Thinking Clearly about Oil and Alternative Fuels

Never mind the recent decline in oil prices from their record highs. The age of cheap oil is over. And it will not return. Shrinking supplies of conventional crude, rising demand from emerging markets and the shadowy presence of speculators have forever ended the days of $20 per barrel oil and $1 per gallon gasoline. If oil were "only" expensive, it would be painful but not particularly dangerous. But because remaining conventional oil supplies are increasingly located in hostile or unstable countries, our oil addiction is also a huge threat to our national security. We need to think clearly about alternatives to oil.

We are safer as a nation when oil alternatives fit easily into our existing fuel distribution and vehicle system, stretch domestic oil supplies and can be produced in large volumes at reasonable cost. We already have this in the blending of 10 percent ethanol (E10) into more than 70 percent of regular unleaded gasoline sold in this country and in 85 percent ethanol (E85) for the more than 7 million flex-fuel vehicles capable of using higher blends of ethanol on the road today.

About nine billion gallons of ethanol will be produced in the US this year, most of it from corn. That is a fraction of the 140 billion gallons of gasoline America will use, but much larger volumes of "cellulosic ethanol" are on the horizon. Cellulosic materials include agricultural and urban wastes, woody materials and grasses. Call it "grassoline." Corn ethanol and grassoline can help ease our dangerous oil addiction, but we must not be sidetracked by irrelevant issues.

Of all the irrelevant issues concerning ethanol, the so-called "net energy" argument is near the top. According to this argument, ethanol is not a good fuel because "it takes more energy to make ethanol than you get when you burn it in your car." The fact is that all fuels, every single one, take more energy to make than you get when you burn them in your car. Gasoline actually has a worse "net energy" than ethanol. Net energy is simply irrelevant.

From a national security perspective, the most relevant question is, "How much oil does ethanol replace?" The answer might surprise you. Very little oil - mostly diesel fuel for planting, tilling and harvesting crops - is required to produce ethanol. A recent publication in the journal Science shows that only about 0.04 MJ (mega joule, a measure of energy content) of petroleum is required to produce one MJ of ethanol. That is a 25:1 advantage in favor of ethanol production. Because ethanol has less energy per gallon than gasoline, we get more than 30 gallons of ethanol for every gallon of oil we "invest" to make the ethanol, versus eight-tenths of a gallon of gasoline per gallon of oil. When ethanol is used as E85 fuel in a flex-fuel vehicle, we are effectively getting around 800 miles per gallon of oil consumed.

Thus, overall domestic fuel supplies are stretched far into the future when we take our own oil and use it to produce ethanol from our domestic agricultural and forest materials. Ethanol from corn and the much larger amounts of grassoline that are on the way are the only near-term petroleum alternatives we have that significantly enhance national security by replacing lots and lots of oil.

Bruce E. Dale, Ph. D.
Distinguished University Professor
Dept. of Chemical Engineering & Materials Science
Michigan State University

Editor In Chief
Biofuels, Bioproducts & Biorefining

Associate Director: Office of Biobased Technologies

Note: Dr. Dale is set to debate Dr. David Pimentel, professor of ecology and entomology at Cornell University, today (Nov. 18) at Wellesley College regarding the benefits of biofuels.

Comments

[deltaman]

Nice piece, I found this website with info on a lot of ethanol news: www.ethanolplug.com Checkout the EIA report on how much money the oil companies swallowed last quarter: http://www.ethanolplug.com/PlugNews/WebExclusiveEIAReportonOilCosIncome/tabid/140/Default.aspx

[nomoreofthesame]

That one supertanker the pirates hijacked is worth $100,000,000. It will all go to Saudi Arabia. When will you flat earth folks wake up and decide to control our own energy future? Or do you like being held hostage to big oil and Middle Eastern Sheiks? E85 corn ethanol fuels my American made car. What a concept, we can make our own fuel today.

[NoWMDs]

CNG is the way to go along with biofuels and hybrid technology.

[KillTheMessenger]

Why CNG? You can easily convert methane into liquid fuels without any modifications necessary to vehicles. Given the inefficiency of the CNG transport chain, the slight loss in chemical energy content is hardly worth mentioning.

[KillTheMessenger]

What Dr. Dale fails to mention explicitly is that he keeps talking about EROEI (which according to him is irrelevant, anyway... talk about being consistent) of mythical cellulosic ethanol, something that, also according to him, we will have shortly, but do not have, yet. Corn ethanol, which we are using in our vehicles now and which constitutes the majority of ethanol produced in the US from biofuels has an EROEI only slightly above one and replaces hardly any oil.

So, indeed, the fairies in fairyland are very pretty. But they do not propel your car, just yet.

[Speedwoble]

Actually, he is talking about Corn Ethanol. Corn ethanol takes very little liquid petroleum, most of the energy used to make it comes from coal or natural gas. Therefore, you are taking a form of energy we cannot use in current vehicles (coal and natural gas), adding in the energy from corn, and outputting more energy in the form of ethanol than you inputted with fossil fuels.

If you think we should make new cars to burn CNG, why not use the natural gas to make more ethanol and burn it in cars we already own.

[IndianaJohn]

And much of the natural gas used to make nitrogen fertilizer could be saved by using nitrogen fixing legumes as cover crops to organically add nitrogen to the soil.

[KillTheMessenger]

Would you please link to that paper in science? Thank you.

[IndianaJohn]

It's pay per view. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/312/5781/1746