Ethanol, It Should be Etha-NO!
Psycmeister beat me to this one. I have long doubted the whole ethanol issue. From my limited brain power, I still deduced that ethanol was less efficient than gasoline. If people are using the environmental reasons for using ethanol, they are hypocrits or dullards.
* Gasoline yields about 20,260 Btu’s/lb of thermal energy from combustion
based on its HHV. On a volume basis that becomes 124,800 Btu’s/gal.while..
* Ethanol yields about 12,770 Btu’s/lb of thermal energy from combustion
based on its HHV. On a volumetric basis that becomes 83,910 Btu’s/gal.
BTU’s thermal energy, HHV, what? Doesn;t make sense. Those numbers…. lower is better! Right?
Wrong!
So, if I did my math correctly, one would need 32% more ethanol per volume than gasoline to obtain the same amount of energy. Additionally,
E85 has always been priced below gasoline, partly because it delivers fewer miles per gallon. Studies show as much as 10-15 percent less(emphasis mine). Sudenga says the price gap has widened as gasoline prices have increased.
In addition, Current automobiles will need to undergo costly renovations:
How does that help the environment? Well it must do some good by freeing us from our dependance of foreign oil, right?
Okay… so family farmers go under, we’ll be burning more fuel, the fuel will ultimately become more expensive, the environment will still be polluted (if not more so), cars will run less efficiently, and current ones will need expensive renovations. If all these people will be unhappy after this legislation is passed, then just who will live happily ever after under this legislation?
I guess that just leaves the corporate farmers and the politicians, doesn’t it?
Oh, so the Oil Shieks won’t get our money anymore. Now it will be the politicians and their corporate farmer buddies. Seems liek a great solution. Let’s stop sending our money overseas. Instead, we’ll cause more harm on the environment and ruin the family farms and enrich a few companies that own most of the farms. All this whole ethanol thing will do is create a new “big” something in society. This one will be big corn. But we’ll all be paying big time for them to succeed.
RF, you’re off base on the price of E85. The lower price has nothing to do with reduced millage (which is likely attributed to gas-bias engineering on FFVs than the energy content of the fuel), but on supply and demand. Ethanol plants have been growing faster than demand, so their is a glut of locally made ethanol in Minnesota. Crude oil recently reached record prices on the international market, gasoline refining facilities in US are old and have not kept pace with growing demand. In a nutshell, E85 is cheaper because (right now) ethanol is cheaper. Go to http://www.CleanAirChoice.org for more information on E85 in Minnesota.
By the way, all branches of the armed services use E85.
If the government subsidized gasoline as much as it does ethanol, it would be dirt cheap at the pump as well. But you can’t overlook the fact that the price of ethanol is bought down by the state of MN. So if they buy down the price of 1 and tax the price of another, that is giving a huge advantage to one over the other.
The ethanol boom we are seeing can be directly linked to the fact that government is paying. Companies get huge incentives to build these plants, but gas refineries, well it is so darn hard to build them (not one for 20+ yrs) due to environmental regs that no one even bothers. The ones we do have are rrunning at max.
I fail to see how using a product to produce energy, when it takes huge amounts of enegy to produce it in the first place. Do you think it might make sense to check into whether we are actually benefitting?
As for the military, that’s great. Unless we are shipping ethanol overseas to where there already is a large amount of gasoline. That would be stupid. But I’m sure that some envirolobbyist made them do that, and pledged to not nag them anymore.
Bob, your recent comment was deleted by my spam controls. I’m sorry. It frowns on long comments, and also ones on posts over 2 weeks old. I was not able to read the comment before it was deleted, so please try again.
If you’d like, I have more recent posts on the subject, and others may also like to weigh in.
Here