Myths And Facts About The Renewable Fuel Standard and Ethanol fuel - MediaMatters

[Bill USA]

3. consider...Ethanol/Methanol can meet half the light transportation fuel needs of the country...

From cmt 2:

The questions addressed and my answers:
Does The Ethanol Mandate Increase Food Prices?
- Yes, but probably not as much as is sometimes claimed.

It helps to read the CBO report referenced in MediaMatters article. Here is a quote from that report:

(emphases my own)

With both direct and indirect effects included, full compliance with the EISA mandates would increase total
spending on food in 2017 by $3.5 billion, CBO estimates, relative to spending under the other two scenarios. With total U.S. food expenditures expected to be roughly $1.8 trillion in 2017, that increase would represent a rise of about 0.2 percent.

from Cmt 2

It doesn't matter if it receives $50 if that money isn't buying us a step on the path to freedom from fossil fuels. The proper question from a policy perspective is 'Does the funding going to ethanol contribute to the elimination of fossil fuels?"

The answer for ethanol is mostly no, it doesn't.

reality: Ethanol currently represents about 10% of the light transportation fuel supply. To that extent we have already eliminated fossil fuel consumption/combustion (Producing Gasoline from Petroleum: 1.23 million Btu Fossil Energy Input to yield 1 million BTUs of gasoline). THere is no technology known to man which will eliminate all fossil fuel consumption/combustion instantly upon initiation of use of that replacement technology. Wind power and solar power are eliminating some fossil fuel consumption for electirc power, but not ALL fossil fuel consumption for that purpose. It will take decades to eliminate or significantly reduce our fossil fuel use for electric power. Hybrid vehicles, due in part to cost, will take decades to be a significant part of the light transportation fleet. In that time the Global Warming will be proceeding and accelerating. Achievements in GHG emissions reductions today are worth MORE GHG emissions reductions achieved in 20 to 30 years. That is, to get the same affect on global warming, a GHG emissions reduction achieved 20 years from now would have to be greater than a GHG emissions reduction achieved today or in, let's say, the next 5 to 10 years. This becomes significant when you consider that increases in hybrid car and PHEV sales to a significant share of total car sales are not expected to occur for perhaps 20 to 30 years. It is important to remember, as Global Warming is accelerating, GHG emissions occuring 20 or so years from now would have to be significantly greater than GH emissions reduction occurring NOW or in the next several years (see below for calculations of numbers of hybrid vehicles needed to match the GHG emissions reductions being achieved right now by ethanol.

Now, back to ethanol. Eliminating 10% of the fossil fuel that would have been consumed for light transportation needs - What does that mean in terms of GHG emissions reductions for the light transportation sector as whole.? The Argonne National Laboratory has determined that the GHG emissions reduction for corn based ethanol is -34%. So in the aggregate that is, for the whole light transportation fleet, that would be .1 x .34 = 0.034 or 3.4% reduction of the GHG emissions for the entire light transportation vehicle fleet. But how does that stack up to another approach to eliminating fossil fuel consumption for light transportation, such as hybrid vehicles (including PHEVs)?

The average increase in fuel efficiency for hybrid vehicles is about 25% - 33%. This translates into a fuel consumption reduction of 20% to 25% per vehicle. The fuel consumption reduction is the measure of the GHG emissions reductions for Hybrid vehicles (it's more complicated for PHEVs so for simplicity, let's just use conventional hybrids for this calculation). To get the number of hybrid cars needed to achieve an aggregate reduction of 3.4% (ethanol's aggregate GHG emissions reduction) of the GHG emissions for the entire fleet, you divide the 3.4% (0.034) by the fuel consumption reduction per hybrid vehicle. So 0.034/0.2 = 0.17 -- which means the number of hybrids (with fuel consumption reduction of 20% per vehicle) needed to get an aggregate reduction of GHG emissions of 3.4% - would be 17% of the fleet.

If we use 250,000,000 cars and light trucks as the number for the entire fleet that would be 42.5 million hybrid vehicles needed to achieve an aggregate reduction of 3.4% which ethanol is achieving today - and has been achieving for the last four to five years.

If you assume a fuel efficiency improvement (over comparable ICE powered car) for hybrids on average of 33% yielding a fuel consumption reduction average of 25% the number of hybrids needed to achieve an aggregate GHG reduction of 3.4% would be: 34,257,576.

NOw, how long it would take to achieve these numbers of hybrids on the road is anybody's guess. Would it be two decades, or three decades? No one knows for sure. But in that time ethanol would be achieving 3.4% reductions every year (and climbing if we were to start using ethanol in the more efficient ways it could be used - or as ethanol/methanol production from agricultural and forestry product waste is committed to and invested in).

THere is also the consideration of what percentage of the entire fleet that hybrid and phevs could realistically constitute. THis depends upon cost and how much battery performance is increased in the future. Cost is an important issue in adoption of any technology. As to future battery performance and when that will be achieved - and how much that will cost - these are all extremely hard to predict. Which is why nobody is making an 'hard' predictions on when hybrid and PHEV sales will reach a specific number of vehicles or percentage of the entire fleet. (usually such estimates are given a range of years or sometimes predicted with a range in numbers for the year 2050 - 35 years in the future!)


from cmnt 2:

Are we going to meet the long term transportation needs of any major sector using corn ethanol? The answer for ethanol is mostly no, it doesn't.

THis is not what the Oak Ridge National Laboratory concluded in their study: Biomass as Feedstock for a Bioenergy and Bioproducts industry: the TEchnical Feasibility of a Billion ton Annual Supply. They concluded that biomass in the form of corn based ethanol and ethanol from agricultural and forestry product waste could meet 30% of the nations need for fuel for the light transportation fleet.


Billion ton update

[font size="+1"] But it must be noted that when they computed the 30% of the supply they were assuming that the fuel efficiency of ethanol can only be computed by using the BTU content of ethanol relative to gasoline. An assumption that is valid only if you insist on using ethanol in a low compression engine (optimized for low octane gasoline). It has been shown that engines optimized to use ethanol can achieve the same fuel efficiency as gasoline or better (15% higher fuel efficiency has been achieved (without downsizing of the engine which would boost the fuel efficiency improvement even higher) when using ethanol (or methanol) because of ethanol's and methanol's higher octane and higher heat of evaporation. Considering this, the volume of fuel supplied would not be 30% of the light transportation fleet's needs but 46% to 53%. (note high compression operation can be achieved with turbo-charging or super-charging which can be controlled to reduce boost to accomodate low octane gasoline and thus achieve a dual fuel car which still is optimized to use ethanol/methanol as efficiently as it can be used).[/font]

NOw, it should be noted that the biomass could be used to produce methanol (this can be done right now) and methanol would perform comparably to ethanol.

Obviously, ethanol/methanol can be used in any surface vehicle transportation application from small cars to large trucks.

This is not to say hybrid vehicles of PHEVs should not be invested in. I am for everyone who can afford one to buy one. We will need them to help reduce GHG emissions from the light vehicle fleet. But we cannot expect to solve the Global warming problem as it applies to light vehicle transportation using hybrids and PHEVs alone. Any GHG emissions reductions we may gain from adoption of hybrids and PHEVs will come too late by themselves to make much of a difference. [font size="+1"]The fact remains that you can replace the fuel cars burn far faster than you can replace the cars that burn it.[/font]


Even greater efficiency gains can be achieved with alcohol (ethanol/methanol) powered engines

Fuel efficiency improvement of 25% to 30% over the conventional ICE are achieveable with the Ethanol Direct Injection turbocharged engine using only 5% ethanol. That means, if all the vehicles in the fleet were equipped with the ethanol direct injection turbocharged engine, we could reduce fossil fuel consumption 28% with a volume of ethanol equal to only 5% of the total fuel supply! We currently meet 10% of the fuel supply with ethanol. The other 5% could be blended with the gasoline used yielding a total gasoline consumption reduction of 33%! This engine cost about 1/4th the additional cost to produce a conventional hybrid car.

Then there is the Ultra-High Efficiency Reformer Enhanced Alcohol Engine: 50% Efficiency gain over conventional ICE

[font size="+1"]By the way, if the ethanol/methanol supply mentioned in the Oak Ridge study above was used in the Ultra High Efficiency Alcohol engine with reformer - which doubles the fuel efficiency of the typical ICE powered car, that supply of ethanol/methanol would meet 69% of the light vehicle transportation needs.[/font]