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Krugman laced into corn for ethanol in NYT editorial today...sorry I don't have a link. He described it as "a really bad idea with bipartisan support"

I've been thinking about dusting off my old 1958 John Deere combine, which can harvest shelled corn, and growing a field to see what kind of return I can get.

If the economy goes into recession and the price drops, I'll just feed the crop to my cattle, who truly love a little corn to supplement their hay.

If you've got a paid-for ranch, and a paid-for combine, it seems like raising some corn could be a pretty good deal.

I agree that the ethanol focus in public policy is absolutely the wrong thing to do in terms of facing the Peak Oil and Global Warming problems.

The real focus ought to be on conservation, followed by conservation, and then a bit more conservation. Lower the ecological footprint of the average US consumer dramatically. It will happen sooner or later, one way or the other.

After focus on this significant cultural transformation -- ELP -- we can make our next priority to fund more research and implementation of renewables. We should focus on generating electricity from wind and solar and biomass plants, and also should focus a bit on liquid fuels, although I don't see any sustainable way to get liquid fuels.

Somehow the whole energy plan seems tailored to bolster American car companies rather than to make positive changes with regard to energy security.

Energy security includes the sustainability component. Extraction of energy from plants that deplete soil and use massive amounts of water will not be helpful for very long, especially at considerable scale.

IEEE Spectrum magazine has an article about ethanol.
Loser: Corn-o-copia.

Estimates corn ethanol EROEI to be 1:1 at best. Using coal to distill it will only make enviromental issues worse.

Corn ethanol appears to be a bad idea ecologically and for global warming.

But it will be pursued to maximum effect, because in the end it will be fantastically profitable for a few people.

Consider it this way:

It is like discovering a coal-fed oil well in Illinois.

I guess I approve of the systems biology initiative, but I wonder why straight chemical engineering (gasification, etc) isn't being seriously investigated as well?

Isn't this going after the really difficult path instead of the easier path?

Plants and microbes have their own evolutionarily dominated needs.

iogen pdf

The problem with many ethanol processes is the energy requirements for heating. Solar and wind could be used for this, but generally they don't. Corn requires energy inputs for cultivation as well. Some processes also produce large amounts of CO2. I think Iogen is on the right track with fungus and termite guts.

In his guest post yesterday ("Ten Fundamental Principles of Net Energy") Cutler Cleveland demonstrated that unless we calculate the energy costs to manufacture a primary energy replacement from dwindling petroleum supplies, then that scheme is merely an inefficient liquid-fuel conversion gimic.

The assumptions of Food and Policy Research Institute outlined above need to be edited for mathematic content. Thus :

At this price, corn-based ethanol production would reach 31.5 billion gallons per year, or about 20% of projected U.S. fuel consumption in 2015. Supporting this level of production would require 382.4 million acres of corn to be planted. Total corn production would be approximately 62.4 billion bushels, compared to 11.0 billion bushels today.

So we would need to increase our current corn production six-fold just to supply 20% of projected fuel consumption.

There is no such land on the planet earth. Is this insane or what?

pete

From Saturday's Wall Street Journal Online:

All Eyes Are on Corn Prices at ADM

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116984798458589394.html ($$$)

Already, profit margins for ethanol plants have dropped precipitously in light of falling oil prices and rising corn prices.

The average net profit of a 50-million-gallon ethanol plant in the U.S. dropped to just below two cents a gallon Friday, down from 50 cents a gallon on Jan. 1, according to DTN, an agricultural-commodities-research firm in Omaha, Neb.

Which corresponds well with the 4.05 break-even corn price HO quotes above. Because corn is now at or very close to that price.

Perhaps the best phrase I've seen yet, to describe the ethanol-o-mania by the gov't, is "Liquid Pork". I think that comes from the PorkBusters website.

The problem is that the PTB are still treating this as a money problem, instead of what it is, an energy problem. They figure if they throw money at the problem it will go away. Nothing will keep us going the way we are now. However, cold processes and those that use wind or solar will yield the best results in the long run. They just haven't figured it out yet and they will only learn the hard way.

This is quite a good presentation on Biofuels.

http://www.aspo-usa.com/fall2006/presentations/pdf/Lynd_L_Boston_2006.pdf

To listen to the presentation you have to be a member of EVWorld however the presentation is extremely interesting on its own. It has some numbers for comparison.

It gives Petroleum the figure of $8.8/GJ and electricity $11.1/GJ. It also gives the extremely low figure of $2.4/GJ for cellulostic ethanol. I am not sure how he arrived at this figure as this is not a production process yet but he seems to think that this makes ethanol better than oil.

Finally there is an equation for the amount of extra land is needed to produce biofuels.

NNLFP= {VMT /(MPG •YPf))-I}. (1/P)

where
NNLFP: Net new land,ignoring changed land for food production (acres)
VMT: Vehicle miles traveled (miles/yr)
MPG: Miles/gallon gasolineequivalent
YPf: Process yield (gallons gasoline equivalent/ton dry biomass)
I:Feedstockproduced from currently-managed lands (ton dry biomass)
P:Productivity of biomass production (tons/acre/year)

However what I got from that is that there is no way that the cars of the USA can be fuelled by ethanol. The terms MPG needs to be increased VMT needs to be decreased significantly before ethanol even has the smallest chance of succeeding.

That is you will have to drive smaller cars a lot less. From my discussions about car size I am not sure that this will be a palatable message. In Australia we have some of the conditions to allow this. We have large taxes on petrol that have reduced VMT and vehicle size. However we do not have mandatory vehicle fuel consumption targets for our manufacturers.

To me ethanol will force smaller more fuel efficient cars and/or plug in hybrids AND force a rise in fuel taxes to reduce VMT. Do yo think that this will happen. To me the push for ethanol is being sold as a method of large cars and being able to drive wherever you want whenever you want exactly as it is today with cheap oil. I do not think people will want to switch fuels AND still have to make compromises.

HO,

In reading your post and some of the responses, I thought it perhaps important to highlight the following...

The President's SOTU alternative fuel target (alternative being the keyword here) is not intended to met by ethanol production. Nor for that matter, was this target created under the preposterous notion that corn ethanol alone would somehow scale up to 35 Billion gallon a year capacities in 10 years - a notion which sadly to say, has been seized upon by the anti-ethanol crowd and played out ad nauseum.

What is not said though and perhaps more importantly, what is not known by those outside of industry/government circles, is that both the word 'alternative' and the associated timeline/usage levels included in the SOTU were specifically drawn from an in-depth, expert analysis of the alt-fuel options currently in commerical deployment, on the verge of commercial deployment and/or on the horizon to do so within the timeframes warranted.

Specifically speaking, I refer (as I have here at TOD for some time now) to the 2nd and 3rd generation alt fuel production paths that compliment an overall integrated biorefinery program that capitalizes on the existing fuel production infrastructure. Needless to say, corn ethanol is part of said infrastructure and for better or worse, this type of ethanol is here to stay.

Corn ethanol producers therefore, can and should be expected to respond accordingly to the increased production targets but don't think for a second that market forces (as outlined in prior posts) i.e. feedstock, ethanol, rail, construction, energy costs etc. let alone competition from the new production paths proper, will not play significant roles in determining corn ethanol's future.

And for those of you who believe that all the corn grown in the US will one day be made into ethanol instead of food and who frantically compute projected corn yields versus 'proposed' ethanol plant capacity (NOOB put your pencil down)... I'm sorry but your falling for and promulgating a scare tactic on a level that borders Y2K.

BTW - although I go to great lengths NOT to promote my specific company affiliation at TOD, perhaps next time instead of refering to a Khosla venture, you just may consider refering to the work of a fellow TOD member =]

Interestingly in their latest report on ethanol the number that they project for ethanol production is not that different from the President’s (35 billion gallons).

I care to differ and have been posting about this repeatedly.

31.5 billion is 20% of projected 2015 use or 160 billion gallons.

35 billon is 15% of projected 2017 use or 235 billion gallons.

We currently use 144 billion gallons/year.

I see projections of 1.7%/yr, so that gives us 170 billion in 2017, not 235.

Also, the 8.5 billion from CAFE improvements is 5% of 170 billion.

Bush's numbers are off. The math doesn't square.

In reply to Syntec, what the President sends to Congress and what eventually becomes law are two different things. There is an excellent chance that the farm and environmental lobby will strip out the coal-to-liquids part and the price safety valves and will send back to the President a simple mandate for 35 billion gallons of ethanol. This he will then sign.

At 2.65 gallons of ethanol per bushel of corn, 35 billion gal will need 13.2 billion bushels of corn and will yield 4.1 billion bushels of dried distillers grains as a by-product.

2004 US corn production = 10.1 billion bushels.
2005 US corn production = 11.8 billion bushels.

There isn't enough corn, so maybe we will feed barley and wheat into the ethanol plants as well. In practise, converting our entire corn crop is a fantasy because people won't stop eating steak and turkey and corn flakes and Coca-cola. People will pay more for these staples and will curse the government. Corn prices will rise to the point where American ethanol is undercut by imports from Brazil.

35 billion gallons = 2.2 million bbl/day of ethanol.

1 gallon of ethanol produces 62% as much heat as one gallon of gasoline.

So 2.2 million bbl/day ethanol = 1.4 million bbl/day of gasoline. This would reduce gasoline demand by 15% and oil demand by 7%.

Producing ethanol consumes large quantities of natural gas. If all the production used natural gas then it would consume something like 5% of our natural gas supplies, which would have to be imported from places like Nigeria and Quatar. However, ethanol distilleries could be run on abundant US coal and the fertilizer imported from elsewhere.

We must also keep our eyes on this:

http://www2.dupont.com/Biofuels/en_US/index.html

It is interesting how quickly DuPont and BP jumped onto the Bio Butanol option, and may indicate that real possibilities are there.

The intent seems to be to introduce first in the United Kingdom;

This would seem to be exactly the right strategy for two reasons:
(a) Britian has rather high gasoline prices by our standards, so the fuel would be competitive there if anywhere on price and (b) Britain is facing a real liquid motor fuel crisis VERY soon. The decline in the North Sea is leaving Britain with a crisis that must be confronted soon, and a viable liquid fuel from biomass may be their only way out, at least for awhile.

We are now watching the bio butanol industry and DuPont with great interest.

Remember, we are only one cubic mile from freedom.
RC

My lab is the recipient of a lot of money from DOE for what is now called the "Helios Project". "Termite guts" decoding is one aspect, but so is "improved" miscanthus, artificial photosynthesis (10% goal!!), algae biodiesel, and a bunch of other efforts. It's basically redirected the mission of the lab. Though the director understands peak oil, his public presentations use the EIA 2037 peak date graph (the one where we don't peak til 81% of our resources are depleted), so thus greatly understates the urgency of the problem. But then, it's a lab, not the real world. I surveyed a wide range of scientists and engineers about the time it takes to go from lab discovery to full commercialization. The average response was about 20 years, quite in line with what Hirsch noted in his report.

Getting from here to there is a lot more challenging than the cellulosic ethnanol proponents would have you believe (or the average techno-optimist here). Here is a summary of the technical challenges--all of which must be solved-- before cellulosic ethanol even has a chance in this world. All of this (with a few footnoted additions) is taken from DOE's Biomass Roadmap cited above (and credit to a brilliant friend who compiled it):

Resource and Sustainability Barriers
1. Biomass feedstock will ultimately be limited by finite amounts of land and water
2. Biomass production may not be sustainable because of impacts on soil compaction, erosion, carbon, and nutrition.
3. Nor is it clear that perennial energy crops are sustainable, since not enough is known about their water and fertilizer needs, harvesting impacts on the soil, etc.
4. Farmers are concerned about the long-term effects on soil, crop productivity, and the return on investment when collecting residues.
5. The effects of biomass feedstock production on water flows and water quality are unknown
6. The risks of impact on biodiversity and public lands haven’t been assessed.

Economic Barriers (or Investors Aren’t Stupid)
1. Biomass can’t compete economically with fossil fuels in transportation, chemicals, or electrical generation.
2. There aren’t any credible data on price, location, quality and quantity of biomass.
3. Genetically-modified energy crops worry investors because they may create risks to native populations of related species and affect the value of the grain.
4. Biomass is inherently more expensive than fossil fuel refineries because
a) Biomass is of such low density that it can’t be transported over large distances economically. Yet analysis has shown that biomass plants need to be large to be economically attractive – it will be difficult to find enough biomass close enough to be delivered economically.
b) Biomass feedstock amounts are unpredictable since unknown quantities will be lost to extreme weather, sold for food and feed rather than ethanol, from rotting or combustion in storage, and above all, farmers aren’t stupid, they won’t destroy their land to make a small amount of money from grain and crop residues, especially as fertilizer costs inexorably increase.
c) Ethanol can’t be delivered pipelines due to likely water contamination. Delivery by truck, barge, and rail is more expensive. Ethanol is a hazardous commodity which adds to its transportation cost and handling.
d) Biomass varies so widely in physical and chemical composition, size, shape, moisture levels, and density that it’s difficult and expensive to supply, store, and process.
e) The capital and operating costs are high to bale, stack, palletize, and transport residues
f) Biomass is more geographically dispersed, and in much more ecologically sensitive areas than fossil resources.
g) The synthesis gas produced has potentially higher levels of tars and particulates than fossil fuels.
h) Biomass plants can’t benefit from the same large-scale cost savings because biomass is too dispersed and of low density.
5. Consumers won’t buy ethanol because it costs more than gasoline and contains 34% less energy per gallon. Consumer reports wrote they got the lowest fuel mileage in recent years from ethanol due to its low energy content compared to gasoline, effectively making ethanol $3.99 per gallon. Worse yet, automakers are getting fuel-economy credits for every E85 burning vehicle they sell, which lowers the overall mileage of auto fleets, which increases the amount of oil used and lessens energy independence. (Consumer Reports)

Equipment and Storage Barriers
1. There are no harvesting machines to harvest the wide range of residue from different crops, or to selectively harvest components of corn stover.
2. Current biomass harvesting and collection methods can’t handle the many millions of tons of biomass that need to be collected.
3. There isn’t enough biomass since farmers aren’t stupid – they won’t sell enough residue to make the nearest biomass refinery economically viable.
4. How to store huge amounts of dry biomass hasn’t been figured out.
5. No one knows how to store and handle vast quantities of different kinds of wet biomass. You can lose it all since it’s prone to spoiling, rotting, and spontaneous combustion

Preprocessing Barriers
1. We don’t even know what the optimum properties of biomass to produce biofuels are, let alone have instruments to measure these unknown qualities.
2. Incoming biomass has impurities that have to be gotten out before grinding, compacting, and blending, or you may damage equipment and foul chemical and biological processes downstream.
3. Harvest season for crops can be so short that it will be difficult to find the time to harvest cellulosic biomass and pre-process and store a year of feedstock stably.
4. Cellulosic biomass needs to be pretreated so that it’s easier for enzymes to break down. Biomass has evolved for hundreds of millions of years to avoid chemical and biological degradation. How to overcome this reluctance isn’t well enough understood yet to design efficient and cost-effective pre-treatments.
5. Pretreatment reactors are made of expensive materials to resist acid and alkalis at high temperatures for long periods.
6. To create value added products, how to biologically, chemically, and mechanically split components off (fractionate) needs to be figured out.
7. Corn mash needs to be thoroughly sterilized before microorganisms are added, or a bad batch may ensue. Bad batches pollute waterways if improperly disposed of.

Cellulosic Ethanol Showstoppers
1. The enzymes used in cellulosic biomass production are too expensive.
2. An enzyme that breaks down cellulose must be found that isn’t disabled by high heat or ethanol and other end-products, and other low cost enzymes for specific tasks in other processes are needed.
3. If these enzymes are found, then cheap methods to remove the impurities generated are needed. Impurities like acids, phenols, alkalis, and salts inhibit fermentation and can poison chemical catalysts.
4. Catalysts for hydrogenation, hydrgenolysis, dehydration, upgrading pyrolysis oils, and oxidation steps are essential to succeeding in producing chemicals, materials, and transportation fuels. These catalysts must be cheap, long-lasting, work well in fouled environments, and be 90% selective.
5. Ethanol production needs major improvements in finding robust organisms that utilize all sugars efficiently in impure environments.
6. Cheap, efficient fermentation organisms that can produce chemicals and materials is key to making the process economic.
7. Efficient aerobic fermentation organisms to lower capital fermentation costs.
8. Fermentation organisms that can make 95% pure fermentation products.
9. Cheap ways of removing impurities generated in fermentation and other steps are essential since the costs now are far too high.

Not going to comment on this topic(well I did once) except to share this website URL.

Its a very interesting website for those who are interested in ethanol credits, subsidies,and so forth.

http://www.eere.energy.gov/afdc/laws/incen_laws.html

Nobody knows what the farmers are going to do. They don' know for sure themselves. But its a good guess that lots of soybean land will likely to to corn. I see that N. Dakota and even some of Montana is going to be planting corn in areas they didn't in the past.

There always this quibble about how corn needs such huge amounts of nitrogen. Does anyone know the 'crop uptake' for corn in N,P,and K?
I doubt it so here is a site from UK showing recommended application rates.Judge for yourself.

http://www.ca.uky.edu/agc/pubs/agr/agr105/agr105.htm

And BTW there is no soil sampling labs I am aware of that can give you the N values. At least none that a farmer could use at that I am aware of at a reasonable cost. UK does the test that I have sampled and they do a very good job but nothing is given for the nitrogen.

There for its not that precise and is a judgement call.

Let me add one more caveat. Farming is not yet a science IMO. There is a heck of a lot of scientific endeavors devoted to it but many times they appears to be incorrect or not very predictive. Soil and weather are too variable. There is nothing better than experience with the land you tend to and know. Thats just the way it is with row cropping. Grasslands management is something I used to do a lot of and its far easier that row cropping. Cattle as well. I knew a lot about raising and caring of horses and cattle. Row cropping takes a lot of skill and experience and a lot of money and huge equipment costs.

Whats going to happen with ethanol and farming? I dont' think we will know til its happening. Sorta like PO in a way. You don't know the harvest until its in the bins.

A couple of comments on some late posts
1) in spite of everything biofuel can work in 700 million cars and trucks and has a lower carbon footprint
2) corn needs too many off-farm inputs to be the basis of a biofuel industry which should aim for closed loop

However my main point is a strong impression I picked up on Australian TV tonight; US farm support will be a liability with trade negotiations. Australia punished the people who gave kickbacks to Iraq under the Oil-for-Food program so now basically farmers down under get close to zero help. Next I think trade negotiators will say cut out all US farm support including ethanol credits. It won't happen of course but for years it will be like salt on a wound.

Question: what are the mechanics of how ethanol is produced from corn or biomass? (I think there was a TOD article on this but I can't find it)
I understand that there is a great deal of natural gas used in the production process.
I am trying to figure out how much natural gas will be required to achieve Bush's target.

Sunday's Des moines Register (jan 28) had an article about using DDGS as boiler fuel for the distillery. Stanley Consultants in Muscatine, IA has researched using the cow manure to produce methane and found it lacking the output to do the job. Their conclusion is that twice as much methane can be generated by eliminating the cow from process. By putting the DDGS directly into the digester the use of nat gas could be completely eliminated. The post digestion residues are an urea rich fertilizer which could replace the use of anhydrous ammonia on the farm thereby eliminating even more fossil fuel from the ethanol production cycle.
If distillers would extract the corn oil from the feedstock and made biodiesel then the fossil fuel used by farm equipment could be eliminated.
Step by step the need to use fossil fuels in the corn belt disappears and money exported out of the corn belt goes down.

Right, I've read all the comments and it seems everyone (as usual with ethanol) is missing the point.

The ethanol programme is NOT a fuel programme. Its a farm support programme.

It is essentially a system to encourage the construction of a huge sink for surplus corn production. Which should act as a price floor for corn due to ethanol mandates.

The bulk of US corn production is used as an animal feedstock. If you're planning on feeding corn to cattle, you might as well ferment the sugars out first to make a useful vehicle fuel. Cattle don't digest the sugars anyway. And the byproduct of corn ethanol is of course, dried/wet distillers grain(DDG). Which, up to a point, is a useful animal feed.

As far as I'm concerned this corn crop would be grown anyway for livestock feed. Even if ethanol was banned tommorrow the corn crop (along with its associated fertiliser consumption) would still be grown.

The only energy which should be used to calculate the energy balance, is the EXTRA energy used to haul the corn to the distillery and the gas used to ferment/distill it.
And of course the extra energy used to plant extra corn to make up the loss of corn volume as its made into DDG.

When viewed in this respect ethanol's energy balance is much better.

However in this circumstance the US shouldn't be mandating huge increases in ethanol production. It should only be "skimming" the ethanol from its livestock feed corn that it would be making anyway.

But, hey, as the saying goes. "Americans can be counted on to do two things, take a good idea and run it completely into the ground, and take a bad idea and run it completely into the ground."

Andy