If ethanol really lived up to its promise, then why don’t we see ethanol-powered tractors (and all the other assorted farm equipment needed for ethanol production)? It seems to me that it should be cheaper to run the ethanol industry on its own ethanol, were ethanol truly economical. And if we had a complex (farmland, refinery, etc.) that was not shipping in any petroleum products, but was shipping out ethanol, then that would pretty conclusively demonstrate ethanol’s value as a fuel.
<< If ethanol really lived up to its promise, then why don’t we see ethanol-powered tractors (and all the other assorted farm equipment needed for ethanol production)? It seems to me that it should be cheaper to run the ethanol industry on its own ethanol, were ethanol truly economical. >>
Chronos,
You are absolutely correct. If ethanol really had a positive net energy balance, an ethanol production system would run on its own product and be self-sufficient. Once started, it would produce the energy it needed to power itself.
Sound impossible? Yes it is, because ethanol is does not have a positive net energy balance. (Sort of like using an electric motor to power a generator to power the electric motor. Actually, when I was in the 6th grade I thought that might work.)
Not long ago a planned ethanol plant in Wisconsin canceled their plans when they couldn’t get a supply of natural gas piped to the site. The fact they needed natural gas to power the plant, speaks volumes.
If ethanol actually had a positive net energy balance, all they would have had to do is divert some of the finished ethanol spewing forth from the out pipe, and use it to run the plant.
I didn’t think it was a joke. Unfortunately, politicians and lobbyists are always trying to rewrite the laws of thermodynamics.
I think it is the politicians who weren’t paying attention in junior high science class. We might be better off if all incoming representatives and senators had to take a refresher course in thermodynamics after their elections.
But the point, as others have made, is that the law of thermodynamics does not apply here in the way it was implied because one has energy input from the sun. Thus, it is entirely possible for the input of fossil fuel energy necessary to produce ethanol is less than the amount of energy that the ethanol can provide as a fuel. Whether this is in fact the case or not can only be resolved by careful study.
I completed a M.S. here at the UW-Madison, and my thesis involved working with the ethanologen Zymomonas mobilis. The funding came from the National Renewable Energy laboratory (NREL), a division of the Department of Energy (DOE). In Cecils article, there are a few assumptions that are made about the efficiency of ethanol production. I am guessing that all current calculations are based on using yeast as the microorganism producing ethanol from corn. The ethanol-producing bacteria Z. mobilis uses a different pathway than yeast, which results in twice the yield of ethanol produced from a molecule of glucose compared to that produced from yeast. The NREL has a pipedream, that such organisms may be engineered to make the process more efficient. Ideally, they see ethanol production from discarded newspapers and lawn clippings, rather than from corn. During my research with Z. mobilis, I realized that there are ways to improve the process, and that if enough funding and research were done in this area, ethanol production could be both economically and energetically feasible. I would suggest that rather than dumping tax dollars into subsidies that favor the grain producers, invest them into the research needed to make this possible.
JShore,
Agree that ethanol contains energy from the Sun.
But, it doesn’t take a careful study to determine whether the production of ethanol uses more energy than it provides when burned. Only a simple thought experiment:
If the production of corn ethanol produced more energy than it consumed, an ethanol production system could be self-sufficient. And to prove it, the ethanol industry would build a self-sufficient ethanol plant that operated on some fraction of its output. (But they haven’t, and I don’t think they ever will.)
So far, all ethanol production systems require an input of energy from an outside source – usually natural gas.
The ethanol industry and corn growers could also try a controlled experiment:
– Convert 10,000 tons of corn to ethanol.
– Then using only that ethanol (and the sun of course) as a source of energy, see how many tons of corn you can grow. (You would have to use the original ethanol for cultivation; planting; harvesting; transporting the corn and ethanol; spreading pesticides, fertilizer and herbicides; making pesticides, fertilizer and herbicides; milling, fermenting, and distilling the corn; making the electricity to power the farmer’s home, barn, computer, grain dryer, et al – I’m sure you get my drift.)
– If they can grow 10,000 tons (or more) of corn to replace the 10,000 tons they started with, and do it using only the energy in the ethanol from the original 10,000 tons, I will become an ethanol believer.
– The Argonne Labs ethanol study seems to say they could grown 13,400 tons using only the ethanol from the original 10,000 tons of corn, but I don’t think it can be done. In fact, I have proposed such an experiment to Argonne and several ethanol energy companies, but all have rejected my idea. I suspect they are afraid of what the results would show.
The hard truth of corn ethanol production is that the more we concentrate our national energy policy on ethanol, the faster we consume the earth’s supply of fossil fuels.
Best,
SkyCowboy
All this energy-sink argument against ethanol sounds suspect to me. I remember being told ages ago that Brazil, unable to import fossil fuels for political reasons, ran all of its cars on ethanol.
If 1980s Brazil can make this work, why can’t 21st Century America?
And another thing - maybe the corn oil is best before distillation.
There was a scandal here in the UK as several people from some regions started running their diesel cars on vegetable oil, either from restaurants as per Da Bear’s post, or from the supermarket. This is illegal because it denies the government their tax money (here, petrol costs ~80p per litre => ~$4.50 / US gallon and 80% of this is tax).
However, you can always make it legal by going to a tax office and after they’ve stared in disbelief as you explain what it’s for, hand them a cheque (check). And apparently, the vegetable oil is still much cheaper, suggesting getting it into your car took less effort/energy than the equivalent fossilised oilternative. Engine performance stays roughly the same too.
All this from a renewable energy resource. Rather than the EU paying French farmers to grow stuff so we can throw it away, shouldn’t we be looking into this?
In fact, can anyone tell me if Biodiesel (which I’ve never heard of) is just vegetable oil, dispensed from a fuel pump?
Steve,
Because it doesn’t (didn’t) work in Brazil. The program in Brazil did get off to a great start when the Brazilian government pumped subsidies into it.
But guess what? As the program matured and the government withdrew the subsidies, the ethanol distilleries slowly started shutting down.
The fact that susbsidies are necessary at all, says all one needs to know about the efficiency of corn ethanol.
If corn ethanol production really returned 134% of the energy it consumes (as the Argonne Lab study says) it would be a license to print money and every company in the US would be jumping into the ethanol energy business. But insetad, the ethanol energy companies and their lobbyists all say their profits depend on continued subsidies.
Best,
SkyCowboy
I don’t think that’s a valid argument. The fact that every company isn’t “jumping into the ethanol business”, only proves that oil is still cheaper. It doesn’t prove that ethanol is negative efficient. And if we’re truly honest, shouldn’t the immense cost of U.S. military presence around the world to prop up friendly regimes in oil-producing countries be factored in?
There’s a lot of traffic here, so I’ll just post general bullets to a lot of other replies:
-Tractors don’t run on ethanol because diesel results in lower maintenance costs. Diesel-cycle engines are built stronger, and diesel fuel acts as a lubricant. Many engines are actually designed to use the fuel to lubricate critical parts, and will seize when run on anything else. When you’ve got hundreds of acres waiting to rot, tractor downtime will make or break you. In the long term, paying back the loan on a million-dollar tractor may also make or break you. Which is why the heavy-equipment industry is very conservative with engine technology.
-Engines in general aren’t tuned to run on ethanol from the factory because of cost. Petroleum products are too subsidized*, and with pumps too widely available, for ethanol to compete. Hence Flex-Fuel Vehicles (FFVs)- engines which can retune for any blend of gasoline or ethanol in a single tank, based on input from a fuel sensor. This is the first step in breaking the “chicken and egg” problem; next there’ll be some stations.
*Yes, petroleum is subsidized, which is why ethanol is subsidized. Ethanol profits depend on continued subsidies, until we eliminate petroleum subsidies, which ain’t gonna happen. But that’s another post.
-Running an ethanol plant on ethanol is pedagoguery. Nuclear plants don’t run on the electricity they generate. Note that in the Northeast blackout, many nuclear plants shut down and could not be restarted, because their loops could not be driven or primed without grid power. Ethanol is useful because it’s a storable, portable liquid, hence it goes to vehicles. Natural gas and coal are not, and generally don’t. That’s why they, and not ethanol, are burned in stationary facilities. As a previous poster said, we’re willing to pay for the convenience of AA batteries, regardless of whether or not they defy thermodynamics. For example: both Germany and Japan turned to ethanol when the Allies cut off their petroleum supplies (from Indonesia and the Balkans, respectively). In the '40s, primitive ethanol technology definitely resulted in a negative energy balance, yet these nations turned to it in a time of national emergency. Why? In Germany’s case, they had plenty of coal and wood. But coal and wood won’t run tanks, planes, and submarines… and coal was beginning to lose favor in surface ships. Ethanol is a dense liquid at room temperature and pressure, with high octane to boot. The ethanol processes convert strategically-poor energy sources into a high-value fuel. Notice that propane has none of these thermodynamic, pollution, or balance-of-trade issues- and it used to be even cheaper than gasoline. And yet, you don’t see propane vehicles everywhere, because its quasi-gaseous state leads to handling and storage issues that simply don’t exist with ethanol.
-There was an attempt at a “circular” ethanol facility. In Sully County, South Dakota, DVCC attempted to build a facility to produce ethanol from local corn. The spent mash (“distillers’ grains”) would be fed to cows on a feedlot. The cow manure would be anaerobically-digested into methane and fertilizer. The methane would power the ethanol plant, and the fertilizer sold back to farmers. Supplemental natural gas was still needed to make up losses- for one, the thousands of cows would be fed in a gigantic, climate-controlled shelter. Again, note that the methane generated would make a poor vehicular fuel, and would be burned on site, with no transport, compression, or storage. Unfortunately, the plant was not built, because gasoline prices were too low. The facility could not pay off the extra equipment planned, based on the price they’d get for the ethanol.
-The Brazil situation does not apply. Brazil produces its ethanol from sugarcane, which is a different beast entirely. It’s perennial, and mono/disaccharide instead of starchy. But like corn, sugar is dominated by national and international politics, so entire industries can be swept away by the stroke of a pen. For instance, the US imposed a heavy tariff on sugar. This was a windfall for Hawaiian sugar, the only state stable enough for domestic cultivation. Meanwhile it was a tremendous blow to the candy industry, which switched to corn syrup where it could, and raised prices where it couldn’t. Neither Hawaiian growers, nor mainland confectioners, had any technological or energy issues- nor did the Brazilian distillers.
-As another poster mentioned, biodiesel is an even better fuel. No biological or thermal conversion processes from the plant onwards. Unfortunately, the US fleet as a whole does not have that many diesel engines, so biodiesel only goes so far (sorry). In Europe, a large fraction of the vehicles are diesel, so biodiesel fuel might actually have a noticeable impact. In response to steve_jonesuk, biodiesel is not straight vegetable oil, it’s a split-off fraction of the oil molecule. This reduces the viscosity.
-I reiterate: the best fuel is no fuel, and Pimintel agrees with me. To a telecommuter or bicycle rider, the debate over petroleum vs ethanol is academic. (But not to a reservist.) And riding a bicycle converts corn directly :).
Rene Carlos
Yes, it costs money for our Department of Defense to keep open the lines of communication and sea lanes we use to get oil here.
But we only have to pay that because of the international security situation, not because the oil industry flouts the laws of thermodynamics.
Fossil fuels make thermodynamic sense because we let Mother Nature convert biomass to petroleum using millions of years of free heat and pressure.
Ethanol doesn’t make thermodynamic sense because we need to use lots of energy to compress those millions of years to a few months, and pay to provide the heat and pressure Mother Nature provides gratis.
Ethanol production would make thermodyamic sense if our corn farmers would grow the corn, bury it, and then wait 70 million years or so to let Mother Nature turn it into petroleum. Obviously we can’t do that, so instead the ethanol industry wants us to subsidize paying for energy to compress that time into a few months.
Best,
SkyCowboy
Madison, Wisconsin
Rene,
No it’s not. The ethanol industry likes to say the ethanol production cycle returns 134% of the energy put into it.
If that was really true, an ethanol production system could triple the original energy investment in slightly less than four cycles. What a great return on investment that would be. Why would an ethanol energy company need government subsidies if that were true?
And yes, if it were true, once an ethanol production plant got started*, it should be able to run itself on some fraction of the 34% excess it produces each cycle.
If that 134% figure were actually true, in only a few years the earth would be awash in energy, and we could drive the cost of energy down so far, it would be pointless to even spend money pumping oil out of the ground. We could let the Middle East go back to being a desert wasteland, and we could sell ethanol to them at less cost than it would take for them to pump oil from under their feet.
Don’t hold your breath. That 134% efficiency ratio isn’t (can’t) be true.
Best,
SkyCowboy
- I concede it would need energy in some other form to get the ethanol plant started.
Hello one and all. I am a long time reader, long time hesitator (at least on posting :>)
One of my close reletives works for the Australian Government (at the state level) in an area closely related to the promotion of renewable energy.
As such, they commisioned: CSIRO in association with The University of Melbourne the Centre for Design at RMIT Parsons Australia Pty Ltd and Southern Cross Institute of Health Research; to look into all the available options for petrol (gas??) replacements.
Anyone interested can read the 500+ pages of results can check out the final report:
http://www.greenhouse.gov.au/transport/comparison/index.html
I myself am much to lazy (lets face it I’m taking time out from work to read SD - that says something about my personal motivation skills), but I have it on good authority that the gist of the report cans the popular oppinion here that ethanol is rubbish. At least for production in Australia.
To put it in comparison, the ethanol industry in Aus is subsidised a little differently. Companies get a grant to set up the factory (based on expected output/year) and thats it. From then on they are completely unsubsidised. Most of them unlike their American compatriots are more than able to make a profit from producing ethanol from distressed corn.
The report DOES take into account the total energy/pollution requirements/output from the full production cycle of the ethonal creation process.
Looking forward to someone more motivated reading the thing 
That has nothing to do with the energy budget, but rather with the nature of dynamos.
That has nothing to do with the realities of ethanol production.
I’d like to point out, since i think many people are not grasping this, that ethanol subsidies and the efficiency of producing it are COMPLETELY unrelated issues. Even if ethanol did return 134% of the energy spent on making it, a lot of other costs such as labor could still make the end product expensive and incapable of competing in the marketplace against fossil fuels. Subsidies are required to lower its price so that people would actually buy it.
If you’re still not understanding this argument, consider that solar energy has a nearly infinite return on energy investment (after all, you’re not using any energy to let the solar panel lie under the sun), but the elecricity that is produced is still more expensive than fossil fuel alternatives and must therefore be subsidised if we are to help the environment.
Don’t confuse economics and enviromentalism, people (or politics, if this is about reducing our reliance on foreign oil).
Alex_Dubinsky has hit it right on the head. Even if there’s a 134% energy surplus from ethanol production these days, that’s ** ENERGY ABOVE AND BEYOND WHAT IT TOOK TO PRODUCE IT. It isn’t 134% profit, that’s for sure.
This does not mean that it’s anywhere near economical, just that it takes less energy to grow corn, transport, store, mill, ferment and distill that corn into a gallon of ethanol than the ethanol has in it.
Energy efficiency is measured in BTUs (or whatever SI measurement they use), while price is measured in monetary terms.
For example, a gallon of ethanol has 50,000 BTUs roughly, which at a 134% efficiency of production means that it only used up 37313 BTU in the production. That same gallon of ethanol may still cost $2 per gallon, making it uneconomical for motor fuel when compared to gasoline.
quote:
Ethanol doesn’t make thermodynamic sense because we need to use lots of energy to compress those millions of years to a few months, and pay to provide the heat and pressure Mother Nature provides gratis.
John W. Kennedy wrote:
That has nothing to do with the realities of ethanol production.
John,
It has everything to do with ethanol production.
When we use fossil fuels we take advantage of millions of years of free heat and pressure to convert biomass into petroleum.
When we make ethanol, we have to consume gobs of energy to compress those millions of years into a few months. If we could wait a few million years to let Mother Nature turn corn into fuel, we wouldn’t need to spend any money on added energy.
Best,
SkyCowboy
Alex,
I submit they ARE related. Any production system that operates at 134% efficiency does not need subsidies to be profitable.
The problem is that the ethanol industry is blowing smoke when they tout that 134% efficiency ratio. If that 134% was true (and how I wish it was) the United States would be awash in energy and every square inch of available land in the country would be planted in corn so landowners and ethanol companies could take advantage of that 34% increase each production cycle.
BTW: The Argonne Lab study the ethanol lobbyists base that number on was funded by the Illinois Department of Agriculture – an organization that has a vested interest in making sure Illinois corn farmers have a market.
Best,
SkyCowboy
SkyCowboy, your response has nothing to do with the point I was making. In fact, you seem to be missing virtually every one of the excellent points that have been made by renefast, Alex Dubinsky, bump, and others, and simply repeating the same things over and over even after they are refuted. Are you actually reading what people wrote?