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specialgreen

Minnesota representative Gil Gutknecht has proposed that the entire United States use 10% renewable fuel by 2010, which he calls the "10x10" proposal (and which the House calls H.R. 4347). See http://www.gil.house.gov/issues/10by10/10by10facts.htm

I thought that there was currently enough corn grown to displace maybe 5% of American imported oil (I don't remember where I read that). Is 10% an achievable goal?

Also, what about transportation? Would this require a new distribution system for ethanol, to get ethanol to terminals around the country (trains, barges, etc.)?

Lgodave · Joined: 01 Sep 2005 Posts: 28 Location: WI

Hi,

Certainly sounds like a very ambitious idea to get done in a 4 year period.

The idea would probably require more Ethanol production plants and yes a better distribution network.

I suppose I'd like to see a better push for E85 pumps but I suspect a national E10 standard would probably make E85 pumps easier to find.

Making the E10 standard for regular 87 octane only might make it easier to enact. Like WI's statewide E10 plan.

Revision · Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 194 Location: Carol Stream, IL

I believe that from prior research that the US uses approx. 10 mil barrels a day in gasoline. 10% of that number would be @1 mil barrels a day in ethanol that we would need in E10. I believe that we are currently producing @269,000 barrels a day... Which means we have a long way to go. Sad

http://www.ethanolrfa.org/media/press/rfa/view.php?id=498

specialgreen · Posted: Tue Dec 27, 2005 12:05 am Post subject:

The US is using about 400M gallons of gasoline per day, or 146 billion gallons per year. Gil wants to replace 10% of that with ethanol, or 14.6 billion gallons.

If we get ethanol yield up from 2.8 gallons per bushel to 3 gal./bushel, that would require 4.87 billion bushels of corn per year (123.6M metric tons[*g]). The US produced 229M metric tons in 2003 [*w]. We used 31M metric tons for ethanol in 2004 [*k], and I think I read that it passed 40M in 2005.

So we're using maybe 1/6th of all corn for ethanol now. To get to 123M metric tons, we could either dedicate half of all corn for fuel, or increase production. It may be possible to increase production by 15% between 2004 and 2010. If such an increase were coupled with a 15% reduction in non-fuel use of corn, then getting enough corn to reach Gil's goal might be possible. Non-fuel use of corn might be reduced if farmers increased their use of distillers' grains to feed cattle.

Personally, I'd try for a national 5% ethanol standard first, which I think might be achievable agriculturally.
Then, getting ethanol to terminals around the country would be the next big challenge.

[*g] http://www.grains.org/grains/conversion_factors.html
[*w] http://www.grains.org/grains/corn.html
[*k] http://www.ksgrains.com/ethanol/useth.html

Revision · Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 194 Location: Carol Stream, IL

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20051228/sc_nm/energy_ethanol_epa_dc_1

Summed up:
In 2007 2.78% of gasoline sales must be ethanol by EPA standards.
Which is about 4 billion gallons.
Over 4 billion gallons of ethanol was produced in 2006.
7.5 billion gallons of ethanol is required for 2012.

---

That 7.5 billion gallons would be equivalent to a nationwide E5 standard. But with many states going to E10 and E20 standards, this begs the question of if there is going to be enough ethanol to go around to fuel the E85 pumps. Sad

specialgreen · Posted: Thu Dec 29, 2005 11:21 am Post subject:

My impression was that E-10 standard gas was only getting traction in corn-producing states; and those states don't use much gas compared to the east and west coasts.

If (say) New York and California both went E-10 across-the-board, then that would definitely lay the groundwork for a nationwide E-10 standard.

Revision · Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 194 Location: Carol Stream, IL

Halfway there! Laughing

According to a recently released California Energy Commission (CEC) study, refiners serving California will continue using ethanol, and increase the amount they use despite the waiver of the oxygenate requirement for reformulated gasoline contained in the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Some refiners noted that without ethanol, they likely would not be able to meet consumer gasoline demand in California.

http://www.ethanolrfa.org/media/press/rfa/view.php?id=483

Sinner · Joined: 04 Aug 2005 Posts: 33

specialgreen,

Thanks for the great effort on your post!

I would like to know what you think about the impact of using other source material for ethanol production would be. Like the switchgrass work going on in LA, the cellouse experiments and the European rapeseed example.

Revision · Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 194 Location: Carol Stream, IL

I think this counts as half of the other shoe.. When New York actually gets something like an ethanol standard going that'll be the total other shoe. Still makes you wonder if New York is planning on importing corn or use the cellulose method.

http://www.csnews.com/csn/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001842084

mtbottle · Joined: 14 Jan 2006 Posts: 46 Location: West Virgnia

I am all for it, but achieving this goal in under 5 years would be tough. You can buy E-10 pretty much nationwide. Sunoco has it here in WVA.

In order to go 10% nationwide, you would have to convert idle cropland to increase corn production. You would also need to add other types of crops. I would say 10 years is an achievable goal.
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ikendu · Joined: 12 Jan 2006 Posts: 11 Location: Iowa

I'm new to this forum (thanks for having a great community of biofuels people!). I often lecture on biofuels so I'm really happy to find a community of people discussing this.

If you take into account the "net energy" of corn ethanol in order to see what life would be like if we didn't use oil, you quickly begin to realize that corn ethanol is a very good way to begin to break our oil dependance but that it will not get us there entirely.

Here are a few rough numbers:

32 million acres of corn in the U.S.
300 gallons of ethanol per acre
Net energy balance of 1:1.64

Net yenergy yield per acre is about 118 gallons/acre (assuming no oil for input).

Net yield of annual acreage = about 3.8 billion gallons per year.

120 billion gallons of gasoline used in the U.S. per year.

So... net yield is about 3.2% of all gasoline.

That is from using every last, single acre of corn production for ethanol.

The gross yield is, of course, higher... about 8.1% of all gasoline.

So...if we really want to get off of oil, we must have higher yielding sources of ethanol (my rough numbers might not be perfectly correct but directionally, you can see the impact).

There is a guy in Iowa who has a process for sweet sorghum that he says will yield 900 gallons per acre.

There is some reason to believe that using enzymes to break down the cellulose in switchgrass would yield about 1500 gallons per acre. That would boost the corn acreage number to about 40% of our gasoline from bio sources. Although, another advantage of switchgrass it that it will grow lots of places that corn won't. Not to mention that it is a perennial that doesn't need to be replanted every year meaning no plowing, reseeding, fertilizing, etc.

There is a discussion of this on EVWorld from the first, annual "Peak Oil" conference from November, 2005 from a guy from the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL).

http://www.evworld.com/view.cfm?section=article&storyid=943
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specialgreen · Posted: Sat Jan 14, 2006 7:16 pm Post subject:

Welcome, Ikendu! Yes, there is a lively bunch of folks here Smile

.

It certainly does look like quite the challenge. But there are varying interpretations as to degrees. You wrote of there being 32M acres of cultivated corn, with an ethanol yield of 300 gallons per acre, for a maximum of 9.6 bn gal/yr, if all corn is used for fuel. That estimate is fairly different from the one I arrived at, above, and I'm trying to find my error.

I wrote of there being 9 bn bushels of corn produced in '03; with an ethanol yield of 2.8 gal/bushel, or 25 bn gal./yr potential. I went back to recheck those numbers, and did find some error:

Ethanol per bushel is usually quoted as being 2.5 gallons [*b]. The 2.8 number I quoted is above average, but achievable [*c].

Also, you pointed out that ethanol has "less energy" than gasoline. But in practice, the difference in MPG with E-10 is negligible (0.1% [*d], or no difference [*e]). Additionally, if a car got slightly reduced mileage with E-10, the driver would add more E-10 fuel to compensate, which is 90% gasoline. So any additional fuel consumption caused by a switch to E-10, would only cause 1/10 as much increased consumption of ethanol.

I also found an error in the opposite direction; USDA claims [*a] an '05 yield of 11.8 bn bushels "up 17 percent from the 10.1 billion bushels produced in 2003."

At 2.5 gal. per bushel, 11.8 bn bushels of corn could yield 29.5 bn gallons of ethanol. A 3%/year increase in production, coupled with a 3% reduction in use of corn for feed, and a 3%/year increase in yield per bushel, would get us within about 1 bn bushels of where we'd need to be...

...to produce enough E-10 for today's motor fuel consumption numbers. And who really believes that consumption won't increase in the next 4 years? I completely agree with your point: that cellulose conversion could become more efficient than corn; and that additional crops could be the only way to answer a likely increase in domestic fuel consumption.

(now, if we could just turn Kudzu into fuel... Wink

).

[*a] http://www.nass.usda.gov/mt/crops/forecast/ansummry.htm : "
U.S. corn for grain production is estimated at 11.8 billion bushels, up 17 percent from the 10.1 billion bushels produced in 2003."

[*b] 2.5 gal/bushel: http://www.ethanol-gec.org/winter96/eawin9608.htm
2.5 gal./bushel: http://www.fsa.usda.gov/daco/bioenergy/2001/2001FactorsNFormulas.pdf

[*c] 2.9 gal/bushel: http://www.igpc.ca/sticking.html

[*d] 0.1% MPG drop: http://www.ethanol.org/documents/ACEFuelEconomyStudy.pdf
(OK, that's a biased source!)

[*e] no MPG drop: http://www.awma.org/journal/ShowAbstract.asp?Year=1998&PaperID=733

specialgreen · Posted: Sat Jan 14, 2006 10:59 pm Post subject:

ikendu · Joined: 12 Jan 2006 Posts: 11 Location: Iowa

hotrod · Joined: 19 Apr 2005 Posts: 872 Location: Colorado

It is not really productive to focus entirely on corn as a source for ethanol, even in the short term. Corn is only a stepping stone. It is the currently most economic source of ethanol in the U.S. having the added benefit of reducing the cost of farm subsidies and improving corn markets for farmers. Ethanol can be made from any carbohydrate source, from wheat to potatos, suger beets, spoiled food products, crop waste (frozen citrus) to cellulose.

Here is a link to the David Andress study on energy balances which has some info on fuel and ethanol sources.

http://www.oregon.gov/ENERGY/RENEW/Biomass/docs/FORUM/EthanolEnergyBalance.pdf

Here is a power point presentation by ANL regarding energy displacement of ethanol over fossil fuels.
http://www.anl.gov/Media_Center/News/2005/NCGA_Ethanol_Meeting_050823.ppt

The Argonne National lab studys by Wang and others have already done the long term impacts and future supply chain numbers on the common sources for ethanol.

New systems are coming on line all the time where new market niches are being exploited. Here in Colorado for instance the Coors brewing company is now extracting fuel ethanol from spoiled beer that used to just be dumped.

Other businesses that have product waste streams are beginning to wake up to the fact that they can develop another co-product for a profit by turning that waste stream or heat energy into an input for fuel ethanol.

Fuel refiners just recently (thanks to Katrina) woke up to the value of adding ethanol even when not mandated by regulation as a fuel extender. That added demand is what caused the recent spike in ethanol prices. Likewise that increased market price/demand will push other businesses to invest in ethanol production. (it also does not hurt to have Venezuala making noises about cutting off oil to the U.S.)

There are lots of subtle pressures building that should push domestic ethanol production through the roof in the next 1 - 2 years.

Larry