Economics of Biofuel
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 4 ก.ค. 2024
- How much does it cost to make biofuels compared to making it from crude oil. Each of the component that goes into it, the profit, and the capital costs are examined and summed. Why is ethanol still sold if it costs more to make?: taxes, environment (oxygenator), supply diversification. Oil vs Food prices over time and discussion of government farm programs. Sugarcane use for biofuels, and an example from Brazil.
I'm currently an undergraduate biochemistry student researching a new catalyst for the transesterification of cooking oil into biodiesel. This catalyst is made with glycerol (byproduct of producing biodiesel) and results in a better phase separation of glycerol and biodiesel made with ethanol.
Currently, almost all biodiesel is made with methanol which not as safe to handle and comes from methane which is not sustainable, but the phase separation works.
There's still new research happening thats exciting for the future of biodiesel! Thanks for all the content, this channel is quite informative and easy to understand.
I’d love to see an updated version using 2021 commodities. Great video.
I think this talk is good as far as it goes, but it's a bit more complicated than that. For instance, ethanol is corrosive, so it takes special--that is to say, expensive--storage tanks, lines, pumps, etc., made out of corrosion-resistant materials, such as stainless steel. So to the fuel systems of automobiles must also be made of those same materials to keep the system from clogging up with rust when fueled with even 10% ethanol. Also, the role of government in rigging prices by socializing costs and myriad economic interventions are difficult to see, but those costs are real and cannot be overestimated. I get that these were beyond the scope of this talk but people need to know about these as well.
some people like a little bit of alcohol in their water supply.
some people like a little bit of water in their alcohol supply.
Well if your water is otherwise undrinkable (like Europe until the 20th century) you HAVE to have alcohol in your water.
@@SVSky herr ober, one bier please for this person 😎
@@klausgartenstiel4586 Never understood the drinking culture of Europe until someone explained this to me on a Rhine River tour
@@SVSky well tho romans build transport system aquaducts to bring fresh water bit obiously its all very limited.
In Wisconsin alcohol is considered a nutritional supplement.
Caturday Nite hahahaha hahahaha that’s hilarious 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
I love his dismay when speaking about bushels
I went to a big ag school. "Good dirt" was fighting words with my soil science roommate.
A four letter word said my soils prof every day;)
your videos are enjoyable
love this episode
Great presentation but one quibble, the USA doesn't have 'the best' soil and climate in the World for growing cereal crops. Yields are low per acre. The record for the highest tonnage cut by a single combine harvester in a day was in the UK a few years ago where tonnage per acre is far higher than the USA. It depends on agricultural input intensity of course but 'the best' is really a complicated matter and what gets grown by farmers often depends on subsidies and tax breaks including for biofuels. We also call subsidies and tax breaks 'market distortions' or economic inefficiencies.
In this example, biofuels only make sense because of tax breaks. It could be argued of course that the tax breaks are really reflecting the fact that there is an economic inefficiency or market failure when we burn fossil fuel in the form of pollution in the atmosphere. Nobody breathing in that pollution could levy a charge to those people running a vehicle so taxes on pollution pays for that harm to the environment.
Do tax breaks really reflect the harm from pollution? That is what the entire argument for biofuel tax breaks really boils down to. In turn the economics of biofuel swings on that argument.
What about the energy used in production vs the final product.
3-4 trips over every acre in a diesel guzzling machine each season, petrochemical fertilizers, transportation energy. Does the solar energy producing corn for fuel exceed the inputs that make all this happen. I can’t find a straight answer for that.
that is why we use money. it serves as an econoomic unit of measurement. Without government involvement it would not make a profit so yes you are using more or just as much energy making it as you get out. just like all these idiotic scams . Wind and solar being the biggest.
He forgot to put in the equation the water ( and energy to transport pump that water ) used in the crops, power needed to fermentation and make biodiesel, the power needed to mix the biofuel with the gasoline, the power to transport of the final product to the destination, plus the increase of the food price etc...
I wish you had talked about sugar beats given that they are so energy rich. Their only problem is that they don't have as good a lobby in Washington...
Switchgrass cam produce 4 or more times the ethanol that corn can. However the farmers lobbied hard to make it from corn. For every acre of switchgrass you need 4 acres or more of corn to get the same amount. It's all politics.
Gasohol. Have not heard that for a while. E-10 seems to be a more current term. Good explanation of the rudimentary basics of the economy of ethanol. Also many other products made from corn during distillation such as corn oil, corn syrup, and many others.
If there is too much farmland, it would be more ecologically sound to use it for meadows and forests, not monocultures for making biofuel. Biofuel has even worse energy per hectare than all the "renewable" power plants.
Dr R. Ethanol based fuels are very hard on my equipment. I'm constantly rebuilding carburetors due to swollen and cracked seal or gummed up passages. This does not happen when I use recreational gasoline devoid of ethanol. Question...is there science on the horizon to address the economical loss due to equipment failure and downtime for using cheaper fuel with corn additive?
Wait, they still use bushels?
BUSHELS??? As in the unit one would use if one would have to group weeds by hand to carry them with his own back?
Well we still use weeds, hands and backs, so why not bushels too?
@@jamesbrown99991 who is seriously using his back and nothing else in modern farming?
I know only of that unit since the founding fathers of my town used it in the town charta.
This was 1100 years ago!
That unit was obsolete when the ox was instructed in the farming business.
My freaking 500 year old farming ancestor would have looked at that unit and gone "what is that, is that much? Is that little? We been using oxen since 200 years I can't relate to this unit at all."
Get with the times. How about the "scooter"? That is the volumina that a 16 year old can deliver with a pizza-scooter in a single night without getting complaints for being slow.
@@keineangabe1804 I'm sure you have a VERY strong case for why using "bushel" as a measurement is definitely indicative of the world's end.
@@haliax8149 now that you mention it: how can a society function if they are unable to place a reasonable measurement unit in the farming system that keeps that society alive?
Shouldn't such a society corrupt with time due to the problem that they can't reform in a reasonable way?
What's next? Next you are telling me that there is no fully centralized system for laws or taxation?
That one farm pays 5% taxes and the next farm (in the next region) 8%?
That one can use a special fertilizer but the neighbor can't?
You should do an analysis on Hazelnut shell Biofuels since they’re a perennial crop
what about biogas CH4?
I was listening to a lecture by a biofuel researcher and in fact they don't generally use corn destined for human consumption but animal feedstock waste or other post processing biomass waste. Also biofuel production can be very cheep if the plant is integrated with a coal powered generator (wonder if it will work with nuclear). The idea is for the biofuel plant to extract waste thermal energy from the power generators cooling system to produce biofuel. Also there are biofuel production methods that don't need large amounts of thermal energy ie algae. Also a over 23% of food grown is wasted either due to logistics costs or market variables. So rather than the biomass going to waste farmers can have it converted into fuel.
I like doing ethanol myself.. I will need a mini plant and source out my materials. I will stockpile it and offer it for sale or use it in my gasoline use... I think there's profit..
Much as I love this channel, I think this video by the Illinois energy professor, shows too much bias from his Illinois roots, the second largest corn producing state in the US. The true cost of corn input is glossed over because of the high subsidies and politics involved. Many of the other comments have also reflected this and other shortcomings. I love all the talks on the economics of nuclear power, which seem to be much more comprehensive.
Number one use for biodiesel, should be fueling the farm itself.
A farm can easily dedicate less than 2 to 5% of it's land (depending of methods, crops and yields) to produce it's own fuel. No transportation needed and no middleman involved. Store the fuel in the farm and run free of carbon.
Well done.
Agree with this analysis entirely. Disagreed with nuclear power, as the cost of storing or eliminating waste is not factored in.
Would add that erosion of American farmland is an added cost, some places we are doing better with this than others. How to calculate this expense?
he discussed nuclear waste disposal in one of the other videos. iirc, he says its small and not a serious problem to store it on site
@@nannite I have nuclear waste being stored onsite within 10 miles of where I live. It is also on the banks of the mississippi river. One bad flood year, and it may be floating. In addition, another nuclear plant is upstream, about 100 miles. Again, storage near the river is untennable. It needs a long term permanent home, not on the edge of a major waterway.
“I was driving across Brazil with some…friends” - suspicions confirmed, Professor Ruzic also runs some operations south of the border
What are the numbers for hemp biodiesel, which has a higher cetane level than soy?
AND is much much cheaper to produce, uses less water, less impact on soil, etc..
77gravity where do you live?
I will never understand why someone would waste farmland for fuel given the alternatives. Especially when considering that we might be closer to the agrigultural natural limit than we think.
If you look at earth as a whole then non of the current alternative energies are better for the environment ,they are actually worse. A battery car produces overwhelmingly more pollution in it's production then a fueled car, and the average car produces as much pollution during it's life as it does in producing it the mandatory ethenol supliment in the gasoline is corrosive and hurts the engines ,If they really cared about the environment they would be very focused on cars being made more durable, and make it so that there are no extra cars, as many many cars go unsold. The alternative energies of today is as pothetic as Arnold Schwarzenegger getting his favorite car electrified,,,,,, let's completely forget that he inspired the whole hummer line to be produced, 10k people can comfortably live within Arnold's carbon footprint
@@silence-humility-calmness Oh, I'm pro nuclear :) The only way we can have a clean way to run electric cars is to rethink battery storage - how we produce them and how efficient they are. Without that, not even nuclear energy fueling those cars is going to help. Not to mention the electricity transportation and transformation loss and so on. If we are to live energy efficient, we basically have to think about reactors in our backyards and apartment blocks.
And yeah I always found the arguments for biofuel ridiculous. Even if they'd use biowaste as fuel it would be stupid because there is so much we can do with the biowaste that is a lot more useful than burning it up.
I did not know about the corrosion in the engines, do you have a link handy where I can read up on that? :)
They use the rest of the plant leftover after harvesting to make ethanol. They don't make ethanol out of corn, they make it out of corn stalks.
When was this filmed? Prof looks younger, and doesn't have the fancy "backwards" white board.
by happenstance ethanol or methanol has future for reasons that are ECONOMIC and I repeat NOT due to their efficency, but economic reasons (even beyond taxes)
This must have been filmed in 2012 or so, oil hasn't been anywhere near as expensive as he's saying in years.
and the reason is fracking.
Crazy how those markets can change. Thanks to this war, we might see record breaking prices very soon.
Why the blood on the screen?
bring back mirror writing
Add the cost of the increased cost is soot by ethanol mixed with gasoline. Internal combustion engines all had to be modified because otherwise this mixture would ruin the engine. Billions lost by consumers due to premature failure of Abe engine not specifically engineered to burn biofuel.
6 $ makes this more attractive
I hope that biofuel is the future. Electric cars are BORING.
I drive my car on HVO 100 its hydogenated vegetable oil 100%. This is available in Sweden. I have an volvo v60 brand new. Fuel is expensive. In sweden but this is supposed to be very environmental
Ethanol is far into the category of "worst case" biofuels; costly to grow, costly to turn into fuel, costly to use as fuel, tending as a co-product to increase use of fossil fuels, wasteful of scarce resources, threatening farm and family stability and threatening food and soil fertility while increasing demand for fertilizers from fossil sources. Presenting ethanol as typical of the economics of biofuel is a bit like presenting fentanyl as typical of the economics of groceries. At the "best case" end of the biofuel mix, diverting waste streams to create drop-in replacement for fossil fuels through efficient modern flash pyrolysis as backup storage from excess peak grid power and carbamides powered the same way from respectively cellulose and animal biomatter then combining using zeolite processing ends up supporting food farming instead of competing with it, and displacing fossil fuels instead of supplementing their demand.
You have some great videos but this one left out a lot...in my humble opinion.
Excise tax is a cost of choice by our government. It is not an inherent cost of producing ethanol so it should not be included in the real cost calculation. We pay the whole cost of the fuel directly or through lost revenue to our government. It is a wash. To be honest, we are spending more than we take in so we are actually charging the difference to our children.
Ethanol helps grain farmers which you have many in Illinois. It is awful for meat farmers. It raises the price of all food for poor people. Look at the price of esp beef since we started making ethanol.
Ecologically, trees are cut down to provide more land to produce grains. Trees probably reduce CO2 more than anything else.
Ethanol helps the ethanol producers and politicians who promote it. Because ethanol is more corrosive than gas, it increases the cost of manufacturing cars and small engines...more expensive materials esp in seals and hoses. Maintenance of auto and small engines is more expensive because ethanol is more corrosive and has an affinity for water. It is good for mechanics but not for the rest of us.
Bottom line, ethanol is a bargain if you don't care about the environment or poor people. What am I missing?
@Desmond Bagley I understand MTBE is worse for the environment than ethanol but some vehicles are designed to burn 85% ethanol. That is totally unnecessary. I am not sure how much is needed for an octane booster but I feel confident it is no more than 10% and likely less. 2,2,4-Trimethylpentane...iso octane...was used as an octane booster at one time after lead was banned...not sure why they changed or if it also had environmental effects. I don't think they can justify ethanol for anything except a small amount as an octane booster and I am not sure they could not use something else for that....one man's opinion.
well I think a lot more people need food more desperately than we need gas
It’s funny how the cheaper oil gets, the less people get fussy about the environment
if i could get into the US (i got 70 charges on my record) i would like to study engineering with this guy
Not going to happen then!
All I'm hearing is that tax is based around buying oil, not running my environmentally viable fuels.
Then you might be interpreting things incorrectly. Ethanol production relies upon tax subsidies to remain viable.
@@mikebetts2046 And it's not just the excise tax. Corn subsidies are why corn is so cheap to begin with.
The non-economic model, just comparing energy in vs energy out, doesn't look so good. Corn requires fertilizers, fertilizer manufacture requires tons of energy (almost entirely sourced from fossil fuels), and in the end you are lucky to get as much energy in the ethanol as you put in. Subsidies and taxes are the only reason it's viable at all.
Of course, moving the externalities of fossil fuels into the excise tax in the form of a carbon tax would bring the economic model much closer to the energy model.
@@oasntet I was with you until the part about carbon taxes. I can agree with the idea that externalities must be accounted for and paid by those who create them but I do not trust the government to perform this task objectively. There are too many political pressures and temptations.
@@mikebetts2046 I have no hope it'll actually happen, but if it did, it could be roughly as effective as the clean air act. Given that a lot of renewables are on the cusp of economic viability, even a half-assed carbon tax policy could help nudge the equation over the inflection point.
land should not be committed to making biofuels, which would require clearing more land and natural vegetation
Government policy is exercised through taxes... until it isnt.
No, Government is doing on gun point "You have to pay this!".
Governments does not force you to buy things, they force you to pay up.
@Stimpy&Ren I usually say 1€ per liter is pure tax and it mostly is an accurate measure. pretty horrible
He didn't account for the subsidies that went into lowering the corn price to that level.
He also didn't account for the diesel used to grow that corn, and the fact you are burning all of it... so you have to add that to the carbon released from the ethanol.
Utter silliness.
13:56 *Trump enters the video*
"The bushel is an archaic unit" - like all the other units used by the 5%. Go Metric, dammit.
On the same day in May 2019, Dave Ruzic (the Illiinois EnergyProf) posted another video about biofuel and ethanol. That video is titled "What Goes Into Making Biofuels?" In that video, Dave used the same irrelevant information about the "energy content" of ethanol versus gasoline. Because that video was not focused on "economics" his negative conclusions about ethanol were different than the negative comments presented above. However, they are just as incorrect.
As I explained in my reply comments to the other video, BTU (energy content) comparison of fuels in an internal combustion engine is irrelevant: "Engine optimization is the key factor, not energy content. An internal combustion engine optimized to run on ethanol will deliver equal or better mpg than the same engine optimized to run on E0 gasoline. Also, some gasoline-optimized engines will get better mpg using E30 to E50 fuels than they will using E0, despite the fact that gasoline has higher BTUs than ethanol.
"Also, there are two other factors to consider when making the kind of comparison that the Illinois Professor made. First, because gasoline burns so inefficiently in an engine, about 25% of the BTUs are lost (the carbon deposits left behind are the proof of the inefficient gasoline burn, whereas ethanol burns clean). This means the effective equivalent energy content of gasoline would be about 87,000 BTUs instead of the rated 116,000 BTUs. In addition, E85 has approximately 15% gasoline. So E85 would have about 82,000 BTUs compared to E100 that only has 76,000 BTUs. Therefore, even if BTUs were relevant in ICE calculations, there wouldn't be a 30% difference, there would be about a 5% difference."
I published two primary reports on the issue, which present additional details:
The Irrelevance Of BTU Rating - Big Oil's Gimmick To Hoodwink The Public
www.theautochannel.com/news/2015/10/19/144405-irrelevance-btu-rating.html
The Irrelevance Of BTU Rating - Revisited
www.theautochannel.com/news/2018/07/14/603714-irrelevance-btu-rating-revisited.html
I'm always available to discuss, argue, debate, share info, etc.
this is politics not economics making the fuel choice
An additional advantage of biofuels is that you can drink them when you're thirsty.
@Stimpy&Ren The poison is gasoline if you're talking about ethanol from the plant. If it's from the hardware store they add something else.
WHy not send the electricity to distill the alcohol to a tesla instead . Return the land to natural grass land. Then use the subsidy to finanace the farmer's next busness venture.
They will just grow a different crop that is subsidized
In Brazil a distill can produce ethanol and eletricity using sugarcane bagasse!
Electricity is not what’s used...it’s almost exclusively steam from a natgas boiler
@@billgriffiths8752 you're right. I didnt think of that.
BUY GEVO STOCKS
ethanol sucks
Never seen anything so dumbed down. Guy would not last a day in the real world. For a start his capex and run up to production is way off. Actually, he is dangerous.
Um... The fossil fuel industry gets heaps of subsidies
Well typical US, this is how it works, money money money, and greed, others might think of it as being food for the people, and not just money
How strange it is that countries that use markets to distribute food end up with so much supply that that producers lobby to stop production while countries that try to protect their people from markets with price ceilings always have shortages. Replace 'food' with any other sacred commodity. It's almost like there's a pattern that could be empirically observed, if someone were to truly care about avoiding shortages...