EPA Mandates How Much Gas You Must Buy

Eric:

Still valid point, but my 1991 Isuzu pickup had a 2 barrel carburetor (2.3L). Not sure what model year they stopped putting carbs on the Isuzus, but in ’91, carbs were still present.

>The last new car to come with a carburetor was made in 1987

Olds 307s were built with carburetors until 1990, when they were discontinued. Multiple GM divisions were using them in full-size RWD applications…by that point, mostly station wagons and some Cadillacs.

Model T running on ethanol grown on the farm. How are we going to tax that? I’m going to have to fire up some moonshine!

Brent,

“Chris, I cannot tell if you’re talking CO or CO2. I am assuming by the numerical answer you are talking CO. The reason doesn’t have to do with fuel, something is wrong with the carb settings. The ethanol provides extra oxygen.”

I did absolutely no modifications to my 2001 Jeep Cherokee, and it runs great on e85.

The number I was talking about is hydrocarbons, I just dug out my smog papers.

Where in the world are you getting you’re info? Fox News? Ethanol improves emissions of everything except acetaldehyde, which is emitted when ethanol is not burnt properly. Usually in cold weather.

http://www.afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/flexible_fuel_emissions.html

“Tailpipe emissions result from fuel combustion in a vehicle’s engine and are emitted from its exhaust system. Emissions of primary concern include hydrocarbons, oxides of nitrogen (NOx), carbon monoxide (CO), air toxics, and CO2. Numerous studies have compared the emissions of E85 and gasoline. Although E85 increases the emissions of acetaldehyde in vehicles, it has been found to reduce emissions of CO2, as well as the emissions of many harmful toxics, such as benzene.”

I didn’t say it didn’t run great. However if it is not designed for E85 you’re likely causing damage. If it is, then the ECU adjusts for it likely advancing timing and doing other things.

The numbers you are quoting didn’t make sense. You wrote ‘carbon’. Elemental carbon is not an exhaust component.

Hydrocarbons difference of 10 ppm on a state sniffer test can simply be catalyst temperature, current atmospheric conditions, ignition timing, etc. It’s nothing significant. The sniffer test is designed to spot gross problems, not much more. IM240 is a bit different but you stated at 3000 rpm, which isn’t relevant to IM240, but rather the basic sniffer at idle and elevated no load throttle.

As to your fox news crack, I am going to let it slide this time. It’s pretty clear you don’t have a clue about this stuff already. Furthermore your government is doing something funny. Because there is simply no way it can reduce emissions of CO2. If you remember highschool chemistry you can see you’ve been BS’d.

The reason it can’t is because of the basics of hydrocarbon combustion. Just look at the molecule structure. Ethanol replaces an H with an OH. That’s it. Additional oxygen. Still a carbon chain. If CO and HC go down, then CO2 must increase, because that’s where the CO and HC went, they were fully burned.

The additional oxygen acts to trick the fuel system into running leaner unless it has an O2 sensor which in case it adjusts itself. The leaner condition, if not corrected, allows for more complete combustion driving CO to CO2 and left over H-C to H2O and CO2.

You can’t get less HC (hydrocarbons, now called VOC, Volatile Organic Compounds)and less CO2 by adding oxygen. You get less HC and more CO2, because the carbon has to go somewhere.

What the government is likely doing is not counting the CO2 from the ethanol, because it’s ‘green’ or some such nonsense. It takes more volume of E85 to go the same distance in the same car than gasoline. This is due to lower energy density. (small carbon chains) In the end, more carbon molecules should end up in CO2.

I think the food producing nations will win. Muslims nations have to buy a bushel of corn even if its $1000/bu. Their best bet is Indonesia. The biggest muslim country has a big upside to grow more food, but it’ll take a while.

Funny thing is, hemp produces 10 times more alcohol than corn per acre, yet hemp is illegal in the US.

Also, porkpacalypse 2013. There’s a shortage of pigs due to the high price of feed, but we liquify 40% of our pig feed every year to make a crappy gas additive? Really?

Funny how the potheads always bring up hemp as the answer to everything, even though bamboo works better in a lot of the cases. But you can’t smoke bamboo….

The reason hemp is mentioned is because hemp is a suitable crop for much of the lower 48 states. A big part of why hemp is illegal is because it is a useful crop. It was widely used for many of the purposes it’s touted for in the USA in the 18th and 19th centuries. However hemp farmers lost the political battle so now it is banned.

Quite right BrentP; hemp competes exceptionally well with trees for paper production (better than 4:1 acreage wise as I recall and it’s annually renewable). You can produce high quality oil from the seeds. Excellent rope, methanol (wood gas) and even plastics from it. So, “Bob”, being the typical knee-jerk prohibitionist apparently doesn’t understand that Cannabis Hemp is virtually free of psychoactive components and people can’t use it to get high. But it will cross pollinate with the “recreational” Cannabis strains and actually dilute their potency (which is why a lot of the growers and “potheads” don’t want to see it re-emerge as widespread agri product).

Unfortunately there a lot of “Bobs” out there. Hence, the one crop that grows well practically everywhere in the continental U.S. will remain dead and buried. And that’s right where John Randolph Hearst wanted it so, he didn’t have to compete with hemp with his less efficient / less profitable pulp wood forests and paper mills. I suspect that if “Bob’s” walking through the secured area of an airport, he’ll “freeze” when he’s told to and will then thank the blue shirted goons for protecting him from terrorism. Oh and Bob, I’m not a “pothead”, I’m a realist with a technical job in the private sector. In other words, I have to think and perform root cause analysis on complex systems daily. Based on your comment, one might suspect that you’re a dumbass on the gun-vernment dole. What do you do for a living “Bob”?

The greater reasons for the upsurge in stood priced are (1)rise in fossil fuel prices, and (2) debasement of the US dollar by the Fed going hog-wild in printing money (a significant part of reason #1, BTW)
E15 for the masses, like the E85 “alternative fuel”, is yet another Government scam to prop up big Agra, especially the highly-influential Archer Daniels Midland Corporation.

Ethanol production requires 25% more energy input than you get from it. The Terrorists profit hugely from their Ethanol Terrorist Act(ETA). Try to get a Publik Skewl/TV-watching/Fluoride Alcohol Aspartame Carbohydrate-guzzling weak mental retard Clover to understand this!

agreed – this was demonstrated by a group of High School students as a class science project. And they weren’t even home schooled! Their teacher is probably in deep yogurt (or some other vile smelling organic compound).

Ethanol CAN be produced with less energy than it releases when burned.

Just not with corn.

I know it can be… with sugar cane. It’s a much better way and the energy balance works. However the sugar and corn lobbies are against it.

No! (And no to all the comments backing it up, too.)

That is only true of the cack-handed, stupid way that the powers that be are currently doing it in the U.S.A. and a few other places, but it is entirely practical to do it a different way – as the Brazilian experience is showing. That’s not simply because they are using sugar cane rather than maize, either, though that does increase the output they get.

Here’s the sensible way to get ethanol, supposing you had a real need for it, properly made engines to burn it (e.g. higher compression), etc.:-

– Don’t use fertilisers made with hydrocarbon energy, use crop rotation to regenerate the nitrates (adding back the crop waste to conserve phosphates) or use green manure (see below), or if you absolutely must use artificial fertilisers, make them with coal energy – or better still hydro-electric or nuclear.

– Don’t use farm equipment and ethanol processing that burns hydrocarbons, run those by burning crop waste. The Brazilians do that for their ethanol processing right now, which is why they get so much better EROEI numbers. And it is quite practical to run engines off producer gas made by (incompletely) burning crop waste, provided you don’t have the logistical issues of collecting and distributing the fuel – so it’s realistic for farm equipment, e.g. tractors.

– To replace artificial fertilisers, you don’t have to use crop rotation that would mean lower total output because of all the tied up land. You can simply tip all the ash you get from the burning and all the other waste into ponds to grow nitrogen fixing pond weeds, then spread those on the fields to rot down as “green manure”. The ponds don’t take much space, so that doesn’t tie up much productive land, and green manure doesn’t blow away like recycled ash on fields.

It’s probably still not worth it, but you can easily get ethanol production with no energy inputs apart from sunlight, and easier still to get it with no hydrocarbon inputs but only other sorts of energy. Doing it the stupid way is what gives you the problems, so either they are doing that to further a hidden agenda, or they are simply just that stupid. Or both, maybe?

@PMLawrence:

Good stuff, PM, thank you! That’s a thread-ender right there.

I didn’t know the Brazilians were being that clever about it–using syn-gas from anaerobic burning etc.

I also didn’t know about nitrogen-fixing pond scum; that’s an awesome trick! I’ll have to incorporate it in my organic gardening efforts. Right now my nitrogen comes from my neighbor’s grass clippings…obviously not a sustainable* practice.

* “sustainable” has been corrupted by the Agenda 21 control freaks to mean “living in Soviet-style housing blocks and acting like a serf”. But I use it to describe REAL sustainability.

Sorry, it looks as though I wasn’t clear enough about how crop waste could be used, as against how it is currently being used in the real world.

If you burn it incompletely in gasifiers, you get producer gas (or the even richer semi-water gas or water gas, if you use certain tricks, but those are only practical on a large scale, not on vehicles). You can run power equipment off that, using fairly conventional internal combustion engines, and it has other uses that aren’t relevant here. That means you can run vehicles that way – though you can’t readily convert the modern, computer controlled sort to do it. They will run “inefficiently” in terms of fuel tank to wheel numbers, but very efficiently in “well” to wheel terms, since that crop waste is in ample supply and free at point of use (there is no marginal cost to getting it, as it is a by-product – for farm use). But as far as I know, the Brazilians haven’t bothered to do any of this, no doubt because of the capital cost of new equipment or of converting old equipment.

As well as that, you can just burn the crop waste to provide heat for processes that can use that. The Brazilians are doing this, burning the sugar cane waste (“bagasse”) to run the stills that concentrate the ethanol. They could use it to keep the fermenting vats warm too, but in their climate they don’t need to. They have a lot left over, so they could still use the gasifier trick on top of that for the other stuff, but so far they aren’t being reported as doing that, at any rate that I’ve heard of.

So there’s no real world gasifier stuff after all, yet. But it’s a low-tech thing, and it has often been used in times of petrol shortages in places where plant matter can be scrounged, even on regular vehicles where getting the fuel took more time and trouble than in farm situations; it was quite common here in Australia during the Second World War, and I remember my father telling me about seeing a bus in Algeria then that had a gasifier on the back with a native stoker perched on it.

I’m not for mandates, and you’re right that the way we currently produce ethanol uses a lot of oil.

My Jeep went from emitting 17.5 ppm of carbon at 3000rpm at my previous smog check(on regular gas) to emitting 7.5 ppm on e85. I don’t care if you believe we are affecting climate change, no one wants to breathe smog.

The way we should be producing ethanol is by using solar, wind or small hydro power to power the boilers, using methane off of the fermenting tanks for co-generation, and gasifying the agricultural waste.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasification

Then feed the left over mash to some hogs, use the excess fat from the hogs to make bio-diesel, and the manure and bio char to grow new crops. The whole thing can be an efficient enterprise. Why aren’t we currently doing all this? Because oil is cheap, due to our government subsidizing it and running up our national debt.

Yes, you’re all right about the Monsanto gangsters and the raw milk hating thugs, but that is no reason to bash ethanol. Bash the mandate all you want, but converting cars to run it isn’t all that bad and is not going to cost you $1500. New jets are less than $100. Ethanol has been added to fuel since the early nineties, so any car ’91 and later can run ethanol. The earlier cars just need re-jetting.

And yes, like Uncle Sam said in WWI, “Hemp For Victory!”

I guess old Uncle Sam is getting senile, or maybe Hearst beat him to a “Pulp”.

Chris, I cannot tell if you’re talking CO or CO2. I am assuming by the numerical answer you are talking CO. The reason doesn’t have to do with fuel, something is wrong with the carb settings. The ethanol provides extra oxygen.

If you converted to e85 I would say it was the work that was done correcting a problem with the fuel system.

Ethanol was introduced to the gasoline with the excuse that it would improve emissions of cars with carburetors that haven’t been adjusted since Reagan was in office and fuel injection systems with broken sensors and other issues.

Otherwise ethanol does nothing after the first carb adjustment or after the first few seconds so the computer in a fuel injected system adjusts all the parameters.

I understand all the raging against the government and there evil plans, but I have a lawnmower, a leafblower, a weedeater, a snowblower and an edger that are all almost twenty years old and run just fine. And I live in Illinois where we went to E-10 over ten years ago. So, I’m not sure what the hell you guys are talking about when you talk about these old small engines just falling apart when you put ethanol in them. Just sayin’.

Yeah Methyl, from everything I’ve read about hemp it’s good feedstock for methanol not ethanol. You can extract high quality oil from the seeds and I know it was used commercially for paint and varnish production as late as 1937. I don’t know if the plants would produce enough seeds for a viable source of bio-diesel though.

I actually did extensive pre-startup testing and mods on a midwest “closed cycle” ethanol plant. The basic theory was as follows: The distillery would use locally grown corn to make the mash for their ethanol production. The process would start on natural gas. As it got going they would feed the spent mash to cattle on local feed lots. The cattle would produce manure they would feed into a digester to produce bio-gas (about 50% methane by volume). The boilers would switch from natural gas to bio-gas as soon as it was available to supply steam to the mash pots, digester and distillery.

It all sounded great in theory, but like a lot of wonderful “green” ideas it turned out to be a multi-million dollar Charlie Foxtrot (for you non-military types that starts in Cluster and ends in K). The investors lost their shirts, the management team tried to sue the company I worked for at the time (we did the biogas system) and finally it all folded. That was in spite of the tax incentives. It was kind of like a bio-gas version of Solyndra…

@Boothe–

As always interesting stuff, Boothe, thanks.

And your experience proves for the eighteen billionth time what we all know, but the useful idiots can’t seem to figure out–only market-driven solutions work, and government-driven projects do one of two things:
1) fail and waste money
2) fail, waste money, and further enslave us to our would-be masters

That whole cycle you describe sounds idyllic. In a free market, somebody would try it on a small scale and gauge success; then they’d get some investors, whom they’d have to convince to risk their venture capital on a scale-up plant. The investors don’t like losing money…unlike government. So they’d vet the project thoroughly. The moment it failed, that message would be communicated clearly–money was lost, this doesn’t work.

I’m betting though that rather than a shoestring operation, because of Uncle’s generosity they used top-notch stuff all the way?

BTW there are many small farmers that use closed-cycle techniques, like hog farmers that use biogas from hog poop to generate their electricity. It can work. Just not if gov does it.

One place I worked gave me a very interesting perspective on the way executives behave and how government works.

What I learned about technology start-ups is that the principles aim to get rich off the investor money and have the company bought up by a giantganto corp. Now where I worked did this in the free market and failed to get bought out.

It failed to get bought out because of the product, which went into a very government controlled area, where technology is frozen in 1962 and no giant corporation has any interest in changing that because they want it that way. That’s where the principle players thought wrong. So no buy out. The executives still did well for themselves however.

Essentially it doesn’t matter if the company fails, it’s about how the executives are compensated, what’s best for them. High ideals, good ideas, doesn’t matter except to the little people. It’s a political system. Follow the money as they say…

Whatever happened IME was the best the executives could make it for themselves and their friends. I assume it applies elsewhere.

Well that’s the short version of how I learned it.

Yeah, you’re right, hemp isn’t good for ethanol, the whole hemp conversation is of topic, but it does compete with a lot of powerful industries, and that is the only reason it’s illegal to grow.

I think he’s excluding the solar energy input the plant used to make the sugars in the first place.

I.E., it’s a net gain of 45%, subtracting all the energy put into planting, fertilizing, harvesting, and processing.

Yeah, that 45% more energy out than put in would rock, wouldn’t it!

No, it does not take “1.3 gallons of petroleum to make 1 gallon energy equivalent of ethanol”, it takes none at all – see my earlier comment. What does take that is, using petroleum to do it instead of doing it a more sensible way – but that’s as stupid as lifting with your back rather than your legs. So it’s an accurate and sound criticism of current policies, but no criticism at all of ethanol fuel as such.

You can get very sound criticisms of ethanol fuel all the same, just by looking at the problems it gives vehicles that aren’t suited to it and the problems it makes for food production (Nassau Senior anticipated those, in his 19th century work on wages, as one special case in which mechanisation could harm wages), but those are other issues, and others have already brought them out here; quite simply, the EROEI (energy return on energy invested/input) issue is a red herring for ethanol as fuel.

I suppose the most you could say is, if it ever became cheap enough to make ethanol fuel the stupid way, using petroleum products, it would be even cheaper just to turn them into fuel grade petrol anyway and skip the ethanol.

Yes PM–this criticism is aimed purely at the stupid (by normal logic) and unproductive way ethanol is made today.

It could be a viable source, done correctly. But the PTB have no interest in doing it correctly–as someone pointed out, it’s not in the PTB’s interest to have energy independence at a local level.

It makes the serfs uppity and difficult to control.

It’s cliche’ but you are indeed what you eat. Dialing back our processed food intake has resulted in noticeable weight loss and better health. While the food may at times be more expensive, and we are ramping up our garden production, the back end health benefits balance out the up front costs. You can pay now or pay later but either way you’re gonna pay somehow.

My ’87 Nissan EXA (the NX to the US I think) uses black box injection and many sensors, but 98 octane is still fubar on the economy.

My ’90 CBR1000 with ’95 carbs does worse with ’90 carbs, but the 98 octane – oh dear on every level. The shit just burns too slow.

I remember some of my mates back in the late ’80’s used to think 130 octane aircraft fuel would give them more power. That’s even worse than the crap fuel economy from LPG. Fools really. Only for high compression engines I’m guessing, let alone lower freezing point at altitude. But who drives their car at 10,000 feet anyway 🙂