[OFB Cafe] Bio Fuels

[Chris Olson]

From: Derek Broughton 
Sent: Friday, July 18, 2008 2:30 PM
To: An Open Discussion Forum on Just About Everything,Especially for Techies. 
Subject: Re: [OFB Cafe] Bio Fuels

> He's not talking about running engines, he's talking about heating oil, but:

I don't see where there's a difference.  In fact, most furnaces are more heat efficient than internal combustion engines, and in any case it's still a combustion process.  All diesel fuel is is #1 or #2 fuel oil with some additives in it to enhance injector and plunger lubrication in the injection system.  Diesels will run on everything from kerosene to HFO, and even coal dust mixed in a slurry.  Furnaces will too.  If you can squirt it into the combustion chamber, in either an engine or furnace, with an oxygen-rich environment, the combustion process is very much the same.

> B20 - that's 20% biofuel, right?  Rick was talking about 3-5%!

Correct.  Biodiesel blends are given by the "B" number.  B100 is pure biodiesel.  Biodiesel (or bio heating oil - same thing - comes from the same tranesterification reactor) has a higher calorific content than #1 fuel oil, and slightly higher (depending on whether it's soy or small-grain based) than #2 fuel oil.  So any amount you can add - even 3-5% - enhances cleaner combustion and fuel efficiency.

> Of course there are, but when you expend more than a gallon of petroleum to 
> generate a gallon of biofuel - which is the case with corn-based ethanol - 
> you are paying the expense of _both_ fuels.

No, it's not the case with either corn-based ethanol or biodiesel fuel.  Since we've talked last, Derek, my wife and I own 100% of BioDiesel Blue, LLC in Chetek, WI, which is currently a 1.05 million gallon per year biodiesel refinery (that's what Rick was referring to when he said he *KNEW* I'd have something to say about it).  And we own about 11% of the stock in Western Wisconsin Energy, LLC, which is a corn-based ethanol plant located in Boyceville, WI.  We're closing down the refinery in Chetek and moving the biodiesel operation to Stenungsund, Sweden in August due to running up against a brick wall in the US created by high commodity prices and unfavorable government regulation of the biofuels industry.

At any rate, I'm quite familiar with the biofuels industry, including the economics.

There's some weenie groups out there trying to portray biofuels, especially corn-based ethanol, as being energy net-deficient, and they're dead wrong.  This includes university professors who've written papers on the topic, and who've never actually seen a bushel of corn produced in their life, nor ever toured an ethanol plant.  In the ethanol process we simply extract the starch from the corn and what's left over is livestock feed, just like if the corn had been fed directly to the livestock in the first place, except minus the starch.  Too many "studies" seem to ignore the fact that we don't get only ethanol from a bushel of corn - we also get meat (food) when the byproduct is fed to livestock.  We now have processes to remove not only the starch from the corn when distilling alcohol, but also the oil (fat - without sending it thru a press - it's a chemical process) from which we can make corn-based biodiesel.

At any rate, and without going into a bunch of complicated numbers, the net energy gain from running that bushel of corn thru an ethanol plant is vastly higher than simply feeding it to livestock for human food, or processing it for other corn-based products.

Biodiesel is more efficient yet.  On my own farm I can grow an acre of canola for about $134 - that figure includes fuel, seed, fertilizer, equipment time, man time, depreciation on equipment, and land cost amortized over 30 years.  Off that acre of canola I get an average of 158 gallons of refined B100 fuel, plus end up with canola meal - which is fed to our beef cattle and the three buffalos my wife has.  Other than the electric motor that runs the screw press to extract the oil from the canola, there is absolutely ZERO energy input in the biodiesel refining (transesterification) process.  It's purely a chemical reaction between a fatty oil, and a small amount of an alcohol (we use methanol) aided by a catalyst (lye).  The end product, after separating the fats from the oil, is a clear colorless liquid that you can drink (it's biodegradable) and it contains more energy than #2 petroleum fuel oil on a per gallon basis.

The "revenuers" are on my ass all the time (they caught my wife this spring and fined her for driving her truck on the road without paying the Federal and State highway fuel tax on the biodiesel in her tank) but when you take that damned tax out of the picture, I can make a gallon of biodiesel on my own farm for about 93¢ from tilling the soil to dumping the final product in the fuel tank.  Make no bones about it - the US government has this whole thing illegal now with the blending tax law.  If you get caught burning straight B100 in anything - the fine is $10,000 per occurrence.  The US tax code requires that biodiesel be blended with petroleum at a minimum of B99 - and then you have to pay the tax on the biofuel as if it was refined petroleum.

And the government even has that all fracked up.  They give importers a credit on the biodiesel blending tax.  So what do they do?  They import a tanker of B100 fuel from South America (or whatever), squirt some petroleum #2 in it, take then take the credit (paid for by taxpayers) for IMPORTING this biofuel (domestically produced biodiesel doesn't get the credit - we have to PAY a blending tax).  However, it doesn't stay here.  As soon as they squirt the petroleum into the tanker they send it off to Europe and sell it there (where biodiesel is immensely more popular than it is here) as B99.

So yes, we're "legal", but don't even ask how.  Like I said, the "revenuers" are on my ass all the time worse than they were on the moonshine runners during Prohibition.  When Don talks about heaving sticks of dynamite off the back of the bass boat while running from the "revenuers", he ain't kiddin' because my run-ins with the IRS have not been good.
--
Chris