Ethanol, Biodiesel

Posted September 28, 2004 * Comments(3)

Also in the Star Tribune today, an article about Gov. Pawlenty’s proposed mandate that the gasoline in Minnesota contain twice as much Ethanol as it does today. This would help reduce our dependence on oil, while at the same time bolstering Minnesota’s corn farmers.

Everyone’s favorite critic of progress, Rep. Krinke of Shoreview, has a brilliant quote, saying that Ethanol subsidies and mandates requiring Ethanol in gasoline, are

“worst of both worlds from a free-market perspective.”

Remember, Krinke is probably the biggest critic of the Hiawatha Light Rail line in the world, and apparently wants the “free-market” to simply sort things out here.

As far as I’m concerned, anything that makes cars cleaner, and reduces our dependence on oil is a good thing, be it LRT, ethanol, etc.

Unfortunately there was scant mention of BioDiesel in the article, and while Minnesota does have a proposal/mandate to have all the Diesel in the state be 2% BioDiesel by 2006, there are a number of provisions that will cause the mandate to not go into effect if they are not met.

Namely, some number of gallons (8 million? I forget… doesn’t really matter) of the BioDiesel must be produced in the state before 2006, and the last figure I saw suggested we were not terribly close to meeting that goal.

So Gov. Pawlenty, I don’t agree with you on much, but congratulations on pushing forward clean technologies for vehicles in our state. A state that mandates clean technologies for it’s energy usage is a state that I am proud of.

3 Comments so far

  1. John Dennett on September 28th, 2004

    I’m totally unqualified to debate this, but I remember hearing somewhere that without the subsidies, ethanol is too expensive to be a real gasoline substitute. Also I’ve heard (not necessarily believed) that the ethanol subsidy is also designed to keep American corn famers solvent, since they produce more corn than there is a demand for. Do you have any info about that stuff?

  2. A.J. on September 28th, 2004

    Yes, John, you are correct in what you remember. Ethanol, to be price competitive, receives subsidies from the government. I do not know at what levels the subsidies are at, in terms of actual dollars.

    There is probably zero, to very little natural demand for ethanol, if you took away the subsidides.

    However it is cleaner, and it is more or less “renewable”. It is renewable in a sense that you can grow it, but ti actaully takes more energy, in harvesting and refining, to create the ethanol, than what you get out on the other end. A net negative on energy use.

    BioDiesel on the other hand, is a net positive, you get more energy out than you expend, and is truly sustainable.

    But I am going to grudgingly support Ethanol efforts simply because it is cleaner and it reduces our dependence on foriegn oil.

    Mandating BioDiesel percentages will actually do much more, since there is a massive amount of fuel used in the trucking industry. One statistic that I read said that 848 million gallons of diesel was used simply from trucks idling last year. If just 20% of that was BioDiesel, that’s 170 million gallons of fuel that could come from American sources.

  3. John Dennett on September 28th, 2004

    yeah, I remembr reading about the net negative of ethanol too now that you mention it. I’m happy to hear that biodiesel is a net positive though.

    I think the thing that’s going to tip the scales for energy dependency is pretty straightforward: the alternative to fossil fuels has got to be cheaper to succeed. I mean, half of our (the States’) energy today is still derived from burning coal. The singularr reason is that it’s still cheaper. Unless you have aggressive pollution fines as market disincentives, it’s gonna be a long time before we stop using that stuff.

    Speaking of pollutants, how ‘clean’ is biodiesel? Is it any better or worse than….dinodiesel?

    Of course I’m all for nuclear power generation, but then I’ve absorbed enough trivial knowledge from the Nuclear Engineering Department here to know that it can be done right and solve all our energy needs. People are still scared of it from all the knucklehead design mistakes that were made in the 60’s and 70’s.