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Hard Look at Gov. Pataki Ethanol Proposal
Posted by Glenn on January 9, 2006 - 7:27pm in The Oil Drum: Local
Topic: Policy/Politics
Tags: biodiesel, ethanol, george pataki, new york, oil, peak oil [list all tags]
Gov. George E. Pataki wants to ... make ethanol and biodiesel, two controversial alternative fuels, available in the 27 service areas on the New York State Thruway and in 100 more stations throughout the state as early as this year, in a first small step toward reducing the state's petroleum consumption. The governor is also proposing incentives to bring refineries that produce ethanol into the state.
So, let's explore ethanol's place in New York's alternative energy basket.
In energy production, this is all that matters. You don't want to waste energy trying to make less energy. Given how dependent our agriculture is on fossil fuels for fertilizer, equipment and how energy intensive it is to refine ethanol for burning, it's not surprising that the full EROEI calculation doesn't add up for ethanol:
Adding up the energy costs of corn production and its conversion to ethanol, 131,000 Btu are needed to make 1 gallon of ethanol. One gallon of ethanol has an energy value of only 77,000 Btu. "Put another way," Pimentel said, "about 70 percent more energy is required to produce ethanol than the energy that actually is in ethanol. Every time you make 1 gallon of ethanol, there is a net energy loss of 54,000 Btu."(Pimentel)
So before we invest too much in ethanol production and distribution, let's make sure there is a positive EROEI. This probably means moving to a more organic method of farming, which would be a great thing, but this doesn't seem to be part of the proposal. Wouldn't it be a cruel hoax if by subsidizing ethanol production to move away from fossil fuels, we end up encouraging more intensive farming practices that require more fossil fuels?
Scale
Let's assume the first (and very important) hurdle of a positive EROEI of 2-5 is met. The next issue we would have to deal with is exactly how much fuel we could replace with corn ethanol:
If all the automobiles in the United States were fueled with 100 percent ethanol, a total of about 97 percent of U.S. land area would be needed to grow the corn feedstock. Corn would cover nearly the total land area of the United States. (Pimentel)
Which is impossible, plus we have to use some of that corn to eat too. Most of the corn produced in this country goes to feed livestock for meat production, so at best we could only replace perhaps a fraction of the gasoline demand and we'd all have to become vegetarians.
Pollution
And from the NY Times, we learn that it's not like ethanol is really that "green" from a local air pollution/global warming perspective since carbon and other dangerous chemicals are still released into the atmosphere:
Peter Iwanowicz, a director of environmental health for the American Lung Association of New York, said the environmental benefits of the two fuels were mixed."Ethanol increases ozone formation, which is obviously harmful for people with lung disease, and biodiesel increases emissions of nitrogen oxide," he said.(NY Times)
Politics
Then we finally get at the political dimension to Pataki's ethanol idea, which goes beyond just having a Green Republican image:
Mr. Pataki has been criticized for promoting ethanol because it is made from corn grown in states that include Iowa, which he has been visiting recently to gauge support for a possible presidential run...Environmentalists have largely denounced making ethanol-capable vehicles, calling that a boondoggle intended for the agriculture lobby and Detroit. When automakers build cars and trucks that can use ethanol, called flex-fuel vehicles, they earn credits that make it easier to meet fuel-economy regulations, in turn giving them leeway to build more gas-guzzlers.
Now that's triangulation politics that even Clinton (Bill or Hill) would be proud to play. And at the end of all this it seems we will be using more fossil fuels than ever before.
A Better Way for NY: Niche Strategy for Cellulose Biofuels
This kind of examination is helpful because it redirects us to better ideas, like plug-in hybrids and biodiesel made from cellulose, instead of food that can be eaten:
...even the governor's advisers say that making ethanol from corn is a bad idea and that they prefer using wood or certain kinds of grass. The plan also includes incentives to help the state modify its hybrid-electric vehicles so that the cars can be plugged into stationary outlets to enable them to use even more electricity than fuel, a practice discouraged by the auto industry.
These aren't universal answers to replacing fossil fuels, but they can serve as incremental steps to a world that is better prepared for peak oil.
Just putting aside the plug-ins for the moment, here's my bio-fuel proposal for New York:
Step #1. Create more incentives for local farms to reduce their consumption of fossil fuels.
Step #2: Locally produce a biodiesel fuel (not ethanol) from excess cellulose or cooking oil waste (not usable food) with a positive EROEI. Create a complete system from farm to refining to sales outlet that is not highly dependent on fossil fuels.
Step #3. Target useful niches in the transportation system, like Buses and Trucks, which run on diesel only and can be easily adapted to biodiesel. These are highly efficient at moving people to work and products to market. More essential to the economy than a single occupancy vehicle, which could use ethanol.
Step #4. Roll this new fuel out in the distribution chain of diesel outlets using only biodiesel supply trucks. Then set realistic targets to convert a significant percentage of over to locally produced biofuels.
This plan would spur more local organic farms and stimulate a local bio-fuel supply system that could operate relatively independent of fossil fuels. This system could keep the economy moving in an fuel crisis and it wouldn't be competing with all the single occupancy vehicles directly since they can't run on diesel.
If Gov. Pataki really wants to insulate the local economy from fossil fuel price fluctuations, then he should really think about the whole supply chain of how biomass becomes a fuel and focus on critical elements in the economy that we would want to prioritize in a fuel crisis.
Send him a note with your thoughts on ethanol and bio-diesel.
Ethanol is important for our energy future because it is the easiest fuel to substitute for gasoline for the 200 million existing gasoline-fueled vehicles in the USA. Existing autos built since 1995 can operate on ethanol concentrations of 20% or more without modification, and the first retrofit kits have appeared in the market to support operation on even higher concentrations of ethanol.
Biodiesel is especially important for support of diesel-powered agricultural equipment, in order to insulate farmers from petroleum price spikes.
But I'm game for more data on the subject. I just want to make sure we do the EROEI analysis before investing huge sums of money into that instead of electric plug-ins based on wind/solar/other. Or just simply investing in greater conservation.
What other studies would you recommend on the subject of ethanol EROEI using corn or cellulose based feedstock?
And I completely agree about ethanol powered farm equipment. We need a whole system that is fossil-fuel free, not just a system that uses lots of fossil fuels inputs and produces another type of liquid fuel output.
There is a 2004 paper by Lynd & Wang of Dartmoth published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology (an MIT and Yale publication)showing EROEI for corn and cellulosic biomass in different types of process configurations. To tie everybody in the paper was guest edited by an Iowa State University Engineering person. They were very thorough in identifying the energy inputs from fertilizing the crop all the way through crop handling, enzyme treatment and cogeneration in the ethanol plants. They show positive EROEI for most processes. Yes, corn can result in negative EROEI if set up indcorrectly and yes cellulosic can be better in some configurations. But corn and cellulosic are about equal if configuring ideally for the respective feedstock. The key is you can't set up one type of operation and then change feedstock or process parameters. No one size fits all. Physical plant construction is critical to positive EROEI. Sounds a lot like refineries and sour crude issues we discuss here all the time.
There have been enormous strides made in industrial enzymes for ethanol production. This has been led by Novo Nordisk but others are working hard in that area. The enzymes are required to lower the energy cost to breakdown the complex molecules into sugars that yeast can convert to ethanol. As I posted earlier today there are also growing markets for the edible waste from the ethanol processors, particularly distillers grain from corn. Not only have the EROEI been shown to be positive there are very strong economic incentives to cycle corn through ethanol plants before feeding animals.
The point of all this is that old data in the biofuels area is not to be trusted. People are figuring out how to get positive EROEI in a sustainable way. I sometimes wonder if the scrutiny applied to biofuels was used for petroleum from exploration to wells through refining to cleanup and waste disposal what the true EROEI would be. Those considerations are typical for evaluating ethanol.
Personally, I think biodiesel has a place - as fuel for planes, say - but cannot replace gasoline for cars. Post-peak, we are going to have trouble growing enough food for the current population of the U.S. Biofuel will be a luxury.
I agree that celluslosic ethanol has its place, as does sugar cane and a few of the biodiesels, but all of these solutions only go so far, and leave me with the following impressions:
1)The latent power in crude oil compared to alternatives is awesome. Until I really dug into this research and looked at the scale of alternatives, I didnt internalize how ginormous our energy subsidy really is...
Yes Pimentel has been discredited: by the Ethanol Lobby, but not yet by science.
The US gasoline consumption is 9.5 million barrels / day, 9.5 * 365 * 42 = about 145 billion gallons annually. The US annual corn crop harvest is 10 billion bushels. 10 * 2.5 = 25 billion gallons of ethanol. Ethanol yield is about 2.5 gallons per bushel. 25 / 145 = about 17% If we used the entire annual corn crop to produce ethanol, 10% could be used for gasohol while the other 7% would be consumed by increased demand before the new ethanol plants came on line.
In addition to corn I have been looking at some numbers on soybeans and potatoes.
The US harvests about 2.5 billion bushels of soybeans annually, and about 23 million tons of potatoes. Potatoes yield about 25-30 gallons of ethanol/ton or 688 million gallons of ethanol about .5% of our gas consumption.
There has been much talk about bio-diesel from soybeans. The only numbers I can find are that soybeans yield about 9.5 to 10 pounds of oil/bushel. How much bio-diesel will 10 pounds of soybean oil yield?? 1.5 Gallons max, that would make 3.75 billion gallons of bio-diesel. Our annual distillate consumption is 4.5*365*42=69 billion gallons. Soybean bio-diesel would only supply 5.4% of our distillate needs. 3.75/69=.0543.
There is another problem with bio-diesel. Currently an average to excellent soybean yield is about 50 bushels/acre. At $6.00 a bushel that is a $300 annual/acre crop, However at best it will yield about 75 gallons of oil and 60 gallons of bio-diesel. That means with zero capitol and processing expense, the bio-diesel has a crop cost alone of $5.00 per gallon.
I understand that Minnesota has enacted a 2% bio-diesel law that requires nearly all diesel fuel to be blended with 2% bio-diesel. Now I don't know how much nearly is, but here is a web-site to explain it further.
http://www.mda.state.mn.us/biodiesel/b2/default.htm
Here is a web-site of oil yield for oil-bearing crops.
http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_yield.html#ascend
Here is a more efficient method of consuming corn. 15% water in shell corn contains 7000 btu's of energy per pound, and 15% shell corn weighs 56 Lbs per bushel. That is 392,000 Btu's per Bushel. At $2.00 per bushel that is $5.10 per million Btu's. Then I checked kerosene it's about the same as distillate. 6.819 Lbs per gallon and 19,810 Btu's per pound or 135,000 Btu's per gallon, or 7.4 gallons per Million Btu's. At $1.76 per gallon that is $13.00 per million Btu's. NG spot today was about $10.00 per million Btu's. Now according to the USDA a bushel of 15% corn should yield 2.68 gallons of ethanol,and ethanol contains 14,000 Btu's per pound and weighs 6.59 Lbs per gallon. That means that a bushel of corn will yield 247,000 Btu's, so you see you lose 145,000 Btu's in the ethanol process, however the leftover mash is used for cattle feed. I don't know the efficiency of a corn burning stove versus a gas or fuel oil furnace, however it is certainly more efficient than using it to produce ethanol, as a significant amount of energy is used in the conversion process. Corn burner web sites.
http://www.bae.umn.edu/extens/ennotes/enaug01/burncorn.htm
http://energy.cas.psu.edu/shellcorn.html
http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/12/09/051209141924.flu6l9pn.html
How much food value does ddg have after 65% of the energy has been removed?
One of the authors of that report, Michael Wang, spoke on this subject several times in various places in 2005, and he has made a PDF of his slides available. I call your attention to his slide 16, and particularly the red line connecting two red dots on the right side. Wang is saying here that his modelling program, GREET, can reproduce Prof. Pimentel's results for corn ethanol energy balance, if he uses the same assumptions as Pimentel, but that the upper red dot (positive energy) results if Pimentel's assumptions are corrected. Notice all of the other blue dots in the upper (positive) part of the graph. Those are all the other studies, which agree with each other, and which agree with Pimentel if his assumptions are corrected. The corrections needed are summarized in the last paragraph on p.11 of the "Update" report cited above.
Co-products and combined cycles are the key in this business (and Pimentel largely ignores them). For example, a few months ago I saw a press release about a new ethanol refinery operation to be established in Colorado in conjunction with a feedlot. The corn will be processed to ethanol in the usual fashion, and the DDGS [Dry Distillers Grain Solids] which remain after the starch is processed will be fed to the cattle. The manure will be composted, and the methane will be collected to fuel the still of the ethanol refinery. The press release implied that the methane will be sufficient for the distillation, with no fossil fuel needed. I ask you: what is the EROEI of this combined process?!? It is very high, probably something like five or ten. There are many other such examples. Dupont has developed a process to produce their new polymer Sorona from corn starch, and now they are working on a cellulosic ethanol process so that they can use the rest of the corn plant. Most cellulosic ethanol processes are going to be able to avoid using fossil fuels because they will fire the stills with the leftover lignin component of the plants (and may even sell excess energy as electricity). That is why you will see assertions that the EROEI of cellulosic ethanol will be much higher than that of current conventional ethanol refineries.
If I'm not mistaken the key difference is that Pimentel's assumptions include fixed or "non-operating" energy costs of equipment, etc. I can accept fossil fuels being used as an initial energy "endowment" that helps create a system that could support itself over time and even ultimately serve to replenish fixed asset needs of the production system.
To what extent can existing ethanol refineries be refitted to switch to a cellulosic process?
The right kind of idea but it can be even better. Methane is an exelent wehicle fuel, its used for all city busses and a lot of cars in my home town.
Use another heat source, preferably one hot enough to make steam for a turbine to also get some electricity. Keeping with the theme it could be biomass. If it is hot enough to give a large electricity surplus use some of it to electrolyze water into oxygen and hydrogen and add 8% hydrogen to the methane.
There is already a small 50 000 m3/year ethanol plant that get a lot of its process heat from combined heat and electricity district heating plant burning mostly forest biomass. The ethanol plant will probably get its capacity doubled in a year or two.
One methane fermentation stage is being built right now and will have a production of an equivalent to 7 m3 of liquid fuel per day to be increased to 11 m3 per day, 4000 m3/ year.
I do not know how large a percentage goes to the methane plant. I am trying to get figures to find out what this means for the total EROEI.
Looking at p. 4, I see energy inputs of natural gas, LPG, electricity, and coal.
p. 6 says that ethanol has a lower energy quality than gasoline. I assume NG and LPG have higher energy quality. And of course, electricity is highest of all.
The production of 100 BTU of corn ethanol consumes 73 BTU of fossils. That already sounds nearly pointless. But consider this: It will be consuming either liquid fuels, or gas (a higher-quality fuel), or coal-fired electricity. I have to wonder whether the claimed greenhouse gas reductions (pp. 14, 15, 19) from ethanol were assuming the electricity would be gas-fired?
p. 6 also says that 100 BTU of cellulose ethanol costs only 9.6 BTU of fossil. Someone wrote above that corn and cellulose could be made equivalent? Doesn't look likely.
Take a look at p. 20. In 2004, 12% of US corn was used to produce 1.7% of the gasoline-plus-ethanol energy used in 2003. So if we used 100% of US corn, we'd be able to replace... a whopping 14% of our 2003-level gasoline consumption.
I look at this presentation, and I see a massive case against corn ethanol!
I also see a case for cellulose ethanol. As confirmed on p. 22. If cellulose really has an EROEI of 10, it seems perhaps worth working on. But I think anyone citing this presentation as support for corn ethanol needs to do a little more arithmetic or become a little less partisan.
If that includes the authors of the report, so be it.
Chris
The biggest improvement that could be made is to use spent steam from steam turbine generators to run the distilleries. This would have a small efficiency hit on the generators, but nearly eliminate the use of fuel for distillation.
Chris
Eliminate cattle/hogs from the equation- 7 to 1 grain to meat on cattle, 3 to 1 on hogs. Compare to 2 to 1 grain conversion with poultry and 1 to 1 with catfish.
Essentially, the world is experiencing an overpopulation in farm animals. Between 1950 and 1994, global meat production increased nearly fourfold, rising faster than the human population. During this period, production rates jumped from 18 kg/person to 35.4 kg/person (Brown and Kane 1994; FAO 1997). The combined weight of the world's 15 billion farm animals now surpasses that of the human population by more than a factor of 1.5 (Table 1).
Arkansas, if livestock/poultry included, produces the same waste stream as 22 million people(Guv Bill Clinton quote,IMHO).
With cattle in feedlots, it takes roughly 7 kilograms of grain to produce a 1-kilogram gain in live weight. Growth of feedlots is now minimal. For pork, the figure is close to 4 kilograms per kilogram of weight gain, for poultry it is just over 2, and for herbivorous species of farmed fish, such as carp, tilapia, and catfish, it is less than 2.
BTW-same article-In areas that produce grain, particularly those that double-crop grains, such as winter wheat and corn in east-central China, there are large amounts of crop residues--either straw from wheat or rice or the stalks from corn--that can be fed to cattle. Cattle, being ruminants, can easily convert crop residues into protein, leaving the manure to fertilize fields. The amount of beef now produced in this manner in the east-central provinces greatly exceeds that being produced on rangelands in the overgrazed northwest.
As China has already realized, the most efficient way to recycle biomass is thru digestive organs eg. mouths.
It seems to me that the process of getting to a higher ERoEI depends on some tenuous links. Perhaps the most unseen is the quality of feed given to the cattle. If the quality is poor, then poor cattle result. Market value would be less and perhaps no one would consume the cattle. The positive ERoEI could break down there.
Again, Thanks!
This would fall more under the category of cogeneration. Ethanol extracted in the manufacturing process and from woody biomass (there is no shortage of "brush" in upstate NY). I don't think that we should encourage susidized farming of soybeans and corn just to produce ethanol, but perhaps as techniques to extract ethanol from byproducts of manufacturing and food production are expanded, we could maximize our energy production within the state.
Besides, wood, cellulose, corn and other materials for biofuels have competing uses, which may have higher energy efficiency than making biofuels. For instance, it is more efficient to burn wood for heating or using it as building material, substituting for energy-intensive cement.
The European war-time experience tells, that in an emergency situation, when oil imports are blocked, wood, coal, lignite, peat and oil shales have been used for making synthetic fuels, never farm products. An energy crisis is usually accompanied by hunger.
It is especially dumb to start talking about using biofuels in a situation when it would be relatively easy to cut the oil consumption by 10% or more by gasoline taxes, for instance. This would reduce directly the oil dependence. Building a biofuel system for the same effect will consume a lot of energy for the infrastructure and, in fact, increase net energy consumption, at least in the beginning.
Regarding EROEI. The problem here is that we use a lot of fossil fuels to grow our food. Forget driving-- the larger problem is not being able to eat. Don't forget that refining oil into gas also takes quite a bit of energy.
Regarding polution. Don't forget that plants use carbon dioxide. Under Kyoto, ethanol should get some credits for this fact.
While ethanol won't ever replace gasoline, we should still strive to develop this resource. We need fuel. We should get it wherever we can-- especially when it's local and home grown.