This is a bit corny - but following Yankee, what can I say?
Posted by Heading Out on April 20, 2006 - 11:14pm
Topic: Supply/Production
(This is the Conference season for Academics and though I have to go out of town for family reasons this weekend, I will also be gone in a couple of weeks for the Peak Oil and the Environment Conf in Washington - which seems to be shaping up to have a very powerful agenda. )
([editor's note, by Yankee] I'd also like to take this opportunity to remind you of the upcoming conference in New York City, Local Solutions to the Energy Dilemma, April 27-29.)
Anyway enough of the excuses. The main part of the story is both a partial explanation of the interesting curve I posted on gas storage, and the immediate shortage that is closing gas stations - in a word MTBE
The National Association of Convenience Stores, whose 2,200 member stores account for 75 percent of U.S. gasoline sales, also said members had reported shortages at terminals around Wilmington, Delaware, and Philadelphia.The transition is a marker for the greater infusion of ethanol into gasoline, and in the immediate short-term this is going to be something that will give the general public a bit of a warm fuzzy, as well as making those farmer co-operatives that are getting into the business a rather short ROI (numbers I heard today from one of those "insider folks" were on the order of 13 months). Unfortunately down the road a couple of years it is still unlikely to make nearly as much difference as it is doing in Brazil.The shortages are not because refiners are not making enough gasoline, or because of a recent rupture on the key Plantation Pipeline that carries supplies from the Gulf Coast to the East Coast, industry officials said.
Rather, the oil industry is rapidly eliminating a gasoline additive called MTBE, banned in several states for polluting ground water, and replacing it with ethanol, a renewable fuel that can't be shipped by pipeline because it absorbs water.
"There's not a shortage of supply," said John Eichberger, a spokesman for the group. "It's a transitional issue."
There are a couple of reasons for this, one being the overwhelming size of the problem in gas shortage that is heading into the world future. The other is that, as China transitions to an industrial economy it's ability to provide food is likely to decline. Thus the ability of the US to meet some of this need from it's agricultural abundance may significantly help our domestic relations (to blur a point). However, as other countries are already finding, ethanol and food are alternate products from the same land. (Although, and this also gets neglected in many discussions, the side product of ethanol production is a brewers grain that is a good feed for livestock).
In the short-term there is an ability to meet an increased demand in the US
It is only in the out years that we will see the conflict develop as we also find that you can't have it both ways, despite:
high crude oil prices have made ethanol prices competitive as a replacement for gasoline. Other factors that have changed recently include improved ethanol processing yields (2.50 gallons of ethanol per bushel of corn in 1980, compared with 2.85 gallons per bushel today), strong increases in corn productivity with little or no increase in fertilizer use, and greater use of specific corn varieties that are tailored to ethanol use. The pipeline for technology and information is fuller today than ever, assuring that the industry will be even more efficient and competitive in the future.Hopefully the Conference will have some more optimistic news than this!
Undulating plateaus is the better alternative.
If we're into humor depletion already, does that mean we didn't notice peak corn?
I don't believe in peak humor - I think there are billions of jokes still out there that remain to be discovered.
Not to quibble over a throw-away, but I'm just CERTAIN that the US has an ample supply of the Cruder Stuff, if only we could just bottle that fine goo and drive our cars on it..
One can argue that as we deplete the clean humor, that all will be left is the high-sulphur humor from whence fart jokes and South Park episodes are made.
Some types of jokes appear to be nearly completely depleted - knock-knock jokes and polack jokes for example.
What is the registration information & cost for the conference.
Is this a good forum to "push" my ideas ? Should I try to becoem a speaker next year (appears too laet this year.
Any thoughts ?
The Petrocollapse Conference
All Souls Unitarian Church
16th and Harvard Streets, NW, Washington D.C.
Columbia Heights Metro Station
May 6, 2006 9 am - 7 pm
http://www.petrocollapse.org/
Here's another story on the gas shortages:
Out of gas
So, this could be going on until June?
1. Ethanol instead of MTBE
2. Sulfur emmissions must be reduced to meet new regulations that are due this year.
3. Shortage of contractors who are incharge of installing, reconfigurations, and repairing.
Most of these work are one time events, so the refineries contract these workers and don't do it internally. Also, these refineries have to compete with the same contract pool as electric powerplants who are also going through spring cleaning and need lots of repairs and installation of new equipment.
http://www.opisnet.com/
They forecast ethanol shortages through mid-2007. I am glad I don't live in an area that requires reformulated gasoline.
RR
Since ethanol cannot be sent through pipelines and must be distributed by tanker rigs--Do you know if this has been incorporated into ERoEI calculations? This potentially could lower the ERoEI to unity [or worse]; another scientific 'nail in the coffin' to halt the advance of the biofuel industry.
Additionally, the required huge management logistics of adequately scheduling ethanol deliveries to JIT marry with regular gasoline deliveries is probably raising prices for gasoline as any time delays costs money.
Bob Shaw in Phx,AZ Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
You are hitting on something that I have given a lot of thought to. The USDA studies have a contribution for transportation in the ERoEI calculations, but it is a very small number. They don't detail what their assumptions are. It is very hard to believe that those transportation numbers they cite (1588 BTUs per gallon of ethanol) account for ethanol being produced in the Midwest and shipped to the east or west coast. I think they are trying to compute an average transportation cost, but that doesn't really make sense from an ERoEI standpoint. That's saying something like "It's OK that the overall ERoEI for putting ethanol in the New York market is negative, since it all averages out." Tell that to the New Yorkers.
I have pointed out in some essays that they do something similar in calculating an average ERoEI for the 9 highest corn producing states. Yet within those 9 states, Nebraska, which must irrigate its corn, has a significantly higher energy input into the process. So, if they say the ERoEI is 1.3, that doesn't mean that it is 1.3 in every state. If California or Arizona uses such an optimistic ERoEI to justify building an ethanol plant, they are making a big mistake because their ERoEI won't be nearly that good (and could in fact be negative for specific states).
RR
It makes me wonder how much more we could get out of that land if it was planted in switchgrass or Miscanthus.
So you're right, the energy that goes into corn & ethanol production is certainly a variable.
I disagree with that all the way. Look at the rack prices of ethanol versus gasoline:
http://www.neo.state.ne.us/statshtml/66.html
Ethanol has never been cheaper than gasoline except for a few brief months when it was oversupplied.
Today's spot price of ethanol: $2.73.
Today's spot price of mid-grade gasoline: $2.17
Yet the gasoline has only 70% of the energy content. Yeah, that really looks competive. As I calculated in a recent blog entry on E85, without the subsidies it will cost over $50 more (compared to gasoline) to run E85 for every 1,000 miles of driving.
RR
Oops. Of course that should read "Yet the ethanol has only 70% of the energy content." Ethanol is priced competitively with gasoline when it is about 70% the price of gasoline. In that case, you are paying the same price for the BTUs.
RR
US tariffs on ethanol is insanely high, which prevents importation of this fuel.
Yes, it's often overlooked, but it's also misunderstood. Cows are ruminants and evolved to eat grass. The general guideline today is not to feed cows more than 3 lbs of DDGS (dried distillers grain and solubles from ethanol production) per day to avoid making them sick. If all US corn were used for ethanol production, it would be enough DDGS for 180 million cows, compared to the 80 million we have now. So at some point, it no longer is the bonus coproduct.
Second, this DDGS output as a byproduct of ethanol production provides, for some bizarre reason, an energy credit to ethanol in the USDA, Argonne, Farrell et al (Science) analyses of ethanol EROEI. This is falacious. It's the same as crediting the energy content of the jet kero, diesel, fuel oil, naphtha, asphalt, etc. in a refinery--all coproducts of gasoline production--back to gasoline in an refinery efficiency analysis. Properly, part of the energy consumption in an ethanol plant should be allocated to the DDGS, not the other way around.
How about 'Tiananmen Square'?
Where exactly in Asia? It would be great to have a TOD:East.
Do you know who Tank Man is? (was)? PBS' Frontline did a great piece on China very recently. Have you seen it? I have so many questions.
There are too many pigs in the states.
But, as we say, four legs good, two legs bad. Know what I mean?
When peak oil hits in earnest, I am not all that sure that the factory farming of animals for human consumption is going to survive. Both processes seem to the casual observer to be extremely energy intensive (not to mention environmentally unsound).
I'm no whacked out vegan, as I like the occasional pork loin or T-bone, but I think factory farms may up in the same boat as the big box stores when they can't get their product to market due to high fuel prices, among other things.
Subkommander Dred
How people can live downwind of pig farms I do not know. Give me a stinky oil refinery any time; those fumes have got to be way less toxic than the crap of 10,000 (?) pigs.
Maybe Muslims and Jews are onto something.
Their pigs (so said Smithsonian anyway) were also happy 'detritovores', if I can bastardize Totoniela's term, helping to aerate and compost the animal wastes. One of the main benefits of this process, so said the farmer, was that the animals rarely got the kinds of disease problems associated with huge, monocultural Agribusinesses. The various animals traditionally seen on farms seemed to have complementary metabolic defenses. Who'da thunk?
In contrast, Pollan mentioned visiting a so-called 'free-range' non-antibiotic, organic chicken warehouse, where the farmers were relieved that these Slum-hens didn't know about the little doors that led out to their little 'free-range' yards, since these defenseless clones were suceptible to more germs than ever, and they could cross-infect the whole population in their little Stadium.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5336252
Bob
Bob
You are quite right in that cow manure can and does make a good fertilizer. However... I can't help but think about the amount of growth hormones, pesticides, and in particular, antibiotics that the cows (and pigs) consume in their feed. The ABX problem is very worrisome from a public health standpoint, as I am seeing ever larger numbers of antibiotic resistant bugs showing up in my patients and within the community at large. As you know, evolution being what it is, the more a bug (microbe) is exposed to antiboitics, the more of a chance of a mutation of that bug into one that is resistant to ABX.
What is so incredible to me is that in this country the largest consumer of antibiotics is the livestock industry. The medications are passed through the cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys...whatever is being raised in the factory farm...into their waste and ulitmately into the environment (land, creeks, rivers, groundwater, maybe even aerosolized into the atmosphere). Not to mention the meat that we consume from these animals.
I'm not talking about farmer Brown and his free range, organic Black Angus cows. These places produce massive amounts of toxic shit, the various chemicals in which can and does find it's way into our food chain. With all of the energy inputs required to make this type of operation profitable, I have a hard time seeing them continue as a going concern within the next few years.
Subkommander Dred
Here in Denver, if the wind is right you can smell feedlots from 40-50 miles away... I wouldn't call what a feedlot cow produces benign!
maybe somebody around knows more about this.
Cow dung for the climate
by Navin Singh Khadka
A model biogas project is creating a win-win situation for rural Nepalese, the industrialised world and the atmosphere.
tp://www.energybulletin.net/9158.html
========Cows make fuel for biogas train
By Tim Franks
BBC Newsnight
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4373440.stm
=
==========In IFWMS, the anaerobically digested wastes from livestock are treated aerobically before the nutrients are delivered into the fishponds to fertilize the natural plankton that feed the fish without depleting oxygen, thereby increasing fish yield 3- to 4-fold, especially with the polyculture of many kinds of compatible fish feeding at different trophic levels as practiced in China, Thailand, Vietnam, India and Bangladesh. The fish produce their own wastes that are converted naturally into nutrients for crops growing both on the water surface and on dykes surrounding the ponds.
The most significant innovation of IFWMS is thus the two-stage method of treating wastes. Livestock waste contains very unstable organic matter that decomposes fast, consuming a lot of oxygen. So for any fish pond, the quantity of livestock wastes that can be added is limited, as any excess will deplete the oxygen and affect the fish population adversely, even killing them.
Chan is critical of "erratic proposals" of experts, both local and foreign, to spread livestock wastes on land to let them rot away and hope that the small amount of residual nutrients left after tremendous losses that damage the environment have taken place.
According to the US Environment Protection Agency, up to 70% of nitrous oxide, N2O, a powerful greenhouse gas with a global warming potential of 280 (i.e., 280 times that of carbon dioxide) comes from conventional agriculture [57]. Nitrous oxide is formed as an intermediate both in nitrification - oxidising ammonia (NH3) into nitrate (NO3-) - and denitrification, reducing nitrate ultimately back to nitrogen gas. Both processes are carried out by different species of soil bacteria. Animal MANURE could be responsible for nearly half of the N2O emission in agriculture in Europe, according to some estimates; the remainder coming from inorganic nitrate fertilizer [58]. Thus, anaerobic digestion not only prevents the loss of nutrients, it could also substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture in the form of both METHANE (harvested as biogas) and nitrous oxide (saved as nutrient).
Chan further dismisses the practice of composting nutrient-rich livestock wastes [59], for this ends up with a low-