Featured Emergency e15 authorization on its way

As of 3 days ago, only about 1/4 of the corn had been planted.

 

Our areas gas supply is fine prices holding steady at around $4 a gallon.

Milk is at $3.91 a gallon first time in a while milk is cheaper than gas.

Our areas issue is the price of groceries and other necessities that continue to rise.

 

For farm that has planned to plant feed corn for ethanol, how much effort would it be to switch to another crop at this point?

 

So the supply of ethanol is fixed for this year, which just means this order will drive up the price of ethanol by substantially increasing demand on something with limited supply. Seems par for the course the last year.

 

We've already been reducing animal consumption since 1980 and substituting more carbohydrates from grains and replacing animal fats with vegetable oils and we've been getting fatter because of it, not to mention the tremendous oxidative damage that polyunsaturated oils have been doing to people. That's a whole other discussion far removed from cars and fuel.

 

Those are still carbohydrates. If you reduce carbohydrates you have to increase protein and/or fat. There's nothing else.

 

There's some research that seems to suggest that obesity, a significant portion of heart disease, some cancers, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's might all be manifestations of metabolic disorders caused by high chronically high insulin levels. Note, that's not high blood sugar levels, but high insulin levels.

Perhaps more important than how many carbohydrates you eat is how often you eat them. Snacking every couple of hours on any kind of carbohydrate, whether fruit, candy, juice, "healthy" grains, or even many vegetables causes continually elevated insulin levels. The longer your cells are bathed in insulin the more resistant they get, not to mention preventing fat metabolism and driving fat deposition. Your blood sugar will remain normal until your cells are so resistant that they no longer respond. The early signs of metabolic syndrome (such as elevated insulin levels) can appear years or decades before standard blood work that just looks at fasting blood glucose will ever detect them.

If your body is deprived of carbohydrates of all types it will switch to metabolizing fat for energy. It does this by having the liver metabolize fat into ketones, primarily beta-hydroxybutyrate and acetoacetate. There is some promising research that suggests some cancer cells are dependent on glucose metabolism and are essentially starved for energy by a low-carbohydrate/high fat diet. Additionally, it seems to be effective in halting the progress of dementia, and even making small reversals, in many patients. It is a well-known tool for effective management of epilepsy. Another benefit is that beta-hydroxybutyrate is an anti-inflammatory, so people with arthritis and other inflammatory conditions report significant reduction in symptoms when eating a low-carbohydrate/high-fat diet.

There's far more to it than even that, but we're so far off topic I really have to stop. Although you can probably tell this is one of my other research interests.

 

I think you may be right.

I wonder how many people realize the price of a gallon of diesel is $5.15 gallon - at least in our area.

Between the price of gas, price of groceries, illegal immigration and the handling of international affairs I think a political win is going to be a hard "get"

 

It's a bizarre strategy since the price of ethanol is barely cheaper than gas now, before increased demand sparks an increase. Even if ethanol could be had for $1/gallon, cutting gas with 15% would only reduce the price of $4/gallon gas by $0.30.

Just for fun this is Diesel in our area right now

 

I have not read the entire thread, and I have to admit, I have not read much about the Ethanol biofuel topics in the past. What exactly was the rationale, either politically, economically, or scientifically, was used to pass the law for adding ethanol in the gas in the first place? I kinda know the part of the policy was based on the subsidy to the farmer, I think... but yeah, is there any benefit of using ethanol as a fuel other than that it reduces the fossil fuel use by the amount substituted. Doesn't the burning EtOH produce just as much CO2 as equivalent energy contents of gasoline hydrocarbon?

 

IIRC it's worse because of the fossil fuels used producing the fertilizer and planting and harvesting the crops.

 

That's including the production process CO2 emission. Yeah, ethanol production can be energy-intensive and a real carbon footprint may be much higher. While I can see that renewable energy benefits over fossil fuel if there is an impending threat of running out of oil in the very near future. But didn't we already mitigate this problem by finding a way to extract oil from shale?

But, my question was on a simple oxidation chemical reaction C2H5OH + O2 = CO2 + H2O (ethanol and oxygen gas to Carbon dioxide to water equation. Doesn't the equivalent energy content of hydrocarbon produces the same stoichiometric amount of CO2 for each carbon atom in the fuel?

 

I believe so, but the energy released depends on factors other than the number of carbon atoms. Ethanol has about 30% less energy per unit than gasoline. The irony is that by increasing ethanol in gasoline they're reducing your fuel efficiency, which adds to the effective price of fuel.

 

I think that "unit" is the weight or maybe volume isn't it? I passed all chemistry classes I took in college, but I can't remember a thing I learned in Pchem class. My vague recollection is that the molecular bond between the carbon atom and hydrogen atoms in ethanol molecules are all single bond, whereas longer hydrocarbons found in gasoline fuel may have some double bond which stores more chemical energy. So, that kinda explains why ethanol has less energy content than gasoline. That's why I said "the equivalent energy content".

But the real question I wanted to be answered was not that. I just wanted to know why the addition of ethanol to gasoline was considered to be a good approach in the first place? Politically, economically, or environmentally, what was the benefit of ethanol in gasoline?

 

As far as I know its only benefits are that it's a higher octane and it's cheaper.

 

It may of started as a way of lessening reliance on imported fuel. The previous heavy use of ethanol in fuel was in the '70s. Methanol was also being considered, and it would be made from domestic natural gas.

The total carbon balance depends on who you ask. Looking at just what comes out of the tailpipe, ethanol could mean the same, or more. The important thing is that it isn't fossil carbon that had been sitting underground for hundreds of millions of years. It's carbon the plants took out of the air to make sugars. The ethanol itself isn't adding to the carbon balance.

The process in making it can be. Like everything else, fossil fuels are used for transport, production, and energy. Plus, there is the CO2 emissions in making hydrogen for fertilizer. These can become greener. Leaving us discussing whether the land is better used as a carbon sink than growing things for consumption.

Yeah, we are leaving efficiency on the table by not moving to higher compression engines while increasing ethanol content. But get in the E30 to E40 range, and regular octane engines have shown an efficiency increase per unit of energy. Some engines may have been doing better than with E0 in that regard.

Admittedly, those results are from small studies, and I never had any convenient E85 stations to try experiment myself.