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99 comments on Peak Oil and The Energy Utilization Chain (EUC)

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joule on December 22, 2006 - 12:50pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Aha!  About a month or so ago I brought up some questions regarding the legitimacy of taking a credit for the energy input of the DDGS byproduct (or co-product, depending on one's point of view).

I think one of the points I was trying to make was that if the DDGS did not exist, cattle would be fed something else, something that would have its own energy content. So, the energy credit (if there really is one) should really be the energy content of the most likely alternative feed that the DDGS displaces, not the DDGS itself. This may or may not be the correct way of looking at it, but I've had a gut feel from the very start that something was a little dodgy about the DDGS credit.

I know very little about agriculture, but is it not also true that cattle can only tolerate a certain percentage of DDGS in their feed mix without suffering adverse effects?  If so, then it would not be too hard to picture the market for DDGS getting saturated pretty quickly as more and more ethanol plants come on line.

 You are probably right that at some point a large fraction of the DDGS will be burned just to recover some heat value from an otherwise next to worthless material.

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dgrimm on December 22, 2006 - 1:44pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Very true that cattle only tolerate a limited abmount of DDG, but 30% of their total feed is very reasonable.

The other big change coming is that companies will start extracting more of the corn oil from the DDG product (already happening at a few plants).  This is positive in several ways.  From what I understand, less energy is than required to dry the DDG, we pick up another high-value product stream (corn oil -- think biodiesel) and the resulting DDG product can be used for the pork and poultry industries, which so far have been unable to use much DDG at all.

Although there will be short term market issues due to the extremely rapid growth of the ethanol business, we will run out of land to grow corn long, long before we run out of a way to utilize the by-product.

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Kalpa on December 22, 2006 - 5:03pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
dgrimm
I saw on a recent ag report that nationwide, cattle are not finishing out as well this past year.  Do you have any theories about this?  They mentioned drought conditions being one, and many people are jumping to the conclusion that its the DDG being fed.  What are your thoughts on this?
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dgrimm on December 22, 2006 - 8:18pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
That is a very intresting side note.  Getting cattle to "finish well" means getting internal fat (marbling, what makes a steak juicy), without external fat, the stuff around the edges.

There is raging debate in the industry about how much feeding DDG is responsible for what has been a significant decline in cattle grading over the last couple of years.

From our personal experience, I think DDG is a significant culprit, and we are investigating how to address the issue.

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Don Sailorman on December 22, 2006 - 8:32pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
So DDG makes for a leaner healthier steer???

Very interesting.

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Kalpa on December 23, 2006 - 9:56am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
It sounds as if this nation's steers are all on the Adkin's diet.  Now there's a big market--using DDGs for a human diet product.  
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Engineer-Poet on December 22, 2006 - 11:28pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Ideally, the drying step would be eliminated completely.  This can be done if the fermentation is integrated with or near to a cattle-feeding operation.
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