The Ethanol/E85 Debate
07-10-2008, 07:38 PM
#21
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Originally Posted by payne171' post='904200' date='Jul 9 2008, 09:17 PM
WOW!
Where to start?
Ok, yes, we should be drilling for more oil anywhere we can. The days of burning natural gas off into the air just to get to the crude are gone. I hate hippies, too.
But...
I am not a Muslim, but you do realize calling a Muslim a towel head is tantamount to dropping an N bomb on an African American, right? Hatred like that is no better than the enemy.
Isolationism is what got the United States into the messes of the first two World Wars. Round 3 will be atomic. Do you really want that?
Blame the correct culprit. Even with the increased price of corn, that only accounts for about 4 cents per box of cereal, for example. The rest is primarily increased transportation costs because of the COST OF OIL. What's left is just the sad state of the economy because we have an oil man in the white house (and not a very smart one at that).
Do a little research. Corn ethanol is made almost entirely from livestock corn or cellulosic material, i.e. the stalks. How does that hurt the food grain supply? (OK, it might make the price of steak go up, but my grandpa owns the small meat processing plant I work at in central Ohio. Our prices haven't changed much)
If you are really worried about taxes, why do you support a president who is building a CATASTROPHIC federal deficit? We'll have to pay it off sometime. Even if deficit spending works, which is debatable, you have to stop it at some point or we will always spend more than our tax revenue. Clinton was not the one who made a one trillion dollar deficit two trillion in four years. If we want to lower taxes, we need to get out of Iraq. There is a reason why Republicans used to be known as the "doves," it's because they did not want to pay the high cost of war. Sure there is a lot of other hippie/tree hugger crap that can be trimmed from the budget, but it's hard to take that criticism from backers of the war pigs (at least that's what Ozzy would call 'em).
Now, regardless of what your opinion is on the politics, you should keep a few things in mind about the potential of ethanol as fuel for an internal combustion engine.
It is very high octane. I believe e85 is in the 104-5 range. This give it a lot of potential as a performance fuel.
Gasoline does have about 30% more btu's than ethanol, but this is offset somewhat by its octane. It also has RON and MON numbers closer together than gasoline, which means that its octane rating degrades less under load, meaning its knock resistance is functionally higher than the equivalent octane gasoline when the throttle is mashed.
All modern cars can handle gasoline ethanol mixtures. Some states are running e10 as their standard gasoline.
e85 burns a lot cleaner than straight gasoline. This means that people in states with emissions testing could use more aggressive tuning measures and still pass emissions. Whether they bust you because your exhaust smells like the air around a beer factory is another story. (God I love that smell)
It burns cooler. There is a company that build a prototype, I think it was even a rotary, that ran on ethanol mixed with water that did not need a coolant system. Even if that doesn't work for us, smaller radiators mean more air flow to intercoolers.
Much of ethanol's bad rep comes from two factors: it's poor fuel mileage in flex fuel vehicles and its economic inefficiencies. The poor fuel mileage is due to the flex fuel nature. If the engine were built to run solely or mainly on ethanol, the mileage/power output would be a lot closer. Imagine building a flex fuel with REALLY high compression and then making it run pig rich when on gasoline so it wouldn't knock. Would it then make sense to criticize gasoline for its poor performance versus ethanol? It's not that much different than people who run high test in cars that don't need it. It's a waste. As for the cost effectiveness of production, it is more of a nod to the future than a cure for now. Technology is already improving so that ethanol will one day be cost effective. It is just a matter of perfecting technology like algae or corn stalk ethanol. They have had Direct Injection tech since the 1950's; it only recently became fiscally practical except in diesels. It's not that different from drilling for new oil; it might not pay off for years, but that is not a reason to do nothing now (we REALLY need to get drilling; the tree huggers conveniently ignore the fact that hurricane Katrina let loose less than 1/10th of the oil the Valdez did. Drilling is clean anymore if for no other reason than oil is too valuable to spill). My hope is that someday we can stop paying farm subsidies because plant production for fuel purposes has made farming profitable enough for it to no longer be necessary.
Maybe some of my thoughts are wrong; unlike the gentleman above, I don't think I know all of the answers. But if I have some good points, maybe we should consider a thought process besides, "No more ethanol and Death to the towel heads!"
Where to start?
Ok, yes, we should be drilling for more oil anywhere we can. The days of burning natural gas off into the air just to get to the crude are gone. I hate hippies, too.
But...
I am not a Muslim, but you do realize calling a Muslim a towel head is tantamount to dropping an N bomb on an African American, right? Hatred like that is no better than the enemy.
Isolationism is what got the United States into the messes of the first two World Wars. Round 3 will be atomic. Do you really want that?
Blame the correct culprit. Even with the increased price of corn, that only accounts for about 4 cents per box of cereal, for example. The rest is primarily increased transportation costs because of the COST OF OIL. What's left is just the sad state of the economy because we have an oil man in the white house (and not a very smart one at that).
Do a little research. Corn ethanol is made almost entirely from livestock corn or cellulosic material, i.e. the stalks. How does that hurt the food grain supply? (OK, it might make the price of steak go up, but my grandpa owns the small meat processing plant I work at in central Ohio. Our prices haven't changed much)
If you are really worried about taxes, why do you support a president who is building a CATASTROPHIC federal deficit? We'll have to pay it off sometime. Even if deficit spending works, which is debatable, you have to stop it at some point or we will always spend more than our tax revenue. Clinton was not the one who made a one trillion dollar deficit two trillion in four years. If we want to lower taxes, we need to get out of Iraq. There is a reason why Republicans used to be known as the "doves," it's because they did not want to pay the high cost of war. Sure there is a lot of other hippie/tree hugger crap that can be trimmed from the budget, but it's hard to take that criticism from backers of the war pigs (at least that's what Ozzy would call 'em).
Now, regardless of what your opinion is on the politics, you should keep a few things in mind about the potential of ethanol as fuel for an internal combustion engine.
It is very high octane. I believe e85 is in the 104-5 range. This give it a lot of potential as a performance fuel.
Gasoline does have about 30% more btu's than ethanol, but this is offset somewhat by its octane. It also has RON and MON numbers closer together than gasoline, which means that its octane rating degrades less under load, meaning its knock resistance is functionally higher than the equivalent octane gasoline when the throttle is mashed.
All modern cars can handle gasoline ethanol mixtures. Some states are running e10 as their standard gasoline.
e85 burns a lot cleaner than straight gasoline. This means that people in states with emissions testing could use more aggressive tuning measures and still pass emissions. Whether they bust you because your exhaust smells like the air around a beer factory is another story. (God I love that smell)
It burns cooler. There is a company that build a prototype, I think it was even a rotary, that ran on ethanol mixed with water that did not need a coolant system. Even if that doesn't work for us, smaller radiators mean more air flow to intercoolers.
Much of ethanol's bad rep comes from two factors: it's poor fuel mileage in flex fuel vehicles and its economic inefficiencies. The poor fuel mileage is due to the flex fuel nature. If the engine were built to run solely or mainly on ethanol, the mileage/power output would be a lot closer. Imagine building a flex fuel with REALLY high compression and then making it run pig rich when on gasoline so it wouldn't knock. Would it then make sense to criticize gasoline for its poor performance versus ethanol? It's not that much different than people who run high test in cars that don't need it. It's a waste. As for the cost effectiveness of production, it is more of a nod to the future than a cure for now. Technology is already improving so that ethanol will one day be cost effective. It is just a matter of perfecting technology like algae or corn stalk ethanol. They have had Direct Injection tech since the 1950's; it only recently became fiscally practical except in diesels. It's not that different from drilling for new oil; it might not pay off for years, but that is not a reason to do nothing now (we REALLY need to get drilling; the tree huggers conveniently ignore the fact that hurricane Katrina let loose less than 1/10th of the oil the Valdez did. Drilling is clean anymore if for no other reason than oil is too valuable to spill). My hope is that someday we can stop paying farm subsidies because plant production for fuel purposes has made farming profitable enough for it to no longer be necessary.
Maybe some of my thoughts are wrong; unlike the gentleman above, I don't think I know all of the answers. But if I have some good points, maybe we should consider a thought process besides, "No more ethanol and Death to the towel heads!"
Well, where to start indeed,
Our “not very bright” president, graduated from the Wharton School of Business, the most demanding business school in the US. He fumbled and stumbled along until he had learned to fly the very unforgiving Convair F-102 Delta Dagger for the Texas Air Guard. He squadron would have rotated to Viet Nam had the F-4 with in-flight refueling not been available in large enough numbers. Sorry Dan Rather.
Then he fumbled onward to become the governor of Texas, then he tricked most of America into voting for him for president twice, even with thousands of dead people in Chicago voting against him. He didn't cheat Al Gore out of anything. Tennessee (his home state) didn't vote for Al Gore. They know Al Gore in Tennessee.
My bumbling “oil Man” president wants to drill here, drill now. I like that. Over 60% of Americans like that.
I don't hate hippies at all. Hippies don't cut the heads of of each others children to get the rest of the family to convert to Shea or Sunni and vice versa. Muslims want us dead. They want other Muslims
Shea vice Sunni dead, and all non Muslims other than themselves (sect) dead. There are now over 1,000 Mosques in the US. Do you suppose that none of those Muslims think like other Muslims across the world? Guess again...............
If you stand by and do nothing while the police beat your neighbor to death because he's black or because he's a Jew, are you not as guilty as the police? Yes you are. Who will help when they come for you? Evil wins when good men do nothing.
So the Muslims are towel heads, like it or not. In your life time you will have to arm yourself and kill a very large number of humans just to live out another day. All of this because we the people think truth justice and the American way is what the world operates on, and every human should have the same chance at the pursuit of happiness. No, nothing is so far from the truth. There is a boogie man, and he is coming to kill you and your family. We have never had Muslims as slaves, although Muslims did have a large number of Americans as slaves. In the Marine corp song that has in it the shores of Tripoli, that was Tripoli Libya, where the US Marines went ashore and liberated hundreds of American sailors and seamen who had been taken as slaves from ships on the high seas by Muslim pirates. There were quite a number fewer pirates when the Marines left.
Isolationism, is the lack of commercial trade and official government communication at ambassador
level. It has nothing to do with building fences to keep out thousands of illegals every night. The first responsibility of a government is to establish and protect its borders.
Our bad economy had three to seven trillion ripped out of its heart on 9-11. So it was not exactly a clean start for our bumbling president. But now nearly 8 years later, unemployment is still at 40 year lows. Not one quarter with negative growth. Two negative growth quarters is a recession. And we are in the third world war, and this time it is for all of the marbles.
Now the ethanol.
Todays prices July10th 2008 were:
number two yellow corn asked $6.6475 per bushel. Bid $6.4275 per bushel. This is the food for you and me, stuff made into syrup, plastics, medicines and so on. It must be below a specified water content
and has a max damaged cernal count and other stuff.
Number 2 yellow corn over 30 % water content delivered to distillers gets you $6.1975 to $6.3975 per bushel. The lower price is attractive because no energy is required to dry the corn and you get a government check just to grow the stuff.
Ethanol $2.4775 per gallon. A bushel of corn makes about 2 gallons of ethanol so let us say you buy the corn at the lowest price FOB the distillers $6.1975 and make two gallons of ethanol out of it. So, you make 2 X $2.4775 or $4.9550. So call it $5.00. The last production numbers available to me today are for May where 500 million gallons of ethanol were produced. Or 2.5 Billion just for ethanol.So did we discover that over 100 distillers of fuel ethanol are loosing over a dollar a gallon on their product. No........the government requires that oil companies add x amount of ethanol to most blends of fuel, and they get a tax reduction for doing that,
so the price of ethanol is just a red herring. The distillers are subsidized to make the stuff and the oil companies pay for part of that in a tax break so are the oil companies required to pay more than the published price for ethanol, or is the ethanol subsidized to a far greater extent than is published.
While most distillers have newer facilities and can produce product using fewer BTUs than the product contains, but not all of them. So when the price of crude base stocks hit $137.00 a barrel (44 gallons) then the cost of ethanol as a filler to add to motor fuel at $2.4775 per gallon when the retail price of the gallon of product sells for over $4.00 then the oil companies like it. They can make more than 12 cents per gallon of fuel sold. Plus they just mix it, they don't make it. So nearly no investment in facilities for 10% of their product. Or, for E85, for 85% of the product. Big oil profits improve the more E85 you guys buy.
But E85 is a total construct to curry favor with a small number of the tree huggers. If the cost of crude oil drops back to $45.00 a barrel where it should be, oil companies can buy refined fuel cheaper than ethanol and with no requirement to add in ethanol, would not buy a drop of it. If there was no support (your tax money), for growing the corn, and no support (your tax money) for distilling ethanol, and no tax break for the oil companies to use it. (There is no tax at all on any company in the USA. The government has those companies collect taxes off of you, and pass the money on to the government).would the ethanol industry last another month? No. It would not.
Lynn E. Hanover
07-11-2008, 05:49 PM
#24
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Originally Posted by Rob x-7' post='904317' date='Jul 11 2008, 06:34 AM
why the **** would you dig this year old thread up?
Well, fuel costs have climbed since last year, so the subject is timley. There are no really big words in it. It didn't cost you anything.
And, you actually don't have to read it if you don't want to.
And might I ask why such a course comment at all?
Lynn E. Hanover
This picture is the 16X engine with longer stroke and 12A width rotors. The front aluminum side housing is off the engine. The
Exhaust ports appear to be lined with inserts to limit heat going into the aluminum side housings.
07-11-2008, 07:03 PM
#26
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Join Date: Jun 2003
Location: St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada
Posts: 1,016
Did we mention that ethanol is created with food and food supplies are low so food prices go up as well? So if there's an increased supply/demand for food than more fuel is needed to ship the whole lot and the towl heads remain happy until everyone is running on lard and beans?
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