If It Matters To Oregonians,
It's In The (insert newspaper here)

The real story here is that Vicki Walker, alas, not the next Oregon Secretary of State, is the first member of the Oregon Legislature to wake up and frankly admit what a blunder the Oregon ethanol mandate was. Better yet, she promises to get rid of it next year!

It almost makes me glad she'll stay in the Senate rather than taking over as SoS.

I would encourage all that are reading this to do their own research, and form their own opinion. Ethanol is saving you money at the pump, whether you use it or not. It is clearly documented by many worthy universities and economists. Don't be mislead.

My fuel economy has dropped two MPH, after inflating all my tires to their maximum pressure and changing the filters/oil.

The mechanic says it's the E10: mileage goes down.

E10 also ruined the carb on my lawnmower (three years old): mechanic says the E10 is much more corrosive, especially on fuel lines and filters.

Ethanol saving us money at the pump?? Is it saving us money at the grocery store??

Gee, Robert, care to back that up with any citations to those worthies?

And don't forget that it's only saving you money at the pump if you don't include the drain on the treasury represented by the billions of subsidies enjoyed by the corn growers.... and if you don't include the cost of dealing with the Gulf of Mexico dead zone (from all the excess fertilizer washed into the Mississippi and on down) and all the extra greenhouse gas emissions pumped into the atmosphere (nitrous oxide, 300 times worse than CO2 per molecule, produced by conversion of nitrogen fertilizer).

And don't forget to include the tax money you're giving as a subsidy to the company proposing to build a COAL-fired ethanol plant in Nyssa, OR, to bring corn from the Midwest and coal from Wyoming to harvest Oregon's subsidies on top of the federal ones.

So even if there were a savings from a fuel with only 2/3 the energy per unit volume, it's more than made up for by the increased taxes to put more money into Archer Daniels Midland's pockets and require more costs for dealing with climate change.

Ethanol: The Greene$t fuel of all. (Except for the suckers who are forced to use it.)

Ethanol from Corn

from U.C. Berkeley's Dr. Tad Patzek’s "Thermodynamics of the Corn-Ethanol Biofuel Cycle":

All living things are entropy creating machines. All life is maintained by processing the energy available from low entropy systems, while depositing higher entropy elsewhere. In this regard, human beings are superior entropy producing machines. Humans extract nourishment and all other material products from low energy environments and transform it to high entropy end products, i.e. pollution.

In modern agriculture, we have boosted the production of cropland far beyond normal limits, and we have appropriated most of the product. Just as in the case of mining and refining ore, we do this through the use of fossil fuels. However, to practice modern agriculture, we must produce vast amounts of entropy in various forms, i.e. soil depletion, water pollution, air pollution, sewage and solid wastes.

In order to perform a Second Law analysis of ethanol, you have to identify and quantify all of this entropy in order to compare the net energy of ethanol production. One of the easiest ways to do this is through the derivation of exergy, which is the available free energy. When determining the exergy of pollution remediation, we must determine the amount of work necessary to return the polluted system back to a pristine state.

When a Second Law analysis of corn-ethanol is performed, we find that the minimum cumulative exergy consumption in restoring all the pollution and depletion of industrial corn-ethanol production is more than 7 times higher than the maximum amount of shaft work produced by a car engine burning ethanol. And this is excluding restoration work for decontaminating aquifers, rivers and the Gulf of Mexico, all tainted by agricultural runoff. Moreover, when you take into account all of the fossil fuel inputs, one hectare of corn-for-ethanol generates 7475 kg of CO2, or 2200 kg more CO2than would be generated by burning an energy equivalent amount of gasoline. In other words ethanol generation produces 42% more atmospheric CO2 than gasoline.

Let me restate this for emphasis. The main reason why we are currently subsidizing ethanol production is the mistaken belief that ethanol contributes less CO2 than gasoline. There is also talk about ethanol being a renewable fuel source. However, in reality, ethanol produces 42% more atmospheric CO2 than an equivalent amount of gasoline, and it requires 10% more energy to produce than it provides. What is more, to remediate all the pollution of corn-ethanol production would require a minimum of 7 times the maximum amount of work that ethanol can produce in a car engine.

Industrial corn-ethanol production is not renewable and it is far from sustainable. Furthermore, analysis shows that there are no process changes that can make the system viable. We would be better off to abandon corn ethanol production right now.

"I would encourage all that are reading this to do their own research, and form their own opinion. Ethanol is saving you money at the pump, whether you use it or not. It is clearly documented by many worthy universities and economists. Don't be mislead."

Okay.

According to this document from the Oak Ridge National Labratory, gasoline has about 115,000 BTU/gallon of energy.

According to this study, corn ethanol takes 131,000 BTUs to make one gallon, and that gallon only contains 77,000 BTUs.

Corn ethanol takes more energy to produce, and contains less energy density when you have it. Less energy density = more burned for same work output, e.g. less efficieny, a.k.a. worse mileage. Oh, and that says nothing for the corrosive nature of ethanol on the gaskets and seals in your engine, thus the non-certification of any ethanol-based fuel for piston engine aircraft by the FAA. In fact, the FAA is still certifying 100LL fuel which uses tetraethyl lead as an octane booster, because there isn't another product available at this time which is safe for use at 20,000 feet.

That research work for you?