Scabby Jack

I see a 15%-20% drop in mpg due to ethanol.

I see more American jobs for small engine repair mechanics and marine mechanics as a result of the many adverse issues ethanol causes in older engines.

I see feed prices rising due to the corn removed from the supply side of the equation. This effects every person on the planet adversely.

I see the fuel costs savings negated by the now mandatory need to place expensive fuel stabilizing additives in my tanks.

I am not now a proponent of this failed experiment at social engineering by government. Enough is enough.

t500hps

1) Gas jumped $.15-20 cents when the switch was made here in VA. I guess gas became cheaper in the mid-west but it certainly did not here!!!!

2) agreed, it burns cleaner, old boats/cars had issues from deposits but that is a trade-off I'll accept.

3) OK, it likely does employee a few thousand extra people.......which is WHY it raised the price of "gas". No way to add that many salaries to the production line and not increase costs.

4) OK, farmers are more profitable.......and anyone who consumes food is paying for it (whether that is acceptable to you is a personal choice)

5) Until vehicles are put on the road that are made for E10 only I don't see it. Every vehicle I have is getting worse mileage. Everyone I know that tracked mileage before/after is getting worse mileage. My boat engines had just been built when we got E10 and I had to re-tune the engine down slightly to account for the new "gas".

6) GREAT.....lets ship them ALL our ethanol and keep the "real" gas for ourselves.

Actually I have no issue using ethanol in my cars. It's the engines that don't get used regularly that are of major concern to me. I keep hearing about parts of the country that can get non-E in high-test fuels but it simply isn't available anywhere here. Small engines have to be taken apart and cleaned, fuel lines replaced, and/or drians installed to dump the old fuel after every use. I keep hearing a stabilizer should be used with E-10.......if it's that important, why don't the manufacturers simply add that to ALL E10 fuels. Also, If ethanol is so great, why do the manufacturers ship it seperate and only mix it with regular "gas" right before selling it?

LapseofReason

I have to get to work so I will just touch on one thing first. I work on motorcycles and am just south of DC and near military bases so I get a lot of new customers all the time. The ones that come from places that had no e10 gas ask first, what's wrong with my bike it ran fine a week or two ago. So I have to tell them what's going on. The fix for a bike or any small engine with a carb is bigger jets, the mix screw most of the time doesn't have enough range to get it right, if it's fuel injected without an 02 sensor I have to remap with a richer map. The fuel injected motors with an 02 sensor, plug a scanner in and look at the duty cycle with e10 vs. gas. It adds more fuel. So if the fix is to add more fuel how is it cleaner. It's not.

TexasVines

there is no subsidy for ethanol.....it was ended at the end of 2011......so again there is zero subsidy for ethanol....there is still a mandate for 10%, but that is not a subsidy and a mandate would normally contribute to ethanol having a higher price than gas, but that is not the case because ethanol now has a competitive market with multiple producers

100% of the corn is not used up when ethanol is produced only the starch.....DDGs are left over after the ethanol is produced....DDGs are actually as good or better of a ration for cattle specifically since cows gain little from the starch content of corn that is used to make ethanol and they benefit more from the protein content of the DDG that is left after ethanol is produced

swine can also eat DDGs and only poultry has a harder time with them so beef specifically is not going up because of high corn prices

here is a price chart for corn

http://ycharts.com/indicators/corn_price

from 2009 to almost the end of 2011 the price of corn was just under to just over 4 dollars per bushel.......after the blenders credit was ended at the end of 2011 when ethanol should have been less competitive corn went up in price and ethanol was still competitive again without a blenders credit which was a direct subsidy

here is a cattle futures price chart

http://futures.tradingcharts.com/his...ontinuous.html

in 2009 cattle were from 90 cents to 105 cents

in April of 2010 when corn was under 4 dollars per bushel cattle moved to 112 to 120 by the end of 2010

in 2011 when the blenders credit was still in play and when corn was under 4 dollars per bushel cattle moved from 120 to 145

in 2012 when the blenders credit was removed, corn had moved to 5 dollars and then higher by the early part of 1012 cattle actually had a 15 cent price drop down to 130 and then actually down to 125 last month ans now the FUTURES (that is why it has the prices until the end of the year) are creeping back up towards 140

so you can see that cattle actually were at an all time high price when corn was at the lowest it has been in several years.....and even when corn was moving up dramatically cattle had a sell off of over 20 cents right at that same time period

if one looks at an ethanol chart they will see that ethanol had a price spike at the end of 2011 right as the blenders credit was ending and then it has had a dramatic decline since that time even as the price of corn has risen

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/commodity/ethanol

and when one looks at gas they will see a price rise at the end of 2011 as the ethanol subsidy was ending and then a drop off into 2012 and then gas has actually had a rise in price as ethanol has stayed steady

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/commodity/gasoline

so again there is no blenders credit which was the past direct subsidy, a mandate is not a subsidy and generally a mandated usage would not be conducive to lower prices it would be conducive to higher prices since the use is mandated regardless of the price

and you can also see that cattle prices often move dramatically differently than the price of corn or the price of ethanol and the price of gas (before blending) does the same

lastly while it is easy to say that without ethanol "using our food for fuel" we would have cheaper beef and cheaper corn oil and the like (corn used for ethanol is not the same as sweet corn and is not consumed directly by humans in general other than cooking oils and the like) the economic reality is that for the last several years the USA has been planting record corn acres and producing record corn crops and as of today the USDA (questionable source at best) is projecting that the USA will have the third highest corn crop on record even with a near historic drought

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...8IB26120120711

right at the top directly from the USDA

* USDA cuts corn yield more than trade expected
* Despite drought, third-largest U.S. corn crop

part of the reason for this is because farmers were able to plant corn knowing they would be able to grow it with at least a small profit.....if ethanol was not around for the last few years there would have been a dramatic hit on the price of corn and farmers would have either fallowed land, planted something else driving down the price of that crop, they would have fertilized less (because fertilizer other than nitrogen like P and K is controlled by non-USA based cartels that control output to keep prices high), they would have not planted poor producing acres, they would not have cleared former CRP ground and ground that had grown up in trees and scrub and they would not have tiled fields in MN and SD especially to the point that there was a shortage of drainage tile in the USA for a year or longer

they simply would not have made the investment to enable them to produce a higher yield per acre especially in areas that are outside the corn belt

from Louisiana to Georgia there are numerous farmers that have given up planting cotton because the price of corn has held steady where they can make a profit....they have sold off their cotton pickers, gins have shut down for good, sold off module builders, and gone to planting a crop that is easier to grow and that is less expensive to grow per acre and they did that because of corn being profitable even at 4 dollars.....if that had not been the case and corn had been at 3 dollars or lower those same farmers would be planting cotton still and they would be putting it into the USDA subsidized "pool" waiting for a price to rise or for a guarantee

nothing cures high prices for the American farmer like high prices because every time a price has gone up on anything in the recorded history of the USA ag sector the USA farmer has responded by producing themselves into poor prices.....without that high price to drive planting acres and land improvements and fertilizer we would still be looking at a massive drought in the corn producing states and we would not have the acres in the far north and the deep south that we have today

we would have poor yielding wheat production (cattle can do well on wheat, but chicken and poultry don't and wheat is not trading near the all time high of just the recent past) in the northern states and we would have cotton or wheat or sorghum and maybe some soypea production in the deeper south and again cattle can do well on cotton seed, cotton seed meal, and gin trash, but not nearly as well as on DDGs and poultry and swine will not

with soy poultry and swine can do well on those as can cattle, but soypeas generally do not produce the same size crop in terms of total dollars returned per acre even though they are cheaper to plant and with increased production of those it would have driven the price even lower to a level where they were not economic to produce in many of the areas of the far north or deep south

so it would have been cotton at a low price going into a USDA subsidized pool to sit and wait until world spinners needed it and it was finally sold or it would have been low yielding wheat planted with little fertilizer or alternate irrigation to keep the price of production low

and we would have less DDGs to feed cattle and we would have less corn to shift from ethanol production to other end users for those that need or demand whole corn VS DDGs

if something is not produced at a profit it will not be produced and ethanol has simply provided a profit level that allows farmers to produce and to invest and without that we would be in worse shape than we are now because a reduced % of nothing is nothing VS a reduced % of something still being something

everything in life is not a simple winner loser equation never has been and never will be

TexasVines

as explained above corn is not 100% removed from the end user when it is made into ethanol a large portion of the usable proteins are left in the form of DDGs that are a very good cattle feed.....DDGs are 5% moisture VS #2 corn being 15% so when you truck or export DDGs VS #2 corn you are shipping or trucking a better protein ingredient and you are also shipping 10% less water that is useless

and the USA farmer does not owe cheap food to the rest of the world period if you feel this is the case then feel free to break out your wallet and send those starving people in Africa some of your cash

also your argument is one of those same old tired arguments where the USA just can't win

here is an article from the turner-fondas at the communist news network from as recently as 2008

http://articles.cnn.com/2008-02-01/w...ta?_s=PM:WORLD

US corn farming subsidies are killing the Mexican corn farmers because they can not compete.....notice that is not USA ETHANOL subsidies that are under attack rather it is the programs that allowed the USA farmer to produce cheap feed to feed the rest of the world that are under attack

it says right in the article...CORN IS TOO CHEAP

here is one from 2001 from some organic bufoonery

http://www.organicconsumers.org/Corn/NAFTAkills.cfm

but wait it gets better

here is an article from 2007 where the price for corn for tortillas that is controlled in Mexico has gone up dramatically causing food riots and panic...and of course they blame Ethanol!!!!

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/19/wo...tortillas.html

wait how can that be.....in 2001 we were killing the Mexican farmer with low prices....and in 2008 corn was too cheap because of USA subsidies.....it is right there in the news

and you know what it gets even better..the corn that is used to make tortillas is not the same as the corn that is used to make ethanol......sweet corn and white corn is used to make tortillas.....field corn is used to make ethanol in the USA.....the reason the price went up for tortillas is because the price for corn to make tortillas is artificially indexed to the price of field corn...so the actual corn used to make tortillas was not in short supply it was just that the index used to set that price was going up because the price of field corn was going up......at that time.....and of course when the price went back down.....a year later....corn was too heap

so please pick a side....do you want the cheap "food" from the USA or do you want to control your countries prices so that your subsistence farmers can make a better living...and before you ask an acre of sweet corn or white corn for food or tortillas always sells at a premium (a large premium) over field corn so those acres are not competing with field corn for acres

and the story is the same for africa....they complain about the food aid....then they complain when there is no food aid and the price is high....and one need only to look at Rhodesia which is now some ****hole called zinbabwe that used to be the bread basket of africa and is not a net food importer by a long shot with run away inflation, corruption, and general african asshattery to see what happens when africa is given the chance to "produce for a "profit" without that evil western food aid or subsidized production killing their dirt farmers.....failure

and lastly in case you have not noticed a huge portion of Americans especially amongst the "poor" are fat as hell and something ,like 45% are on food assistance and they are busy abusing the hell out of that buying chips, sodas, candy, shrimp, and lobsters and high prices steaks so **** them as well

the reason there is an issue right now is because Brazil had a very poor crop, the Russian block has been playing games with export limits, some south American countries are having export limits, those countries have infrastructure issues, and the USA is having a record drought in the "corn states" and that would have had a worse impact without ethanol keeping prices high at planting time so that farmers in areas outside of the corn producing states planted record acres of corn

again the word and complex issues in the world are not "win lose" and we can see the results of that type of thinking by looking at every third world ****hole that subscribes to that failed group thing where one year prices are too high and the next year they are too low and the same thing is to blame....the USA and the USA corn production and ethanol and no wait it is not ethanol it is crop production subsidies no wait ethanol no wait high oil!

Panther

It's a good thing that the farmers are now growing what I "crap corn", instead of growing edible corn or feed which in some cases we now import from somewhere else?

So now the farmers make more money from growing crap corn but over time we become dependent on someone else for food?

CrownHawg

TV, just one question. Is it true that it takes MORE energy (in the form of diesel for the tractors, electricity for the stills) to produce one gallon of Ethanol than that gallon of ethanol itself results in when burned? I did not have time to read your novella. Since it takes these "outside" sources of energy, doesn't this contribute to the "green house gasses" that ethanol purports to eliminate? Just curious.

TexasVines

what exactly is "crap corn"?

there are two types of corn (both of which are very similar, but used for a different purpose)......sweet corn and field corn

the vast majority of corn grown in the USA (which is by far the largest producer of corn in the world) has always been field corn......field corn has always been used for animal feed and for industrial purposes like fructose and cooking oil......sweet corn has always been used for food....farmers rarely is ever switch between the two because sweet corn requires a canner to be close by since it does not transport well over long distances or it requires a distributor that can get it to the grocery store quickly and onto the shelf before it dries out or spoils

sweet corn also requires a picker that picks the whole ear and either husk the ear right then or leaves the husk on depending on the use

field corn has always been harvested with a combine that husk the corn, removes the grain, and spits the fodder back out onto the field

there has been no dramatic shift between the two the "cost of food" argument is either by people that do not have an understanding of the differences in the types of corn and their uses or by people that live in countries that rely on a large amount of cooking oil to cook their foods or by animal feeders which is where the largest amount of field corn goes

field corn is also used in cereals and grits, but a box of corn flakes has about 7 to 15 cents of actual corn in the box depending on the price of corn

a bushel of #2 yellow corn is 56 pounds.....a box of cereal is 18 oz or so (says so right on the box)

there are 16 oz per pound so there are 896 oz of corn in a bushel or about 45 boxes of corn (we will discount some for "loss" in production)

so if corn is 3 dollars per bushel a box of corn flakes would have 7 cents of corn in it....if corn was 8 dollars it would have 18 cents of corn in it.....but a box of corn flakes is 3.00 per box or more....so while the cost of the main ingredients in corn flakes did double it would be impossible for a maker or a seller to double the actual price on the store shelf based on the cost of the corn alone because the cost of the corn only went up a very small fraction of the cost of the overall product....high corn prices did not increase their marketing expenses, it did not increase the cost of the box (which can be more than the price of the corn) it did not increase the cost of the trinket for the kid in the box, and it did not increase the transportation cost or the cost of electricity or natural gas to produce that product

a loaf of bread has 7 to 10 cents worth of wheat in it so again it would be impossible to double the price of a dollar loaf of bread based on the doubling of the cost of the wheat to go in it

and as for cattle and swine specifically cattle do extremely well on on DDGs which is the left overs after brewing or ethanol production (which is brewing) and swine do well on them too it is only poultry that do not use DDGs as well as the other two animals mainly bred and raised for meat

so I have no idea what you mean by "crap corn" VS good corn and as we can see the argument that ethanol has dramatically raised the cost of food is a specious one at best and as I showed with the above commodities charts cattle were at an all time high in 2011 when corn was just coming off of 3.75 a bushel and as corn was climbing to the recent highs cattle actually had a drop of 20 cents pretty much right at the same time.....so it would be impossible at this time to blame the high price of beef on ethanol alone

no this is not true and it has been admitted as being false by the number one person that has made that claim after intelligent scientist proved him wrong over and over

the study was done by an idiot from Cal and an entomologist (studies bugs) from cornell

the study had numerous flaws like double counting energy used to grow crops and not counting the DDGs left over as feed from the production of ethanol

the study correctly counted the "alternate cost" of growing corn VS some other crop on the same acres, but then it again counted the cost of the "energy" of the sun

there is no "energy cost" of the sun because the sun shines every day it shines for free whether or not that ground farms corn, weeds, dirt, weed, hay, or anything else

so once you have counted the opportunity cost of corn VS some other crop that is the end of the cost of that "energy" because after that opportunity cost is counted there is no actual cost of the suns energy it shines for free day in and day out if you want it to or not

and again DDGs represent a large % of the corn that is left after fermentation and these are very good rations for cattle and swine especially.....so to ignore those factors would of course make ethanol a "loser" in the scale of production VS cost to produce

lastly their study used a long dated conversion factor for bushels of corn to gallons of ethanol

the study was widely ridiculed by those that did actual proper studies and of course as your last sentence states everyone else "did not have the time to read" up on an important topic they relied on a tweet or on a news blurb from the nightly idiots on what ever "media channel" was gunning for viewers with junk science

the name of the person from cornell was david pimentel and from UC was patzek

recently pimentel has basically been forced to come out and admit that ethanol takes only 40% of the energy it produces to be made which is a 2.5 to 1 energy gain of energy out VS energy in

since you have clearly stated that you are not going to take the time to read up on that you will either have to accept that or not, but if you change your mind and you google david pimentel you will see numerous listings for his junk science reports, and then if you weed through you will see numerous other listings where many more credible scientist and organizations have thoroughly debunked his claims and where even he years later had to stand before an audience and admit that after "recalculations" there has been a new energy balance that I stated above....hell one link discussing it even is on democratic underground which is hardly a bastion of reality or quality science or discussions of science and reality and it clearly calls out pimentel and his little buddy and it list off numerous other organizations and universities that have proven their results to be garbage

so ethanol is a net energy gain and has been proven so time and again by numerous researchers, universities, and government agencies

prostock85

I based what I said on what I remember hearing, for that I appoligize. I also was referring to E85 not 10 or 15. I would be ecstatic to have us as a country be self served. And sorry again if my foreigner comment was offensive, I live in Jersey where we have many farms. Very very few seem to employ legally. There is a 15 pass van that drops them off and picks them up, no English and paid cash.... I didn't realize field corn only used Americans. I guess I should believe quotes from the internet vs what I see in person. See you on the water.

LapseofReason

Its cool man didn't ever take affense to what you said, and to tiered from rebuilding carbs and fixing rusted gas tanks to respond to Mr. Government cut and paste. Turned 16 hours today all from eathanol damage.