Moving on to other things, I found this on Drudge, and while I know it is OT for steve383's original question, it goes to some of the comments made in the answers to this thread.
By my reckoning oil prices will have to hit 3 times the real cost that it reached in the seventies ($60 in 2004 dollars) before it will even seriously affect the buying habits of the American public. That's because oil as a proportion of GDP is only 1/3 what it was then. SO, $180 per barrel.
Another way of looking at it is that the Europeans are paying around $7 per gallon, and do seem to buy smaller cars. So, given that it costs about a dollar a gallon to refine and distribute, that says at $300 per barrel things might happen in the states.
Even then, financing the SUV will still cost far more than driving it.
So, who's predicting $200-300 oil without a major intervention of some sort?
Cheers
Greg Locock
Please see FAQ731-376 for tips on how to make the best use of Eng-Tips.
The pump price of fuel depends mainly on how much the government of a country wants to charge for it - crude oil prices and refinement costs are trivial compared with taxes added.
In the UK we currently have people jumping onto the CNG bandwagon because it's a lot cheaper than gasoline and diesel to the consumer, through lower tax rates. If we all switched to CNG, I wonder how long our goverment would continue to take a bath?
Likewise ethanol. Convert the whole country to ethanol and we'll suddenly have an ethanol tax to fill the hole left behind. Taxes have to come from somewhere - I just wonder what the excuse will be when the tax goes up?
As I mentioned earlier, the ethanol / renewable combustible fuel program in Brazil got off the ground in the late 70´s /early 80´s, in the aftermath of the 1973 OPEC price hike.
To the best of my knowledge, no other country has undertaken a similar initiative, at least on the same scale as Brazil´s.
In ethanol-producing regions of Brazil, this alternative fuel is available at 40-50 % of the price of petrol. In the big cities, the price reduction is of the order of 30-35 %.
No wonder the car manufacturers in Brazil are now busily turning out FlexFuel versions and these models are outselling the petrol-only models.
Obviously, any country can do it if land, water, labour - and principally, sunshine - abound.
And there are umpteen lessons to be learned from the Brazilian experience, right across the spectrum.
Last time I checked (when I had a brewery) the production of ethanol by fermentation of sugars produces a lot of CO2 so unless there is some new way of making the ethanol, that CO2 has to count in the big picture.
There seem to be more and more flexifuel cars around here in Sweden, I'll try to test drive one soon. LPG isn't used much here as a vehicle fuel so isn't taxed as such. I know a few people who fill up at work from their industrial LPG tank and drive for almost nothing. They just have to take out the LPG tank in the boot/trunk one a year for car testing.
I have modified my Daihatsu Charade from 1990 to use E85. I have mounted a pressure reducer on the fuelreturnpipe & mounted a resistance in serie with a press button between fuelcontrolbox and temperaturtransmitter in the motor. All to a cost less than 200 us dollar. The car starts and runs perfecly. I can send pictures if someone wishes. Se also
The idea behind CO2 reduction is based on the natural cycle of CO2. CO2 is first absorbed by the sugar cane (or other crops), then transformed to ethanol (and yes, released back to the atmosphere by the fermentation). The ethanol is burnt in the engines and released as CO2 (and H2O) back to the atmosphere.
So the CO2 balance would be zero.
However, other fuels are employed during the entire process: normally the trucks used to bring sugar cane to the ethanol plant, the trucks used to deliver ethanol to the distribution centers, and to deliver ethanol to the gas station are all Diesel fueled. The use of Diesel oil is what makes the CO2 balance non-zero.
By the way, sugar cane bagasse is also used as fuel in the
ethanol plant to generate steam and power (with a surplus of power as compared to the own consumption of the plant). So, if you compute the decrease of fuel consumption in conventional power plants, you may find even a negative balance of CO2 (I never checked it, however).
So, don't worry with the CO2 bubbles and enjoy a cold beer!
Before anyone thinks of a wholesale conversion to Ethanol, has anyone calculated what the total source crop output would be needed to significantly offset the petroleum demand?
Here in the US, Ethanol primarily comes from corn, but sugar cane and beets can also be used. I have a difficult time thinking that the corn production can be scaled up to replace a simple 10% of the total US petroleum usage by Ethanol. Someone with more brains than me needs to do some agriculture calculations and cross with the US petroleum production.
Franz
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how will that change as demand for petroleum escalates and supplies dwindle. I don't know, but I do wonder.
When petrol and diesel hits 20 or 30 bucks a gallon, usage will drop and currently expensive alternatives will seem cheap and will also be priced according to supply and demand until the demand drops back to balance reasonable supply capacity. One thing for sure, there is potential to increase renewable supplies, but no potential to produce more oil. There is a potential to find new reserves, and to exploit previously uneconomical reserves, but I think, that to will decline in the reasonably distant, but foreseeable future.
Regards
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franzh,
As our newspapers have ben currently reporting, Brazil is all to happy with your E85 program, as it may herald the day when we may eventually supply the US with ethanol, as we now do China, Russia and India !
Could it just be that vesyed interests are not too happy over any such future development eating into their revenues and wresting away some of their political clout ?
It does make sense when you say that to address a mere 10 % substitution of current petrol consumption with ethanol would be a formidable task for the US. But again, your oil consumption per capita is huge, at least twice that of Western Europe, as is also your per capita contribution in heating of mother-earth (Kyoto etc.).
We had a tough time prior to entering your beef market, but we eventually did, despite strict sanitary regulations etc. China and Russia are already on our beef-export list.
And we are currently runner-up to the world´s largest producer (??)of soya beans.
We are blessed with vast resources of water, land and year-round sunshine. It could definitely be our Mecca in the forseeable future. In fact, there are American farmers investing in soya production in our ever-expanding agricultural frontiers.
I forgot to add the oil use to produce and transport fertilizers, oil to transport workers, oil and coal to produce steel to erect the ethanol plant and so on...
Clean fuel is never aboslutely clean...
patprimmer,
As to the use of ethanol in tractors and trucks, it is technically possible, but diesel engines are still the best choice, I guess, for such purpose (heavy duty applications)
Paulista,
US production of ethanol is almost the same of Brazil. Lots of cars run already on ethanol, too. The advantage of Brazil is the lower production cost due to the higher avarage insolation along the year and to the use of sugar cane instead of corn as raw material.
fvincent,
That a small percentage of ethanol has been added to petrol for sometime now in the Midwest States is old hat.
But E85 fuel is a new development and a promising idea.
If the whole thing can be boiled down to more (or less) insolation between producwer countries I do not know.
What is said routinely is that our levels of insolation plus other factors make us hard to beat in soya production, enabling multiple harvests of crops while the US has only one.
One by-product of our cane-sugar-derived ethanol is a copious supply of effluent (vinhoto, at 7:1 ratio) which was previously discharged into streams and rivers, creating an environmental problem of devastating proportions, but which has in the last few years been redirected for production of fertiliser.
The leftover crushed cane-sugar (bagaço) is combustible and enables the ethanol producer to be self-sufficient in energy, plus pump something into the electrical grid if the tariff makes it worthwhile. Bagaço may also be hydrolysed in kilns, thereby breaking down the fibres and making it suitable for animal feed (principally ruminants).
E85 is a political fuel and this is an engineering forum.
There is neither engineering nor economic justification for using it, but if it makes you feel all warm and fuzzy - as if you were actually doing something useful - then by all means go ahead and put it in your tank!
During my time at university, the more astute eng students were aware that unlike physicists, mathematicians etc., most engineers have a tunnel vision of the world and life.
Either black or white......with us , or against us !
Thanks fvincent, I'd forgotton about the source of the carbon the the sugars. I think you can get about 10-15 tons of corn from and acre and about 400 litres of ethanol per ton of corn so thats about 4000-6000 litres of ethanol per acre. Sounds pretty good to me!
Someone else can figure out what acreage would support 10% of the US switching to E85.
cheers, derek
Rob, I like you idea of pretending that politics doesn't exist-- a bit like the tooth fairy, and santa, and Saddam (oops, sorry that last one was real.)
The main ingredients for making sugar (and therefore ethanol) are air, water and sunlight. When the middle eastern deserts are empty of oil, they could be transformed into ethanol producing lands (given a bit of irrigation).
Then again if anyone else has read Lomberg's against-the-flow book "The skeptical environmentalist", they'd already know that the middle east could power the world through massive photovoltaic cell deployment.
For what its worth. I have a 99 camaro 3.8L with a turbocharger, running on e85. Only modifications to run e85, were 43lb/hr injectors to replace the stock 22lb/hr, and custom computer program. Its been almost 5 months, and I've had no issues. I've run up to 17psi of boost for short bursts on the stock 9.4:1 C/R long block.
