Post
by diane o'thirst » Sun Oct 15, 2006 11:09 pm
I hear you. My mechanic directed me to the EPA website and read from it, saying that ethanol causes more tailpipe fumes than straight gas but there are several companies that are refining the technology to comply with EPA standards. There is a service station called Sequential in south Eugene that sells biofuels and Portland is getting some of its own. I just added a guy to my Myspace friends list that is getting the word out on biofuel stations in Oregon. He's part of a network of similar bloggers.
One thought I had after talking with my mechanic was, "The EPA are on the take and protecting Big Oil." I thought this because my friends told me they went further on one tank of gas — better mileage — and ethanol-mix fuel was cheaper than straight petrol (naturally...petrol is finite and diminishing while ethanol comes from renewable, more decentralized resources and has a smaller industrial network; not as many miles to transport it to get it distributed). It's pretty simple math that less money + fewer tankups = Big Oil's bottom line suffers. Upon further reflection, though, I saw how that line of thinking is short-sighted as well. Conspiracy theories ≠ hard facts and I'm more inclined to follow that. Is the EPA on the take? It wouldn't surprise me, they're a government agency and power corrupts. But to say that they're protecting the oil companies doesn't make much economic sense.
Most investment analysts will tell you that it's not a good idea to put all your eggs in one basket, financially. Most savvy businesses learn to diversify early on if they don't include a strategy for that in their original business models. Diversification can mean a depressed bottom line in the short run but in the end it pays off.
My mechanic would LOVE to do ethanol conversion jobs. The fact is, they're a national chain and they're under scrutiny, so they can't. The fine is $50,000. At the same time, they have to live in the community and when they're off the time clock, they come home and are listening to what their neighbours are talking about. Around here, everyone's talking about ethanol mix and bio-diesel. Part of the buzz is environmentally-related but a good mix is economy as well. Eugenians take the mantra of "buy local" seriously, because more often than not buying local is the difference between a local company/employer staying afloat and going down the tubes.
So, my supporting of ethanol is several-pronged. I have to admit that it's primarily economically-rated: America has the capability to produce it's own fuel and I'm not talking about drilling off the west coast and Alaska. There are a million acres of farmland that the government is paying farmers to let lie fallow. It is literally more lucrative for them to sit and take government subsidies than to grow crops.
Somewhere else on this board, there was talk of inedible garlic fields that the port-o-let companies dump our sewage on; they're used to scent propane and aren't consumed by people. So there is a stripe of agriculture that produces vegetable material that doesn't go into the food stream.
Suggestion: what if our nation's sewage plants turned to fertilizing non-edible plants on farms, instead of dumping effluent into our waterways? Employ a percentage of non-edible farms to grow biofuel crops, whose sole intention is to go into the energy stream. Put that together with the PMU farms, the fallow farmlands, and you have existing infrastructure that is channeled into a productive economy, that of growing biofuels.
It's pretty simplistic but it stands to reason that biofuels would be less expensive than fossil fuels, according to the same economic machine that makes agates less expensive than diamonds. The latter must be mined, and processed by huge machinery, refined by a handful of highly-trained master craftsmen, and distributed through a worldwide network; the former can be picked up in the raw on the ground, the beaches, etc., and will yield a fine, lovely, acceptable piece after a few hours in a home's rock tumbler. Same with biofuels: many people — around here, anyway — with a couple 50-gallon drums mix their own biodiesel out back. They've just eschewed a whole fleet's worth of semi rigs! Naturally the cost would be lower.
Let's continue this thought. If production of a fuel can be decentralized, with each community forming a co-op that produces its own biofuels from waste material that would be burned anyway, then why should a company have a nationwide network of tanker trucks and tanker ships like the Exxon Valdez? Mega-fleets become obsolete, or at least cut back drastically. That's an adjustment, where do we pick up the slack? A savvy junior veep could see an opportunity to get some dialog going within the trade, and calls a meeting. Let's get everyone talking and decide on standards. The emphasis is less on logistics and turns to quality control: creating a consistent, marketable product vis-a-vis the fuel.
Let's say that I fill up my Mazda Navajo's 19-gallon fuel tank with E-10, at $2 a gallon and I pay the nice man $38. Where it went 320 miles on a tankful of petrol, it now goes 400 miles which with my regular usage is a week and a half to a fortnight. I go from paying $250 a month for plus unleaded petrol with MTBE to around $100 a month for a fuel that travelled less than 30 miles from point-of-production to service station. (None of this is hard data since I've yet to tank up on E-10; give me a couple weeks, I may retract and give more accurate experiential figures)
In that hypothetical regard, a midsize SUV gets 20 - 25 miles per gallon on biofuel. This is in line with Honda's lowest fuel economy. And let's be honest here, unless you're breeding St. Bernards or you're Mormon and have nine kids, you don't need bigger than a midsize SUV. Anyway, let's say our hypothetical biofuel trade organization agrees that 25 mpg is an acceptable floor for fuel economy in the product, let's maintain that floor and work up from there. Ten years later we're seeing cars that get 80 mpg on biofuels and one vehicle can go 4, 5 even 6 months between tank-ups. Sure, each tankup would cost fairly bigtime bucks but since it only happens 2-3 times per year, it's an investment. Costco economics: one trip to Costco sees you dropping $350 but you're set for a longer period of time than if you just hopped over to Winco or Albertson's every week for the same period.
One more postulation: the Cascadia Independence Party has a plank where they want to phase out semi rig distribution networks and jump onto railroad distribution. Admittedly it would be difficult to implement this on a scale that encompasses North America, but if the distribution network was based on diesel trains, which are in place now, then biodiesel would become the leading fuel to power our transportation and distribution lines. How many miles to the gallon do diesel train engines get? Compare this economy to a convoy of semi rigs of a similar length and goods capacity and how much fuel that takes to achieve similar distribution.
Nature holds that it is more resource-wise to maintain the fully-developed, functional and contributing unit than it is to grow a burgeoning zygote to an adult. The nation's railways would need to be added on to and the trains themselves retrofitted to burn biodiesel at a rate that is equal to superior to present economy.
Whew! [drink water] Hope I didn't lose y'all during that jawing. I'm in a talky-thinky mode tonight for some reason...apologies if that got rambly.
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