Best comment of the thread. Period.

100% Agree.

Government is pollution of rational thought.

Ethanol is insanity.

Guess who’s picking up the tab?

The great-great-great-grandchildren.

Yeah, its time for corn ethanol to go for all the reasons above. One area that does sound promising is the ongoing development of cellulosic ethanol. Basically turning the corn stalks and leaves into ethanol. The technology already exists, they’re just working on making it efficient enough to compete.

LukeinNE on July 28, 2012 at 7:22 PM

Umm, no.

The process for creating ethanol from cellulose is as old as the process used to create it from grain. The reason it hasn’t been adopted is that it is much less feasible. Cellulose is not energy dense. It is bulky, and the logistics of transporting it for processing largely outweigh the benefits. Further, as a farm kid, you should know that stover isn’t free. It contains nutrients that must be replaced to the soil if the grain and the stover are both removed. And replacing them costs $$$$. The loss of soil cover alone that would occur if stover were removed would have immense negative effects and costs. There are no useful by products from its creation that could be sold to offset its costs of production.

These are just some of the reasons cellulose biofuels have not caught on, and are ultimately unlikely to.

I know there’s not a lot of people who spend time pondering ag policy, but every time there’s a HotAir post on the cost of food in relation to ethanol people lose it.

1. Crop insurance is a good deal for taxpayers.

Why? Because the premiums to cover a widespread disaster like we are seeing this year are so expensive no one could afford to purchase the coverage. If no one purchased insurance the federal government would still fill the gap with disaster $$$. The current program encourages producers to pony up for disasters along the way. Taxpayers can pay 100% of the cost of a disaster bill, or see the farmers who receive an insurance benefit paying up to 50% of the cost of covering a disaster on their own. It is good policy.

2. Ethanol is a good market regulator.

Studies have shown that the ethanol industry has made farming more profitable by incorporating grain surpluses that inhibit the market and otherwise would need to be destroyed over time. A crop of corn doesn’t keep forever. You have to use it. Thirty years ago, that meant dumping it on foreign markets at a loss to the grower or spending even more government money to coerce farmers not to grow a crop. One of the main complaints about ag policy used to be “paying farmers not to farm.” You don’t hear much of that anymore because prices have improved and the ethanol market is one reason for that.

Ethanol plants are also private entities that must maintain a profit over time. Many are shutting down now, due to the increase in the price of corn making the product unprofitable. As the drought continues, more will follow. Once a plant shuts down, it won’t begin the process again until it is financially sustainable over the long term to do so, creating a natural buffer to high prices. Further, the law that was passed that incorporates renewable fuels into the national supply chain does allow that requirement to be relaxed in time such as this, an even further method of buffering the market.

3. Profitable farmers pay taxes.

The most recent study I saw a couple years ago (we were still paying blenders to add ethanol to gas then) showed the program to be a net balance to the federal treasury. The government was bringing in as much income from farmers and increased tax base (due to higher employment and increased economic activity in rural areas) as they were spending in transfers to the oil companies for blending the stuff. Once the blender’s credit went away, it probably resulted in a net income increase to the government. If those jobs were not available, the taxpayer would be paying higher unemployment and transfer payments.

4. A reality based community needs to get real.

Continued fallacies make arguing about it silly. Ethanol blends are not bad for car and truck engines. More than a dozen states have required its use for over ten years without cars piling up by the side of the road. But the myth persists.

Ethanol does have fewer BTU’s per unit than gasoline, but is higher in octane so those units burn hotter. A vehicle capable of compensating for the differences in fuel sees only a minimal mileage decrease. Most cars do not currently have that capacity, so the product is used primarily as a smog reducer in blends. But it does have other benefits: Another reason for the mileage differential is that ethanol is often blended with oil distillates that would not otherwise qualify as gasoline. Because it is higher in octane, the ethanol allows these lower grade oil products to be used in the fuel chain. This is a good thing, since it means we are able to use a greater percentage of every barrel of oil that comes from the ground as a motor fuel than we otherwise would.

There are no cash subsidies paid for the product. Up until recently, oil blenders were paid to incorporate it and bring it to the retail market. That expired last October. Now they must do so on their own dime. The alternative, in periods of stockpiled grain, is to pay farmers to supplement their income until the backlog clears, or potentially lose them to bankruptcy which decreases food security. Which would you prefer? If you believe farming is easy, how come fewer and fewer do it every year?

Ethanol produces valuable by-products. The process used to create it also produces high value feed components for the livestock industry that reduce their demand for corn and protein sources. Would livestock producers prefer to feed cheap corn? I know I would, but also have seen first hand the benefit to rural communities that the ethanol industry has provided: more employment, higher income, increased monetary velocity in the region. If you believe the rising tide lifts all boats, ethanol policy is one of the places you can show it.

I am not a huge ethanol user. I am actually a livestock producer who fared better when grain farmers were losing their ass. But I am man enough to say that the policy is effective even though it does not benefit me personally, because I have witnessed it.

I wish people were capable of taking a nuanced view of what the industry does and weigh it against the costs. I realize an internet forum is probably not the place to achieve that, but one of the major issues in agriculture is the disconnect people have with the places and ways their food is produced. If one person can step back from their knee jerk assessment of agriculture due to the discussion, it is worthwhile to attempt it.

Burning our food: The drought and the vice of ethanol

The glass is half full !

Let’s be optimistic here. Eco-Scammers surely do not look at the drought as a “bad thing”. Why, with all that extra heat and solar radiation (sun-light) just think of all the energy we can get by just laying down acres upon acres of solar panels…right over the top of the dryed up corn stocks ! :)

It’s a WIN WIN !! Eco-scammers win either way !! “Food into FUEL” or “Solar panels” !! Take your pick :D !

ethanol is incredibly inefficient, particularly corn, Beyond parody, A tax payer ripoff for a product that destroys engines and has poor mileage.

pat on July 28, 2012 at 5:51

PM

And does zero for MPG. Ethanol has 34% less energy per gallon. Cars that burn 10% ethanol on the average get 3-4% less gas milage, and unsubstantiated reports say it could be worse.

Save the corn from the gas tank, and make tortillas instead.

itsspideyman on July 28, 2012 at 6:55 PM

My son’s Prius gets 45 mpg with E10, but with E0 (plain old gasoline) he gets 54 mpg, a 20 percent improvement.

Maybe just maybe this drought is just what we need. High corn prices will drive the price of ethanol up and hopefully put some heat on our elected knuckleheads in DC.

…there’s plenty of dogs!

KOOLAID2 on July 28, 2012 at 6:19 PM

Hey … you just think that greasy spoon is serving you up a chicken fried steak.

I went to the grocery store today and paid 14.00 dollars for a SMALL SMALL roast!! My husband makes 10.00 an hr.! I am going to have to find some meatless meals!

lisa fox on July 28, 2012 at 8:07 PM

See my 8:12 link for government-certified ways to stretch those food dollars.

Funny stuff.

The ethanol rip-off of American taxpayers goes well beyond the lunatic-left d-cRAT socialist eco-fascists. MANY, MANY establishment Repubs also support this atrocity and even some alleged “conservatives” do also (like newt gingrich, to name but one).
TeaPartyNation on July 28, 2012 at 6:41 PM

This is the saddest thing. We know in the GWB era a number of Repubs went astray on spending, and on climate change in particular as the left had succeeded in duping us (many of us, I should say) good. Some establishment Repubs MAY have got some of the same payoffs to their cronies or campaign donors similar to what O has so openly and flagrantly exploited; but these Repubs need to now repudiate their past support for this lunacy.

Green energy was justified mainly because of global warming, which is bogus (the hockey stick was debunked, so current temperatures are not unusual; and CO2 arguably has nothing to do with the climate).
Some Repubs may have fallen for the idea that green energy could help reduce oil imports. But that is a complete fallacy: the exorbitant green energy subsidies if applied to conventional energy would have produced much more energy, and hence a much more significant drop in imports. But green subsidies actually crowd out conventional energy on the margins, and ultimately it is not sustainable, as the govt is going to go belly up bankrupt if they kept pouring these subsidies down the drain; look at Europe where the huge green energy subsidies has a lot to do with their financial problems (and they still are making only a tiny dent in innocuous CO2 emisions!).
So, it crowds out conventional energy, but green energy eventually will disappear if it does not benefit from the continuous lavish subsidies, leaving us worse off then if we had spent nothing on subsidy (with the conventional capability displaced). Yes, it’s lunacy!

Every politician, former politician, leader, advocate and person involved in this whole ethanol scheme should be arrested, forfeit all property, stripped of citizenship and removed from society…commensurate to the damage they have inflicted and the irretrievable wealth they have stolen from the people of this Nation.

It is and has always been a Ponzi scheme.

It never has been about saving energy or weaning the nation off fossil fuels.

The science, the engineering, the mathematics all prove that this scheme is totally inefficient across the board.

A waste from the first day.

Only dummies like Obama know the deep secret liberal commie sauce you need to open that can

The drought is making it even worse. My family’s farm is actually going to make out quite well this year. We’re in the Platte River Valley in south central Nebraska. While its dry as a bone out here, we’re sitting on the Ogallala Aquifer so irrigation is allowing us to have a harvest of about 90% of normal. With corn at $8/bushel, we’re actually deferring payment on corn we’ve sold to stay in our current tax bracket, which has never happened before. So it by no means is the situation uniform nationwide.

My thoughts and prayers are with the folks in Illinois and Indiana who are burning up and have no irrigation to mitigate it. Hopefully they’re all insured.