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U.S. corn-based ethanol worse for the climate than gasoline, study finds

reuters.com

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Re: U.S. corn-based ethanol worse for the climate than gasoline, study finds

#111

Post by mywittyname »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #73
deeviant wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a simple case of it's energy density. The energy content of ethanol is about 33% less than pure gasoline. Higher octane doesn't even necessary equate to higher gas mileage. As soon as octane is high enough for your engine tuning, there's no mileage benefit.

> As soon as octane is high enough for your engine tuning, there's no mileage benefit. That's exactly my point. Would it be possible to design an engine from the ground up for very high octane fuels?

Yeah, this is how most E85 engines generally work. They have a E15 engine map, and an E85 and map. And use sensors to figure out which fuel is in the tank and which map to use.

Stock cars generally don't take full advantage of the octane benefits of E85 because they will blow up if someone fills the tank with E15. But in the aftermarket world, "corn powered" cars make substantially more power, especially turbocharged ones. They have the benefit of owners that understand to manually switch maps when changing fuels.

Re: U.S. corn-based ethanol worse for the climate than gasoline, study finds

#112

Post by bluGill »

xen2xen1 wrote: post #101

So "oil and water don't mix", as is often said. Oil/ gas with corn based additives DO mix with water, so it cannot be piped through a pipeline, thus making it be carried totally by truck, and making it's carbon footprint even worse.

It cannot be put in existing pipelines. You can build a whole new pipeline that will carry ethanol. Nobody wants to invest that much money.

Re: U.S. corn-based ethanol worse for the climate than gasoline, study finds

#113

Post by Scoundreller »

cashsterling wrote: post #37

As others mentioned, this is not a new finding. There is a lot of academic and industrial/economic analysis on this subject. Ethanol from corn was never a good idea economically for anyone other than corn farmers. It is also bad environmentally and places additional competitive demand on our food supply (choice and competition between corn going into food or fuel supply). Similar analysis has been done on other crop…

Ethanol is great for gas stations too. Your tank doesn’t go as far so you need to visit them more often.

Dunno how the complaints about ethanol = bad because it’s hygroscopic really are. Yeah, 100% ethanol will pull in atmospheric h2o, but in a gasoline+ethanol mix?

If anything, a small bit of ethanol helps “break the phase” and at least runs any moisture through your engine instead of a separate layer which is surely worse. Dunno if any unscrupulous gas stations/suppliers deliberately water down their ethanol laden gas just to earn some extra margin.

Re: U.S. corn-based ethanol worse for the climate than gasoline, study finds

#114

Post by bluGill »

hammock wrote: post #47
randomdata wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to the alternative, though? The corn will be grown either way. It's not hard to see 100 bushel per acre swings in corn yield between growing years even within normal growing parameters, never mind times of crop catastrophes. While everyone hopes for a good year every year, you can't plan for a good year. As such, there will always be times where there is way more corn than we can handle. Which is what happen…

>The corn will be grown either way. Citation needed

When your turn corn into ethanol there is a byproduct "distiller grains" that is fed to animals. This is feed we would have to grow in some form anyway.

Re: U.S. corn-based ethanol worse for the climate than gasoline, study finds

#115

Post by Scoundreller »

retrac wrote: post #76
jfengel wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corn farmers from Iowa. Where they hold the first caucus of the interminable election season. No American politician or political party can afford to offend corn farmers. We should count ourselves lucky that our gasoline is only 10% corn.

It is surprising how much politics and law can affect what is grown where. The US-Canada border cuts right across the prairies. Conditions are pretty much identical in northern North Dakota and southern Manitoba. Yet the border is clearly visible on some maps of agricultural yield: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:OatsYield.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RyeYield.png

Though lots of ethanol in Canadian gasoline too. Hard to find any without 10% ethanol, even in jurisdictions with limited corn growing.

What caused that?

Or do the US subsidies on corn make it cost effective for Canadians to burn ethanol? If so, where’s my cheap E85? I’d run it in my old Corolla and see what happens.

Re: U.S. corn-based ethanol worse for the climate than gasoline, study finds

#116

Post by RosanaAnaDana »

bluGill wrote: post #79
ravenstine wrote: post #71

> The research, which was funded in part by the National Wildlife Federation and U.S. Department of Energy Can't imagine there's any conflict of interest there. > ethanol is likely at least 24% more carbon-intensive than gasoline due to emissions resulting from land use changes to grow corn, along with processing and combustion. The nice thing about words like "likely" is that it leaves the door open for the other th…

Plowing the soil is a terrible thing to do. Which is why no farmer has done it since around 1980. Modern tilling is much better for the soil, and doesn't release as much carbon form the soil (it needs more power from the tractor, and thus more CO2 from fuel, but still a lot less carbon total because the soil is saved. The above is also why GMO crops are so great for the environment: by using a little roundup (just a…

>Plowing the soil is a terrible thing to do. Which is why no farmer has done it since around 1980.

Thats just not true. Plenty of farmers still plough. There has been some movement to lower disturbance low-till/ minimum-till systems for commodity crops, but we're still seeing soil carbon losses in agricultural soils in general. Number isn't going up and to the right, its still going down and to the left. I appreciate the importance of these kinds of systems, but I also appreciate that its not nearly as well adopted as one would think based on a survey of youtube videos. There is a very real departure from the Internets vision of farming and real-life farming in terms of practice.

I do agree however that carbon in the soils is the answer to most problems. The closest thing I came to witnessing a fist fight at work was between two 50+ yo scientists regarding aluminium/ alumina ions and their relationship with soil carbon. If geriatric scientsits are willing to raise fisticuffs over it, you should wonder why they care so much.

Re: U.S. corn-based ethanol worse for the climate than gasoline, study finds

#117

Post by 1letterunixname »

jfengel wrote: post #53
cashsterling wrote: post #37

As others mentioned, this is not a new finding. There is a lot of academic and industrial/economic analysis on this subject. Ethanol from corn was never a good idea economically for anyone other than corn farmers. It is also bad environmentally and places additional competitive demand on our food supply (choice and competition between corn going into food or fuel supply). Similar analysis has been done on other crop…

Corn farmers from Iowa. Where they hold the first caucus of the interminable election season. No American politician or political party can afford to offend corn farmers. We should count ourselves lucky that our gasoline is only 10% corn.

Correction: W did this to give more power to agribusinesses and large-scale farmers who were drifting towards democratic socialism.

The market price is destabilized and undercut by government subsidies who put most farmers in the unenviable position of taking corporate welfare in order to make a living.

If the government got out of the business of picking winners and losers, and deciding who to rain money on and who to starve, the corn would be more expensive and sugar cane would be cheaper.

Re: U.S. corn-based ethanol worse for the climate than gasoline, study finds

#118

Post by ravenstine »

retrocat wrote: post #102
ravenstine wrote: post #71

> The research, which was funded in part by the National Wildlife Federation and U.S. Department of Energy Can't imagine there's any conflict of interest there. > ethanol is likely at least 24% more carbon-intensive than gasoline due to emissions resulting from land use changes to grow corn, along with processing and combustion. The nice thing about words like "likely" is that it leaves the door open for the other th…

The research article is located here: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2101084119 >; if you're interested in what "likely" means in this context, it may be beneficial to read through the article. My understanding is that the "likely" comes from it being an estimate using models, as the research article states. > Substituting our empirically derived domestic emissions for those modeled in the RFS RIA would r…

> With the increase in demand for corn for fuel usage, more fields are needed to plant the corn. Because the corn is for fuel, not food, food wouldn't have been planted in place of the corn had there not been fuel demand.

Spent corn used in ethanol production becomes livestock feed. Good quality feed, actually. Even with a surplus of spent corn, it can be dried and kept around until needed. Point being that it actually is food, just by proxy. More fields may be needed to scale for demand, but it wouldn't be linear. For all we know, the scale of corn production has a modest relationship with ethanol or is correlative and weakly causative.

Re: U.S. corn-based ethanol worse for the climate than gasoline, study finds

#119

Post by rootusrootus »

retrac wrote: post #76
jfengel wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corn farmers from Iowa. Where they hold the first caucus of the interminable election season. No American politician or political party can afford to offend corn farmers. We should count ourselves lucky that our gasoline is only 10% corn.

It is surprising how much politics and law can affect what is grown where. The US-Canada border cuts right across the prairies. Conditions are pretty much identical in northern North Dakota and southern Manitoba. Yet the border is clearly visible on some maps of agricultural yield: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:OatsYield.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RyeYield.png

There are several factors in addition to ethanol, right? US livestock feed is primarily maize, but is that true in Canada? And the US has nearly 10x as many cattle. It seems like regulations are the primary driver in the border split, but not all of the regulations are about ethanol (also, Canada uses corn to make ethanol, too, in some areas).

Re: U.S. corn-based ethanol worse for the climate than gasoline, study finds

#120

Post by throwaway5752 »

hatsunearu wrote: post #90
cashsterling wrote: post #37

As others mentioned, this is not a new finding. There is a lot of academic and industrial/economic analysis on this subject. Ethanol from corn was never a good idea economically for anyone other than corn farmers. It is also bad environmentally and places additional competitive demand on our food supply (choice and competition between corn going into food or fuel supply). Similar analysis has been done on other crop…

Ethanol also is used as an octane booster. I'd rather take Ethanol than MTBE or TEL.

This should be the highest rated response to the parent because it's overwhelmingly used as a low octane fuel booster additive, not a fuel.

If you have 85 gasoline and need to get it to 87, you blend it with an appropriate quantity of ethanol (octane rating 108.6, thanks for the correction).

Reference: https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/ethanol_fuel_basics.html

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