EPA Decreasing Ethanol Production Requirements

[1engineer]

What does this mean? Quite possibly there will be less ethanol in your gasoline-ethanol blended fuels in the future. I follow ethanol and fuels in general and know a bit about the subject. I just wanted to include a few links here EPA proposes cut to ethanol requirement for gasoline - Nov. 15, 2013 and here The secret, dirty cost of Obama?s green power push | New York Post on what is really happening behind the scenes. It's still too early in the game to tell what benefits will actually occur to consumers but having the EPA reduce targets instead of increasing them is a positive! Why are they doing it? There are several different reasons and as I am not a policy maker I do not know for sure but ethanol production has not been good for much of anything except to prove we can make fuel out of corn. It has:
Raised prices on corn in general and feed corn in particular
Cost US taxpayers Billions in subsidies
Decreased fuel efficiency in vehicles
Not improved the net emissions

Anyway, just wanted to put this out there for you guys as a PSA.
"The More You Know" and all that.

 

[KidVermicious]

That sounds vaguely positive. I'm a huge fan of reducing our reliance on oil, but ethanol has never seemed like a viable way to do it.

 

[homeyclaus]

Ethanol is an excellent oxygenate for gasoline, with a significantly lower environmental impact than MTBE. Modified ethanol-enriched E5-type gasolines were available in Canada in the early 90's to produce better-burning mid- and super-grade fuels, and for some engines worked really well.

This being said, ethanol is corrosive to a number of materials auto manufacturers insist on making things of in the USA. In Brazil, it's not a problem, because there is consumer demand, rather than government insistence on it.

Ethanol production is a complete bureaucratic disaster in the USA. It only exists because of the perversion of farm subsidies, EPA exemptions, and other crony capitalism. Leave it to government to ruin a good thing.

 

[KidVermicious]

In Brazil, it's not a problem, because there is consumer demand, rather than government insistence on it.

It's not that consumers demand it particularly, it's just that they can manufacture it dirt cheap because they have a surplus of sugar. They have sugar because that what grows well on their surplus crop land, and they have surplus land because they're slashing jungle at a truly destructive rate to create it because that's cheaper than using sustainable farming practices. It won't last.

It's exactly what the US did to it's own frontier in the previous century, and I don't mean to call the practice evil, necessarily, but it does demonstrate that no matter how clean or efficiently it burns, ethanol production as we currently know it is not sustainable, not ecofriendly, and not a viable replacement or even a good supplement for petroleum.

 

[homeyclaus]

It's not that consumers demand it particularly, it's just that they can manufacture it dirt cheap because they have a surplus of sugar. They have sugar because that what grows well on their surplus crop land, and they have surplus land because they're slashing jungle at a truly destructive rate to create it because that's cheaper than using sustainable farming practices. It won't last.

They slash the forest to graze cattle. Sugar cane is an invasive, noxious weed like bamboo, so ethanol is a waste product that needs to be removed as the cane shreds make their way to the furnace. The ethanol fuel market there emerged in the 70's because of a fuel taxation oversight by the Brazilian government (paralyzed by military dictatorship and its dirty war at the time), and the farmers and (ironically) state-owned PetroBras exploited it to the fullest. Even now, ethanol fuel taxation there is a bit of a political third rail.

It's exactly what the US did to it's own frontier in the previous century, and I don't mean to call the practice evil, necessarily, but it does demonstrate that no matter how clean or efficiently it burns, ethanol production as we currently know it is not sustainable, not ecofriendly, and not a viable replacement or even a good supplement for petroleum.

That's the Brazilian Argument - you yokels cut down all your primal forests, so don't come here telling us not to do it. This being said, Brazilian "progress" has been a lot better, environmentally speaking, than American progress of the 18th and 19th centuries.

The point is there is a big difference in ending up with ethanol as a byproduct of sugar production (sustainable or not, for the better part of 50 years), and government subsidies and mandates to grow GM corn unfit for human (possibly animal) consumption in forms other than syrup and motor fuel. ETA: Environmental "goodness" isn't part of either equation, no matter how much rhetoric the pols in the Ministry of Truth attach to it.

 

[KidVermicious]

You've got some misunderstandings. Brazilian ethanol is not a byproduct of the sugar industry. The waste from sugarcane production is burned as fuel for generating heat and power, and the majority of sugar produced is used directly to manufacture ethanol (Brazil produced 734,000 tons of sugarcane in 2011, of which 538 tons were processed in plants producing ethanol).

Brazil's deforestation rate is another thread, and I don't want to get into whether they're right or wrong to do that, but the reason they do it is because it's cheaper to slash new jungle and grow a couple years of crops there and abandon it than it is to maintain and fertilize the land for long-term crop production (and they grow so much sugar on that land because, as you noted, it's a weed - it ain't hard to grow). As I said before, that model is not sustainable, and when they run out of quasi-fertile jungle to slash, they're going to have to manage their crop lands the hard way and it's going to start costing them a lot more. Brazilian ethanol prices will go through the roof and their economy will crash much worse than anything we saw during the 70s fuel crisis.

All that aside, there's the human impact - land used to grow sugarcane for non-food purposes is not land used to produce food for an exponentially growing world population. If you think peak oil is going to suck, wait until we hit peak farmland.

Ethanol will not replace petroleum as a world fuel. It's a dead end.

 

[homeyclaus]

You've got some misunderstandings. Brazilian ethanol is not a byproduct of the sugar industry. The waste from sugarcane production is burned as fuel for generating heat and power, and the majority of sugar produced is used directly to manufacture ethanol (Brazil produced 734,000 tons of sugarcane in 2011, of which 538 tons were processed in plants producing ethanol).

Brazil's recordkeeping on this matter is highly suspect because of MERCOSUR/NAFTA politics, and because of Brazil's huge underground economy. The fao.org site also claims the following sugar cane production:

Production (tonnes)
year
country
item 2010 2011 2012
Brazil
Sugar cane
717463793 734006059 670757958


That's 670 million tons. Hm.

Brazil's deforestation rate is another thread, and I don't want to get into whether they're right or wrong to do that, but the reason they do it is because it's cheaper to slash new jungle and grow a couple years of crops there and abandon it than it is to maintain and fertilize the land for long-term crop production (and they grow so much sugar on that land because, as you noted, it's a weed - it ain't hard to grow). As I said before, that model is not sustainable, and when they run out of quasi-fertile jungle to slash, they're going to have to manage their crop lands the hard way and it's going to start costing them a lot more. Brazilian ethanol prices will go through the roof and their economy will crash much worse than anything we saw during the 70s fuel crisis.

You can hammer their ag practices all you want, and you're right, they're turning what was once Amazon jungle into a desert because for whatever reason they're not rotating crops.

And yes, at some point that party will end, and it will be interesting.

All that aside, there's the human impact - land used to grow sugarcane for non-food purposes is not land used to produce food for an exponentially growing world population. If you think peak oil is going to suck, wait until we hit peak farmland.

Ethanol will not replace petroleum as a world fuel. It's a dead end.

I never said it would, and I, in fact, agree with you. My point was simply that from an engineering perspective, there is a place for ethanol as a fuel additive, it sucks less than most alternatives, and that how the US goes about producing it is as disgusting as politics can get.

I generally complain that in Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina, sugar is half the price of flour, or less, with notable effects on the local desserts. At least it's not high-fructose corn syrup, but I just cannot believe that 80% of those countries doesn't have type 2 diabetes by age 10.

The ethanol sugar cane systems I looked at now does two "extractions" on the shredded sugar cane. The first "boil" extracts much of the sucrose. What's left is fermented to produce ethanol, and the remaining material is dried and burned to produce the heat needed for the first, second, and third steps. The developer of this technology claims that it's energy-positive. Not sure. I also saw a "how it's made" episode on that, I need to see if I can get a link to that.