currently. I see a unit being shipped up I57 virtually every time I drive the Istate....and these aren't little toys either but require a 32-48 tire trailer to ship. Solar could be more economical, but needs a kick in the pants to bring initial costs down. generally you are talking about 5-7 thousand dollars per kw and it only produces power on sunny days....great in the SWUSA, but here it stays cloudy much of the winter.

Essentially, there is no simple easy answer. But alternatives will be forced on us at some point. when is open to debate, but I for one want to be ready should that occur in my or my kids lifetimes....what you want to do is your choice.....Choose wisely

Oh just to make sure that I have some hotrodding content in this, my current plans are to build a FI E-85 burning dragster this next year. I will gladly put my 12.5:1 speedpros back into the 350....It will be cool to see what kind of performance i can get at the local track I-57 speedway

Uncle Bob · February 10, 2008, 01:09:59 PM

Actually that's a very good rebuttal, and it advances the understanding. 600 page books could be written about this/these topics so our little inputs here barely scratch the surface. So I'll just throw out a couple more thoughts.

Now that it's clear we agree that petroleum is the most economical for now, it points out how vacuous the decision of our congress is to shut off exploration and production of domestically available crude oil. If I thought they had some strategic vision in mind I might be less critical, however by all outward indications they are pandering to a slice of their constituency rather than to the broad needs of the entire population.

As for how we produce ethanol, the fundamental problem still is we're attacking our food stream. You're correct, world demand for grains is part of the equation for rising prices. All the more reason we shouldn't divert corn production to motor fuel (aside from the neat economics of E85 vs racing gasoline, you could get the same benefit from methanol which doesn't steal from food). Our farms should be able to supply the domestic food market first, then sell anything beyond that to the world market. That would increase the flow of foreign trade with our country rather than out, helping to balance some of the petro dollar flow. Secondarily that would reduce the need for farm subsidies (assuming politicians would pull themselves away from the teat of special interest money), lowering the financial burden on the rest of us. And third it wouldn't divert investment capital from pursuing other non-food fuel source developement as happens now when we spend tax dollars propping up the inefficiencies of ethanol production. We haven't even mentioned how diverting acreage from food to fuel purposes effects our balance of trade and potential national security issues by forcing us to replace the displaced domestic food production with foreign sources.

Part of my passion for this is that we have enormouse known reserves of coal, and shale oil that, as future crude oil prices are forced up by declining reserves (if that's really true, and considering actual versus known) those sources become more viable. As does geothermal. My primary reason for leaning toward a liquid based fuel stream, and hydrocarbon in particular is that from an economics standpoint we already have a refining and distribution infrastructure network in place that would be enormously expensive to replicate/displace unless we made a switch to electricity (thus the nuclear/coal fired/etc. arguments) which also has an effective existing distribution system. Again, each of those alternatives have been given short shrift because of dedicated special interest minorities that have used fear mongering and political bribery to impede the developement of any of these, what I consider more viable, alternatives.

tomslik · February 10, 2008, 03:47:05 PM

Quote from: "Entoman"I gotta reply again on this.....
Quote from: "tomslik"
Quote from: "Entoman"Guys I gotta disagree with a lot of the crud being spouted by the liberal media about ethanol being bad...
First I work in the industry (Univ. of Ill Extension) and have studied many of the projections and outright non truths about ethanol.
First:
There is a net sum gain when ethanol is brewed from corn. If you use figures from the way ethanol was distilled in 1900 then it takes about 5 quarts of ethanol to get 4....That is simply not true today. The exact net gain depends greatly on the process. but in most cases it borders on a 2:1 ratio, very competitive with oil.

it takes 2 quarts to make 1!?!?!
don't sound like progress to me......

That would be 2 parts of Etoh produced for every 1 part used....Your response is typical of somebody who is trying to nitpick because they don't have a good grasp on the topic

i'm getting the feeling that YOU don't have the grasp.
it's that little "nitpicking" that makes a difference..between theory and reality...
Second:
I just read a study about the mileage that is derived from etoh/gas mixtures. contrary to popular belief there is a net gain in mpg in etoh/gas mixtures up to E-30 mixes in non-flex fueled autos. this is mostly due to etoh being an oxidizer that promotes more complete combustion of the mix. Above E-30 the lower energy content of Etoh comes into play and mileage suffers.

tell it to my truck, it's dropped 3 mpg since we've been on this "oxygenated" crap

Your drop in mileage may be very real, but there are always exceptions to any study. Is yours carbureted or FI? The study focused on FI, non-flex fuel vehicles because that is the predominant auto being used today

it's 2000 gm 5.3 and don't EVEN tell me how you "studies" tell you it should get better milage.
OBVIOUSLY you don't deal with altitude drivability issues.
now, if it were a flex-fuel vehicle, you MIGHT have a leg to stand on...

Third.
Ethanol production will cause the planet to warm significantly.......What are these guys smoking? Etoh is produced from carbon that is easily accessible on the surface of the planet. And every bit of it has been and will be again released once the source plant dies. FACT! Petroleum is large quantities of hydrocarbons that are sequestered deep within the earth that aren't released until they are pumped up and burned....HOW CAN ANYBODY SUGGEST WITH A STRAIGHT FACE THAT BURNING A SEQUESTERED CARBON SOURCE IS BETTER THAN RUNNING A CIRCUITOUS SOURCE SUCH AS PLANT MATERIAL??
What happens when corn, sugar, switchgrass, miscanthus, or whatever is harvested? it is replanted and the successive crop removes the Carbon that was released. Simplistic? yes, but it works, Reference everyother life cycle on the earth.

ever ask a farmer why he doesn't plant the same crop year after year on the same plot of ground?
what happens with a drought?
disease?
bugs?
hail?
you want me to go on?
i grew up in nebraska, i know where corn comes from...

Did I say the same crop??? I did not! However all of the things you say are real problems that occur from time to time. Simple crop rotation doesn't always work, the Northern corn rootworm has figgured out that if it lays its eggs in soybean fields, the farmer is likely to plant corn the next year....its favorite food....GMOs are now the predominantly grown crops in the US. 3 out of every 4 acres planted in corn is GMO corn, while 9 out of every 10 acres of soybeans are GMO. A new corn on the horizon is a 8 gene insertion corn that essentially takes most insects and weeds out of the equation. Monsanto is currently testing several events of drought tolerent and water conservative corn....The corn of your past is not the same corn of today.... Oh and Etoh can be made from virtually any biological source. Corn is easy, so that is what is being used now. On the horizon are other sources such as sugar beets, sweet sorghum for the traditional type of sugar fermentation processes, yet as cellulostic Etoh processes are improved, then Etoh can be made from virtually anything that has cellulose. Additionally lignin can also be broken down and converted into Etoh. These sources could improve possible yield of Etoh from an acre of cropland 3-5 fold. One other point. Nebraska grows corn that is rotated with grain sorghum, soybeans and alfalfa. But as a state Nebraska is not the only state to grow crops...last time I checked, crops in some form or another were grown in every state. Each has its own unique principles, needs and potentials....

Finally, what would you have us do? Continue to be dependent on the Middle East and their oil? Or develop home grown solutions? As an aside, because of the Etoh push and other factors, farmers are enjoying one of the most optimistic periods in US history.

Can ethanol completely replace oil? with current technology NO, but as a part of the answer, Yes.

Oh and how to increase the mileage from Etoh, bump the compression a bunch and its efficiency will increase and make it closer to gas....
Doug

Quote from: "wayne petty"i have been thinking about fuel economy....

current engines are running at fuel mixtures to feed the cat... too lean and it does not heat enough to work... too rich and it melts....

ethanol is a great idea to reduce fuel imports... except it reduces fuel economy.... so we are burning more fuel per mile with the 10%+ blends...

the makes the refiners more money ... the goverment more money in collected taxes per mile driven... and we get to pay both...

somebody is going to have to come up wiith an electricly heated or microwave heated cat.... something that does not require a constant amount of unburned hydrocarbons to heat... it is probably not possable now that i think about it as you have to create enough electricity to power it... so i guess we are just stuck.,.....until someone has a brainstorm...

38HAULR · February 10, 2008, 04:17:40 PM

The Cats again. In Australia We had to get rid of all Leaded petrol because it was "poisoning us'. Yet all statistics showed decreasing blood lead levels in the overall population despite increasing vehicle population. We were fed a US graph back in 1990 by our then environment minister.[we started using ULP in 86] .The graph showed the US trend since mid 70,s when you guys switched. No one bothered to ask about the long history of decreasing blood lead levels before this. My take is that lead had to go because of cats and nothing else. Best alternative we have is LPG ,great for rodders anyway you get to rip out the emission controls,no need for a cat if you run straight LPG,and use a polution engine in your early ride........Frank.