beginning to hate E85!

[TurboDave]

Price of corn is going through the roof because we can't produce enough of it, and almost everything in our daily lives are tied to corn in some way.

The price of wheat is now shooting up and un heard of rates, why? because farmers are no longer growing wheat so that they can plant more corn to cash in on the E85 craze.

Celluslosic products are no where near ready yet, so we suffer for some greenies knee jerk reactions, to get everybody on E85, even we couldn't even put a dent in the gasoline production, even if we used everybit of corn we could produce. But then there would be nothing left for food production, or feed products. What's wrong with this picture? It's a no win situation

[SouthernCal GN]

And the hits just keep on coming.........


Jan-14-2008 10:30
10% Ethanol Blend Mandated in Oregon Beginning Tuesday

Salem-News.com Business Report
As of January 15th, E10 Fuel is Required to be Pumped in Northwest Oregon.

Salem-News.com Business Report
Photos courtesy: blogs.citypages.com

(PORTLAND, Ore.) - A new law goes into effect tomorrow in Oregon requiring gasoline retailers to pump a ten-percent ethanol blend. The E10 standard kicks in on January 15 for these counties in northwest Oregon: Clackamas, Clatsop, Columbia, Marion, Multnomah, Polk, Tillamook, Washington, and Yamhill.
A second group of counties will be rolled in by April 15th: Benton, Coos, Curry, Douglas, Jackson, Josephine, Lane, Lincoln, and Linn Counties. And the rest of the state must meet the standards by September 16, including Baker, Crook, Deschutes, Gilliam, Grant, Harney, Hood River, Jefferson, Klamath, Lake, Malheur, Morrow, Sherman, Umatilla, Union, Wallowa, Wasco, and Wheeler Counties.
Gas stations in the Portland area already pump a ten-percent ethanol blend during the winter months, so some motorists won't notice a difference. "Gasoline blended with ethanol performs in much the same way that regular gasoline does," says Earl Baker, AAA Oregon Approved Auto Repair Coordinator.
"It can be very difficult if not impossible to detect the difference in engine performance when comparing an ethanol blend to regular gas."
Baker says there are some changes you should be aware of. "Ethanol is a solvent. It can help clean combustion chambers, and scour your fuel delivery systems, fuel tanks, fuel lines and fuel injectors." Baker adds that ethanol also attracts water, unlike regular gasoline which repels it, and that could potentially cause problems. He says, "Over time, E10 will break loose any deposits of dirt or water currently suspended in your fuel tank.
This could potentially cause fuel filter clogging, and the possibility of fuel injector issues." Baker adds that ethanol can also cause corrosion and attack certain gaskets and rubber parts in a car engine. But Baker says these issues shouldn't impact many motorists.
"E10 will still have all of the properties of regular unleaded fuel as additives will continue to prevent engine valve recession. People have been filling up with E10 in the Portland area during the winter months and it has not caused major problems."
You may notice changes in your gas mileage when you fill up your tank with an ethanol blend. Some studies have shown that fuel economy may decrease slightly by one to four miles per gallon, but there are many variables that impact your mileage, including tire pressure, car condition, use of heater or air conditioner, etc.
Auto makers in the U.S. approve the use of fuels containing up to ten percent ethanol, and some recommend it because it burns cleanly. Ethanol can actually make regular gasoline burn more smoothly and slightly cooler because it raises the octane rating of regular gas.
The new fuel standards do help reduce tailpipe emissions of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. Fuel containing up to ten-percent ethanol has been certified by the Environmental Protection Agency to reduce carbon monoxide emissions by up to 30-percent.

[usetaboost]

Just had a meeting on the whole corn/wheat thing yesterday. Here's an interesting fact for ya. DId you know it costs $1.29 for every $1 worth of gas? So who do you think is winning here? OIL COMPANIES. Plus the ethanol gives worse gas mileage. It's just a way to add to the price of gas and to add on to the supply and demand. The price of wheat has went up 130% since 2006. Just since January 1st of this year the price has doubled. Real estate is crap, gas is sky high, factories all over my area are starting to fire and lay off, including where I work. It isn't looking good. Then we wanna give out driver's licenses like they're prizes in a cereal box. Give illeagal immigrants amnesty so we can give them free housing, food, health care, etc. Let's just burn the whole thing down and start over. Sorry for the rant. Just in a bad mood from the meeting at work yesterday

[TurboDave]

Ya, but at this point in time, I no longer even care about the arguements made about whether or not it's good for environment, or how much it actually costs to produce it or whatever.

It's just that the economy is teatering on the brink of recession, and the E85 lemmings in government just keep up the march toward the cliff edge.

100% of all of our corn production could only make a tiny dent (about 15%) in offsetting our needs for petroleum.

But we still need corn for products/food/feed.

Farmers see a quick buck in corn production and switch from wheat to corn. Wheat prices skyrocket because of shortages. Can't blame the farmers, they need to go where the income is.

It's the greenies and government idiots jumping on something that is unsustainable at our present technology.

[jdpolzin]

No offense here but I have grown up farming my whole life, do you realize that there are a TON of uses for corn? Not just E85 is bringing up the cost of corn. EVERYTHING is bringing up the cost of corn. It's hard to get enough corn to feed our dairy cows anymore. Also, if you know, there are limiting factors of how much corn we can raise. We need to rotate fields every year, Soy beans one year - corn the next. The world is becoming more dependent on our farmers again, I dont think it's such a bad thing. The only problem is that most farmers arent just mom and pop and 10 kids anymore. They are enormous corporate farms owned by our government.

[TurboDave]

I was born and raised on a WI dairy farm, so I know a little about farming. Trust me, this is not about the farmers. This is about the morons in gov. pushing E85 as an alternative fuel.
Corn is being pushed up primarilly because of the demands!! Corn in one way or another touches almost everything we eat, and in most other products.
It can't possibly support our food/product needs plus the huge demand for Ethanol production.
It's rediculous.

[Pablo]

QUICK, stop using e85 and send the money to arabs with oil wells instead! That'll fix our economy real good.

[JOHNDEEREGN]

Originally Posted by Pablo

QUICK, stop using e85 and send the money to arabs with oil wells instead! That'll fix our economy real good.

Guys there are 50 or more Ethanol plants within a 200 mile (or less) radious of where I live. They are actually starting to shut them down because it is costing more to produce a gallon of Ethanol than it is selling for.

Thats a lot of money setting idle not producing anything. I know local farmers that bought 2,3,4,5 up to 10 shares ($18,000 per share) to invest in our local plant. They aren't very happy right now

As soon as the towel heads drop oil again most of them will probably close anyway

[Hot Air]

Guys,
This is a technical forum dedicated to preparing our cars to run E85. It is not a political forum. We are getting off track.
Conrad

[novaderrik]

E85 is awesome. i'd rather buy that and give the local economy a boost than send my money half way around the world to people that will use it to teach the next generation to "hate us for our freedoms".
yeah, a few big companies will make a lot of money off E85- but the same thing happens when you run straight gasoline. the difference, tho, is that with E85, at least most of the money stays here, and more and more small local family farms get to make a good living feeding our energy thirst.
even if we weren't using some of our corn crop to make the stuff, the price of corn would still go up. just like the price of everything else. it's that wonderful thing called "inflation". this has been coming for a long, long time. our economy and dollar needs to go down before it can go back up.

[jdpolzin]

Originally Posted by novaderrik

E85 is awesome. i'd rather buy that and give the local economy a boost than send my money half way around the world to people that will use it to teach the next generation to "hate us for our freedoms".
yeah, a few big companies will make a lot of money off E85- but the same thing happens when you run straight gasoline. the difference, tho, is that with E85, at least most of the money stays here, and more and more small local family farms get to make a good living feeding our energy thirst.
even if we weren't using some of our corn crop to make the stuff, the price of corn would still go up. just like the price of everything else. it's that wonderful thing called "inflation". this has been coming for a long, long time. our economy and dollar needs to go down before it can go back up.

Agreed!

[GNVYUS 1]

Oil is $103 today, isn't the real issue that oil itself has gone up meaning everything else is going to go up?? If you want to deal with rising prices in everything you consume, keep sticking with imported oil. Or we can slowly get off it with technology and that would include E85 and evolving to more renewable energy sources.

E85 would be cheaper if they didn't have too grease the palms of big oil to distribute it. Big oil again looking out for us, our future energy issues and global peace.

Corn will be a short lived crop for Ethanol, farmers will make a ton more $$ with Switchgrass and I couldn't be happier to be a Capitalist on that one.

I can only imagine what people were saying in the 70's during the gas crunch, I am sure it wasn't how insignificant corn prices were rising.

[johnnyttype]

havent u guys noticed that the price of a lot of products is going up, not just corn and wheat. im sure that demand for corn may have some impact on the price, but its not the whole reason the prices are going up. just think for a second, how exactly do they get all this corn and products of corn from the midwest to the east or west coast? or just harvest the corn for that matter? thats right, gasoline or diesel fuel... and what's happening with them right now? their prices are high and on the rise!

just thought i'd add that to this discussion because it hasn't been mentioned yet

DRBOOSTER you beat me to it!!!

[WFO]

Originally Posted by DR.BOOSTER

E85 would be cheaper if they didn't have too grease the palms of big oil to distribute it. Big oil again looking out for us, our future energy issues and global peace.

Jackpot.

When I bought my powerstroke 4 years ago they couldn't sell a drop of biodiesel because it was almost $2 a gallon,and petro was $1.25.

Now that petro is a ridiculous $3.60 a gallon,oh look at that,biodiesel is $3.80 a gallon.

Just a little friendly price fixing by your local petroleum company...

[TurboDave]

pablo
dr.booster
wfo
jdpolzin
novaderrik

and others, you have totally missed my point and intention, so I'll stop repeating myself and trying to clerify what's really happening.
Bye.

[faster]

Guys this is only 4 pages of a 25 page report from the international fuel symposium of 2005 on fuel production efficiency. Unfortunately the graphs would not reproduce.

Alky has a positive fuel production to btu required while fossil fuels have a negative.

Someone is lying about alky production costs and efficiency and I believe we can make alky far cheaper and far more efficiently that gas but those numbers will never be common knowledge because then the oil companies (who control the world) will be exposed.

I will try and post the whole report as a web link so you can read it. This one is from 2005 and a new report is scheduled this year. I can e-mail the whole report to those that want it in pdf format.


The following is from the report:

The energy and environmental effects of using fuel ethanol in the United States have been debated since the inception of the fuel ethanol program in 1980. Over the past 25 years, more than 20 studies were published regarding the so-called “energy balance” of corn ethanol. In those studies, energy balance is usually defined as the energy in a gallon of ethanol minus the total
fossil energy input (including the energy in coal, natural gas, and petroleum) consumed to make that gallon of ethanol. Several studies conducted in the late 1970s and 1980s concluded that corn ethanol resulted in a negative energy balance. But the majority of more recent studies — with the
exception of a few studies conducted by Pimentel and his co-authors (see Figure 15) — have concluded that corn ethanol indeed has a positive energy balance. Since the 1980s, researchers in the Center for Transportation Research at Argonne National Laboratory have conducted life-cycle analyses of the energy and emission effects of transportation fuels for DOE. In 1995, with DOE’s support, Argonne began to develop the GREET (Greenhouse gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy use in Transportation) model — a life-cycle model for transportation fuels and vehicle technologies. The model contains more than 85 transportation fuel pathways, including four for fuel ethanol (corn dry milling, corn wet milling, woody cellulosic, and herbaceous cellulosic). The GREET model and its documentation are posted on Argonne’s GREET web site (Argonne Transportation Research GREET/index.html). There are now more than 2,000 registered GREET users worldwide. Since 1997, Argonne has applied, updated, and upgraded the GREET model to evaluate fuel ethanol’s energy and emission effects relative to those of petroleum gasoline. In 1997, Argonne published its findings from an ethanol analysis conducted for the State of Illinois (Wang et al.
1997). With DOE support, Argonne continued its efforts to analyze the effects of fuel ethanol (Wang et al. 1999a; Wang et al. 1999b). In 2003, with support from the State of Illinois, Argonne analyzed the potential effects of blending ethanol into diesel (Wang et al. 2003). This paper presents Argonne’s updated energy and GHG emission results for fuel ethanol; these results were generated by using the most current version of the GREET model.
Energy Balance of Fuel Ethanol As discussed, energy balance is defined as the energy content of a unit of the energy product minus the fossil energy inputs used to make it. Calculations of fossil energy inputs include all
key activities used in the production of the energy product. The GREET model can estimate energy inputs required to produce transportation fuels, including ethanol. Although GREET does not explicitly present energy balance values for different transportation fuel products, its intermediate results do contain information about the energy balance values. Figure 2 shows the key activities that are included in energy balance calculations for both cornbased
ethanol and petroleum gasoline in the GREET model. For corn ethanol, GREET includes fertilizer production, fertilizer transportation from plants to farms, corn farming, corn transportation from farms to ethanol plants, ethanol production, and ethanol transportation from ethanol plants to refueling stations. For petroleum gasoline, GREET includes petroleum recovery,
petroleum transportation from oil fields to petroleum refineries, gasoline production in refineries, and gasoline transportation from petroleum refineries to refueling stations.

As Figure 2 shows, GREET simulations indicate that 0.74 million (mm) Btu of fossil energy is consumed for each million Btu of ethanol available at refueling stations. Thus, Argonne’s GREET simulations show a positive energy balance value for corn ethanol. On the other hand, 1.23 million Btu of fossil energy is consumed for each million Btu of gasoline available at refueling stations, so production of gasoline has a negative energy balance value. Note that in
GREET calculations, the energy used to produce a fuel, as well as the energy contained in the fuel, are taken into account. For example, for a kWh of electricity used, GREET takes into account the 3,412 Btu contained in that kWh and the energy loss in electric power plants to produce that kWh of electricity. The same applies for other energy products, such as gasoline,
diesel, natural gas, etc. Why does corn ethanol have a positive energy balance while petroleum gasoline’s energy balance is negative? The difference is primarily caused by the definition of the energy balance calculations: the energy in an energy product minus the fossil energy used to produce that
product. In the corn ethanol case, the feedstock for ethanol production is corn; the energy needed for corn plat growth (through photosynthesis) is solar (not fossil) energy. Solar energy is not considered in the energy balance calculation because solar energy is renewable and is not subject
to resource depletion (unlike fossil energy). In the case of petroleum gasoline production, the feedstock is petroleum; the Btu in the petroleum used to produce gasoline is taken into account in the energy balance calculation.
Figure 2. Activities Included in Energy Balance Calculations for Corn Ethanol vs. Petroleum Gasoline

Figure 3 presents energy balance calculations for U.S. electricity generation. The United States generates 54% of its electricity from coal, 14% from natural gas, 1% from oil, 18% from nuclear energy, and the remaining 13% from other sources, such as hydro-power. Figure 3 shows that, for U.S. average electricity, 2.34 million Btu of fossil energy is consumed for each million Btu of electricity available at a wall outlet. Fossil-fuel-powered electric plants have an energy conversion efficiency of about 35%. Thus, fossil electric power plants in the United States may require 2.96 million Btu of fossil energy per 1 million Btu of electricity generated. The fossil energy requirement of 2.34 million (rather than 2.96 million Btu) shown in Figure 3 for U.S. average electricity generation is due to the fact that a significant amount of U.S. electricity is generated from nuclear energy and hydro-power, which are not taken into account in fossil energy requirement calculations.

U.S. Electricity Generation: 2.34 mm Btu Fossil Energy Input Figure 3. Calculation of Fossil Energy Balance of U.S. Electricity Generation Thus far, we have addressed energy balance results for corn ethanol, petroleum gasoline, and U.S. average electricity. Figure 4 further summarizes the energy balance results for these three energy products plus cellulosic ethanol and coal. Of the five energy products, only cellulosic and corn ethanol have positive energy balances because solar energy is the ultimate energy feedstock for ethanol production. The huge positive energy balance for cellulosic ethanol is attributable to little use of fertilizer during farming of cellulosic biomass (compared with corn farming) and use of the unfermentable portion of biomass in cellulosic ethanol plants to generate steam and
electricity. Based solely on the results presented in Figure 4, gasoline production and electricity generation— both of which have large negative fossil energy balance values — should be eliminated. This obviously wrong conclusion is caused by the deficiency of fossil energy balance values
themselves. By adding all fossil Btus together, energy balance calculations fail to address the fact that different energy products have very different qualities and uses. For example, while electricity suffers a large negative energy balance, it is a high-quality energy product that we depend upon heavily to meet our daily needs. In practice, there is no energy product that can be substituted in most of applications in which we use electricity. Similarly, gasoline is a premium transportation fuel for use in internal combustion engines. We cannot — and should not — make energy choices solely on the basis of the energy balance values of individual energy products.
Yet energy balance values have mistakenly been made a focal point in ethanol policy debates. Key Technical Issues for Corn Ethanol An objective evaluation of corn ethanol’s energy and environmental effects should take into
account key technical issues, including improvements in the energy efficiencies of key production activities and proper treatment of ethanol’s co-products. Of the activities that comprise the corn ethanol production pathway, nitrogen fertilizer production, corn farming, ethanol production, and co-products of ethanol plants are key factors in determining energy and
emission results for corn ethanol. Each of these factors is discussed in the following paragraphs.

Nitrogen Fertilizer Production Corn farming requires intensive nitrogen fertilizer use. Wang et al. (2003) examined recent trends in the energy intensity required for nitrogen fertilizer production. Because of the dramatic increase in natural gas prices in North America in recent years, many North American nitrogen fertilizer plants shut down. Consequently, the United States increased its nitrogen fertilizer imports. Nitrogen fertilizer plants that have recently been built outside of North America have higher energy efficiencies than the old North American plants. GREET simulations take into account recent improvements in the efficiency of nitrogen fertilizer production.
Corn Farming The United States has about 80 million acres of corn farms that produce more than 11 billion bushels of corn a year. Over the past 100 years, the U.S. corn yield per acre has increased nearly 8 times — to over 140 bushels per acre (Perlack et al. 2005). However, the increase in per-acre
corn yields before 1970s resulted from increased application of chemicals, especially nitrogen fertilizer, to corn farms. While the high chemical inputs helped per-acre corn production, they d