As others mentioned, this is not a new finding. There is a lot of academic and industrial/economic analysis on this subject. Ethanol from corn was never a good idea economically for anyone other than corn farmers. It is also bad environmentally and places additional competitive demand on our food supply (choice and competition between corn going into food or fuel supply).
Similar analysis has been done on other crop feed-stocks (switch grass, etc.) and none of the analysis has shown that crop derived ethanol is a good idea.
I'm not a leading expert on this subject by any means, but I am a PhD chemical engineer and did a lot of research into alternative fuels science and economics about ten years ago. I'm not up on the latest research and analysis but the fundamental thermodynamics and carbon cycles of crop-based ethanol have not changed much in the past ten years or so.
It is surprising how much politics and law can affect what is grown where. The US-Canada border cuts right across the prairies. Conditions are pretty much identical in northern North Dakota and southern Manitoba. Yet the border is clearly visible on some maps of agricultural yield:
Though lots of ethanol in Canadian gasoline too. Hard to find any without 10% ethanol, even in jurisdictions with limited corn growing.
What caused that?
Or do the US subsidies on corn make it cost effective for Canadians to burn ethanol? If so, where’s my cheap E85? I’d run it in my old Corolla and see what happens.
Do you really think they would have put those “flex fuel” badges on cars if they all could run E85 without problems?
From my interwebs knowledge you need a fuel sensor (to tell the percentage of ethanol) and an ECU that can take advantage of the different fuel blendings.
So, yeah, maybe not a dead car but definitely not an efficient one.
yes, I do think car vendors would affix stickers implying that existing features are actually new additions (worth paying extra for). I don't know if that's true in this case, but I don't think it's an argument either way.
There are several factors in addition to ethanol, right? US livestock feed is primarily maize, but is that true in Canada? And the US has nearly 10x as many cattle. It seems like regulations are the primary driver in the border split, but not all of the regulations are about ethanol (also, Canada uses corn to make ethanol, too, in some areas).
I think that has more to do with getting away from Iowa and New Hampshire since those states have shown a surprising level of support for candidates outside of the preferred establishment picks.
The preferred establishment picks still have to win. Biden didn't do well in Iowa in 2020, though potentially because Biden's Iowa campaign was run very poorly. [1]
On the other hand if a primary chooses a candidate that ultimately produces a winner in the general election, they probably should go first the next time.
Iowa didn't vote for Bill Clinton in 1992. But as it was for Biden, it was after Iowa where Clinton got momentum (in Clinton's case Georgia). [2]
> which is why the Democratic Party changed it under cover of starting with "a more diverse state"
It wasn’t because they care about offending farmers or removing ethanol subsidies, it was so that Biden can lock down some early primary wins in 2024 with States with a higher percentage of black voters.
The 2024 changes, inasmuch as they are about specific elections and not the general long-term arc of the party, are about 2028 more than 2024. No one is expecting a significantly contested nominating contest when the party has an incumbent President seeking reelection.
The prediction markets on PredictIt have the Democrats winning at 52 cents, and the Republicans at 50 cents. You should expect the election to be quite close.
I’m talking about the Demcoratic nomination contest, not the general election, but even in the latter case I would expect prediction markets odds of victory more than a year out to have very weak, if any correlation, to margin of victory. Heck, I don’t know of any research showing that prediction markets far from elections are even good at predicting odds.
Meh, if you look at the Candle for 90d you can see the high/low for Nov3,4th of the 2020 election [1]. There's so much volatility in that data its hard it's hard to consider this an accurate predicator for 2024.
The volume for 2024 is also so low compared to 2020 so I don't think you can use the current 2024 predictions as evidence.
Incumbents do have an advantage, but I wouldn't say they aren't expecting a significant contested election. Trump was the incumbent, and it was a pretty aggressively contested.
> Incumbents do have an advantage, but I wouldn’t say they aren’t expecting a significant contested election
I’ve clarified the grandparent: I was referring to the nominating contest (the aggregate of primary elections and caucuses that are addressed by the schedule change being discussed), not the general election.
everybody is jumping down GP's throat here by focusing on the word "Biden".
him saying they're doing it to lock in Biden (their mainstream/establishment frontrunner) in large early primaries in 2024 (the next election) is not really different from saying they're doing it to lock in their mainstream/establishment frontrunner in large early primaries in future elections to avoid the kind of "self destructive" internecine primary battles with fringe candidates like Bernie Sanders--yes, he was very popular, but his views are to one side of the Democratic party which is to one side of the Republican party which makes his views part of the fringe in the uniform tapestry of views--which have taken place for many years.
Not saying it's right or wrong, just saying GP's analysis holds together as part of the larger analysis everybody here seems to be basing their thinking on.
> him saying they’re doing it to lock in Biden (their mainstream/establishment frontrunner) in large early primaries in 2024 (the next election) is not really different from saying they’re doing it to lock in their mainstream/establishment frontrunner in large early primaries in future elections
Yes, it is.
Because it refers to specific geographic strengths that Biden had as a candidate, not strengths that are uniformly typical of establishment-preferred Democratic candidates.
(Now if, instead of referring to Biden’s particular and unique strengths that correlate with the change, they had said that it was to lock in estanlishment candidates by moving some larger, more expensive states to campaign in forward, and that that establishment support was more key in campaigning in those states – a weak but at least superficially plausible argument – that would be different. But “states with a higner percentage of black voters” are…a different thing.
oh my sweet summer child, The Democrats have been trying to reduce/eliminate the influence of Iowa and New Hampshire for many years. The reason it's not likely that primaries seasons would be changed solely for a particular candidate is that a party will need to "live with" the result for some time to come, they're not going to be able to rearrange it every election.
South Carolina Democrats, black and white, are much more toward the center of the overall electorate, which is where the national campaigns shift their focus after running left and right in their respective D and R primaries. It is not Biden's specific strength that matters, because it was also the reason "Super Tuesday" was created many years ago to benefit the establishment candidate (Walter Mondale at the time)* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Tuesday#1984:_Beginnings...
And black voters are (or have been) reliably Democrat, which benefits all Democrat candidates, not particular to do with Biden (or Bill Clinton) though they did enjoy outsized black support. Saying the first primary is being moved "to make the electorate look like America" is designed to shut up the Left, who would scream bloody murder if they said "putting this state first is an establishment move because SC is not so left wing" It takes an "establishment move" to change the primaries because the state parties have to change it in the local places with cooperation or opposition from the other party in those states.
* a much younger Biden was a candidate back then too but when, as an English coalminer's great-grandson, Biden's support was centered in the UK so nobody in the US was doing him huge political favors)**
**this is a tongue-in-cheek reference to Biden plagiarizing Niel Kinnock's speech which knocked him out of the 1992 race https://archive.ph/idkaA
If absolute fairness were the reason for change ALL parties that primary would do so by some algorithm that's transparent.
E.G. 5 Primary waves (Tuesdays/weeks/months) sorted by the 10 states with the least population to the most population.
Why? It's a better rough approximation for a representative sample over an increasingly large window of voters than the current process, and still keeps any benefit of ramping up from smaller to larger populations to narrow overall selection in the field. Plus the algorithm is so simple that it can be outlined in a sentence.
There’s some logistical issues as some States run the elections so the individual parties can’t pick their own primary dates (unless they pay for themselves which I think they’re loathe to do).
Assuming parties could pick the primary border, I think it’d be most advantageous to pick the States sorted by the absolute value of the win/loss percentage for a given state. That way highly contested States get an earlier say in the process and presumably a candidate that is more favorable in those markets comes out ahead earlier in the process.
I'll take any change over usurping Iowa (though IMO New Hampshire actually functions quite well historically as the first primary based on my recollections, I think the worst that happens is that a small state gets good roads), but going small population to large population kinda still "discriminates" against large urban centers.
I think an established rotation would be better, and at least a medium sized state rotating in the "first wave".
> If you’re going to change it, why don’t do the primary on the same day like any other country?
It is not true that “every other country” has parties select their presidential (or nearest equivalent, whether as head of state or head of government, other countries frequently divorcing those roles) candidate by simultaneous national elections. Sometimes, they don’t even (in a legal sense) choose a candidate at all, though the party may have its own process of deciding and announcing who its members responsible for the leadership election (e.g., MPs in Westminster-style system) will vote for should they secure the necessary majority to decide the outcome on their own.
In fact, I couldn’t off the top of my head name even a single country that uses a national simultaneous primary to select party nominees for election head of government or head of state, can you?
In Argentina, by law, the candidates for all national elections for all parties are selected by las PASO (mandatory simultaneous open primaries), which are national simultaneous elections. I don't know if there are many other such countries, but there's one.
How is the US worse than other countries where the majority-party apparatus selects the country's leader with no involvement of the electorate? Just look at the prime ministers the UK has cycled through
to date with no elections.
Selecting a head of government through the electoral college is less democratic than one elected person from every riding deciding who is the leader collectively.
Just because it was a plot point on the West Wing in 2006 doesn't make it reality. Iowa is not a kingmaker, and it's not even the first state in the primary season for Democrats anymore.
It's really just more mundane: BigAg is powerful and our representatives take their money.
I think the democratic party is upset that everyone wasn't going along with the superdelegates who really have the first votes. They want to choose their candidate and go through the motions of a primary.
It's been speculated the reason they shifted to SC was to favor President Biden's
The one thing the Iowa caucus did was make it easier for grassroots candidates. If they hadn't bungled the caucus so badly in 2020 for example, Pete Buttigieg would have had a better shot at it like Obama in '08 (he won the caucus, but we didn't find out for weeks!).
We subsidize corn for the same reason we subsidize oil and are starting to subsidize the semiconductor industry.
If we didn't subsidize food, we'd be importing a lot of food. In the event of war, famine, plague, etc, we don't want to be without a supply of food, fuel and now electronics.
> Can solar and goats and wind and IDK algae+co2 make up the difference?
Can row covers etc be made from corn; from cellulose and what other sustainable inputs (ideally that are waste outputs)?
Compostable thermoformable biopolymers for food packaging
FWIU transparent wood "windows" are made out of treated cellulose? How do they compare with glass and plastic in terms of transparency for full spectrum UV for e.g. plant growth, sanitization, and vitamin D?
> Is solar laser weeding a more sustainable approach?
>> The unmanned system (robot) is well suited for weeding operations, and it helps to minimize the required workforce and herbicide usage while weeding. Two solar-powered weeders, EcoRobot and AVO robot models, are developed by Ecorobotix, Switzerland (Figure 2). These models work more effectively in row crops based on the detection of weeds (>85%), and a herbicides is applied precisely on the weeds to destroy them. The solar power used in EcoRobot and AVO models is 380 W and 1150 W, respectively, and they have a working time of 8 and 12 h once fully charged by solar panels [64].
> What rotations improve the compost and soil situation?
Is there any particular reason why another state hasn't snubbed Iowa yet and moved their caucus/primary up? Granted, it would cause a chain reaction but...
Correction: W did this to give more power to agribusinesses and large-scale farmers who were drifting towards democratic socialism.
The market price is destabilized and undercut by government subsidies who put most farmers in the unenviable position of taking corporate welfare in order to make a living.
If the government got out of the business of picking winners and losers, and deciding who to rain money on and who to starve, the corn would be more expensive and sugar cane would be cheaper.
I don't have any credentials on the topic but I've tracked Ethanol inefficiencies for years in my vehicle. I tow often (between 3000-7000lbs) and my tow vehicle has the capability to run up to 15% ethanol. On average, over the last 7 years, I will lose on average 30% tow range and significant power loss at 10% ethanol. Ethanol has rarely ever been cost effective but it's also harder on engine components because of the less efficient power cycle and quicker buildup in the downpipe of the turbo system in my vehicle.
I monitor other engine vitals with an OBD reader while towing and my engine cycles through thermals faster when running Ethanol as well - the engine gets hotter faster because Ethanol burns hotter, but the BTU output is less - leaving me with that less efficient power cycle.
Overall Ethanol is a complete detriment to any and all IC operations. And don't even think about using Ethanol in any 2 stroke motor. Not only will it basically destroy your motor in record time but it's the worst type of fuel for fuel delivery systems that may not be used on a daily basis.
Ethanol and all the ridiculous subsidies tied to it are one of the biggest rackets out there. It's been known from the beginning that the only thing it's good for is wasting valuable crop land. If it were actually useful we wouldn't need to continue to subsidize corn production for its use decades later.
> places additional competitive demand on our food supply (choice and competition between corn going into food or fuel supply).
I'm not sure this is the case. The vast majority of corn is field corn grown for silage anyway. The ethanol extraction process leaves a mash which is then fed to cows. Given the soil conditions, corn and soybeans will likely remain the most profitable cash crops so unless subsidies are created for other crop types not much would change. My perspective from living in Iowa for 2/3rds of my life.
My statement you quoted above was super 'hand wavy', but it is a mass & energy balance situation.
Ethanol production from corn, corn stover, or whatever (you can tell I'm not a farmer), removes carbon & energy from the "farm field system" that would otherwise stay in/on the field, be tilled or decompose into soil, and end up in next years' corn (or the year after that, etc.). It makes the farming cycle less efficient from a carbon management perspective and, as others have mentioned, that means more fertilizer, etc. to make up for the carbon loss. Without increased fertilizer use and general land management... crop production would decline year over year as result of removing plant material for ethanol production.
Also... one could imagine corn breeding and propagation scenarios in a 'field corn' field where (a) silage is maximized for feeding cows and (b) a trade off between silage and stover is made to maximize overall profit.
So there does end up being a competition between (1) optimizing for efficient food production and soil management and (1) optimizing for maximum profit. The second option does diminish food production unless made up for by there means.
Still not a great explanation. I don't have any references to share but there are some good review articles out there that talk about this in detail.
Part 2:
I was "sort-of" conflating corn with other crops for biofuel production. I should not have done that. My statement that ethanol production from corn "places additional competitive demand on our food supply" might not be completely true in a high-impact sense. But ethanol production from corn does still impact food production and land-use as described in part 1.
In the case where a crop like switch grass is cultivated specifically for biofuel production... here we would definitely have a case where there is competition for use of arable land, a finite resource, between biofuel production and food production.
That's a poor justification for the current regulatory regime in which ethanol in gas is mandated. If MTBE or TEL then they should be banned. If regular gasoline doesn't have enough octane, it should be up to the market to figure out which octane booster should be used, rather than the government enforcing use of ethanol by decree.
The fact that the current regulatory regime hasn't forced the use of an octane booster that is acutely toxic is more of a case of a broken clock being right twice a day than it being good policy. I would even argue that in this case, the broken clock isn't even "right". As the OP points out, use of ethanol has negative consequences as well, and the fact that its use is mandated basically gets rid of any incentive to come up with a better octane booster.
Ok, but one broken clock is easier to manage than a dozen broken clocks that are also potentially malevolent. At least all cars are tuned for the same type of fuel, and it would theoretically be easier to migrate all infrastructure from one formula to another as we did with lead.
How would auto manufacturers manage their cars' fuel systems if every station could potentially have a different octane booster? How do all those cars switch over to an entirely different formula when a bunch of those octane boosters are found to have issues?
Personally, I think the industry needs an R&D consortium to look into better technologies that all shareholders can use. Federal input and regulation, but the companies are free to work together to find better solutions for the environment and our health.
This should be the highest rated response to the parent because it's overwhelmingly used as a low octane fuel booster additive, not a fuel.
If you have 85 gasoline and need to get it to 87, you blend it with an appropriate quantity of ethanol (octane rating 108.6, thanks for the correction).
pure ethanol according to wikipedia has an octane rating of 108 on the scale that's normally referred to. 100 is the octane of a particular isomer of the hydrocarbon C8H18 which is called... octane!
and for people not familiar with the subject, the purpose of an octane booster is to make your fuel less explosive (even though the point of your fuel is to be exploded to release it's energy) The problem with low octane fuels is not that they have lower energy, but that when you compress them they can explode prematurely (before you're ready to collect the energy) and compressing them is a way to get more energy out of an engine. Ethanol is less explodey, and so is tetraethyl lead.
Carbons are the little black spheres with 4 equidistant holes, and hydrogens are the smaller white ones with a single hole.
And you've got all the little somewhat-flexible rods to act as chemical bonds and connect the different carbon and hydrogen atoms in any combination you like.
Octane is a generic name for most any combination you can legitimately make out of C8H18. Any of these is referred to as an octane isomer.
If you put all 8 carbons in a straight row and "saturate" the remaing holes with the 18 hydrogens, this straight-chain form in particular is referred to as Octane proper, or more descriptively to avoid confusion, normal-octane since it is a straight-chain isomer.
This normal- or n-octane is not the stuff that burns with a very good antiknock rating at all.
The one particular branched-chain C8H18 isomer having the proper name 2,2,4-trimethylpentane is the one that serves as a calibration fluid for laboratory antinock determination. Even though there are many other branched-chain C8H18 isomers possible, this one is the most commonly obtainable and carries the generic name "Iso-octane".
Actually most of the time it costs more for oil companies to purchase the ethanol than it would for them to use smother burning hydrocarbons which they already have access to in larger quantities.
It does have one plausible benefit which is managing crop overproduction (supply demand mismatches) because if the market is glutted, converting some of the production in ethanol or similar long-lasting products is not a bad idea.
As the basis of a fuel supply, it's a very poor idea.
There is competitive demand with food supply but that is the point. If we did not have surplus corn produced, the USA would be very vulnerable to food disruptions. Because as we saw during COVID, business supply chains are only optimized to current demand without disaster. So if there is another channel to purchase corn it creates more demand and keeps excess production going at a price that is still possible to produce at.
If the USA suddenly had a food crisis, the ethanol production could be stopped.
> If the USA suddenly had a food crisis, the ethanol production could be stopped.
Could it? 99% of corn grown (including that used for ethanol) isn’t the sweet corn for eatin. Would take a while to switch and I’m guessing there isn’t much excess capacity for turning it all into corn syrup and such.
COVID couldn’t even figure out how to redirect institutional toilet paper into consumer toilet paper. And that’s the same product!
The real buffer for a “food crisis” (whatever that is) is the amount of crop fed to livestock and food exported, not ethanol.
>COVID couldn’t even figure out how to redirect institutional toilet paper into consumer toilet paper. And that’s the same product!
Did the TP "shortage" actually get bad enough that a non-negligible portion of the population had nothing to wipe their bums with? Regardless, starving is much more dire than having nothing to wipe with. If people were actually starving, I'm sure they would have no issues eating field corn intended for animal consumption.
It’s not so much corn farmers as the operators of the ethanol plants who benefit. Lots of funds and support and mandates for their products to be bought.
Various things will always be done to prop up commodity prices for American farmers, if not ethanol then something else.
Ethanol is great for gas stations too. Your tank doesn’t go as far so you need to visit them more often.
Dunno how the complaints about ethanol = bad because it’s hygroscopic really are. Yeah, 100% ethanol will pull in atmospheric h2o, but in a gasoline+ethanol mix?
If anything, a small bit of ethanol helps “break the phase” and at least runs any moisture through your engine instead of a separate layer which is surely worse. Dunno if any unscrupulous gas stations/suppliers deliberately water down their ethanol laden gas just to earn some extra margin.
This was a problem when ethanol first appeared in large percentages for a few years until proper materials were included in engineering specifications for things like fuel pumps & hoses.
Some conventional wisdom about not putting alcohol into your gasoline does go way back to the Model T days, it was widely regarded as safest just to not do it, since you can't be sure how much water is in the alcohol.
I was under the impression that corn ethanol was effectively solar energy because corn turns sunlight and carbon into biomass then we burn the biomass back to atmospheric carbon. Isn't that the fundamentals? Is there a big, basic reason it doesn't work or is it lots of little side effects? Thanks for weighing in.
One other big, basic reason from early school Biology you are missing is the Nitrogen Cycle. Earth crops are not particularly efficient at fixating Carbon into biomass and generally need plenty of other mineral inputs such as potassium and phosphorous and zinc and especially Nitrogen. Nitrogen alone is an interesting problematic "inefficiency" because Nitrogen wants to be a gas at Earth pressures/temperatures (like Carbon) and so also needs to be fixated and plants very rarely have evolved that sort of fixation directly, instead relying on "the Nitrogen Cycle" to (eventually) fixate it into soils.
One of the things humanity has done as it has industrialized agriculture (to deal with the time issue of that "eventually") is that it has industrialized "the Nitrogen Cycle" as much as it can, and in so doing added a lot of additional Carbon inefficiencies to how we fixate Nitrogen for use by our crops. Modern crops couldn't grow at the same industrial scales without modern fertilizers, but modern fertilizers generally don't exist without massive carbon subsidies.
The fundamental reason is producing ethanol from corn requires quite a lot of energy; for cooking the mash and distilling the final product. If the cycle was entirely ethanol "all the way down" it could be carbon nuetral although using ethanol for production would detract from the "total efficiency". Invariably other fuels are used in production.
I went through the math a few years ago from the perspective of "micro power plants" for powering BTC mining. Coal is the winner from a cost perspective; but terribly dirty obviously. And capital intensive. Burning corn as fuel to a high efficiency boiler is actually more efficient than ethanol.
Put simply, the land is fertilized with petrochemical fertilizers that come from oil and have a heavy carbon Footprint, the automated equipment that harvests it and moves it to the processor burns a lot of diesel. It's not as if the corn just springs up, there are costs.
I have a weekend car that is supercharged. E85 is a lot cheaper than race fuel.
It has a benefit in the more efficient forced induction engines as seen many foreign automobiles.
I think this has been well established for years. I remember seeing some studies circa 2008 showing that more energy in the form of diesel and fossil fuel derived fertilizer went into corn ethanol than you get out in usable fuel. It has always been an agricultural subsidy.
Those are not the same gasoline. Ethanol is high octane and so you mix it with a much worse grade of gasoline and get the same octane. E0 advocates attribute to lack of ethanol what is really just the better grade of gas.
That’s an issue if you’re running E100. Gas+ethanol blends will dramatically reduce ethanol’s hygroscopicity.
But if water is getting into your fuel (focus on fixing that, not your fuel choice), isn’t it better if the ethanol can carry it through the engine instead of just accumulating as a separate layer?
Nothing scientific but on motorcycle forums I used to frequent people often blamed E15 for seals swelling up and no longer working. I can’t say if that’s the cause but I did have a face gasket between the fill neck and tank expand. After sitting out for a few days it shrunk back to its original shape.
It's not like lead-free and eathanol-free gas is devoid of anti-knock agents... for much of those decades MTBE was used which was part of a groundwater contamination scandal.
Wikipedia has an interesting article on the subject @
Octane is a measure of the relatives ratios of the octane molecule with some other (I can never remember which). 100 octane means the fuel acts in your engine the same as fuel made from 100% octane molecule. 0 octane means it acts like 100% the other, 90 octane mean it acts like a mix of 90% octane and 10% the other.
You can go below 0 or above 100 if you find some other molecule/mix that acts worse/better, though how you extrapolate beyond the 0-100 range is subject to debate, confusion and deception. Ethanol is clearly better than pure octane, though how much depends on how you choose to extend the scale.
There’s also the issue of how/what exactly you’re measuring. There are two different scales that result in European readings being several points higher (eg US 93 is ~ Euro 98)
I find ethanol actually increases knocking in all of my engines. Switched to ethanol free years ago and I recall it made a difference in performance and mileage.
It will take time for the computer in the car to detect the ethanol and switch to a high ethanol fuel map. In the mean time, the engine is going to run pretty lean, since more ethanol is required than gasoline for the same volume of air. Running too lean usually causes the engine to buck and shake pretty badly.
This, of course, assumes that the car is even capable of running higher ethanol blends.
The performance benefits are mostly from turbocharged engines. Though, Chevy V8s can see solid torque gains over 4000 RPMs.
Once you get into the E50+ blends, you should have seen a huge mileage reduction. 10-20% for E50 and 25+% on E85. There's so much less energy density in ethanol.
Unless your car has a turbocharger or other means to run a higher compression ratio and thus take advantage of the higher octane of ethanol fuel. I've seen this done in lab and garage settings (they typically don't retain the ability to run regular gasoline), but I'm not aware of any commercially available engine that does. Race settings similar things as well, but they are trying to get power not fuel efficiency and so you can't get a fair fuel efficiency measure.
GM cars run separate tuning maps for E85 and E15 with an ethanol sensor to help the engine decide which to use.
You're not going to see the insane power gains possible on E85 from the factory though because the E85 map needs to be conservative enough to no blow up if someone suddenly fills up with regular.
> I'm not aware of any commercially available engine that does
Engines with knock sensors and advanced valve timing + phasing can do that. Source: mine does, stock '08 K20 engine, which has a very wide operational RPM range, so these things matter.
That's such a small difference it could literally just be that it's a slightly richer setting because E85 needs a higher fuel ratio for Stoichiometric burning.
Just like if you try run a gasoline engine on alcohol without adjusting the fueling it'll be too lean and knock if it runs at all, you'll be too lean with sufficient ethanol in the gasoline without adjustment.
But they're still higher octane fuels. E85 is specifically sought out for this purpose in the gearhead scene, so they can run high boost getting something alcohol-like at the pump.
Lots of anecdata of people running their regular vehicles on E85 without issues.
Lots of theoretical concerns “omg, you’re not following the owner’s manual, god is going to blow up your engine and kill 4 kittens”, but either nobody has blown an engine or hasn’t admitted to it.
Plenty of parts of the world where E85 is substantially cheaper than E10 (e.g. France where it’s ~43% cheaper) where I’m sure lots of people are running it or various mixes.
Yes I remember corn based ethanol, among other alternatives for liquid fuel production, were hot topics during the Bush Administration. If I recall correctly an issue of NatGeo/SciAm/NewSci wrote that it wouldn't achieve it's goals or benefits and there better avenues such as algae to explore and I believe at least for Brazil, further sugar cane waste utilization. It always struck me as odd to see we've stayed the course on this approach when even in the beginning the numbers weren't adding up.
The DOE lists three benefits - energy security, jobs and offset carbon emissions. If the net carbon one turns out to be bogus, the other two benefits remain
Jobs for the jobs god is just the broken window fallacy though. If employing people in ethanol production is hastening the ruination of our environment, lets just give them money not to do that instead.
Mostly it pulls those people away from more economically productive activities. What might those farmers otherwise plant? What about the associated ag businesses? Surely they wouldn't evaporate. And the ethanol processing plants could probably make other distilled products for industrial use.
> The research, which was funded in part by the National Wildlife Federation and U.S. Department of Energy
Can't imagine there's any conflict of interest there.
> ethanol is likely at least 24% more carbon-intensive than gasoline due to emissions resulting from land use changes to grow corn, along with processing and combustion.
The nice thing about words like "likely" is that it leaves the door open for the other thing. Did the study find that ethanol is more carbon-intensive, or is it someone's opinion that it's more intensive?
I don't see how this adds up. As the article mentions, the carbon atoms in ethanol came from the atmosphere to which it returns. Yet not all of the carbon even makes it back. But the mere tilling of the soil puts ethanol somewhere worse than fossil fuels?
By that logic, we'd better stop farming crops all together.
> Tilling fields releases carbon stored in soil, while other farming activities, like applying nitrogen fertilizers, also produce emissions.
And we're to assume that, without the production of fuel ethanol, the same land wouldn't be tilled and used for other crops?
What is the nature of the carbon in that soil? Is it carbon that is constantly making its way up through the soil and into the atmosphere? Does stable isotope testing corroborate that it's a meaningful contributor to the global increase in atmospheric CO2?
The research article is located here: <https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2101084119>; if you're interested in what "likely" means in this context, it may be beneficial to read through the article. My understanding is that the "likely" comes from it being an estimate using models, as the research article states.
> Substituting our empirically derived domestic emissions for those modeled in the RFS RIA would raise ethanol’s projected life cycle GHG emissions for 2022 to 115.7 g CO2e MJ−1—a value 24% above baseline gasoline (93.1 g CO2e MJ−1). The RIA estimate, however, includes improvements in feedstock and ethanol production efficiency that were projected to occur by 2022, such that the GHG intensity of ethanol produced at earlier time periods and over the life of the RFS to date is likely much higher [...].
My understanding is that they took the model used in the RFS RIA (when the RFS was first introduced), and plugged in what they've seen over the past few years to that model. Take that with what you will.
> And we're to assume that, without the production of fuel ethanol, the same land wouldn't be tilled and used for other crops?
With the increase in demand for corn for fuel usage, more fields are needed to plant the corn. Because the corn is for fuel, not food, food wouldn't have been planted in place of the corn had there not been fuel demand.
> With the increase in demand for corn for fuel usage, more fields are needed to plant the corn. Because the corn is for fuel, not food, food wouldn't have been planted in place of the corn had there not been fuel demand.
Spent corn used in ethanol production becomes livestock feed. Good quality feed, actually. Even with a surplus of spent corn, it can be dried and kept around until needed. Point being that it actually is food, just by proxy. More fields may be needed to scale for demand, but it wouldn't be linear. For all we know, the scale of corn production has a modest relationship with ethanol or is correlative and weakly causative.
Plowing the soil is a terrible thing to do. Which is why no farmer has done it since around 1980. Modern tilling is much better for the soil, and doesn't release as much carbon form the soil (it needs more power from the tractor, and thus more CO2 from fuel, but still a lot less carbon total because the soil is saved.
The above is also why GMO crops are so great for the environment: by using a little roundup (just a little - not only is it a mist sprayed, but that mist is mostly water) much less fuel is used vs cultivating (think mechanical hoe).
>Plowing the soil is a terrible thing to do. Which is why no farmer has done it since around 1980.
Thats just not true. Plenty of farmers still plough. There has been some movement to lower disturbance low-till/ minimum-till systems for commodity crops, but we're still seeing soil carbon losses in agricultural soils in general. Number isn't going up and to the right, its still going down and to the left. I appreciate the importance of these kinds of systems, but I also appreciate that its not nearly as well adopted as one would think based on a survey of youtube videos. There is a very real departure from the Internets vision of farming and real-life farming in terms of practice.
I do agree however that carbon in the soils is the answer to most problems. The closest thing I came to witnessing a fist fight at work was between two 50+ yo scientists regarding aluminium/ alumina ions and their relationship with soil carbon. If geriatric scientsits are willing to raise fisticuffs over it, you should wonder why they care so much.
Plouging is a specific subset of tilling. Many farmers till, but it is a very different type of tool that is a lot better for the soil. No-till and limited till are very common as well, and there are government programs encouraging them.
It is worse than you probably think because of the fertilizer, transportation of crops (and operating farm machinery), drying of crops, fermentation to ethanol, and (perhaps most brutally) distillation to high enough grade to mix with hydrophobic gasoline.
I was doing reviews of at least a half dozen studies of this that dated back to the mid '00s, back then the most optimistic studies were around 1.3 joules of ethanol for 1 joule for extraction (which excludes the sunlight). Meaning you're burning 1 joule of gasoline to farm and transport and manufacture 1.3 joules of ethanol. But the pessimistic estimates from then were also below 1, meaning that you literally use more petrochemicals to support growing the crop than the crop produces in finished fuel.
Whether it's breakeven, a little positive, or a little negative we've known for a long time that it's marginal at best, thus the interest in cellulosic ethanol. Whether it's 0.7 joules out or 1.3 joules out per joule in depends on assumptions like how far you need to transport things and how dry the crops start. There's no way to avoid that uncertainty.
That whether it's positive, unity, or negative is sensitive to these variables is a statement of just how marginal it is. It should just be positive, always, or what are we doing? Confusingly, some oil wells are barely breakeven because they use so much energy to build the well and process the fuel.
You can follow the citations inside this article, but, for instance:
> Resulting EROI is typically around 1.4-1.5 [for shale oil].
So every 1.4-1.5 joules of shale oil you burn required 1 joule of other energy to extract. Net it produces only 0.4-0.5 joules of free energy after extraction, and that's... well, arguably not actually enough to operate a civilization but let's not go there.
Corn ethanol has been a scam and known to be one for a very long time. Shale oil is marginally less of a scam, but is truly hard to justify compared to PV solar or wind which both easily exceed 4 and 34 depending on the details.
But no, variation in the estimated EROEI is entirely normal and expected because different sites have different details.
Of course its Dr. Lark again. He's been contradicting USDA for years.
There's something like 12+ PH.ds who are working in this field and create papers consistently. 11 of them agree, and then Dr. Lark comes out and disagrees.
Every couple of years, Dr. Lark comes out with a new set of studies that contradicts everyone else. And then the news organizations / hacker news around here focuses on what Dr. Lark says rather than what the other 11 guys say.
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I don't necessarily want to demean Dr. Lark or his work. But people need to have context here. This guy is anti-Biofuel, and has been since the early 00s (maybe earlier).
I'm not 100% sure what to do about this problem per se. Contrarian professors are important parts of the scientific process. Someone like Dr. Lark is very important to making sure that everyone's i's are dotted and t's are crossed.
But the general "media" picks up on the contrarian, and uses that as "Entire field is wrong, everybody is wrong" and shouts it from the rooftops. Rather than... you know... rightfully pointing out that they're focused on the contrarian.
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We need contrarians like Dr. Lark. But we don't need media overly focusing upon contrarians and highlighting their specific research as if its the mainstream in the field.
See yall in 2 years when Dr. Lark publishes another contradictory paper, like he always does.
Who is funding who here? Is Dr. Lark being funded by the fossil fuel industry? Are the 11 other scientists being funded by 'big corn' or the USDA itself? Does the USDA/'big corn' have a revolving door situation where the USDA scientists have come from and maintain ties to industry?
Dr. Lark's contribution, is that he has correctly identified holes in everyone else's research on a somewhat consistent basis. Sometimes you need an outsider to see the flaws in your methodology.
Dr. Lark in particular brought up the issue of land use changes: how forests get cut down, release a lot of carbon, and then farmland is made over the forests. He has legitimate points, and releases calculations and research to show how it changes the biofuels numbers.
Yes, its exaggerated at times and then the counter-points come out, but the push back-and-forth is necessary to advance the field. And we actually have technology that answers questions that Dr. Lark poses. IIRC, Argonne National Labs took satellite photos over the USA, measured how many forests got converted into farms using AIs, and ran the numbers.
The discussion going on is very high level and sophisticated, modern, and high tech. This is a field (and discussion) to be proud of as an American.
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What I'm cynical about is how the media treats these discussions. They want to invent problems where there are no problems. Instead of pointing out what most of the researchers agree on, today's media focuses on what the singular, most extreme member of a group disagrees with everyone else about.
I wonder about that. Let’s take wood pellets, the largest market of which being converted coal-fired plants in Britain and Germany.
Texas and North Carolina produce them for export. Under perfect conditions, waste sawdust becomes pellets but it’s understood in those states that old-growth timber is used.
Shelled corn burns hotter than wood, and biomass pellet stoves make up a marginal part of the domestic heating market. For export, where heating and power generation are disrupted by war, shipping that corn seems a good transitional step without the harm associated with somehow discovering new sources of wood pellets.
Intuitively this seems wrong. The explanation in the article doesn't seem convincing. Any form of synthetic fuel that doesn't take more carbon out of the Earth should be better, no?
Compared to the alternative, though? The corn will be grown either way.
It's not hard to see 100 bushel per acre swings in corn yield between growing years even within normal growing parameters, never mind times of crop catastrophes. While everyone hopes for a good year every year, you can't plan for a good year. As such, there will always be times where there is way more corn than we can handle.
Which is what happened in 2006. A lot of corn, having busted the bins and having no home, was left out to rot. Ethanol subsidies were introduced in 2007 to build out more ethanol plants to provide a greater buffer in excess times when the regular corn market can't absorb it all so that we aren't both burning gasoline and letting the corn rot away to nothing.
I don't recall ethanol ever being considered better for the climate in a vacuum. It was only ever thought to be when you take reality into account.
When your turn corn into ethanol there is a byproduct "distiller grains" that is fed to animals. This is feed we would have to grow in some form anyway.
Saying "the corn will be grown anyway" is not done in good faith. The corn is grown because it is profitable to do so. Remove subsidies and the corn will not be grown - something else that is profitable will be grown.
Of course it is profitable to do so. There is a large market for it, from animal feed, to sugar, to tortillas, to many things in between.
The trouble is that it's unpredictable how big the crop will be before planting. As mentioned before, yields can vary quite significantly from year to year. As such, you will have periods of excess where we don't have enough storage for it all. Ethanol was promoted as a way to clean up those excesses before they turn to waste, recapturing some of fuel that was put into its growth initially.
On the other hand, US soybean acres have grown by essentially the same amount over the same period (63.78M in 1983, 87.45M in 2022). It is well understood that soybeans and corn are kept in the same rotation for a lot of practical and ecological reasons, so how are you establishing that it isn't excess as a byproduct of producing other crops? None of this happens in a vacuum.
(The expression is not to be read literally. 'Citation needed', widespread after Wikipedia, rhetorically points to that idea in a generalized intention including "foundation needed". I.e.: "You need grounds to write that".)
It doesn't seem to be bad faith. They are asking for your evidence for the claim that corn will be grown anyway. I agree that corn will continue to be grown anyway, but at this point it's nothing but our opinions without supporting evidence.
They asked for a citation, not evidence. A citation that cannot be provided as there was no quote in which to cite.
Furthermore, good faith participation seeks to provide equal value to the participants. "Citation needed" offers nothing to other parties.
Apparently, according to another comment, "Citation needed" is some kind of Wikipedia slang, but a website that attempts to document knowledge is very different to a casual conversation and to try and conflate them, again, can only be done so in bad faith.
I am not the poster you are replying to but calling that post “bad faith participation” surprised me. Stopping ethanol production will lower demand for corn so it is conceivable that this would reduce the marginal value in producing corn and cause some amount of corn production to become worth less than the alternatives (like planting different crops or less intense farming of corn field, etc.)
To me at least, not being an agricultural economist, the statement that the corn would be grown anyway wasn’t obvious on the surface; I too would have liked to have seen some further justification for the claim.
See, your comment comes in good faith. You clearly put thought into and offer something that allows continuation of the conversation.
"Citation needed" is a purposeful attempt to dead end a conversation. It fundamentally cannot be replied to in a reasonable way. What would even be cited? There was no quote in which to cite. Maybe if I scour Google hard enough I'll find someone else saying the same thing and then I can pretend that I quoted it instead of using my own words, but what would that gain?
The ethanol situation is an interesting topic that is worthy of continued discussion, I agree. It's unfortunate that the bad actor steered discussion away from it. Oh well.
The issues is that it does. Using tractors to farm and harvest it all, all the industrial processes to create fertilizer all require carbon to be taken from within the earth. If you only look at the corn to fuel yes it doesn't produce as much additional carbon, but once you include all the externalities you have more carbon emitting processes.
Maybe not specifically addressed in this article, but those researchers also look at CO2 emissions from simply disturbing the land and converting grassland for farming.
In Brazil, burning rainforest for ag use looks very bad abroad. Should be similar on the American prairie.
I’m not saying that you specifically need to hear this, but for anyone reading and for the record, electric vehicles pollute less than gasoline cars even when considering the pollution at the source of power generation, and even if that source power plant is the worst kind, one burning coal.
As for pollution during manufacturing, EVs cause more, but then they break even in pollution terms in comparison to gasoline vehicles after less than three years, and are a net environment win each year after that.
I've been tracking my flex-fuel usage - mostly E85 fillips - for a while now, tracking price and MPG. At least with the prices I've been getting, I typically get around 15% less MPG, but the price is between 10-15% cheaper. My 'cents per mile' price has generally remained the same over the last year or so I've been tracking (been tracking longer than a year, but have been using E85 more regularly in the last year).
Now... I've got a small car/engine. The MPG might be markedly worse on a bigger car. Don't know. But at least in my case, cents/mile is about the same.
Last... year or so I've been getting E85 when possible/convenient, and defaulting to regular 87 octane when E85 isn't available. Those tend to be the only reliably available options - haven't seen E10 around here. Last 6 months have been about 80% E85 and 20% 87 regular.
This is probably a fudged statistic, because you have to add oxygenates to what's called 'pure gasoline' to get it to burn cleanly and efficiently, which bulks out the volume considerably. (These kinds of arguments were also trotted out in favor of tetra-ethyl-lead to provide the 'oxygenate' which only needs to be added at 1% or IIRC, compared to 10% ethanol blend or similar usually).
Fuel blending for optimal combustion characteristics is a complicated business, most of what people claim about this issue is not very reliable.
I wonder if this doesn't need to be the case. With the higher octane rating couldn't you in theory run a much more efficient and higher compression engine?
That is the theory behind "flex fuel" vehicles. In practice, the optimizations don't materialize in real world usage. This is likely because of safety factors built into the ECM preventing the engine from running enough timing advance to take advantage of the octane of a blended fuel.
The total amount you can get from changing the timing isn't very much. Even if you put in a whole new camshaft. Not to mention timing effects emissions as well.
The more typical way to do this is have a turbocharger (supercharger... I can never remember the difference and which you want when). You and run more boost which increases the compression ratio. However this requires an expensive turbo and so isn't a popular option.
I'm not sure why turbo cars have not made these modifications though. There are probably other trade offs I'm not aware of.
Exactly. More ICE cars are coming standard with turbochargers which would enable more to take advantage of the extra octane, but it's an optimization problem with constraints: fuel efficiency, reliability, drive-ability, emissions to name a few.
It's a simple case of it's energy density. The energy content of ethanol is about 33% less than pure gasoline. Higher octane doesn't even necessary equate to higher gas mileage. As soon as octane is high enough for your engine tuning, there's no mileage benefit.
Yeah, this is how most E85 engines generally work. They have a E15 engine map, and an E85 and map. And use sensors to figure out which fuel is in the tank and which map to use.
Stock cars generally don't take full advantage of the octane benefits of E85 because they will blow up if someone fills the tank with E15. But in the aftermarket world, "corn powered" cars make substantially more power, especially turbocharged ones. They have the benefit of owners that understand to manually switch maps when changing fuels.
Agreed, there are several aftermarket ethanol content analyzer sensors available, easily installable onto the fuel line of any car. These supply an ethanol % reading to the ECU and allow for aftermarket tunes to adjust timings based on the current fuel blend. No manual swapping necessary.
As expected, the press distorted the study's conclusions to the point of actually lying:
"we find that the production of corn-based ethanol in the United States has failed to meet the policy’s own greenhouse gas emissions targets and negatively affected water quality, the area of land used for conservation, and other ecosystem processes"
It's one thing to "fail to meet" some emissions reductions and quite another to actually increase the emissions altogether.
Not too surprising, almost inevitable: the government demanded it to help the corn lobby, the excuse was it was greener.
Bet we can't get rid of those regulations for years to come too, especially since new regs seem to be heading in the direction of banning all new gas cars. So probably after that, if at all.
A big problem with agriculture-based bio-fuels, is that growing crops with modern technology uses a lot of fuel. Tractors and other machinery, fertilizer, and a million other things all take energy, which often comes in the form of fossil fuels.
My brother-in-law has a farm, and claims that if you look at the amount of energy used and produced by farms, agriculture hasn't been economically viable for more than half a century. We pump fuel out of the ground, have farms turn it into food, and we eat that. It works because the energy from fossil fuels is already there, and eating is important. But if farms turn fuel into more fuel, those farms need to be a lot more efficient, or we're just burning fuel for nothing.
- Farmers were over producing corn and needed new markets.
- Americans, sick of importing oil from conflict zones, desired a US produced fuel
- Americans desired a renewable fuel source.
- Brewers grain, a by-product of ethanol process could be marketed to dairy & beef producers as a less expensive feed source.
The silly way they connect corn to bananas annoys me, which you could do for literally anything, corn -> fuel -> lights -> you ate near a light ergo CORN!
I don't see how this is anything but good. Having a single crop for so many things, makes the replicator go brrr. Yes it's a single point of failure, but it's efficient to use food production to scale everything else and it's not a dead-end if corn were to have problems (ie Interstellar)
Arguably civilisation and market are orthogonal so the marketisation and commodification under capitalism means there's very little civilisation as well.
I have know idea what this string of words means in context. Agricultural products, especially staple grains are all commodities, definitionally: "a raw material or primary agricultural product that can be bought and sold, such as copper or coffee." In the Inca store house system for example, potatoes were the central commodity, and all types of foods stuffs were made from the freeze dried potatoes. In MesoAmerica corn was used for food, drink, animal feed, and so on.
Turns out that growing corn - which uses a huge amount of fuel, to then turn that into fuel produces more emissions. Perhaps if we stopped paying people to grow corn, they wouldn't find such stupid things to do with the corn that no one wants to buy.
Would corn syrup be such common ingredient without corn being so heavily subsidized.
Would animals be kept in feedlots and filled with corn if it wasn't subsidized.
Govt subsidizes of corn hurt our bodies, out environment, and our tax returns.
Yes, including sugar beets, sorghum, and even cattails.
As far as whether we will or should use other crops, I doubt it. The whole thing with corn mostly came from the US having a large surplus of corn and needing something to do with it. Since we're operating on the false belief that the carbon cycle itself is a bad thing, and because we're trying to move to electric (theoretically), I don't think society is going to invest itself into more ethanol.
Sure. As far as I know, corn is only used in the US, for fairly obvious reasons. Where I'm from it's made from carb-rich waste and sidestreams from various sources. Of course, the yields do pale in comparison to the corn megaindustry of the US, which produces more fuel ethanol than the rest of the world combined.
Sugar cane is good, and used quite successfully in Brazil, but of course only grows in sub/tropical climates. Sugar beet is used in Europe to some extent, as well as staple crops like wheat and rye – not sure how they compare to corn.
There is potatoes. In WW2 the potato production in Nazi Germany basically determined the launch rate of the V2 rocket, which used Ethanol derived from potatoes as fuel.
The only way this gets resolved is when political parties stop pretending that Iowa is somehow representative of their voters and shift the primary schedule to put it farther behind other states.
Democrats especially shouldn’t put up with Iowa considering how it hasn’t voted D anytime recently. Not to mention the completely FUBAR 2020 primary.
Make GA or NH first contest.
Then a lot less pressure for this losing ethanol boondoggle.
I still don't understand why we're still doing bio fuels. We've known for decades that they are a disaster. Am I missing something, is there evidence to the contrary?
For now I can't see how we can just stop fossil fuels without starving half the world (as we need them for fertilizer production). Never mind cement, plastics and steel.
Unfortunately policy decisions seem to rarely be made based on evidence. It's a handout to farmers (and the entire ethanol industry) which politicians don't want to touch.
Which pumps agricultural land values. Great news for retiring farmers.
Cutting corn/food prices would bankrupt some overextended corporate/new entrant farmers (and their lenders), but it’s not like the fields would become unharvested.
This would be better positioned as a crop surplus and/or crop waste to fuel initiative. The government could still encourage overproduction of staple crops to guard against food shortages while being a reliable buyer of the the surplus to make ethanol out of.
So "oil and water don't mix", as is often said. Oil/ gas with corn based additives DO mix with water, so it cannot be piped through a pipeline, thus making it be carried totally by truck, and making it's carbon footprint even worse.
It was positioned as both at one point. Really they just threw out every imagined or perceived benefit and ran with it irrespective of what the data was or is indicating.
I thought that corn-based ethanol exists solely for the purpose of taking advantages of government subversives and had nothing to do with climate or the environment...
It's Probably losing it's place in the DNC primary, but Michigan which plants 2 million acres of corn will be 5th and Iowa still might be on Super Tuesday. If the RNC keeps the early caucus it might turn into a more partisan issue which might be worse.
> It's Probably losing it's place in the DNC primary,
The rule has already passed. It can defy the rule and keep its early date, but then it will lose half its delegates under the rule.
> Michigan which plants 2 million acres of corn will be 5th
Fifth isn't second, and two million acres of corn in a state with a $473B GDP is not the same significance as thirteen million acres in a state with a $180B GDP
> Iowa still might be on Super Tuesday.
Most of the country that isn’t on the early calendar is on Super Tuesday
Certainly all true, but I think it's still to be seen what kind of influence the Corn Belt will have in the DNC primaries, and what will happen with the RNC.
It's not a total myth per se, because it once was and sometimes still can be true for engine components that are simply not designed to handle ethanol.
Such is not the case for pretty much every car built after the year 2000, roughly speaking. Every soft component in modern cars is designed to handle at least 10% ethanol, and effectively handle 100% ethanol.
Corrosion is not really an issue either. The E85 you get from a pump is anhydrous, and the only way you'll get things like phase separation is if water is added deliberately. Ethanol doesn't pull water into gasoline. That's a myth. It's not a dessicant. This topic has been studied and it's simply not worth worrying about.
Most cars on the road today, including those that aren't Flex Fuel, can run somewhere between E30 and E50 with no problems whatsoever. They can even run on E85 or E100 with either a software update or a piggyback device between the ECU and the fuel injectors, everything else remaining OEM.
A car running on ethanol won't rust, fall apart, or blow up. If anything, ethanol can be better for engines given that it burns cooler and leaves way less carbon deposits.
If a small engine today has seal failures or other issues, it's more likely to be the BTX (benzene, toluene, xylene) in gasoline and not the ethanol component.
By the way, I'm speaking from direct experience. Not only have I converted small engines to run on ethanol, but I converted my 2013 Hyundai to be a flex fuel vehicle.
Cars are not the only engines that use gasoline. Lawnmowers, weedwhackers (with added oil), and snowblowers, just to name three things in my garage that get E85 gas[1], all have some degree of problems with it.
[1] Because that's what's available around me, not because that's what they should be getting.
Are any of your small engines designed or specifically converted to run on E85? Or are you using some lower ratio of ethanol to gas? In any case, small engines like those in lawnmowers are more of an effort to get running properly because, unless something's changed, they're not using an ECU or lambda sensors that would allow them to change the fuel trim (I'm probably speaking the obvious here so forgive me). They usually have to be re-jetted and maybe have their timing manually advanced.
The truth is it's complicated, because modern ICEs are complicated.
> Most cars on the road today, including those that aren't Flex Fuel, can run somewhere between E30 and E50 with no problems whatsoever.
That's straight up not true if we define "run" as "run as well as on E10" (granted I wish it was so I could save money on having to upgrade fueling for my cars).
With the huge focus on MPG manufacturers generally aren't overbuilding their fueling systems: My 4 series will "run" on E30 with a stock tune, but logging AFRs and fuel rail pressure will show it's a dangerous game where the ECU is pulling a ton of timing as the fuel system struggles to keep up.
Even with a tune, E20 is the maximum the fueling system can maintain without straight up running out of fueling and going into limp mode under heavy load
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The more balanced truth is: ethanol for vehicles is a complicated topic, because modern ICEs are complicated beasts.
Cars are designed to not break down on E10, but you will find some people argue (imo validly) that part of why car reliability dipped around the turn of the century was all the changes needed to support that kind of flexibility. Materials changed, engine management got more complicated (the fact that a car will run at all on E30 while clearly exceeding its fueling limits is a testament to that), etc.
Ethanol can be better for sure, my car is a million times more enjoyable on a simple E20 blend than California's awful 91 blend, but at the end of the day, ethanol fuel is a bit of a farce (and again, I'm someone who'd have a terrible day if we actually stopped producing it).
We're having the public pay to prop up our energy independence, and producing more emissions along the way. E85 prices don't reflect the difference in energy content, and the cost at the production side to make E10 blends. Gas would be cheaper for most people if we didn't have that requirement, hence why in times of economic need we've suspended the requirement.
Ironically the people who I personally see benefit most from E85 are people who are well off enough to use it for a performance boost, or businesses taking advantage of how much artificially cheaper E85 is. Average people get the short end of the stick and few to none of the benefits.
> That's straight up not true if we define "run" as "run as well as on E10" (granted I wish it was so I could save money on having to upgrade fueling for my cars).
Variances between vehicles will always be a factor. This doesn't mean that most of them won't run sufficiently or even well with a higher ethanol ratio. Your experience with your 4 Series is interesting, and you seem to know a lot about ICEs, but all the research I conducted before I even considered trying E20 convinced me that the possibility of engine failure or damage is extremely remote.
I'll have to find them when I get home, but there were at least 2 studies I came across where researchers tested (I think) E20 on several vehicles from different years and manufacturers to see what would happen. The only issues the vehicles encountered were ones that had nothing to do with the fuel system.
In any case, it is a nuanced topic, though I struggle to say it's quite as complicated as your perspective.
> Even with a tune, E20 is the maximum the fueling system can maintain without straight up running out of fueling and going into limp mode under heavy load
That's very interesting. With my vehicle, it ran almost identically to E10 on E50 (yes I made sure that was roughly the ratio present in the tank), and on E60 it started to run rough and showed a lean condition code but was still perfectly driveable.
> Ethanol can be better for sure, my car is a million times more enjoyable on a simple E20 blend than California's awful 91 blend, but at the end of the day, ethanol fuel is a bit of a farce (and again, I'm someone who'd have a terrible day if we actually stopped producing it).
In any case, I find it an amazing fuel. Although my vehicle isn't optimized for the higher octane rating of ethanol, I experienced an obvious performance improvement on even E20 in terms of power. My bias was low in that case because at the time I was certain I wouldn't see greater power.
> Ironically the people who I personally see benefit most from E85 are people who are well off enough to use it for a performance boost, or businesses taking advantage of how much artificially cheaper E85 is. Average people get the short end of the stick and few to none of the benefits.
Do you think that's a limitation based on the availability of Flex Fuel vehicles, or the price of the fuel itself? Even when adjusting for the energy-per-volume using the most pessimistic calculation, E85 shouldn't be more expensive than gasoline. At current prices, E85 should be ~$0.50 less per gallon than regular gas when adjusted. At least that's how it is for the fuel prices near me.
But let's say that E85 and gasoline cost exactly the same per joule. All that would mean is that E85 has less range. If EVs have taught us anything, it's that many people don't mind having less range.
It gets deeper and deeper into the whole nuance of this all: when I say "run as well as E10", I mean the ECU is now running at different timing than it would with E10, the injectors are running at a higher duty cycle across the RPM range.
But modern engines will happily run like that for a long with no outward issue (especially if you're not someone that strains them), so some might argue that it's "running just as well".
I strain my engine, so it's not what I'd consider running well.
(Also all that is about E20-E30. "technically it's running well" won't continue all the way until E50 when at E30 you're already seeing the ECU needing to cope in the logs, and that's across many cars, not just my 4 series)
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And when I say ethanol as a fuel is a farce, I mean zooming out at the whole exercise, not on a personal level. It's amazing in my tank, easily providing as much of a performance boost as much more drastic options like messing with emissions equipment. Even adjusting for energy, it is still cheaper than 91...
But again, zooming out, for most people the performance difference is negligible because for them it'd be E10 vs E0, not E10 vs E30+. And they're paying a lot of money into the ethanol system for this marginal benefit:
- Ethanol is heavily subsidized by taxpayers at production, at its "natural cost" the energy difference would make it more expensive gasoline: https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/laws/ETH?state=US
- Ethanol is subsidized again when its blended into E85 instead of E10, but most consumers are only even able to get E10. Even the physical pump dispensing E85 gets an additional rebate!
- Because some of the subsides are only for fuel over 10% ethanol, E10 which most people have no choice in taking actually ends up more expensive than both E0 and E85! In times of need we end up dropping the E10 requirement because of that: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/12/biden-waiving-ethanol-rule-i...
- The food that they do need, regardless of what they drive, competes with biofuel for farmland which is absolutely insane:
Ethanol is hard on all the soft bits in an engine. Rubber seals, diaphrams and so on. This is most dramatically seen in small engines that still use carburetors vs fuel injection.
That isn't the ethanol, that is the bad gasoline they mix in with the ethanol. When you buy E0 you get a better grade of gasoline that doesn't degrade the seals as much.
Not since the mid 1960s at the latest. Sometimes hobby farms have gasoline tractors. Many farms still have a working tractor from the 1950s they use for small tasks. There is some random lawnmower sized equipment with a gas engine. Overall though diesel is much cheaper to run in the real world and so no "real farm" uses gasoline for much farming.
Sorry not a native English speaker, when I said gasoline I meant petroleum derived liquid fuel such as gasoline or diesel or aviation fuel or kerosene.
Sorry not a native English speaker, when I said gasoline I meant petroleum derived liquid fuel such as gasoline or diesel or aviation fuel or kerosene.
Not to mention all of the fuel used to move around the fertilizer, tractors, finished corn, the energy used to grid/heat/ferment/distill into ethanol, and then to truck around the ethanol. It's actually almost hilariously indirect and inefficient when you think about it.
Well all the final products (contextually, material fuels or just energy) have a production history: to call one of them inefficient you need to compare production processes. Diesel fuel does not come ready from "diesel springs".
I've seen a lot of these studies and the problem is always the same: the real-world spread on the inputs and outputs is always so much larger than what the report concludes. Since they're comparing ethanol and gasoline, you have two spreads to consider. As an example:
Worst-case for standard gasoline vs Best-case for corn ethanol:
A) Gasoline produced from Alberta tar sands syncrude (which has to be melted and partially hydrogenated using natural gas piped in from Northern Canada/Alaska) shipped by oil tanker (burning dirty bunker fuel) to California refineries for conversion to gasoline by distillation/cracking (with high CO2 emissions related to use of fuel to drive the require heating of the heavy crude oil);
B) Ethanol produced from corn grown with ammonia fertilizer made by splitting water with sun/wind energy, planted and harvested with renewable-powered electric equipment, and fermented and distilled into 95% pure ethanol (the eutectic limit of distillation) using only solar and wind power and in facilities right next to the farmer's fields;
And, conversely, the best case for gasoline and the worst case for ethanol:
C) Gasoline produced from regionally-produced light sweet crude with a minimal need for transport, hydrogenation or extensive processing, meaning much lower emissions from transportation and refining (we could even have electrolytic hydrogenation from water using sunlight to produce the hydrogen);
D) Corn produced in Kansas with large amounts of natural-gas-manufactured ammonia fertilizer, lots of natural-gas-derived synthetic pesticides and herbicides, planted and managed with diesel-powered equipment, then shipped overseas to China for fermentation and conversion to ethanol in a coal-fired ethanol distillery.
So if you break those spreads down you get a ridiculously wide range of estimates. Hence any specific number presented ('at least 25%' in this case) doesn't really tell you that much, other than if you dig through the specific methods used (which are generally hard to find, sometimes they'll put the methods in another paper hidden behind a paywall) you can tell what interest was backing this particular study. Some will even include things like the carbon emissions needed to feed the workers who grow the crops, or who work in the refinery, and so on, which is just nonsense. (The emissions of the restaurant workers who feed the oil refinery workers and the field hands have to be accounted for...?)
Personally, I think artificial photosynthesis is the vastly superior solution relative to either corn ethanol or crude oil gasoline, as you could plausibly run it anywhere with access to seawater and sunlight, saving agricultural land for food production (and conserving ever-scarcer potable water as well). It does however make sense to be able to convert excess agricultural production into useful products, although just composting it back into the soil might be wiser in the long run.
This argument is the same as people who said electric cars are worse for global warming because they are powered by coal plants and take more energy to produce. Completely invalid! If there is a cheaper and easier-to-scale system of converting carbon dioxide in the air into hydrocarbon fuel, then I’m all ears.
But mostly fuel. The amount of fuel burned by the average person directly and indirectly is wayyyyyyy more than their distilled beverage and hand sanitizer consumption.
Similar analysis has been done on other crop feed-stocks (switch grass, etc.) and none of the analysis has shown that crop derived ethanol is a good idea.
I'm not a leading expert on this subject by any means, but I am a PhD chemical engineer and did a lot of research into alternative fuels science and economics about ten years ago. I'm not up on the latest research and analysis but the fundamental thermodynamics and carbon cycles of crop-based ethanol have not changed much in the past ten years or so.