I’m with you. It shouldn’t be a sudden ASAP demand drops off of the face of the planet thing, there should be enough warning that farmers will have a couple/few seasons to make plans for switching crops.
I think it’s inevitable though, ethanol use is going to drop dramatically as the alternatives increase. I think when the average Joe citizen discovers how much freshwater goes into making ethanol, the screeching is going to be loud and constant.
This. E85 was a flop and E15 has gotten a lot of push back but there are still many cars on the road from an era where electric cars were a pipe dream. The corn belt also has lots of good crop options to go back to. The only issue I see is land is over valued if corn isn't a good option and nothing would fill the dollar per acre void.
Bio diesel makes a jet fuel that mostly functions okay, but cold temps and gelling are an issue. Replacing 100LL with ethanol doesn't really work. It's too heavy for the energy carried which is also too bulky, water containment prone, and costs too much to overhaul and certify planes to use it.
Latest i heard is ethanol plants around here want to make the switch but their carbon scores aren't good enough to qualify. And there aren't anywhere near enough people using the sustainable practices it would take to get their corn supply to a level that would qualify. Sounds like plants are also hoping to connect to the carbon pipelines to help
The crappy thing about a lot of these carbon incentives are things that we adopted 10+ years ago and they don’t want to pay anything if you have already adopted those practices.
Gasoline still needs octane boosters. 87 octane is 10% ethanol.
When analyzing what is and what isn’t good for the environment. Pick your poison carefully.
But the health and environmental impacts of the octane sources that are used must be considered as well. By adding ethanol to finished gasoline, called “splash blending,” octane ratings can be increased while simultaneously lowering toxic octane sources.
https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-a-brief-history-of-octane
So bad for cars that odometer readings on cars on the road are higher than ever. Cars make 200k miles easily…wasn’t the case years ago. If ethanol were half as bad as the oil industry suggests, I wouldn’t expect cars to last like they do.
Water into ethanol? Gee, I can't drain the feilds fast enough. See the mighty Mississippi? It's literally the drain for the midwest. Now out in Nebraska/Kansas they should start highly regulating the irrigation as that aquifer is being drawn down rapidly. It's one thing to water between rains to avoid significant yeild loss but when you plan to irrigate every year because you don't have the rainfall to support the crop you can't continue doing it forever.
Yes, I live between them. The fuck good are they doing me while I stare down 10+ days in the 90s with no rain? Am I to truck water down 150 miles from Lake Michigan?
I’m completely out of my depth here as a dry land cotton farmer so feel free to tell me if I just need to shut up and stay in my lane, but I think the water consumption to feed corn + rising land costs is a viscous cycle. Pumping up so much water to keep yields high causes the land valuations to jump. In order to afford more land and keep things profitable, you have to keep pumping water. And so on and so on. It’s going to hurt for several years when/if corn demand falls off. But it should eventually lead to lower yield, water conscious crops. Which I would think might lower land valuations and the cost of production. Here we get away with much lower yields because we have far fewer inputs and it’s kept land prices much lower than other areas.
10+ 90° days without rain isn’t a threat here, it’s a certainty. I’ve watched a lot of corn and cotton farmers go broke up on the plains as their water table drops by several feet a year. They just keep drilling deeper and deeper, and I suspect they’ll continue to do so until they are either stopped or they run dry. It’s a poor business plan that will catch up to everybody in their area eventually.
Something interesting, I see you have cicadas. I’m in west central IL and have yet to hear one and I’ve been out every night listening. We always have them. A town 40 miles away had pictures on the news of them piling up under trees.
I didn't have them at my farm, where they were (in the millions) was at a place I was farm sitting for 6 weeks. Those were the 17 year Cicadas, not the Dog Day Cicadas that should be coming out in a few weeks. Dog Day Cicadas come out every year around the 4th of July by me.
The place I was farm sitting was 14 or 15 miles north of me as the crow flies. My general area, 5 mile radius didn't have any huge hatches.
That’s a good point. I should have said that I’m in Kansas and we do have ethanol plants here. The water issue first became obvious in the west but it’s becoming more apparent heading east now. If we don’t make some massive changes, it will end up being a major issue almost everywhere.
They have been talking about saving the ogalla for 40 years.... one of my fav nat geographic articles of all time wqs on the ogalla.... mostly cause of the epic farm photos.
Don't know that ethanol will collapse, but hard to see any growth at all from this point on. The case for ethanol is getting weaker with the growth in electric cars and solar farms that provide \*way\* more energy per acre than corn-based ethanol.
Not sure about the energy per acre difference, but ethanol provides energy storage in a cheap extremely dense package instead of an extremely expensive battery. It is also cheap to retrofit into existing vehicles and the supply chain. The one thing that I think would push for a nice ethanol boom was if ethanol itself was exempt from road taxes like the electricity is. Usually at retail the e15 blend pays off but the e85 never does. That mpg hit coupled with the same tax per gallon as gasoline makes it impossible to break even. The "extra" fuel tax per gallon on e85 vs e10 due to the reduced mpg is effectively 15 cents. Switching from e10 to e85 will burn about 20% more fuel per gallon. If you need premium gas, running e85 is a no brainer. If you don't need premium, justifying that price difference is hard, but still is slighly in e85s favor. Oh, and we are farmers. Use e85.
It blows my mind how different stations can have wildly different prices. Around 50% of the stations around me, E85 is a full $1 less expensive per gallon. Easy math for an ROI. The other half of stations seem to be anywhere between a few cents less than E15 and half a dollar less expensive.
E85 and e15 aren't typically price shopped as much. People will drive across town to save a couple cents on gas, even if it costs more then they save but they won't do a quick calculation for E85. E85 is easy to compare once you know you take that price x 1.20 to see the price comparison to regular e10.
But is that taking into account the transmission losses? Going from DC to AC you lose power. Each transformer you lose significant power. Usually from a solar farm to a residential customer you are going to hit at least 6 transformers in addition to the rectifier. Then to charge a car you have to go to dc again and have charging loss, loss in the battery, and loss going from the dc battery to the ac motor. I wanna say it's like a claimed 10% loss at each power transformation.
Don't know the answer to that and don't really study it myself. Here's one thing I've read on it. I've seen a few other pieces analyzing it that also highlight the increased energy from solar. To this point I haven't seen anything from land grant colleges or trade groups that pushes back on it.
[https://agdatanews.substack.com/p/should-farmers-plant-solar-panels?sd=pf](https://agdatanews.substack.com/p/should-farmers-plant-solar-panels?sd=pf)
I wonder if e15 contains the optimal amount of ethanol for cars--from a macro perspective of energy usage, damage to cars, renewability, etc.? Or perhaps it's something between e15 and e85?
e15 Is much more storage stable then e10, and I believe it burns better. e85 actually makes a really good fuel, but you have to have an extremely high compression engine which in turn can only run e85 or race gas/aviation gas with lead. Octane rating of 105 vs 85-93 regular to premium. You can run a high compression engine with a turbo and see about a 10-20% efficency increase. Which mostly offsets the 22% lower efficiency in the fuel. e85 also makes more horsepower when burned so you can use a slighly smaller engine and get the same performance which again saves fuel. e85 also has almost 0 carbon emissions (for the ethanol part) as it cycles back into the growing corn.
Ethanol production uses a ton of energy in the production that’s about half of the emissions.
Wouldn’t day zero carbon but the rest of the points are valid
Most of that energy comes from drying the corn. Corn doesn't need to be dried though, that is done for storage purposes and it dries in the feild on its own, but some of the harvest is lost when the dry kernels fall when harvested. Even after the ethanol is made using the sugar in the corn, you still have a biproduct which is calorie rich in starch called distillers grains.
I don't think that the ethonal market will have a sudden collapse. Instead, it will probably be like coal, where the demand that drives the market will slowly slowly fade over a period of two - three decades. I'm 38 now, and I expect ethonal to largely have faded away by the time I reach 68.
One option would be to convert the farm to a Renewable Natural Gas farm. Instead of making ethanol you make Renewable Natural Gas. RNG is one of the best ways to decarbonize heavy transportation. It makes bio-LNG for ships and rail.
They’re operating in Europe as we speak: https://www.renewableenergymagazine.com/biogas/nordsol-and-prodeval-unveil-groundbreaking-biolng-production-20240515
I k is in Saskatchewan any canola that isn’t up to food spec that’s been desecrated. They dilute diesel with it and it seems to work good in newer engines. Supposed to be better for them too.
I guess they could do the same with low grade corn… but to have that we need farmers so…
Each 56 pounds of corn (one bushel) produces 2.8 gallons of ethanol and a byproduct 17.5 pounds of animal feed. That's why we haven't seen the price of ribeye go through the ceiling since they started blending ethanol in gasoline.
Personally I always found this solution just plain stupid and I hope I'm wrong, but using farm land that should be producing many types of food crops to produce the same crop year after year using vast amounts of chemical fertilizers will probably end up hurting US in the end.
Ethanol is a net negative in terms of energy input vs. output. America needs to focus on more realistic solutions while helping farmers transition away from corn. It's what helped drive the obesity epidemic and has lowered our overall resilience in our crop land. I don't want to buy any food from China.
You hear people say this. But it's wrong. True, making ethanol out of corn is slightly net negative from an energy perspective. But that doesn't consider the byproduct. The corn used to make ethanol still retains about 31.5% of it's feed value as compared to the corn used to make the ethanol. When you take the cornmash feedstuff into consideration, it make sense to make ethanol.
I personally don’t think it’s going anywhere. As a first world leader Uncle Sam would be a fool not to keep a diversified energy portfolio. Look at what the energy projection for quantum computing and AI is going to need, I think we will see power plants running off ethanol in the near future.
cause that would just be so smart… instead of harnessing all that free sunlight, or all that free wind power or nuclear, we’ll use an energy negative process instead. nothing like burning diesel to make clean ethanol.
There will always be a need for liquid fueled vehicles. However I do see us starting to double crop soybeans instead of growing as much corn. A lot of diesel power is very hard to electrify. But with emissions rules we might start to see heavy duty has engines though. It will be harder for offroad equipment to switch due to dyed fuel. However the most important thing here is that if we have cheap liquid fuel there won't be a huge demand for electric. A huge chunk of the price at the pump is taxes. Sooner or later electric cars which are heavier and cause more wear and tear will be paying their fair share and there will be even less demand to switch. The other thing about electric cars is while you can charge at home cheap, these paid charging stations being installed are expensive to charge at. More so then to actually buy the gas instead.
Corn ethanol needs to go. It's a net energy loser and the need for it has been completely supplanted by fracked gas and green energy. The only concern needs to be making the farmers who invested in ethanol technology whole while phasing it out as quickly as possible.
This. I got downvoted on this exact sub several weeks ago for suggesting that without the subsidies and mandates, corn ethanol wouldn't survive very long as a fuel source.
Precisely. I'm generally very wary of subsidized anything, be it electric cars or ethanol. Yes, I'm aware there's regulatory capture, and subsidies are a way for new technologies to get a foothold, but I think in most cases viable technologies will win out regardless.
The subsidies ended years ago. Only the mandate/rins are still in place. Even if they removed the mandate blending stock gas needs the octane boost from ethanol. Ethanol is still going to get blended with or without government policies.
Like I said, ethanol is still the cheapest octane boost so 10% is going to get blended. E15 may or may not increase in demand depending on the price of gas and ethanol. At the same time we have a 10% mandate we also have a 15% cap on ethanol in non-flex vehicles. You can run E20-E30 in your vehicles. Brazils been running those blends for years.
All in all, there's government programs that support ethanol while also we government policies that hold it back.
Yes, I'm sure ethanol would still get blended. That being said, there is demand for gasoline that doesn't contain ethanol for running small engines like chainsaws. Manufacturers have recently started using components that don't degrade when using blended fuel, but most of my chainsaws aren't that new. It's difficult, at least in Canada, to find gasoline without ethanol now.
Brazil gets their ethanol from sugar cane, which is inherently much more productive than corn, which is why it's economical there. The main reason ethanol got the big boost was the misguided post 9/11 push to get off of foreign oil. Ethanol did little to get America away from foreign oil, we can thank fracking technology for that!
Brazil is expanding their corn ethanol industry. I don't know the economics of sugar cane ethanol but in the heart of the US we don't have the ground and climate to raise sugar cane. We raise corn and we're really good at it.
Where I am at it's seems to be equally hard finding no ethanol or E15. You have to know which stations sell which. I can find both. I'm all for consumer choice. I'd like to see E0, E10 and E15 offered at every station. Let the consume decide what they want to buy. To me if I can save a dime on E15 I'm going to do it because the MPG hit isn't significant enough to justify paying 10 cents or more.
The federal govt has to have a replacement for this demand. For one electrical vehicles will go much slower than people think. The tech and infrastructure won’t be ready for at least 20 years.
Second, renewable jet fuel with be part of the demand future.
Because less than 2% of the cars are electric and you are willing to set at a charger for 30-45 minutes while others fill up their gas tank and are on the road in 5 minutes.
I just mean they won’t scale yet to the masses. Over 50% of people that own an electric car say their next car won’t be electric.
I've had mine for 6 years and I haven't gone to a charging station even once so I guess i can't speak to a 45 minute charge.
But FYI it's not 2%, it represented 8% last year in the US and 18% worldwide.
I think you mean the % of sales not of the North American fleet. If you don’t drive much I suppose you can charge at home.
If you’d like to place a wager in the percentage of the NA fleet that’s plug in electric by 2030 id take a pretty large bet.
Look I’m not anti electric. I was responding to a note on what we are going to do with all the corn ethanol. It’s not going away any time soon
>If you don’t drive much I suppose you can charge at home.
That's why we're interested in an electric service truck. Most days, it's averages 20 miles, occasionally 30-40. It's home every night, and we have 3 phase on the yard for the grain bins, so we could go with whatever level of charger we want. It's a diesel, so we plug it in every night in the winter anyways, unless we have room in the shop to keep it warm overnight.
I have three e transits for my electrical buisness. Just bought two 2023s for 38k each after Ford incentives and dealer discounts. 100 mile range. Charge every night.
100 miles has been fine. I've got 30k miles on 2022 and just bought the 2023s. We do small projects, I can hit 2 or 3 jobs planned out same area.
More than 100 miles a day is probably too much windshield time.
I don't think it's going anywhere. It actually has some potential as a bridge fuel. Other electrofuels are still way off in the future and ethanol is available now. I do wish it was switchgrass ethanol instead of corn ethanol but it's not going anywhere. Definitely not with the legislative support.
But I would take that bet on EVs by 2030. The average person in America drives 40ish miles per day. No charger needed for that tiny number of miles
Switchgrass doesn’t work. Not energy dense enough to harvest and transport. It’s been tried and the investment dried up and the pilot plants shut down.
But I don't see why a few of the farm pickups couldn't be electric. We have phase 3 every where on the farm for the barns, bins, corn dryers, etc.
They don't usually drive more than 150 miles a day. If you do, grab the gas vehicle.
My mom isn't going to switch because she drives 30k a year but my dad's work truck could switch without a hassle. Not sure they make anything rugged enough to replace the F350 yet.
We don’t put enough miles on any of our vehicles to justify the battery replacement cost. I admit that I don’t know how long the batteries would last in something that only gets 3000 miles a year put on it. The trucks we use on the farm cost us $750-$2500 15 years ago and the upkeep is minimal. I’m not going to buy a $70,000 truck that might need $8000 of batteries in 5 years when these old beaters do the specific tasks that we have them for.
Fair enough. Dad seems to burn through a f350 every 4-5 years and then it's turned into a field unit for the help to run around in.
They gave up on the 70s fords finally. l which makes me a bit sad.
Ahh, the old Fords…we had a ‘71 or 2 that wore a 500 gallon tank and spray booms and later in its life wore a bale spear. The original GripSpur tires, it would go almost anywhere. It was pretty destroyed by ‘82 when dad got the newer style. It wasn’t near the truck.
I think they're referring to things such as semi's, tractors, and other ag/industrial equipment as opposed to every day light vehicles. That being said, I still don't see everyone going fully electric for their commuting needs for awhile yet. There will be a demand for fossil fuels for quite awhile yet in some capacity.
But this entire chat is about ethanol. All of the things you mentioned like semis, tractors, and ag equipment run on diesel. Moving those to electric wouldn't have any impact on ethanol usage or production. When we talk about ethanol we are talking about gasoline cars, the vast majority of which get used to drive 15 miles to work and back. The technology for those is there (millions of cars have been made), the infrastructure for those is largely there (all you need is a spare 120v outlet in the garage) and they are quite affordable nowadays with many brand new models under $30k, potentially even under $20k.
Ag will be disrupted, becuse current Soy/corn/glyphosate crop rotation is absulutely unsustainable, distorted, wrongly subsidised enviroment.
Lets hope the ethanol thing will be significantly reduced.
It's all subsidized, if that goes away the corn farmers will have to stop buying new equipment and fancy trucks every year. Other than that don't see the problem.
Gas in Europe is $8 per gallon and they aren't clamoring to add ethanol to make their fuel supply cheaper. It's almost as if the only thing that makes it viable is there government backing it.
It’s an extremely large risk. 35% to 40% of corn and soybeans is for ethanol. Take a look at corn and soybean prices before the renewable fuel standard. They were much lower and so were farmers incomes.
Last year over 1.1 million or around 8% of new cars were fully electric. For all the people saying electric cars are going to take decades to replace gas cars, they are under estimating the pace of change. I’m not saying it will happen next year but a decade from now, fuel demand will be much lower. Battery prices, charging times and the availability of electric vehicle options are changing fast. In China, they have affordable cars on the market that can charge from 10% to 80% in 12 minutes. The average person stops 18 minutes on a road trip. Battery prices have fallen to $57 a KWH from around $100 in 2022! That means an F-150 lightning with a large 130 kWh battery would have went from $13K to $7.4K! For more normal vehicle batteries, (75 KWH) the cost would decline from $7.5K to $4.27K. These falling prices are allowing for EVs to sometimes cost the same or lower versus similar gas cars! So if you can charge a battery in 15 minutes or less, the vehicle price is the same as a gas car, and there are chargers all over the place like in China, how many people wouldn’t buy an electric car if they could save thousands per year on fuel and maintenance? Enthusiast might not change but the average joe which makes up almost the entire market thinks with their wallet.
China has invested in batteries and EV supply chains for the last decade and is ahead of the US. I would think it will take a few more years for these new battery plants with lower cost lithium iron phosphate chemistries (no cobalt, nickel or manganese) to be launched in the states. Excluding unforeseen geopolitical events, USA BEV pricing will be similar to gas cars in a few years.
Finally, for all the rural people that say they have no where to charge. With a few exceptions in maybe Montana or North Dakota, rural people rarely need a fast charger. Almost all rural people have a place to charge at home and will never need to charge around town. As long as there is a charger every 50 miles, you’ll never have the worry. The bipartisan built back better bill is doing exactly that. Chargers every 50 miles on main highways.
I hope for my farmer friends they start to diversify their incomes. Corn and soybean volumes tied to ethanol will likely decline every year from here on out. In ten years, maybe 5-10% of volume is reduced. But it will get worse each year. Don’t fight wind or solar and try to put it on your least productive land if possible. Diversifying income streams is the best way to keep farming profitable.
Diversified income is the only way to save farming in general. My grandfathers both didn’t diversify while another man in town did by opening a processing plant and stock yard, stock exchange terminal, small trucking, plus crops. His family is still going strong and no one in my extended family farms anymore. My great grandfather opened the first electric dairy in western OK soon after the Great Depression, my grandpa made millions, and he had to cash in most of his life insurance to keep farming as basically a hobby.
Ethanol at no time ever was a viable fuel alternative for the masses.
Not efficient. The more alcohol % added to fuel, the more fuel required to get eqaul output or more.
Modern fuel system components not compatible
Only for the farmer in grants and funding.
I think if we have smart policy makers ethanol can have at least thirty years of strong demand as the bridge fuel to an all EV future. There’s going to be a lot of ICE vehicles running for a long time and there’s no reason they need to be running on petroleum gas to the end.
But of course we don’t have smart policy makers. Instead we have a bunch of salesmen who do what the lobbyists money tells them to do. And the oil companies have a lot of money to throw at them.
It can be. There’s absolutely no reason you can’t farm on biofuels and refine on wind and solar. Yes, that production cycle would be less efficient than using fossil fuels if you continue to externalize the cost of carbon pollution, but it’s entirely possible to close that loop and leave fossil fuels out. Remember it’s only been about a century since we spent nearly a third of agricultural output feeding the draft animals we used to produce it. There’s plenty of room in the energy budget to beat that with renewable sources.
I agree. We can’t get hung up on current limitations of green energy, we need to keep putting in the work to improve it and scale it. It’s like any other big problem, we can’t use magic spells to solve it in an instant, we need to stay on course, and keep doing the work. We can already see dramatic improvements in cost, capacity, availability, etc. and it will just keep getting better.
I wouldn’t even be able to deliver a tanker into town on 5 gallons from my farm. I burn more than that to pick up my fertilizer as well. Glad to hear that there are more efficient operations than mine. Anyhow, only using 5 gallons of fuel to produce 650 gallons of ethanol plus the stillage seems way more efficient than typical operations, kudos to you.
I’m talking about gallons burned per acre on 230 bushels per acre corn on our better soils. .75 gallons to strip till half the nitrogen. .6 to plant. .2 gal times 3 spray and y- drop passes. And up to 2 gallons/acre to harvest. That leaves a little to haul it to town and to have the dry fertilizer put on.
I really don’t think corn ethanol will ever go out of demand. You still need to burn some kind of fuel in order to generate that electricity to charge the car. Makes more sense to me to use ethanol for that & save the petroleum products for jet fuel & military applications
No actually you don’t. Wind, solar, hydroelectric doesn’t burn anything.
Nonetheless none of the ethanol goes to power plants in the US now. It goes into gasoline. No power plants use gasoline.
Wind and solar by itself won't supplant anything. However adding batteries to the mix changes everything. The ability to offset generation and consumption times is what takes wind and solar from useless to game changing. The cost of battery storage is falling yearly and with the amount of money being invested in battery research ensures it will continue to fall for some time.
I'd bet my money on things changing faster than you expect.
We don't even need a huge breakthrough. It's already happening. R&D is going into making existing cell lines cheaper. R&D is going into using less cobalt and other hard to get minerals. Mining sites are scaling up and able to more effectively mine per ton. New mineral sites are being discovered. New mineral refineries are coming online. At the end of the day, every cost in batteries is coming down slowly. In the last 10 years the cost per kwh of Lithium-Ion has become a fraction of what it was. Maybe we will have some breakthroughs but in the meantime the battery industry isn't waiting.
I don't see diesel replaced tomorrow but there is writing in the wall for where our electricity is going to come from sooner rather than later.
So we should keep getting tankers of fuel from foreign countries for the rest of our lives because one time a solar panel was hauled from China on a boat? That is silly, a panel is transported basically once and then generates power for decades and far exceeds it's debt of being transported.
I also wouldn't discount wind either, the fuel is free. At a local wind farm each tower averages around a half million dollars in electricity (a retail rate) per year. So there should be room cover costs and generate profit. Maybe not as much profit as some other options but at the end of the day it doesn't seem like it should be completely discounted for being "expensive".
I think we are within 10 years of precision fermentation causing a major disruption to the Ag industry. It will start or has started in the dairy industry. Reducing the need of cattle feeds. The acres used for dairy will need to be converted to other uses. Wind Solar or more ethanol production. Ag should start now lobbying for set aside payments for carbon sequestration.
There are many products like insulin and certain vitamins that are produced via precision fermentation. Essentially kinda like brewing beer, you can train a microbe to excrete about any biological material. Currently the cost is high, but it’s falling rapidly. Also many previously expensive pharmaceutical products have been produced with precision fermentation for decades. Insulin for example, previously required two tons of pig pancreas to make only eight ounces of insulin! Now insulin is made in a bioreactor for a significantly lower cost than traditional methods. (Insulin cost is low. Cost is different than price.)
I highly encourage any farmer to take a look at rethink-x’s report on precision fermentation. If the author is half right, (He has been shocking accurate with other predictions going back a decade.) farming is in for a massive disruption from 2035 onward. [rethink-x report](https://www.rethinkx.com/food-and-agriculture)
Oh is fermentation like brewing beer? Interesting. Wtf is creating ethanol? Jfc. Sounds like someone is grifting some venture capitalists for their dough.
Yes it is similar to brewing beer with more controls. Essentially precision fermentation requires more controls than beer but less than pharmaceuticals with clean rooms.
There is a company in Indiana called liberation labs building large scale bioreactors for precision fermentation. They claim these purpose build factories will enable cost competitive food ingredients. These microbes still require food like sugar from crops to grow their biological materials, but compared to a cow using their stomachs as a bioreactor, it is so much more efficient. You only grow what you need and nothing else like hair or hooves. So they will use 10-25 less feedstocks like corn using precision fermentation! Not good for corn volumes.
Bioengineering that makes cells in a vat. So it’s not fake cheese or butter it’s not like cheese or butter it is cheese or butter. But made cheaper on less of everything. Feed water land pollution less of everything. Search YouTube and if this affects your livelihood you need to understand what’s coming and coming fast.
Those automobiles will never replace my horse, what do you mean the radio has live pictures. Man wasn’t supposed to fly or he would have been born with wings. All said by people who didn’t see the future that was looking them in the face. I didn’t say I want this to happen it is happening. You can get out of the way of an avalanche but you can’t stop one. Take a few minutes and look it up watch some videos this IS IN Production NOW. Not maybe someday kind of stuff.
Ok Quick answer is Google carbon production from beef production. It’s more than I want to type out . My main point is when these plants can produce the same product on very little land with very little water compared to dairy and no pollution of air or water from the growing of Agriculture all at a fraction of the cost . It’s going to happen like I said it is happening with dairy and eggs and it is the same product with cheaper cleaner inputs. I’m not an environmentalist or anti farm. I’ve lived my whole life in and around ag and hunt and fish and grow my own food. I’m just trying to give a heads up here. I’m too old to affect me too much . But dairy has alway been tough way to make a living and the days of seeing the milk trucks making the rounds here has been gone for years and I’m not thrilled by that but it’s what has happened.
Bullish
Gas demand has peaked and in turn ethanol use in cars has likely seen it's peak as well.
However, sustainable aviation fuel can be made from alcohol. Your average corn field can produce over 500 gallons of ethanol. Converted to jet fuel its still over 300 gallons of jet fuel per acre. If the government and airline industry are serious about using sustainable fuels vs fossil fuels, corn ethanol has to be a major source to get the volume you would need to fuel the industry.
The major hurdle is carbon sequestration. They have to get that done to get the carbon scores low enough. If that gets done all the climate smart ag isn't needed. It'll help but carbon scores drop drastically if you can sequester your carbon. Obviously.
In 5-10 years the industry will need to expand, IMO.
How do they currently calculate carbon scores? And how would corn farmers be able to improve sequestration? I know there has been a lot of talk about cover crops and soil microbes and what not but so far it’s been just a lot of talk.
Carbon sequestration is likely going to need to be piped to a location it can be stored underground. So that's the big issue. Some farmers/landowners are hesitant to put a pipeline on their land. This is where a farmer could be more or less helpful for the whole project.
As far as practices they can't help the plant sequester carbon, but they can qualify for CSA "climate smart ag" and lower the plants CI score. If and this just came out from the government guidelines which may change later, they no till, cover crop, and use efficient fertilizer. CSA bushels will have a lower CI and help the plant lower their score. Likely in the future I think you'll see a premium offered at ethanol plants for CSA corn, but they'll likely still buy and grind non-CSA corn. It'll just mean their CI score isn't as low.
We could become the world's #1 supplier of cheap vodka. Problem solved.
This is how we win against Russia. 🤣
I’m with you. It shouldn’t be a sudden ASAP demand drops off of the face of the planet thing, there should be enough warning that farmers will have a couple/few seasons to make plans for switching crops. I think it’s inevitable though, ethanol use is going to drop dramatically as the alternatives increase. I think when the average Joe citizen discovers how much freshwater goes into making ethanol, the screeching is going to be loud and constant.
This. E85 was a flop and E15 has gotten a lot of push back but there are still many cars on the road from an era where electric cars were a pipe dream. The corn belt also has lots of good crop options to go back to. The only issue I see is land is over valued if corn isn't a good option and nothing would fill the dollar per acre void.
What’s going on with ethanol in aviation fuel? I haven’t been keeping up.
Bio diesel makes a jet fuel that mostly functions okay, but cold temps and gelling are an issue. Replacing 100LL with ethanol doesn't really work. It's too heavy for the energy carried which is also too bulky, water containment prone, and costs too much to overhaul and certify planes to use it.
[удалено]
Agree. We only use soy based B11.
Latest i heard is ethanol plants around here want to make the switch but their carbon scores aren't good enough to qualify. And there aren't anywhere near enough people using the sustainable practices it would take to get their corn supply to a level that would qualify. Sounds like plants are also hoping to connect to the carbon pipelines to help
The carbon pipeline that got canceled in Iowa and Illinois was going through one of our farms. Do you think it will get rejuvenated?
The crappy thing about a lot of these carbon incentives are things that we adopted 10+ years ago and they don’t want to pay anything if you have already adopted those practices.
There’s a few Regen programs today that make this no longer true
Thanks! I’ll look into that.
As far as i know that one is dead. But there's another one that's supposed to go through where I'm at that might still happen
Amen!
It’s bad for cars, bad for driver’s wallets and bad for the environment. Why would people push back against it?
Gasoline still needs octane boosters. 87 octane is 10% ethanol. When analyzing what is and what isn’t good for the environment. Pick your poison carefully. But the health and environmental impacts of the octane sources that are used must be considered as well. By adding ethanol to finished gasoline, called “splash blending,” octane ratings can be increased while simultaneously lowering toxic octane sources. https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-a-brief-history-of-octane
So bad for cars that odometer readings on cars on the road are higher than ever. Cars make 200k miles easily…wasn’t the case years ago. If ethanol were half as bad as the oil industry suggests, I wouldn’t expect cars to last like they do.
Water into ethanol? Gee, I can't drain the feilds fast enough. See the mighty Mississippi? It's literally the drain for the midwest. Now out in Nebraska/Kansas they should start highly regulating the irrigation as that aquifer is being drawn down rapidly. It's one thing to water between rains to avoid significant yeild loss but when you plan to irrigate every year because you don't have the rainfall to support the crop you can't continue doing it forever.
I’m with you. I should’ve said that I’m in Kansas so it’s an area where we will need to make drastic changes in the future.
Fresh water isn’t an issue in the Midwest like it is the farther west you go.
But it is.
Ever heard of the Mississippi River? The Great Lakes? You can’t make a crisis out of everything, everywhere, all the time.
Yes, I live between them. The fuck good are they doing me while I stare down 10+ days in the 90s with no rain? Am I to truck water down 150 miles from Lake Michigan?
I’m completely out of my depth here as a dry land cotton farmer so feel free to tell me if I just need to shut up and stay in my lane, but I think the water consumption to feed corn + rising land costs is a viscous cycle. Pumping up so much water to keep yields high causes the land valuations to jump. In order to afford more land and keep things profitable, you have to keep pumping water. And so on and so on. It’s going to hurt for several years when/if corn demand falls off. But it should eventually lead to lower yield, water conscious crops. Which I would think might lower land valuations and the cost of production. Here we get away with much lower yields because we have far fewer inputs and it’s kept land prices much lower than other areas. 10+ 90° days without rain isn’t a threat here, it’s a certainty. I’ve watched a lot of corn and cotton farmers go broke up on the plains as their water table drops by several feet a year. They just keep drilling deeper and deeper, and I suspect they’ll continue to do so until they are either stopped or they run dry. It’s a poor business plan that will catch up to everybody in their area eventually.
I don't irrigate, no one in my east central Illinois area does. If I had to rely on irrigation I'd quit.
You got me there. I’m in the same boat. Grass is turning brown already.
Something interesting, I see you have cicadas. I’m in west central IL and have yet to hear one and I’ve been out every night listening. We always have them. A town 40 miles away had pictures on the news of them piling up under trees.
Periodical cicadas are in clusters and can come out earlier in the summer. Annuals are more wide spread and easier to find mid summer.
Ah, it’s just too early.
I didn't have them at my farm, where they were (in the millions) was at a place I was farm sitting for 6 weeks. Those were the 17 year Cicadas, not the Dog Day Cicadas that should be coming out in a few weeks. Dog Day Cicadas come out every year around the 4th of July by me. The place I was farm sitting was 14 or 15 miles north of me as the crow flies. My general area, 5 mile radius didn't have any huge hatches.
But I’ll bet you can.
It isn't until suddenly it is. We are just as vulnerable to water shortages as any place else.
If we have that kind of drought things will be a little tough.
https://missouriindependent.com/2024/06/14/time-for-a-reckoning-kansas-farmers-brace-for-water-cuts-to-save-ogallala-aquifer/
How many ethanol plants are in Kansas? Kansas is west in my book. From Kansas City westwards you can argue that fresh water is limited.
That’s a good point. I should have said that I’m in Kansas and we do have ethanol plants here. The water issue first became obvious in the west but it’s becoming more apparent heading east now. If we don’t make some massive changes, it will end up being a major issue almost everywhere.
Anywhere west of the Missouri River would classify as needing to pay attention to water usage.
They have been talking about saving the ogalla for 40 years.... one of my fav nat geographic articles of all time wqs on the ogalla.... mostly cause of the epic farm photos.
Don't know that ethanol will collapse, but hard to see any growth at all from this point on. The case for ethanol is getting weaker with the growth in electric cars and solar farms that provide \*way\* more energy per acre than corn-based ethanol.
[удалено]
Agreed!
Not sure about the energy per acre difference, but ethanol provides energy storage in a cheap extremely dense package instead of an extremely expensive battery. It is also cheap to retrofit into existing vehicles and the supply chain. The one thing that I think would push for a nice ethanol boom was if ethanol itself was exempt from road taxes like the electricity is. Usually at retail the e15 blend pays off but the e85 never does. That mpg hit coupled with the same tax per gallon as gasoline makes it impossible to break even. The "extra" fuel tax per gallon on e85 vs e10 due to the reduced mpg is effectively 15 cents. Switching from e10 to e85 will burn about 20% more fuel per gallon. If you need premium gas, running e85 is a no brainer. If you don't need premium, justifying that price difference is hard, but still is slighly in e85s favor. Oh, and we are farmers. Use e85.
It blows my mind how different stations can have wildly different prices. Around 50% of the stations around me, E85 is a full $1 less expensive per gallon. Easy math for an ROI. The other half of stations seem to be anywhere between a few cents less than E15 and half a dollar less expensive.
E85 and e15 aren't typically price shopped as much. People will drive across town to save a couple cents on gas, even if it costs more then they save but they won't do a quick calculation for E85. E85 is easy to compare once you know you take that price x 1.20 to see the price comparison to regular e10.
Don't dispute your other points, but the energy per acre difference, from everything I've seen, is too big to be dismissed. It's *huge.*
But is that taking into account the transmission losses? Going from DC to AC you lose power. Each transformer you lose significant power. Usually from a solar farm to a residential customer you are going to hit at least 6 transformers in addition to the rectifier. Then to charge a car you have to go to dc again and have charging loss, loss in the battery, and loss going from the dc battery to the ac motor. I wanna say it's like a claimed 10% loss at each power transformation.
Don't know the answer to that and don't really study it myself. Here's one thing I've read on it. I've seen a few other pieces analyzing it that also highlight the increased energy from solar. To this point I haven't seen anything from land grant colleges or trade groups that pushes back on it. [https://agdatanews.substack.com/p/should-farmers-plant-solar-panels?sd=pf](https://agdatanews.substack.com/p/should-farmers-plant-solar-panels?sd=pf)
I wonder if e15 contains the optimal amount of ethanol for cars--from a macro perspective of energy usage, damage to cars, renewability, etc.? Or perhaps it's something between e15 and e85?
e15 Is much more storage stable then e10, and I believe it burns better. e85 actually makes a really good fuel, but you have to have an extremely high compression engine which in turn can only run e85 or race gas/aviation gas with lead. Octane rating of 105 vs 85-93 regular to premium. You can run a high compression engine with a turbo and see about a 10-20% efficency increase. Which mostly offsets the 22% lower efficiency in the fuel. e85 also makes more horsepower when burned so you can use a slighly smaller engine and get the same performance which again saves fuel. e85 also has almost 0 carbon emissions (for the ethanol part) as it cycles back into the growing corn.
Ethanol production uses a ton of energy in the production that’s about half of the emissions. Wouldn’t day zero carbon but the rest of the points are valid
Most of that energy comes from drying the corn. Corn doesn't need to be dried though, that is done for storage purposes and it dries in the feild on its own, but some of the harvest is lost when the dry kernels fall when harvested. Even after the ethanol is made using the sugar in the corn, you still have a biproduct which is calorie rich in starch called distillers grains.
I don't think that the ethonal market will have a sudden collapse. Instead, it will probably be like coal, where the demand that drives the market will slowly slowly fade over a period of two - three decades. I'm 38 now, and I expect ethonal to largely have faded away by the time I reach 68.
Managed decline
One option would be to convert the farm to a Renewable Natural Gas farm. Instead of making ethanol you make Renewable Natural Gas. RNG is one of the best ways to decarbonize heavy transportation. It makes bio-LNG for ships and rail. They’re operating in Europe as we speak: https://www.renewableenergymagazine.com/biogas/nordsol-and-prodeval-unveil-groundbreaking-biolng-production-20240515
I k is in Saskatchewan any canola that isn’t up to food spec that’s been desecrated. They dilute diesel with it and it seems to work good in newer engines. Supposed to be better for them too. I guess they could do the same with low grade corn… but to have that we need farmers so…
Still gotta feed livestock
Each 56 pounds of corn (one bushel) produces 2.8 gallons of ethanol and a byproduct 17.5 pounds of animal feed. That's why we haven't seen the price of ribeye go through the ceiling since they started blending ethanol in gasoline.
Correct!
Personally I always found this solution just plain stupid and I hope I'm wrong, but using farm land that should be producing many types of food crops to produce the same crop year after year using vast amounts of chemical fertilizers will probably end up hurting US in the end.
Ethanol is a net negative in terms of energy input vs. output. America needs to focus on more realistic solutions while helping farmers transition away from corn. It's what helped drive the obesity epidemic and has lowered our overall resilience in our crop land. I don't want to buy any food from China.
You hear people say this. But it's wrong. True, making ethanol out of corn is slightly net negative from an energy perspective. But that doesn't consider the byproduct. The corn used to make ethanol still retains about 31.5% of it's feed value as compared to the corn used to make the ethanol. When you take the cornmash feedstuff into consideration, it make sense to make ethanol.
I personally don’t think it’s going anywhere. As a first world leader Uncle Sam would be a fool not to keep a diversified energy portfolio. Look at what the energy projection for quantum computing and AI is going to need, I think we will see power plants running off ethanol in the near future.
cause that would just be so smart… instead of harnessing all that free sunlight, or all that free wind power or nuclear, we’ll use an energy negative process instead. nothing like burning diesel to make clean ethanol.
Yup, nothing like burning diesel to build and transport solar panels, wind turbines or uranium.
There will always be a need for liquid fueled vehicles. However I do see us starting to double crop soybeans instead of growing as much corn. A lot of diesel power is very hard to electrify. But with emissions rules we might start to see heavy duty has engines though. It will be harder for offroad equipment to switch due to dyed fuel. However the most important thing here is that if we have cheap liquid fuel there won't be a huge demand for electric. A huge chunk of the price at the pump is taxes. Sooner or later electric cars which are heavier and cause more wear and tear will be paying their fair share and there will be even less demand to switch. The other thing about electric cars is while you can charge at home cheap, these paid charging stations being installed are expensive to charge at. More so then to actually buy the gas instead.
Corn ethanol needs to go. It's a net energy loser and the need for it has been completely supplanted by fracked gas and green energy. The only concern needs to be making the farmers who invested in ethanol technology whole while phasing it out as quickly as possible.
This. I got downvoted on this exact sub several weeks ago for suggesting that without the subsidies and mandates, corn ethanol wouldn't survive very long as a fuel source.
Should they also remove the subsidies for wind power, solar power and electric cars?
Yes.
They probably will eventually. Either when they fail, or when they can stand on their own (economic) feet.
Precisely. I'm generally very wary of subsidized anything, be it electric cars or ethanol. Yes, I'm aware there's regulatory capture, and subsidies are a way for new technologies to get a foothold, but I think in most cases viable technologies will win out regardless.
The subsidies ended years ago. Only the mandate/rins are still in place. Even if they removed the mandate blending stock gas needs the octane boost from ethanol. Ethanol is still going to get blended with or without government policies.
I'd argue that the mandates are a subsidy, as it creates an artificial market. Without the ethanol mandate, ethanol demand would be lower.
Like I said, ethanol is still the cheapest octane boost so 10% is going to get blended. E15 may or may not increase in demand depending on the price of gas and ethanol. At the same time we have a 10% mandate we also have a 15% cap on ethanol in non-flex vehicles. You can run E20-E30 in your vehicles. Brazils been running those blends for years. All in all, there's government programs that support ethanol while also we government policies that hold it back.
Yes, I'm sure ethanol would still get blended. That being said, there is demand for gasoline that doesn't contain ethanol for running small engines like chainsaws. Manufacturers have recently started using components that don't degrade when using blended fuel, but most of my chainsaws aren't that new. It's difficult, at least in Canada, to find gasoline without ethanol now. Brazil gets their ethanol from sugar cane, which is inherently much more productive than corn, which is why it's economical there. The main reason ethanol got the big boost was the misguided post 9/11 push to get off of foreign oil. Ethanol did little to get America away from foreign oil, we can thank fracking technology for that!
Brazil is expanding their corn ethanol industry. I don't know the economics of sugar cane ethanol but in the heart of the US we don't have the ground and climate to raise sugar cane. We raise corn and we're really good at it. Where I am at it's seems to be equally hard finding no ethanol or E15. You have to know which stations sell which. I can find both. I'm all for consumer choice. I'd like to see E0, E10 and E15 offered at every station. Let the consume decide what they want to buy. To me if I can save a dime on E15 I'm going to do it because the MPG hit isn't significant enough to justify paying 10 cents or more.
They better start figuring out something else to grow . The world doesn’t want their GMO corn and people are starting to catch on about seed oils
The sooner it's gone the better. One of the worst policies the US ever undertook
It is a terrible policy. I just don’t see it going away.
The federal govt has to have a replacement for this demand. For one electrical vehicles will go much slower than people think. The tech and infrastructure won’t be ready for at least 20 years. Second, renewable jet fuel with be part of the demand future.
Tech and infrastructure won't be ready for 20 years? How in the world have I managed to drive mine for 6 years now?
Because less than 2% of the cars are electric and you are willing to set at a charger for 30-45 minutes while others fill up their gas tank and are on the road in 5 minutes. I just mean they won’t scale yet to the masses. Over 50% of people that own an electric car say their next car won’t be electric.
I've had mine for 6 years and I haven't gone to a charging station even once so I guess i can't speak to a 45 minute charge. But FYI it's not 2%, it represented 8% last year in the US and 18% worldwide.
I think you mean the % of sales not of the North American fleet. If you don’t drive much I suppose you can charge at home. If you’d like to place a wager in the percentage of the NA fleet that’s plug in electric by 2030 id take a pretty large bet. Look I’m not anti electric. I was responding to a note on what we are going to do with all the corn ethanol. It’s not going away any time soon
>If you don’t drive much I suppose you can charge at home. That's why we're interested in an electric service truck. Most days, it's averages 20 miles, occasionally 30-40. It's home every night, and we have 3 phase on the yard for the grain bins, so we could go with whatever level of charger we want. It's a diesel, so we plug it in every night in the winter anyways, unless we have room in the shop to keep it warm overnight.
I have three e transits for my electrical buisness. Just bought two 2023s for 38k each after Ford incentives and dealer discounts. 100 mile range. Charge every night.
From your perspective how often has the 100 mile range been an issue. Do you feel like 100 miles is good enough for your use case?
100 miles has been fine. I've got 30k miles on 2022 and just bought the 2023s. We do small projects, I can hit 2 or 3 jobs planned out same area. More than 100 miles a day is probably too much windshield time.
I don't think it's going anywhere. It actually has some potential as a bridge fuel. Other electrofuels are still way off in the future and ethanol is available now. I do wish it was switchgrass ethanol instead of corn ethanol but it's not going anywhere. Definitely not with the legislative support. But I would take that bet on EVs by 2030. The average person in America drives 40ish miles per day. No charger needed for that tiny number of miles
Switchgrass doesn’t work. Not energy dense enough to harvest and transport. It’s been tried and the investment dried up and the pilot plants shut down.
You aren’t in the rural Midwest.
But I don't see why a few of the farm pickups couldn't be electric. We have phase 3 every where on the farm for the barns, bins, corn dryers, etc. They don't usually drive more than 150 miles a day. If you do, grab the gas vehicle. My mom isn't going to switch because she drives 30k a year but my dad's work truck could switch without a hassle. Not sure they make anything rugged enough to replace the F350 yet.
We don’t put enough miles on any of our vehicles to justify the battery replacement cost. I admit that I don’t know how long the batteries would last in something that only gets 3000 miles a year put on it. The trucks we use on the farm cost us $750-$2500 15 years ago and the upkeep is minimal. I’m not going to buy a $70,000 truck that might need $8000 of batteries in 5 years when these old beaters do the specific tasks that we have them for.
Fair enough. Dad seems to burn through a f350 every 4-5 years and then it's turned into a field unit for the help to run around in. They gave up on the 70s fords finally. l which makes me a bit sad.
Ahh, the old Fords…we had a ‘71 or 2 that wore a 500 gallon tank and spray booms and later in its life wore a bale spear. The original GripSpur tires, it would go almost anywhere. It was pretty destroyed by ‘82 when dad got the newer style. It wasn’t near the truck.
I think they're referring to things such as semi's, tractors, and other ag/industrial equipment as opposed to every day light vehicles. That being said, I still don't see everyone going fully electric for their commuting needs for awhile yet. There will be a demand for fossil fuels for quite awhile yet in some capacity.
But this entire chat is about ethanol. All of the things you mentioned like semis, tractors, and ag equipment run on diesel. Moving those to electric wouldn't have any impact on ethanol usage or production. When we talk about ethanol we are talking about gasoline cars, the vast majority of which get used to drive 15 miles to work and back. The technology for those is there (millions of cars have been made), the infrastructure for those is largely there (all you need is a spare 120v outlet in the garage) and they are quite affordable nowadays with many brand new models under $30k, potentially even under $20k.
Kill it now. One of the worst subsidies
Ag will be disrupted, becuse current Soy/corn/glyphosate crop rotation is absulutely unsustainable, distorted, wrongly subsidised enviroment. Lets hope the ethanol thing will be significantly reduced.
It's all subsidized, if that goes away the corn farmers will have to stop buying new equipment and fancy trucks every year. Other than that don't see the problem.
Not to mention that this whole thing is a net negative energy process and does the opposite of the intended.
Gas in Europe is $8 per gallon and they aren't clamoring to add ethanol to make their fuel supply cheaper. It's almost as if the only thing that makes it viable is there government backing it.
The energy it takes to produce it is silly. It sounds good to be self sufficient energy wise, but ultimately this is a gimme to farmers.
It’s an extremely large risk. 35% to 40% of corn and soybeans is for ethanol. Take a look at corn and soybean prices before the renewable fuel standard. They were much lower and so were farmers incomes. Last year over 1.1 million or around 8% of new cars were fully electric. For all the people saying electric cars are going to take decades to replace gas cars, they are under estimating the pace of change. I’m not saying it will happen next year but a decade from now, fuel demand will be much lower. Battery prices, charging times and the availability of electric vehicle options are changing fast. In China, they have affordable cars on the market that can charge from 10% to 80% in 12 minutes. The average person stops 18 minutes on a road trip. Battery prices have fallen to $57 a KWH from around $100 in 2022! That means an F-150 lightning with a large 130 kWh battery would have went from $13K to $7.4K! For more normal vehicle batteries, (75 KWH) the cost would decline from $7.5K to $4.27K. These falling prices are allowing for EVs to sometimes cost the same or lower versus similar gas cars! So if you can charge a battery in 15 minutes or less, the vehicle price is the same as a gas car, and there are chargers all over the place like in China, how many people wouldn’t buy an electric car if they could save thousands per year on fuel and maintenance? Enthusiast might not change but the average joe which makes up almost the entire market thinks with their wallet. China has invested in batteries and EV supply chains for the last decade and is ahead of the US. I would think it will take a few more years for these new battery plants with lower cost lithium iron phosphate chemistries (no cobalt, nickel or manganese) to be launched in the states. Excluding unforeseen geopolitical events, USA BEV pricing will be similar to gas cars in a few years. Finally, for all the rural people that say they have no where to charge. With a few exceptions in maybe Montana or North Dakota, rural people rarely need a fast charger. Almost all rural people have a place to charge at home and will never need to charge around town. As long as there is a charger every 50 miles, you’ll never have the worry. The bipartisan built back better bill is doing exactly that. Chargers every 50 miles on main highways. I hope for my farmer friends they start to diversify their incomes. Corn and soybean volumes tied to ethanol will likely decline every year from here on out. In ten years, maybe 5-10% of volume is reduced. But it will get worse each year. Don’t fight wind or solar and try to put it on your least productive land if possible. Diversifying income streams is the best way to keep farming profitable.
Diversified income is the only way to save farming in general. My grandfathers both didn’t diversify while another man in town did by opening a processing plant and stock yard, stock exchange terminal, small trucking, plus crops. His family is still going strong and no one in my extended family farms anymore. My great grandfather opened the first electric dairy in western OK soon after the Great Depression, my grandpa made millions, and he had to cash in most of his life insurance to keep farming as basically a hobby.
Absolutely fantastic post! I agree 100%!
Well this is good news! You can tell that Gates guy to back off on trying to control world population. We aren’t going to starve.
Ethanol at no time ever was a viable fuel alternative for the masses. Not efficient. The more alcohol % added to fuel, the more fuel required to get eqaul output or more. Modern fuel system components not compatible Only for the farmer in grants and funding.
They will use ethanol fuel to power the generators that charge their cars
Ethanol is just comically inefficient solar energy. Besides Brazil there is no other Ethanol power plant in North or South America.
[удалено]
Solar panels over parking lots in the suburbs sounds good to me. Put those big patches of concrete to work hah
Agreed!
I think if we have smart policy makers ethanol can have at least thirty years of strong demand as the bridge fuel to an all EV future. There’s going to be a lot of ICE vehicles running for a long time and there’s no reason they need to be running on petroleum gas to the end. But of course we don’t have smart policy makers. Instead we have a bunch of salesmen who do what the lobbyists money tells them to do. And the oil companies have a lot of money to throw at them.
We have a choice to burn fossil fuels or to burn fossil fuels to make corn ethanol to burn. It’s not as if corn ethanol is carbon neutral.
It can be. There’s absolutely no reason you can’t farm on biofuels and refine on wind and solar. Yes, that production cycle would be less efficient than using fossil fuels if you continue to externalize the cost of carbon pollution, but it’s entirely possible to close that loop and leave fossil fuels out. Remember it’s only been about a century since we spent nearly a third of agricultural output feeding the draft animals we used to produce it. There’s plenty of room in the energy budget to beat that with renewable sources.
I agree. We can’t get hung up on current limitations of green energy, we need to keep putting in the work to improve it and scale it. It’s like any other big problem, we can’t use magic spells to solve it in an instant, we need to stay on course, and keep doing the work. We can already see dramatic improvements in cost, capacity, availability, etc. and it will just keep getting better.
I burn less than 5 gallons of fuel to grow over 650 gallons of ethanol. Just how bad have you been led to believe ethanol is?
And there is still 30% of the value left as feed after they make the ethanol.
Great point!
I wouldn’t even be able to deliver a tanker into town on 5 gallons from my farm. I burn more than that to pick up my fertilizer as well. Glad to hear that there are more efficient operations than mine. Anyhow, only using 5 gallons of fuel to produce 650 gallons of ethanol plus the stillage seems way more efficient than typical operations, kudos to you.
I’m talking about gallons burned per acre on 230 bushels per acre corn on our better soils. .75 gallons to strip till half the nitrogen. .6 to plant. .2 gal times 3 spray and y- drop passes. And up to 2 gallons/acre to harvest. That leaves a little to haul it to town and to have the dry fertilizer put on.
Ethanol has the potential to be a bridge fuel. But will it be made from corn or switch grass. We don't have smart policy makers so it will be corn.
I really don’t think corn ethanol will ever go out of demand. You still need to burn some kind of fuel in order to generate that electricity to charge the car. Makes more sense to me to use ethanol for that & save the petroleum products for jet fuel & military applications
No actually you don’t. Wind, solar, hydroelectric doesn’t burn anything. Nonetheless none of the ethanol goes to power plants in the US now. It goes into gasoline. No power plants use gasoline.
[удалено]
Wind and solar by itself won't supplant anything. However adding batteries to the mix changes everything. The ability to offset generation and consumption times is what takes wind and solar from useless to game changing. The cost of battery storage is falling yearly and with the amount of money being invested in battery research ensures it will continue to fall for some time. I'd bet my money on things changing faster than you expect.
[удалено]
We don't even need a huge breakthrough. It's already happening. R&D is going into making existing cell lines cheaper. R&D is going into using less cobalt and other hard to get minerals. Mining sites are scaling up and able to more effectively mine per ton. New mineral sites are being discovered. New mineral refineries are coming online. At the end of the day, every cost in batteries is coming down slowly. In the last 10 years the cost per kwh of Lithium-Ion has become a fraction of what it was. Maybe we will have some breakthroughs but in the meantime the battery industry isn't waiting. I don't see diesel replaced tomorrow but there is writing in the wall for where our electricity is going to come from sooner rather than later.
[удалено]
So we should keep getting tankers of fuel from foreign countries for the rest of our lives because one time a solar panel was hauled from China on a boat? That is silly, a panel is transported basically once and then generates power for decades and far exceeds it's debt of being transported. I also wouldn't discount wind either, the fuel is free. At a local wind farm each tower averages around a half million dollars in electricity (a retail rate) per year. So there should be room cover costs and generate profit. Maybe not as much profit as some other options but at the end of the day it doesn't seem like it should be completely discounted for being "expensive".
Only 50-60 harvests left until the top soil is depleted anyway, want to invest in your kids future change practices
I think we are within 10 years of precision fermentation causing a major disruption to the Ag industry. It will start or has started in the dairy industry. Reducing the need of cattle feeds. The acres used for dairy will need to be converted to other uses. Wind Solar or more ethanol production. Ag should start now lobbying for set aside payments for carbon sequestration.
What the fuck is precision fermentation?
There are many products like insulin and certain vitamins that are produced via precision fermentation. Essentially kinda like brewing beer, you can train a microbe to excrete about any biological material. Currently the cost is high, but it’s falling rapidly. Also many previously expensive pharmaceutical products have been produced with precision fermentation for decades. Insulin for example, previously required two tons of pig pancreas to make only eight ounces of insulin! Now insulin is made in a bioreactor for a significantly lower cost than traditional methods. (Insulin cost is low. Cost is different than price.) I highly encourage any farmer to take a look at rethink-x’s report on precision fermentation. If the author is half right, (He has been shocking accurate with other predictions going back a decade.) farming is in for a massive disruption from 2035 onward. [rethink-x report](https://www.rethinkx.com/food-and-agriculture)
Oh is fermentation like brewing beer? Interesting. Wtf is creating ethanol? Jfc. Sounds like someone is grifting some venture capitalists for their dough.
Yes it is similar to brewing beer with more controls. Essentially precision fermentation requires more controls than beer but less than pharmaceuticals with clean rooms. There is a company in Indiana called liberation labs building large scale bioreactors for precision fermentation. They claim these purpose build factories will enable cost competitive food ingredients. These microbes still require food like sugar from crops to grow their biological materials, but compared to a cow using their stomachs as a bioreactor, it is so much more efficient. You only grow what you need and nothing else like hair or hooves. So they will use 10-25 less feedstocks like corn using precision fermentation! Not good for corn volumes.
Thank you for the answer I was looking for! This is setting up great for the Matrix to actually come to life. The future is bright.
Yes 100% this is where I first heard about it myself and why I’ve spent more time learning about it.
Bioengineering that makes cells in a vat. So it’s not fake cheese or butter it’s not like cheese or butter it is cheese or butter. But made cheaper on less of everything. Feed water land pollution less of everything. Search YouTube and if this affects your livelihood you need to understand what’s coming and coming fast.
Yes, the next big thing that's all ups and no downs. Promises of solving every ailment. Sure.
Ya so what’s the carbon source. My cows are advanced fermentation vats that turn grass into beef.
Those automobiles will never replace my horse, what do you mean the radio has live pictures. Man wasn’t supposed to fly or he would have been born with wings. All said by people who didn’t see the future that was looking them in the face. I didn’t say I want this to happen it is happening. You can get out of the way of an avalanche but you can’t stop one. Take a few minutes and look it up watch some videos this IS IN Production NOW. Not maybe someday kind of stuff.
Answer the question. What’s the carbon source. I’m not really smart but I do know basic laws of physics and chemistry still apply in this world.
Ok Quick answer is Google carbon production from beef production. It’s more than I want to type out . My main point is when these plants can produce the same product on very little land with very little water compared to dairy and no pollution of air or water from the growing of Agriculture all at a fraction of the cost . It’s going to happen like I said it is happening with dairy and eggs and it is the same product with cheaper cleaner inputs. I’m not an environmentalist or anti farm. I’ve lived my whole life in and around ag and hunt and fish and grow my own food. I’m just trying to give a heads up here. I’m too old to affect me too much . But dairy has alway been tough way to make a living and the days of seeing the milk trucks making the rounds here has been gone for years and I’m not thrilled by that but it’s what has happened.
So you don’t know how it works but you’re convinced that it is going to take over agriculture?
Have a nice life
Don’t worry. The US government will always find a way to funnel money to white farmers.
Bullish Gas demand has peaked and in turn ethanol use in cars has likely seen it's peak as well. However, sustainable aviation fuel can be made from alcohol. Your average corn field can produce over 500 gallons of ethanol. Converted to jet fuel its still over 300 gallons of jet fuel per acre. If the government and airline industry are serious about using sustainable fuels vs fossil fuels, corn ethanol has to be a major source to get the volume you would need to fuel the industry. The major hurdle is carbon sequestration. They have to get that done to get the carbon scores low enough. If that gets done all the climate smart ag isn't needed. It'll help but carbon scores drop drastically if you can sequester your carbon. Obviously. In 5-10 years the industry will need to expand, IMO.
How do they currently calculate carbon scores? And how would corn farmers be able to improve sequestration? I know there has been a lot of talk about cover crops and soil microbes and what not but so far it’s been just a lot of talk.
Carbon sequestration is likely going to need to be piped to a location it can be stored underground. So that's the big issue. Some farmers/landowners are hesitant to put a pipeline on their land. This is where a farmer could be more or less helpful for the whole project. As far as practices they can't help the plant sequester carbon, but they can qualify for CSA "climate smart ag" and lower the plants CI score. If and this just came out from the government guidelines which may change later, they no till, cover crop, and use efficient fertilizer. CSA bushels will have a lower CI and help the plant lower their score. Likely in the future I think you'll see a premium offered at ethanol plants for CSA corn, but they'll likely still buy and grind non-CSA corn. It'll just mean their CI score isn't as low.
Hemp biodiesel.