Fuel Consumption Down 11%

Chill, Bob
I'm sure he was kidding.......profile says he owns a Prius and is a "San Francisco cyclist"
I'm sure there are guzzlers out there more worthy of your ire.

 

Pc sure is unique with member like yourself. Went from joking around to being "unsuccessful" and a "troll".


iPhone ? - now Free

 

Less than $100/car in brazil. California had infrastructure for M85 until 2004, when the govenator decided he liked hydrogen and ethanol better, and killed it.

There are already methanol tankers, no problem there, because infrastructure exists. We have the california experiment with methanol that shows that if vehicle is flex fuel and prices are ok, people will pick methanol. There is plenty of midwestern infrastructure for ethanol, and plenty of gulf coast and california infrastructure for methanol mixing and transporting. What is missing are cars and pumps. If gasoline wholesales for $2.30/gallon, and methanol for $1.80/gallon and methanol has half the energy, methanol won't be mixed, but during price spikes which occurred say a year ago, where gassoline was about 3x more than methanol, or if tax policy favors alcohol larger blends can be used. California killed the pumps and cars in 2004, in 2008 methanol was cheaper, but the infrastructure was gone. The same goes for ethanol, in 2012 corn ethanol was expensive, if there is a bumper crop it may get cheap. If we have the infrastructure - cars and pumps - we can transition. Methanol infrastructure is much cheaper than hydrogen infrastructure, but ethanol and fuel cells have big pacs.

Algea and cellulistic ethanol have much lower impacts than corn, so if you simply swapped the marginal corn land to switch grass you would get much more alcohol. Algea doesn't really have a land use or water problem at all, but algea at the local experimental ponds is much more expensive than soybean based bio diesel, corn is much cheaper than switch grass, these need technical breakthroughs.

http://www.methanol.org/energy/resources/alternative-fuel/methanol-flexible-fuel-vehicles.aspx
Plenty of capacity to make a difference. More could be built as oil prices increase.

More of a reason to start with legislation now.

Mainly technology, OPEC, and other things. We need to get a jump on transitioning away from conventional oil. Other liquid fuels are not running out.

exactly

yes, OPEC seems to be targetting between $90-$120/bbl. They must think demand will drop or alternatives will appear above $120/bbl.

Here is the trick, to use less oil to do the same work as the price goes up. During the 70s government policies did the oposite. In the 80s efficiency went up and oil prices came down. In the 90s and early 2000s low oil prices had efficiency stall, but now inflation adusted oil prices are around where they were in 1981. We are more efficient, but we should have improved more to have less of an impact. The key is to have $bbl x numbers of barrels be a smaller percentage of gdp. Dollars look stable for the next couple of years, but if we do not get more efficient then oil prices will go up.

More reason to put out an oil tax, a open fuel standards, etc. That will reduce the impact off price spikes.

No he did well in choosing an inefficient vehicle the full size f150 gets 16 mpg with its biggest engine with gasoline, you read the E85 number. He could have chosen a tundra but even that is 15 mpg on gasoline, 11 on E85. He picked an inefficient vehicle for his joke, and you bought it.

 

Here is my concern: oil is the largest feedstock for transport fuels, by orders of magnitude over any liquid fuel alternatives (at present). You are spot-on in advocating for favorable tax treatments (if, for nothing else, than to reflect the carbon intensity of each fuel, i.e., California's LCFS) and also for an OFS which is a no-brainer (unless you have a no-brain congress, like at present).
You are absolutely right that both tax policy and OFS will reduce the impact of price spikes......they just won't prevent them.
Think of it this way. If wholesale gasoline spikes to $4.50 ($5 after taxes), and wholesale methanol is $2 ($2.30 after taxes, assuming favorable treatment), then there is no reason that methanol sellers will not increase their price to $3 or more, reflecting the 60% energy content of a gallon of methanol vs. gasoline. Ditto for ethanol.
Because methanol and ethanol are in much shorter supply relative to gasoline -due to lower production levels- their price will simply be bid up to the going rate of gasoline. So, in a sense, ethanol and methanol are indexed to OPEC through transitive properties. (Of course, this is short term......in the long run, being able to sell something retail for $3 that costs only $2 wholesale will induce more production). But the underlying premise here is that until methanol and/or ethanol start producing anywhere near the energy content of the 130 billion gallons of gasoline we guzzle every year, we are in for a bumpy ride.

U.S. policy has been so short-sighted, foolish, and uncoordinated that one wonders if we wouldn't have been better off doing nothing since it is possible our actions made things worse. Until we get breakthroughs in cellulose, ethanol will ebb and flow based on how good the crop is (and then there's always the food vs. fuel debate). Methanol is a different story. Not sure what motivated CA in their 90's M85 scheme, probably environmental concerns rather than energy security. Today is a different story. The massive shale natural gas deposits should give confidence to private-sector building of nationwide M85 infrastructure, rather than government promotion. M85 is a perfect (and perhaps rare) example of where profit motive and national interest (energy security) intersect.
W./ regard to PACS........one wonders why 'Big Gas' (which includes Exxon via XTO) aren't doing more to promote M85 and OFS, since it will goose NG prices, rather than complain bitterly how they're drilling costs are barely breaking even with Henry Hub.

Poorly worded on my part. Instead of "solving land/water use issues WITH algae and cellulose", I meant we can "solve land/water use issues BY USING cellulose and algae". I look forward to both, but am anxious to see the $/bbl price when scaled up.

Let's also not forget that all those high-tech weapons, infrastructure, free health care and free education requires $100+ oil in most OPEC countries, and even in Russia. I think they are primarily concerned with what their own people will do to them should oil drop way below $75. The U.S. could really throw a match into the gasoline, so to speak, by taxing gasoline to keep prices high and using the revenue to promote efficiency. But whether it is a good idea to see OPEC+Russia (not to mention N. Dakota, Texas, etc.) implode is another story.

Absolutely. The key part of that equation is that WE control the "number of barrels" but the $/bbl is increasingly out of our hands. Non-OECD oil use now exceeds OECD oil use. China now imports more oil than the U.S.!
So, I would word it the opposite way:
"Oil prices will go up, so we must get more efficient"

 

Continued high oil consumption is a threat to the United States economic and national security. I therefore do advocate unfavorable tax treatment to oil, which I hope will reduce its consumption. This is unlike europe's tax treatment which seems to favor diesel over gasoline, and is price based increasing price spikes. Higher oil taxes are themselves incentives for the purchase of plug-ins, and development of bio-fuels, both of which may help the countries economic and national security.

I am against California's LCFS, as this doesn't actually reduce carbon from fuels in the country, it simply shifts more difficult to refine oil to other states, and closes the california market further to refined products. This does give state regulators more control over oil refining in the state, but exacerbates maintenance problems in refineries, which can create temporary spikes like they did this year.
+1

Yes I mispoke. It won't stop rising prices, but it could cut off the worst spikes. This also needs financial regulation as wall street also bid up the spike. In 2007 the price of oil was under $60/bbl, in 2008 we spiked to $145/bbl, then dropped to $40/bbl in 2009, and now are sitting at around $95/bbl. Now we really have a real increase of $40/bbl over 6 years. Imagine if we had limited speculation in oil futures to only those companies that buy and produce oil, had a $40 oil tax, that was taken off at spikes, and slammed back on with falling prices, and a way to move the new natural gas production as a substitute for oil. Likely we would have had an after tax price of oil of $100 in 2007, a spike to $145 (remove the tax short term to avoid bad short term consequences), a drop to $80, then a slow rise to $135/bbl now.

Oil price is controlled by OPEC, while methanol can be produced from natural gas (currently cheapest), coal, biomass, or electricity (solar, wind, nuclear, etc), heat and solar, and there is competition.
Simpler, cheaper way to make liquid methanol fuel using CO2 and sunlight
Much methanol production is mothballed. In the short term yes, methanol would be constrained by production volume, but in steadily rising oil prices were occurring more production would be brought on line to within a couple year period satisfy demand. Natural gas has gone from 30% more expensive than oil (and coal used to produce ethanol) to oil being 800% more expensive than natural gas just in the last 15 years.

In Brazil, ethanol does not follow oil prices, and more ethanol is used when it is cheaper, more oil used when ethanol is expensive.

 

Methanol is even more dangerous than Carbon Dioxide and Carbon Monoxide combined when it comes to climate change . A recent study suggest that the EPA has underestimated USA Methanol emission by over 100% - because the EPA studies have failed to take into consideration Methanol emissions from agriculture/livestock and oil-natural gas production operations. [1]

Non OPEC oil production of 54 million barrels per day is now currently outstripping OPEC oil production of 36 million barrels per day[2].

Currently in the USA the major cost of a gallon of gasoline is due to the price of oil -with about 70 to 80 percent of the price of gas due to the money needed to purchase the oil futures contract that guarantees the price of oil. Recent jumps in gas prices are due to speculative spikes in oil future contracts. Oil future contract were initially conceived as insurance if a newly drilled oil well turned out dry - however, with today's modern technologies - this risk no longer exist.

The oil futures contracts is based on a 24hour-7days a week open global speculative/underwriting market. The initial price offered for the contract is use to raise the capital to pay for the oil production/exploration/extraction.
OPEC countries promise to limit their oil production and band together to prevent the initial price of oil future contracts from falling too low (it is similar to agricultural subsidies which set the price of agricultural produced to prevent farmers from going bankrupt).

Today - spikes in gasoline and diesel are not due to OPEC countries or non-OPEC countries oil production restrictions or initial oil futures contracts BUT are caused by speculative forces in the futures trading market - these speculative forces are sometimes institutions like Berkshire Hathaway and Bank of America and sometimes they are individuals likes Venture Capitalist Soros.


[1] Methane Emissions Much Higher Than EPA Estimates, Study Finds · Environmental Management & Energy News · Environmental Leader

[2] Short-Term Energy Outlook - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)

 

You probably mean methane

 

You are correct. My bad. Thanks for the correction.