Ethanol and America: My Conversation With William Larsen

I recently had an excellent email dialogue with William Larsen (Indiana 3rd District Republican challenger to Mark Souder) regarding ethanol and other alternative fuels. I will first begin by explaining how this started…William and I had a brief exchange of differing philosophies on a different blog (I made some half-cocked comment about the ignorance of NOT using corn for fuel) and he sent me the following email (my responses in the usual titilating mint green):

Andrew,

Considering that mother nature puts a lot of energy into growing things, yes it does count for something. However, ethanol contains less then 85,000 btu’s of energy. There just is no way to increase this, its just plain chemistry. With that said, how much energy does it take to convert the grain or bio-mas to ethanol?
If you would like I have three studies that go into detail on the energy balance equation for producing ethanol. The most efficient takes about 90,000 btu’s. This means I have consume 5,000 btu’s more than I can get out. This is inefficient.
Now if we could produce ethanol and consume only 75,000 btu’s we got something. We could take 7/8 of a gallon of ethanol and use it to plant, grow, harvest and distill 1 gallon of ethanol. In this case the more you grow the more you get.
However, because of the way things are, it consumes more energy than it contains meaning it is a very bad idea.
best regards,

-Bill Larsen

Bill,

In black and white, you are correct.
Several other things to consider:
-Less messy to manf.
-Bi-products useful in other industry (hydroponic agriculture, fish farming can use the virtually unlimited supply of 78degree F water….)
-Technology will catch up to the fuel…if they have to! We find ways every day to do more work with less energy consumption…but necessity is the mother of invention.
-Would help to roll back farm subsidies
-Less concerns with import dilemmas
-Less interaction with rogue nations
-No net loss of business or profit to oil companies, since they are the only industry that already has a distribution model in place for this sort of thing.
-Cleaner to burn

These points must be weighed carefully before a wholesale discard of the idea. As far as the aggregate inefficiency, is our current system of fuel procurement and/or refinement truly a good use of time and resources? I see wasted time and money at virtually every step of the process…each contributing to a fuel cost that is only sustainable because of demand…it’s an excellent display of capitalism, but in a commodity market it comes across as almost criminal.
Addicted to oil? No, just addicted to the work oil does…there is energy “lost” (to heat or motion) in every transaction we affect (theory of conservation of energy). By your calculation, human beings are not efficient enough (by virtue of our extremely poor energy intake to work output ratio) to warrant survival…and yet we keep eating (we’re such a selfish animal). If energy conversion was a perfected science, perpetual motion would be feasible….
My point is, work with what you’ve got. For now, it’s petrol. For the future, we know science will evolve to make Ethanol a better fuel (or better engineered machines to burn it), but only if that is paying the bills for the scientists…nobody is going to do it if a) they don’t have to b)they don’t profit considerably from it.
Wrap your mind around this: Diesel takes less refinement that gasoline, yet it is more expensive. Why? Because of the refining capacity we ration for diesel production drastically (and negatively) effects the supply side of the economics. Now, take 80% of the gasoline out of the refineries and replace with diesel. Suddenly, diesel could feasibly hit $1.30 per gallon and agriculture is affordable again, making Ethanol vastly more cost effective to manufacture. Chicken….egg…..who cares? Just get one of the two out there!!!
I like you. I may vote for you (which means stepping out of my “modus operandi” and actually registering as a Republican in the primary…something I’ve never done. I’ve always voted “issues only” on primary ballots).

-Andrew

Andrew,

There is a much better way, cleaner and actually renewable now. Denmark produces 80% of its electricity this way. Off the coast of Massachusetts they are installing I believe 150 of them. They will produce 5 megawatts each.Stop subsidies to farmers. 5% of all farm land is not very good for farming. Install one or two on each farm and pay a royalty to the farmer. This would increase the revenue to the farmer, spread out our electrical generating capacity and is cost effective now.I am talking about wind power. These units are designed to go ten years without maintenance. We need to get away from burning fuel to expand a gas to push pistons. It is inefficient.In my written blog, I did mention by-products. The problem is how much by -products can be used? By-products are used as feed for live stock. Think about the total gallons of ethanol needed to replace oil. We could never use that much by-product, which means it becomes waste.As for more efficient means, it comes down to thermodynamics. Energy cannot be created nor destroyed, only changed in form. As a mechanical engineer with years of experience in power equipment and energy sources, we will not get much better at distillation than what we have now. Our efforts would be better devoted to implementing something that has tremendous payback, no tax credits needed and works now with known technology. We have been using heat to transform energy for over two hundred years.Oil shale holds a much better return than Ethanol. Canada has a large facility in operation now. This would use US based oil shale to produce US based oil. The coal fired boilers we have today use a talcum powder size coal. It is mixed with a bit of moisture and is pumped to the boilers. Because of its size, it is nearly 100% consumed. It falls onto a moving conveyor at which time you could pick it up without burning your hand. We are extracting as much energy as possibly can be now. We might get 1% more efficient, but it would take tens of billions to do it. We have reached the point of diminishing returns.I appreciate your comments.Best regards,

-Bill

Mr. Larsen,

Do you mind if I blog our ethanol email conversation? You did an eloquent job of posing the “con” argument, and I assure you that I will keep your statements in context and intact without inserting my own commentary. I just believe that it is a debate that is more ready for the public now than ever….I’ve been meaning to get into blogging the ethanol debate for a month and I had not yet prepared a proper foray…

-Andrew

Andrew,

Please by all means. I searched for reports on Ethanol production for years. Reports summaries very and some are suspect, but as I said, I do have three I saved to PDF on my hard drive. I need to find the actual links where I got them from. If I do, I will add them to the blog.
What you raised is very important that we get it right. Politicians are giving ADM I believe $5 Billion a year in tax credits for Ethanol. This is huge. Are we moving in the right direction? Are we going after the fuel of the 21st century?
Best regards,

-Bill