Say Anything Blog

19.1 miles to the gallon using 87 octane which he purchased for $3.09/gallon.

19 mpg in a Yukon?  Wow, he must have a feather-foot.  And on 87, that’s pretty impressive.

E-85 from a cost-benifit standpoint has to be about $1 cheaper than gas to make it worth it finacially.

How interesting! Using E85 might be worth it for in-town driving where you have more stop and go than the need for power on a long-haul driving.  I will have to keep this in mind when deciding on my next vehicle.  Thanks to you and your dad!

Ethanol just has less energy than gasoline, and nothing will change that.  Glad you pointed up the basice dishonesty of govt bribery(subsidies) to induce people to buy something they would not normally choose to buy.  There is also the problem of initial cost.  How much more did your Dad have to pay over the price of a normally-fueled vehicle of the same kind?  Did he have that choice?

"Give the lefties a pile of money, and they’ll spend it buying votes.” - Rush Limbaugh on the “bailout”.

In order to fully utilize whatever ethanol CAN do for you, your vehicle’s engine would have to run much higher compression ratio pistons than any currently do. Alcohol can tolerate more cylinder pressure than gasoline, which helps to re-capture lost efficiency. But at best, you would probably still only do what gasoline already does. Starters, batteries would need to be more robust to crank the engine over, and fuel systems must be made of different, corrosion- resistant materials, also. There’s more from a technical standpoint, but that’s enough for today.

In order to fully utilize whatever ethanol CAN do for you, your vehicle’s engine would have to run much higher compression ratio pistons than any currently do. Alcohol can tolerate more cylinder pressure than gasoline, which helps to re-capture lost efficiency. But at best, you would probably still only do what gasoline already does. Starters, batteries would need to be more robust to crank the engine over, and fuel systems must be made of different, corrosion- resistant materials, also. There’s more from a technical standpoint, but that’s enough for today.

Something like 13.5:1 is ideal if I recall correctly.

I wish that ethanol was our savior, but the technology (in its current form) just isn’t ready.  For starters, you will get (as you noticed) about 80% of the fuel economy with ethanol as you do with gasoline.  A car that gets 16 mpg on gas will get 12 on ethanol.  Not to get too technical, but ethanol simply has less internal energy per unit volume.

If you are thermodynamically inclined read this.  I’ll distill it somewhat.  With the current corn based ethanol technology if we used every bit of corn in America for the production of ethanol it would only replace about 2% of the gasoline currently used.  That leaves no corn for consumption, which obviously isn’t feasible.  Cellulosic ethanol, such as the type derived from switchgrass, offers much more upside.

Bottom line: corn based ethanol is a boondoggle.

That engineering paper kicks ass! Thanks Brian.

For me the key sentence in the paper is the first one in the “Acknowledgments” section:

“My work on biofuels receives zero funding.”

You know what no funding buys you?  Objectiveness.  How can you really trust the findings of a researcher who is in the pockets of the government, oil companies, or the ag lobby?

Maybe this guys invention of free energy is the answer.

I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Ethanol is a gimmiky hula hoop.

I’ll distill it somewhat.

Brian,

Considering that the subject is corn-based ethanol, I think your pun, intentional or not, is damn clever.

Brian, we’ve addressed Patzek & Pimental’s work on this blog before.  Rather than repeat everything that has been said before, here’s an excerpt from their original article (& it’s follow up):

This is a perfect illustration why we need to be careful about what we read in the MSM, even from the conservative branch of it.

The 30% more fuel claim by Pimental has been shown along time ago to be defective, as has been long established. It is a complete embarrassment on the part of the WSJ hat they continue to trot out this defective study.

The study was based on in some case on numbers pulled out of the air and in others using ancient, outdated figures on farm energy use from the late 1970’s, when tractors burned gasoline (most use diesel fuel, which is much more efficient). For a detailed rebutttal see this. Pimental was forced to publish corrected numbers, where he still makes a claim of less efficiency, but if you track through his figures, you get 5% more energy produced than you used to produce it. This using his ultraconservative assumptions. Other, more reasonable studies, suggest a ratio of 1.5 is achievable.

As I’ve noted before, these are based on the use of fossil fuels to produce the ethanol. If you switch to biodiesel (with an efficiency of about 3), you end up with much better numbers for the ethanol production.

Note, at worst even an efficiency of 1.05 makes ethanol a greater than 100% efficient energy storage mechanism....sort of like a battery on an electric car that ends up with more juice than was used to charge it with.

This, like the global warming hype, is a good example of how bad science can adversely affect our ability to make good long term policy decisions.

I don’t have time to go through Patzek’s new article, which I admit I had not seen until you provided the link, however, regardless of whether it contains superior scholarship to the prior work, we still need to treat it with as much caution as the papers by the pro-ethanol crowd.

There are a number of puzzling statements in his prose, not to least of which the conclusion that ethanol could only account for a maximum of 2% of our energy needs.  At 7.5 billion gallons (Patzek’s numbers) annually, compared to about 90 billion gallons of gasoline consumed and factoring in a 25% loss due to current limitations in ethanol-burning engines, we are already producing 6% of our energy needs.

From his background, Patzek is clearly very biased---putting forth negative opinions that were so flawed they were contradicted within the same paper.  For a more balanced (in my judgment) view, perhaps look at this.

I think most people agree that the long-term future of ethanol is from other sources than corn kernels, such as sugar-based ethanol or cellusitic ethanol.  Even if the energy efficiency of ethanol were just 100% (that is we got as much energy out of it, as it required in human-generated energy to produce it), it would still be very viable as a mechanism to store energy from nuclear, hydro, wind & even coal that would allow us to preserve our way of life.  [Think of ethanol as a storage system rather than a energy source.]

The bottom line is we need to not stop reasoning when we find somebody who affirms our opinion, even if that person were say Dick Feynman or Albert Einstein.  Even they were known to be wrong at times.

I think it’s time you had “the talk” with your father about who get’s the use the “company” vehicles.

Carrick,

I’m an engineer so I’ll look at the Graboski & McClelland paper with an open mind, although it will be hard since they wrote it for the NATIONAL CORN GROWERS ASSOCIATION.  Maybe I’ll blog on it , but no guarantees.

Actually, we don’t need to concentrate on papers, implied bias, or whatever at all.  Rob’s original point makes the case that is well known; ethanol has, per gallon, much less energy than gasoline, and costs, per mile, more to run a vehicle.  Even if we removed the tariff on Brazilian fuel, it would barely break even.

In return, we pay billions of dollars in crop subsidies to grow the corn, billions more to subsidize ethanol distillation, and suffer environmental devastation as meadowlands are plowed for corn, and the phosphorus used to grow that corn goes down the Mississippi and fundamentally changes the ecology of the Gulf of Mexico.

By any objective measure, that’s a fool’s bargain.