Hello we're back to Energy 101. It, is still looking at energy sources.
This time we're going to look at a renewable fuel, and that being ethanol.
ethanol is a energy source. And it is a significant energy source as
we saw last time. It makes up about 5% of our transportation fuel and is, 5% is a
significant number, and it would, does substitute in gasoline on almost a
one-to-one basis, although we'll talk about that a little more later, with,
with gasoline. so a gallon of ethanol in your tank,
mixed with a gallon of, gasoline would displace a gallon of gasoline.
That's an oversimplification, but it is a direct substitute.
But, how much of the Ethanol we're using, where does it come from? What are its
characteristics. You hear a lot of various things about
ethanol, good and bad. So let's look at some of them.
Well, the US ethanol that is produced today is all, it all comes from corn, in
any quantity of significance at all. so when, when you talk about ethanol in
the US, we're talking about corn ethanol, and you hear other terms such as
cellulosic ethanol. We currently do not get any significant
corn ethanol from cellulosic material, which we'll refer to later.
But at the current time, 40% of the corn grown in the US goes to ethanol fuel.
That's a pretty astounding number. that's 40% of the corn grown, and it
really ethanol as a demand for corn Is a, is a compete, competitor to food.
Because of course one of the big producers, users of corn is raising a
beef cattle and hogs and things and pigs and porc and so That, the and price of
anything at your grocery store that's made from corn has gone up in price
because 40% of the demand for corn as a whole goes toward ethanol, which is not a
food product. So that's, that's one issue with corn
ethanol. Again, [INAUDIBLE] cellulosic ethanol,
which we hope to get to here shortly in the future, regarding the US, production
of ethanol, is another ballgame. By the way, Brazil here, Brazil has
started back in the early 80's. Producing ethanol from sugar cane and
they have a long growing season. They have inexpensive labor, in order to
harvest it and deal with it, the handling of it.
so they are getting a substantial amount of their.
transportation fuels from ethanol, and even exporting it some around the world.
so what has happened to ethanol production in the past, From period 1980
to current. So over here, we see that in 1980, the
production of ethanol was very low. It was down at 0.02 or so barrels,
million barrels per day. .02 20,000 barrels per day, very very
low. And it is, it gradually went up as we
moved down to 2001, 2002 and at this point you started having subsidies of
approximately 50 cents a gallon for the production of ethanol to go into
gasoline. And since then, it has skyrocketed.
And that's just, that's basically due not only to the 50 cents a gallon subsidy,
but it also is do to mandates to blend gasoline that's put into automobiles with
10% ethanol. And so, so all cars now, essentially all,
not 100%, but almost 100% of the gasoline that you get at the corner filing station
contains 10% ethanol, and that's, a lot of that, most of that is by mandate.
they mandate every year so many gallons of ethanol must be used to, in blending
with gasoline. And that has driven the production of
ethanol. At the end of 2011 the,
approximately 50%, $0.50 a gallon subsidy for, ethanol blended with gasoline went
away, which had, stayed for gosh 15, 20 years at least.
But it's, that's now gone, but the mandate to blend a certain number of
gallons a year has continued to increase and therefore the production of ethanol
is now almost a million barrels a day. And I've put everything pretty much on
the same. Units here and that is millions of
barrels per day when we're talking about, natural gas liquids or crude oil or
ethanol, barrels per day in the production.
So remember we're producing in this country about 6 million barrels a day of
oil, and we're producing almost one million barrels per day of ethanol.
So that's, that's a pretty good chunk, and it does substitute almost on a one to
one basis in displace in the use of crude oil, so that we don't, don't have to
import that million barrels a day from overseas or outside the country.
So it does reduce crude oil consumption on almost a one-to-one basis, but not
quite. how does, eh, how is, does ethalol,
ethanol used, in our transportation fleet? Well, in mostly it's with 10%
ethanol and 90% gasoline. All cars are now approved for 10, use of
10% ethanol. and even in cars since 2000, produced
since 2000 have just recently been approved.
Retroactively for 15% ethanol. Because with the recession and the
decreased gasoline sales there wasn't, you couldn't get there wasn't enough
gasoline being used to, at 10% ethanol concentration to use all the ethanol that
was mandated to be blended. But
another way that we use ethanol in our transportation vehicles is E85.
E85 is 85% ethanol, 15% gasoline, and it's, can only be used in flex fuel
vehicles. They're special vehicles.
There's some mileage boost that you get if the manufacturer of automobiles make
them flex fuel. It only costs the manufacturer a $100 or
$200 to make Cars that they produce, the Chevrolets, Fords, Cadillacs, Mercedes,
BMWs, whatever they might be, to convert them to where they can use either 100%
gasoline or 15% gasoline and 85% ethanol. You put anything in the tank and
detectors detect what it is and make all the adjustments in the fuel distribution
system so that the car runs fine. there are approximately 10 million flex
fuel vehicles on the road, that's out of a couple hundred million vehicles that
are on the road. So about 5% of them are already flex fuel
vehicles and about million a year, or close to it, are being added to our fleet
on the road today. So that's the way the ethanol is used and
the reason it makes up about. 5% of our total transportation fuel and
that's shown here. We saw this pie chart before, the yellow
is the 5% in ethanol. 72% gasoline, 23% diesel, by the way that
70%, 72% gasoline includes things like aviation fuel.
And that we don't blend ethanol with aviation fuel.
It, it's because of this unique characteristics of aircraft engines.
now I've, I've mentioned a couple times that, that a gallon of ethanol displaces
and can displace a gallon of, approximately a gallon of oil or
gasoline. Well that's not really true as I we look
at it a little closer. And the reason is, is that if I burn a
gallon of ethanol I get about 2/3 of the amount of heat released as I get from a
gallon of gasoline. So that means when I go to the fuel
station and corner gasoline station and pump.
90% ethanol, and 10%, excuse me. 90% gasoline, and 10% ethanol,
I cut my gas mileage a little bit compared to 100% gasoline.
And take, for an example, a, a 30 miles per gallon auto that will get 30 miles
per gallon on 100% gasoline, will get about 28 miles per gallon on.
10% ethanol fuel, that exclamation point should be a 1, I apologize for the typo
here, that's 10%, 10% ethanol. So ethanol will, you'll use more gallons
of ethanol to go the same distance than you will from gasoline.
So there's not quite a 1 to 1 energy balance there.
Well what percent then is that of the, looking at liquefied, a liquid petroleum,
total liquid petroleum, which is a term that is used a lot and you see it in the
press and newspaper articles and TV media presentations, that they talk about
petroleum. So petroleum are liquids, but then they
are made up of ethanol, natural gas, liquids that we talked about last time,
and oil. Now how does the production compare? We
looked at, before, the production of natural gas liquids,
which is the red here, that's added to oil that's in the blue down here.
So, this is about the 6 million barrels per day.
The, natural gas liquids is about 2 million barrels per day.
And this is about 6. And the ethanol is about,
One millions barrels per day. So you can see that these 2 here, in
particular and, well, this crude oil with the marking discovery and things have
increased production significantly since 2008.
So if we add all of them together, we're up here.
at in 2008, we were about 7 1/2, and now, we're about, 8.7 or so.
So that's a significant increase, 7 1/2 to 8.3 or 4,
8.7 or so. So, things, things are improving in
trend, when we add all those together. But, we talked about last time, and
natural gas liquids. they do not substitute on a 1 to 1 basis
for oil. ethanol does a better job of it, but it
substitutes on about a, 1 barrel of, er, ethanol substitutes for about 2/3 barrel
of gasoline, so we had to be careful about that.
Okay. You hear a lot about that, the term
ethanol energy balanced produced, for ethanol produced from corn.
what we're talking about there is how much fossil fuel does it take to make a,
ethanol, that has one unit of energy in it, make the unit anything you want, make
it a million barrels of ethanol or you can it one barrel of ethanol or one
gallon of ethanol. it requires .8 units of fossil fuels to
make energy, enough energy in ethanol to produce one unit of the ethanol.
So it's pretty thin, it's only about 20% gain, but the fossil fuels aren't oil in
general. They're primarily natural gas and coal,
so in some ways it's like we're, we're transforming natural gas and coal into a
transportation fuel, which is not typically used for transportation.
So that's one way to view it, because it takes about .8 equivalent barrels of
natural gas and coal equivalent on an energy basis to make one equivalent unit
of corn ethanol. So it's, it's, it's not a very renewable fuel in that regard,
because we're only gaining about .2 units for every one unit of ethonal we produce,
as fare as gaining in the energy produced.
This is shown here with a corn ethanol That this is percent of ethanol energy
output, how much, how much energy input has to go in to produce the ethanol,
that's fossil fuel inputs. And here's the yellow is coal, the red is
natural gas. Other is green and oil is, is blue.
Now the kind of things that these are used for instance is the tractors that
plow the fields and pick the corn, use petroleum, use diesel fuel or gasoline
and in the processing of, of corn to ethanol, it takes a lot of
natural gas, because you get a lot of water mixed with the ethanol, and you
have to increase the concentration to about 99% pure ethanol and 1% water, and
it comes out of the, at one point it comes out at about 80%, water and 20%
ethanol. So we have to distill it down, it takes a
lot of natural gas. So those the kind of ways that we have to
use fossil fuels to produce ethanol, corn ethanol, that is.
And if you compare that with cellulosic ethanol, that we can certainly do it in
the laboratory, we can get it for instance wood, like wood alcohol that
we're, that you, start, invented, so to speak,
and the process was invented in 8, 1898. it takes very little fossil fuel energy,
in energy input, in order to produce a full unit of, of ethanol energy in the,
etha, when we burn it So, cellulosic ethanol, which wood is just one example
of it, would be much much better from an energy balance viewpoint.
Okay, next time we'll look at look at some of the energy independence,
what all this means. We hear about energy independence, you hear about, a lot about
oil independency, energy independence. So we'll look at those topics now that
we've covered all of the significant fossil fuel production that we have coal,
oil, gas, natural gas, liquids, and ethanol.
Thank you. See you next time.