[SGVLUG] [OT] Especially for Tom & his Prius.... [my rebuttal, then I'll shut up]

[Dustin Laurence]

On Wed, Jul 12, 2006 at 01:33:09PM -0700, Greg Stark wrote:

> Ultimately, don't we want to get away from fossil fuel which equates to
> getting away from dependency on foreign oil?

There are many motivations: national self-sufficiency, or at least
independence from some of the most volatile locations on earth,
individual self-sufficiency (urban homesteading), sticking it to The Man
and Big Oil, global warming, pollution.  Pick your cause; we've got lots
to choose from. :-)

> ...E-85 gets us there 85%.

The problem is that it doesn't.  To start with, there isn't enough
arable land in the United States to replace more than about 5%-ish of
just the diesel we use (not even touching gasoline), and to do that
you're just about diverting the entire agricultural production of oil
and sugar.  And most of that is biodiesel--we just don't produce enough
sugars to do even that much with ethanol.

Then you have to ask yourself about where the gallons of ethanol we can
produce came from.  Turns out the farmer burned a lot of diesel in
tractors and trucks, it was shipped using more petroleum by rail or
truck (assuming it is domestic and didn't spend some time on a ship
somewhere).  And of course more rail and trucks to bring fertilizer,
herbicides, pesticides, and so on, including shipping the diesel itself.
:-)  And it took some fossil (most likely) energy to produce the
fertilizers and biocides.  And the feedstocks for those had to be
produced or mined....

The net result is that it takes almost as much energy to produce a
gallon of corn ethanol as it yields by burning.  So if we magically did
have the land to do it, we'd have to increase our corn production not
by fifty or a hundred times, but by a several times more than that.

Brazil does better partly because sugarcane produces a lot more alcohol
per <mumble>, though I strongly suspect it also benefits from less
mechanized agriculture (and a much lower standard of living for farmers
and farm workers).

Biodiesel has a much better return; it seems you can get several gallons
of biodiesel for each gallon you burned to grow it, but it's not
trivial.  It is also better because soy oil (which is surprisingly most
of the US oil crop--even if you wish the soy producers didn't control
commercial biodiesel production we'd have to convert fields wholesale to
change, and it might be that it's better to grow soy so as to have the
soy protein and so on to sell--oil isn't the only product.

There are other theoretical sources, such as growing oil-heavy algae on
land that can't otherwise support agriculture, and that's attractive
because algaes grow very fast and usually don't require much.  Or you
can try to make methanol or butanol from cellulose and tap a different
feedstock entirely.

I think that's all pie in the sky until there are working plants for a
few years.  But a lot more places have arable land than petroleum, and I
suspect that right now the best promise biodiesel has is to replace a
few dangerous and unstable allies of convenience (does anyone fantasize
that the House of Saud is really our *friend*?) with a much larger, more
stable, and more hetrogenous collection of potential suppliers.

That's good, but I'm not sure how feasible it is--most people really
have no idea just how much petroleum we import.

> (Wonder if you could mix Bio diesels to replace benzene with Ethanol.)

Huh?  I don't follow--ethanol is a high-octane fuel.  Spark-ignition
engines like it, compression ignition really doesn't.  Biodiesel is the
opposite.  I can't see why you would ever want them near each other.

> Why worry about efficiency so much if it your fuel is renewable.  Ok, there
> is only so much fertile land left and sunlight.  But with global warming,
> the growing season is extended, and soon you'll be able to farm sugar cane
> on the tundra and Siberia.  Canada's and Russia's new cash crop.

No, it won't work like that *at all*.  First, "warming" is a misnomer,
"climactic disruption" is better.  Some areas probably get colder,
certainly you can't count on Northern regions getting warmer.  If the
global average warming stops the N. Atlantic heat engine, like seems to
have happened in the past, all of Northern Europe gets *much* colder,
for example.  And we probably don't even know about most such phenomena
and won't until they suddenly stop working.

And supose it did work like that and you magically have temperate
conditions in the sub-arctic.  The sub-arctic hasn't supported heavy
vegetation since <mumble> (some places probably since the continents
broke up), so there isn't good soil there.  How are you going to grow
with marginal soil.  Well, you can fertilize and spray it to death--uh
oh, now you've created a vast new demand for chemicals while the world
is grappling with half it's population trying to emigrate to places that
cannot and should not take them.

"Canadians For Global Warming" is amusing, but I just wanted to make
sure nobody deludes themselves that it actually is likely to work like
that.

> Why haven't Toyota, Honda, and VW produced cars for E-85?  So far it's only
> GM, Ford and what ever is down in Brazil!

It costs billions to produce a new car (to Western standards), and Japan
is probably the most expensive place in the world to produce cars.  It
isn't profitable unless Americans, Europeans, and Japanese will buy
them.  The latter two have no hope of producing useful amounts of
ethanol particularly (as the worst of the potential fuel sources), and
the former can mostly produce it as an additive (not that it's bad as an
additive, just that it doesn't solve the problem--whichever version(s)
of The Problem you subscribe to).

Though, stay tuned--there is a lot of pressure to be able to serve niche
markets by being able to profitably tool up for smaller runs.  The US is
such a big market that we could actually solve the problem for the whole
world "at the stroke of a pen" by requiring that the factory warranty on
all diesels be honored running on pure biodiesel *or pure vegetable
oil*, and that the factory warranty on all spark-ignition engines be
honored on any reasonable blend of the high-octane alternatives
(alcohols, natural gas, propane).  There are detail problems there no
doubt but a lot of the problem is simply that the ECU's don't have
control laws for the kinds of sensor readings they get from odd fuels.
The user can be expected to replace injectors and stuff like that, but
their stupid proprietary ECUs are hard to mess with.

Better still would be to make it illegal to sell a car without full open
ECU specs and let us program the thing.  Won't happen, but that's what
*should* happen.

Dustin

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