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southern MN | E25 is about the most efficient return on investment, in costs to a car driver and in overall efficiency of using ethanol as a fuel additive to the conventional gasoline supply.
While ethanol has less btu than gasoline, it burns a bit more evenly when the spark plug flashes it, so it is a bit more efficient in an internal combustion engine. The ‘magic number’ for most autos today is a 25% blend of ethanol. You should actually see your mileage go up a bit going from e10 to e15 if your engine is tuned right. Less btu but more efficient burn.
It takes energy to grow and distill ethanol, as well as land resources. If we got about 25% of our engine energy from grain ethanol in the USA we would be getting about the best cost to return on the whole big picture. That is today. If we change our feed needs, grain uses, energy costs, this number also changes. Other countries like Brazil have different numbers, altho their relationship of sugar cane and corn and land use is also changing now.
E15 is quite a bit cheaper than e10 locally, and both are much much cheaper than e0. Locally I don’t know why everyone isn’t pulling the e15 tanks dry and the other gas stations not offering it boarding up the doors. The influence of big oil is incredibly strong.
There has not been a direct subsidy to ethanol for many years here. Some argue that the various changing subsidies to farmers is a subsidy to ethanol, but I guess those subsidies are to produce grain and can be applied to meat, milk, bread, plastics, ink, and so on, and are not an ‘ethanol subsidy’ in my mind? There are many federal subsidies that help big oil as well, directly and indirectly. So….
The true cost of producing ethanol vs producing gasoline depends on the relationship of crude oil price vs (corn, sorghum, sugar cane, etc). Generally those grain prices follow crude prices at a pace that keeps ethanol truly cheaper to produce than gasoline. When crude is very high ethanol is quite a bargain, when crude oil is very cheap there is a much smaller discount to ethanol. There are brief times the markets do not mirror each other and costs are inverted of course.
It would be difficult to replace all the motor fuel in this county with starch and oil crops such as corn and soybeans. The sudden demand for those crops would outpace any logical production capacity we have. If we stepped up production and use slowly over 50 years, we could do it. It would not be the most efficient thing to do. Again we return to the 25% use of these crops as a good base line to use as fuel.
If we went to 100% fuel needs, what would we do with all the soybean meal and distillers mash created? We would need to learn new ways to create good feed for our livestock from such high concentrations of those 2 products, instead of blending now with whole grains and fiber.
Corn and soybean squeezings are a really good and efficient supplement to our current liquid fuels. All or nothing are both bad choices right now. Moving from the current 10% to a 25% use would be a good short term goal for nearly everyone except it appears, big oil.
My state uses 10-15% ethanol, and 5-20% biodiesel, using our corn and soybeans in state.
I sure hope we can move to allowing a choice of E25 sooner than later. E15 should be a no brainer yesterday already.
Paul | |
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Ethanol Question
