Interesting article debunking Ethanol

KyleH said:
1) Yes there are tariffs. Its a 54 cent tariff until 2009.
http://www.ethanolproducer.com/article.jsp?article_id=2713
http://www.alternet.org/environment/57388/
http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/11474/1/383

2) I agree making it from corn makes no sense. Making it from Sugar and importing it does. Worrying about foreign dependency on oil is stupid. We can make it from sugar so I am not sure why you say its not a viable solution. The entire country of Brazil runs on it.

3) Yes that is why you can and do make more power on it. Power is being used as an abbreviation for horsepower. As in the number.

4) I am not proposing forcing people to use it. I think everyone involved in this argument are proposing it as competition for regular gasoline. Forcing people to sue it has nothing to do with nothing. No one is saying that. The applications it does work in is where its being suggested to work, no one is saying lets run the whole country on the stuff. I am saying lets use it as a free market price cap on Gasoline prices and as a great fuel for daily driven high performance cars.
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4) The government is already forcing people to use it. MTBE has been banned, yet oxygenates are required in our fuels, ergo, E10 has been mandated across much of the country.

3) Power is irrelevant to the discussion. Energy content of the fuel is. When you buy fuel, you're buying energy, just as you are when you buy electricity, natural gas, coal, or a power bar at the 7-11. The rate at which you can convert that energy into useful work is where power comes in. The fact that you can turn ethanol into useful work at a greater rate than you can turn gasoline into useful work is not relevant to the economics of ethanol use as a fuel. Ethanol, with current subsidies for domestic production and tariffs for foreign produced ethanol, costs more per unit energy than gasoline. Until that changes, Ethanol will not be a viable fuel for widespread use in the US. For niche markets, it's great. Joe (ponyfreak) running E85 in his Viper to make 1000+ HP is a good example. For me driving my Navigator to work in the dead of winter, E85 would suck.

2) We don't have the sugar crops that Brazil does. We have corn instead. Our climate does not support the production of sugar like Brazil's climate does. So we either need to improve our technology for turning what we have or can readily grow into ethanol (or other bio-fuels)efficiently, or import those fuels. Importing ethanol from Brazil will do little to ease our dependance on foriegn sources of fuel, it will just shift our dependance from one country to another. Perhaps Brazil is more agreeable to us at the moment than Saudi Arabia, but if the goal is to decrease our overall dependance on foreign sources of energy, a mere shift in the overseas source does not accomplish the goal.

1) I stand corrected. However, the ethanol you buy at the pump does not come from foreign sources, and as such it is not subject to a tariff, but rather a subsidy. I imagine that removal of the subsidy and the tariff would not result in any significant decrease in the price at the pump, because production would decrease. All the current corn-based ethanol would disappear from the market due to production cost, thus increasing the demand / price of foriegn ethanol.

I agree with you that ethanol has promise as a motor fuel in the US, however the current way our lawmakers are going about forcing it down our throats is not exactly the best course of action. Further research may make ethanol a better solution for us, but for right now, it's not nearly all it's cracked up to be.
 
By forcing us to use it I meant E85 specifically. Not ethanol in general.

And when you say that decreasing foreign dependence is the goal, I wholeheartedly disagree. International trade is, for consumers, wonderful. IMO The problem with trade deficits is overstated. The goal is to keep transport cheap. I couldn't care less about where the fuel comes from, even Ceaser commie Chavez, as long as its cheap and works well. Political bullcrap needs to keep its nose out of my wallet.

I wasn't talking about removing all regulation, just specifically the 54 cent tariff. I wasn't really talking about the 51 cent (IIRC) subsidy. I would be for a subsidy on Flex Fuel cars (assuming its a reasonable one) as an incentive to encourage the market.
 
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KyleH said:
And when you say that decreasing foreign dependence is the goal, I wholeheartedly disagree. International trade is, for consumers, wonderful. IMO The problem with trade deficits is overstated. The goal is to keep transport cheap. I couldn't care less about where the fuel comes from, even Ceaser commie Chavez, as long as its cheap and works well. Political bullcrap needs to keep its nose out of my wallet.
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I would disagree here.

It is better to become less dependant on foreign countries on NECESSITIES. Food and fuel come to mind, although we easily produce enough food for ourselves.
 
At first everyone feels that way, I certainly used to. Why is it worth the cost of doing that?

It is the exact same product, provided cheaper. At first it seems like it would help the American economy, but in reality, thats not true. It helps a small section of the American economy, the corn producers, and the ethanol refiners.

A good real life example of this that played out recently and is fairly well documented/well known is the steel industry. There is a quote that goes something like "Ask any man if we should have a steel industry in America, and they will say yes!-unless they are an economist."

The US steel industry has always sought protection from foreign competitors, in march of 2002 President Bush levied a 30% increase on flat rolled steel, as well as other increases on many other kinds of steel.

In retaliation for this Tariff, the main steel exporting countries increased their tariffs on orange juice, meat, and our other major exports, so the steel tariff now hurt all those industries. Further more, and perhaps even most importantly 160,000 people work in the American steel industry, and they had their jobs saved. However now the 12 MILLION people in steel consuming industries had to cut costs and cut jobs. Further more all the products are now more expensive, so now money that people could have spent on gas, food, or other consumer spending, now goes to paying the higher cost of steel based products.

We protected an American "core industry" at the cost of the American economy. Protectionism is a Faustian bargain, you give up a lot, to gain little.

For proof of what I was talking about with the steel industry (or at least proof I didn't make any of that up):
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/03/20020305-7.html
 
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KyleH said:
At first everyone feels that way, I certainly used to. Why is it worth the cost of doing that?

It is the exact same product, provided cheaper. At first it seems like it would help the American economy, but in reality, thats not true. It helps a small section of the American economy, the corn producers, and the ethanol refiners.

A good real life example of this that played out recently and is fairly well documented/well known is the steel industry. There is a quote that goes something like "Ask any man if we should have a steel industry in America, and they will say yes!-unless they are an economist."

The US steel industry has always sought protection from foreign competitors, in march of 2002 President Bush levied a 30% increase on flat rolled steel, as well as other increases on many other kinds of steel.

In retaliation for this Tariff, the main steel exporting countries increased their tariffs on orange juice, meat, and our other major exports, so the steel tariff now hurt all those industries. Further more, and perhaps even most importantly 160,000 people work in the American steel industry, and they had their jobs saved. However now the 12 MILLION people in steel consuming industries had to cut costs and cut jobs. Further more all the products are now more expensive, so now money that people could have spent on gas, food, or other consumer spending, now goes to paying the higher cost of steel based products.

We protected an American "core industry" at the cost of the American economy. Protectionism is a Faustian bargain, you give up a lot, to gain little.

For proof of what I was talking about with the steel industry (or at least proof I didn't make any of that up):
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/03/20020305-7.html
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Agreed, but in this discussion, steel is different than oil for one important reason: we have plenty of iron buried under US soil. What we don't have enough of (or can't extract quickly enough) is oil. We have a foreign DEPENDANCE on oil, but merely a foreign ADVANTAGE on steel. We are under no one's thumb for steel; if our current suppliers decided to cut us off for whatever reason, it wouldn't be crippling. We would just ratchet up our own steel industry to pick up the slack.

Should OPEC decide to cut us off from their oil, well, some of you are old enough to remember the last time that happened...
 
We aren't discussing oil, we are discussing ethanol. Should Brazil ever decide to cut us off, even if E85 does get going, we will always have corn, always have Puerto Rico, and always have other countries which can grow sugar. (Although they may not be as stable or as big of producers as Brazil.) Free trade tends to make good allies. (Except in the case of the middle east.)

Again why is it advantageous to have this protectionist tariff against ETHANOL?
 
KyleH said:
We aren't discussing oil, we are discussing ethanol. Should Brazil ever decide to cut us off, even if E85 does get going, we will always have corn, always have Puerto Rico, and always have other countries which can grow sugar. (Although they may not be as stable or as big of producers as Brazil.) Free trade tends to make good allies. (Except in the case of the middle east.)

Again why is it advantageous to have this protectionist tariff against ETHANOL?
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Have no clue...I don't know enough about economics to comment.

Ethanol is a stop-gap solution anyway. When we have nailed down fusion technology in at most 30 years, energy will be relatively free and everyone will be driving an electric car. Then the middle east can find other customers for their "bloody" oil.
 
KyleH said:
Yea and hydrogen powered cars have been 15 years away since the 1970s.
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Hydrogen was even more "debunked" than ethanol. It takes a LOT more energy to make hydrogen, and engineers still can't devise a safe method of containment or delivery into said containment. One car accident could set off multiple explosions on a hydrogen-car packed freeway.

As for fusion, both Berkeley and the French have working fusion reactors producing power factors of about 1:10 (1 joule of energy to produce ten joules). Once they improve efficiency (and the range of electric vehicles), it's just a matter of time. The oil moguls will fight it, but the politics of the middle east almost demands an alternative. And electric cars and charging stations are already here; it's just the power infrastructure that would need to be built up.

Why this hasn't been better publicized I have no idea.
 
From "Syriana"

But what do you need a financial advisor for? Twenty years ago you had the highest Gross National Product in the world, now you're tied with Albania. Your second largest export is secondhand goods, closely followed by dates which you're losing five cents a pound on... You know what the business community thinks of you? They think that a hundred years ago you were living in tents out here in the desert chopping each other's heads off and that's where you'll be in another hundred years, so on behalf of my firm I accept your offer.
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logres said:
"Buy it" as in go along with it, or "Buy it" as in hostile takeover and keep it in their basement?

If the latter, I'm not sure how one would purchase Cal State Berkeley...
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With a lot of flaming homosexuals carrying marijuana.
 
KyleH said:
We can make it from sugar so I am not sure why you say its not a viable solution. The entire country of Brazil runs on it.
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From Wikipedia.

"Most cars in Brazil run either on alcohol or on gasohol; only recently dual-fuel ("Flex-Fuel") of ethanol and the ethanol/gasohol ratio are expected to increase again with deployment of dual-fuel cars.
Presently the use of ethanol as fuel by Brazilian cars - as pure ethanol and in gasohol - replaces gasoline at the rate of about 27,000 cubic metres per day, or about 40% of the fuel that would be needed to run the fleet on gasoline alone. However, the effect on the country's overall oil use was much smaller than that: domestic oil consumption still far outweighs ethanol consumption (in 2005, Brazil consumed 2,000,000 barrels of oil per day, versus 280,000 barrels of ethanol)[1]. Although Brazil is a major oil producer and now exports gasoline (19,000 m³/day), it still must import oil because of internal demand for other oil byproducts, chiefly diesel fuel (which cannot be easily replaced by ethanol)."
 
Csp

Csp

This is part of an article I read on alternatives to oil. Any thoughts?

What's the most promising alternative energy technology?
Few people know about this one, but based on my research, it's the most promising: Concentrated Solar Power, which requires no solar panels at all. It works by concentrating sunlight onto a small pipe using cheap parabolic reflectors. The pipe contains a liquid that's heated to very high temperatures by the sun and drives a steam boiler that rotates a turbine to generate electricity (much like nuclear power plants, but without the nuclear waste). It's cheap, low-tech, and far more affordable than solar power. Plus, it can be built in practically any desert, so it doesn't take up valuable land. As another bonus, when CSP operations are built near the ocean, they can desalinate ocean water as a side effect, providing fresh water for irrigation to grow food. This is the only renewable energy technology I know of that can produce cheap energy, fresh water and crop irrigation all at the same time. Plus, it has no emissions, no toxic chemicals, no nuclear waste and very little environmental impact.

CSP is, in my opinion, the single most promising technology for renewable energy. Isn't it interesting that almost nobody is talking about it? The best solutions, as usual, are routinely ignored.
 
A nuclear power pant generates little waste and can be anywhere from 600MW-2000MW, maybe more. The largest currently operating systems using CSP generate 80mW. Nuclear power is cheap, safe, efficient, and makes very little pollutants compared to Coal. Hippies don't like nuclear power cause they are stupid. Not to mention CSP plants cant stand alone, they need a fossil fuel plant attached to them for when its cloudy, or its night time.

http://www.eere.energy.gov/solar/cf...name=Concentrating Solar Power/cat=The Basics
http://www.progress-energy.com/aboutenergy/powerplants/nuclearplants/index.asp
 
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So install 10 80mW CSP plants. Would cost way less than 1 nuke plant!! I'm not against nuclear power plants...BGE here is getting ready to install the 1st NEW plant in __how many years??? I'm all for it! But still, 10 or 20 even CSP plants would really be something.
 
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