IER CRITIQUES FEDERAL BIOFUEL MANDATE EXPANSION

IER CRITIQUES FEDERAL BIOFUEL MANDATE EXPANSION
New Study Examines Ethanol-From-Natural-Gas Production Issues
 

WASHINGTON D.C. -- The Institute for Energy Research released today a new study on the implications of producing ethanol from natural gas (EFNG), entitled "Should Ethanol Made from Natural Gas Be Added to the Federal Biofuel Mandate?" The study, conducted by Mr. Lindsay Leveen, a widely-recognized chemical engineer, analyzes the efficiency, economic, and ecological issues associated with EFNG. Leveen's findings include:

• The production of EFNG offers no ecological, economic, or energy efficiency merits to substantiate expansion of federal biofuel mandates.
• Rather than reducing carbon dioxide emissions, as proponents of EFNG suggest, the process required to convert natural gas to ethanol will likely increase carbon emissions significantly.
• Fifty percent or more of the energy content of natural gas will be lost in the process of making EFNG, thus unnecessarily wasting a clean-burning hydrocarbon fuel source.
• If EFNG is deemed “renewable” and is able to meet the required CO2 reductions, it would only serve to expand and further entrench the Renewable Fuel Standards 2 (RFS2) mandate, a policy that requires consumers to use less efficient, more expensive fuel.
• Used in an identical vehicle, EFNG has carbon emissions that are at least 23 percent higher than the baseline for gasoline set in the RFS2, will approximately double the carbon emissions per mile traveled when compared with vehicles using compressed natural gas (CNG).
• EFNG is not a commercially viable product, as the estimated cost of EFNG is higher than the ethanol futures price has reached yet in 2013, thus requiring natural gas-based ethanol industries to receive long term government support in the form of additional mandates and regulations or monetary incentives and subsidies.

IER President Thomas Pyle released the following statement:

"Natural gas is a clean, abundant, and efficient energy source in and of itself. This effort to expand biofuel mandates to include ethanol from natural gas is a blatant misuse of our natural resources that will not only harm our economy but the environment as well. America’s natural gas boom will continue providing our nation with the affordable and reliable energy that it needs, unless senseless policies out of Washington squander the opportunity. Any effort to fix a federal market distortion by adding another market distortion is just a problem in search of a problem."

To read the full study, click here.

About the Author

Lindsay Leveen is a chemical engineer who recently received a professional development award from the Northern California Chapter of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers for his lifetime work in his field. With more than 30 years of experience, Leveen has worked for several major global chemical companies in both long term strategic planning and as a consultant.

###

For media inquiries, please contact Benjamin Cole
bcole@iedrdc.org
202.621.2957

Free Gasoline For Life F-Gallons

Hi my name is Pen O Kio and I am an extraordinary visionary.  I have started a new auto company called Messla.  We are not innovating any technology or greening up carbon emissions like another company that has a similar name to us.

 

We are offering a unique value proposition to consumers that is heavily subsidized by our misguided and completely corrupt government.  Yes we will sell you our Model T that is actually a standard Ford Fiesta for $45,000.  This is $30,000 over invoice but don’t fret.  The US government and the State of California will give you a total of $10,000 for buying a green small car. 

Then Messla Motors will sell other auto companies zero plutonium emissions credits as our car is plutonium free.  You the buyer don’t get this zero plutonium money.  We at Messla do as it subsidizes our "low" price to you. 

 

Now for the zinger that will close the deal with you.  Messla Motors will give you free gasoline for as long as you own the vehicle.  If Messla Motors goes bust, I Pen O Kio will personally fork out the dough for your free gasoline until either of us expire whichever comes first.

The department of entropy (DOE) has devised a new cost for your F-gallons (free gallons) that show you pay $0 per gallon for your F-gallons versus the common motorist having to fork over $3.61 a gallon at the pump.  Yes zero cost of fuel for as long as you own the car!

. 

Yeah by taking your money upfront and fibbing that you are saving the planet plutonium emissions your cost of gasoline is zero.  This is far better than the $1.22 per gallon for electricity you would pay by filling up my competitor's Tesla with electrons some of which are nuclear derived with plutonium waste.  Our fuel cost is lower and we have no plutonium emissions. Take that Tesla your dirty little secret is out.

Dr. Moniz at the DOE is fully on board, and soon the DOE will issue a national alert via the good doctor’s Facebook page that F-gallons are free and it is stupid for you all to pay $15,000 for a Ford Fiesta and buy gasoline at pump at prevailing prices when he and governor moonbeam will give you $10,000 toward your $45,000 Fiesta with free gasoline for life. President Obama loves the idea as it will create thousands of those “good manufacturing jobs” he so often promised. And to boot there are no plutonium emissions.

We at Messla Motors will pocket $13,000 per vehicle on top of the $45,000 you pay from the zero plutonium credits other auto companies are forced to pay us via clever legislation enacted in the once golden state.  This way we will show a quarterly profit and our stock will zoom over $100.  The New York Times will call me a visionary who brought plutonium free driving to the  masses. 

I have no worries that in 2016 my competitor Tesla will sell the people’s EV for $30,000.  I will eat my ten gallon hat filled with mid grade if this happens.  Simply my business plan is about making hay not PV electricity while the sun shines.  

Don’t think I am trying to screw you.  I care for the planet and want to make sure all of us drive zero plutonium emissions vehicles for the highest price that are subsidized by government and then promoted with the add on of zero cost fuel for life personally guaranteed by me the founder of Pay Through Your Nose, Pal.

Don’t worry soon the only icebergs left will be lettuces but I have a plan how to sell salads to the first people of Artic Canada.  Welcome to America and have a nice day.

Secretary Of Energy Corrupted In One Month

                                                                 E-XTREME                               

Update  The comparison between e-gallons and gasoline is actually even more stark.  The gasoline car with 15 gallons and 28.2 mpg has a range of 423 miles. To get 423 miles at 0.35 kwh per mile one needs a battery pack of 148.1 kwh.

Performing the requisite math of how much the EV would cost with 148.1 kwh without government subsidy and with profits to the battery and auto company, the added real cost is just north of $150,000. Amortizing this over 80,000 miles the e-gallon cost is just over $54 a gallon.

With gasoline at $3.60 a gallon the e-gallon is 15 times as expensive a gasoline if we are going for the same range. The DOE opened this Pandora's box by making the comparison to gasoline. I am just demonstrating on a real apples to apples basis how pathetic EVs are and they are on life support from a totally misguided government policy brought to us by lost souls.

Come on Dr. Moniz you understand thermo let's clean up the mess at the department of entropy and put some order to the chaos and craziness there. 

Only one month on the job and the new Energy Secretary is already corrupted by his boss and Washington politics.  Continuing the fake out of his predecessor Dr. Chu at the Department of Energy, Dr. Moniz now claims it only cost $1.22 for an e-gallon of electric power for an electric vehicle.

His department of “entropy” calculates the e-gallon by taking an average the 0.35 kilowatt hours per mile for the 5 top E vehicles, then multiplying by the gasoline car mileage average of 28.2 MPG, and then again multiplying the average cost to a household of electricity of 12.33 cents per kilowatt hour.  Viola an e-gallon is estimated by the DOE to cost $1.22.

http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2013/06/f1/eGallon-methodology-final.pdf

Now the Green Machine will do the reality-check on this assumption.

The average gasoline car has a gasoline tank that holds 15 gallons and gets 28.2 MPG to equal a range of 423 miles.  This car has a fuel tank that costs the motorist approximately $150 of the total price of the car.  The motorist will drive 150,000 miles over all the years of owning their gas car and the cost to amortize the tank is therefore 1/10 of cent per mile ($150 divide 150,000 miles).  Each gallon of gasoline gives the car 28.2 miles of range, thus the amortized cost of the gas tank is 2.8 cents per gallon (0.1 cents per mile times 28.2 miles per gallon). Adding this to the $3.60 price at the pump for a gallon of gas and we have a total cost of $3.63 per gallon for the fuel and the amortization of the on board storage of the fuel.

No EV (electric vehicle) on God’s Green Earth has a range of 420 miles but the Tesla Model S has a range under real driving conditions of perhaps 230 miles with the 85 kwh battery pack.  Dr. Chu reported last August that the cost to produce an EV battery pack is $650 per kilowatt hour. 

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/10/16/A-123-Is-a-Goner

Without the massive government grants, the real price for the battery pack is this $650 cost plus the margin to the battery producer plus the margin to the auto company.  This means the real price should be $1,000 per kilowatt hour.  Without  government subsidy, the Model S should have a “real” price for the batteries alone of $85,000.  Let’s assume the motorist with a Tesla Model S does drives 80,000 miles in ten years.  The cost to amortize the batteries is then $1.06 per mile ($85,000 divide 80,000 miles).  The gasoline autos achieve a fuel economy of 28.2 MPG.  Multiply 28.2 MPG by $1.06 and we yield $29.89 per gallon equivalent for the real cost of ownership of the batteries.  Add the $1.22 to the $29.89 and Dr. Moniz should report the thermodynamic truth of $31.11 as the actual e-gallon cost.

Dr. Moniz claimed an e-gallon costs one third of a gasoline gallon.  In fact it costs almost nine times as much for electricity versus gasoline.  Mr. Secretary, it looks like you have fuzzy math where 3 squared equals 3 to the minus 1.  Shame on you Dr. Moniz!   I had high hopes for you but within a month your boss and Washington DC corrupted you by a factor of 3 cubed.

KIOR Now Four On The Floor

KIOR hit $4 a share at the close today.  It is ready to go even lower as the news trickles out that they only produced one single solitary truckload of diesel from pine in Mississippi.  Condi Rice is not saying much and probably has KIOR’s lawyers checking her director’s errors and omissions insurance.

I did a little checking of who besides Khosla owns a bunch of KIOR stock.  A not so green hedge fund called Artis Capital owns about 16% of the outstanding shares.

http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/kior/institutional-holdings

The next largest holding is by the Province of Alberta Canada.  My guess is their pension or sovereign wealth fund got smitten by the gangrene promise of diesel from pine trees.  Actually after further investigation it looks like the Province of Alberta and well as Mr. Khosla are propping up KIOR with loans.

http://biz.yahoo.com/e/130523/kior8-k.html

I then had this memory that the Province of Alberta is also a big investor in Bloom Energy and I tried to piece together the connections between KIOR, Bloom, Khosla, and Kleiner Perkins.  Quickly I remembered that Mr. Khosla was once a partner at Kleiner and is still listed as a partner emeritus on Kleiner’s web site.

http://www.kpcb.com/partner/vinod-khosla

I then kind of remembered that Khosla and Kleiner were tied at the hip at Amyris. 

http://gigaom.com/2010/09/28/who-wins-in-amyris-ipo/

I then kind of remembered that this guy from the Alberta Investment Management Corp named Jagdeep Bachher is on the board of Bloom Energy.

http://www.bloomenergy.com/about/board-of-directors/

I then remembered that Jagdeep Bachher was once on the board of KIOR.

http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/person.asp?personId=54715540&privcapId=28363594&previousCapId=27742428&previousTitle=AMYRIS%20INC

OK so we now have a guy named Jugdeep who is in deep with Kleiner and Khosla and how the Province of Alberta invested citizens’ funds in greentech that is simply gangrene and had a guy named Jugdeep representing their interests on the board of directors.  Khosla, Kleiner they are all the same.  Jugdeep, in deep it is all the same.  Green, gangrene ha ha they are not the same.  Green is good, gangrene smells of cronyism that has now even crossed the northern border.  Condi you may have caused a rift with our good neighbor to the north when news gets to Calgary that the pine trees in Mississippi are being converted into soot not diesel. 

Kior Produces One Truckload Of Diesel In Eight Months

The company that Condi Rice is touting as a board member managed to ship one truckload of diesel since it started up its commercial plant over 8 months ago.

Yes a truckload of diesel may equal 2,000 gallons and the wonder company that Vinod Khosla took public is supposed to produce approximately 4 million gallons of the cellulosic derived transportation fuel (diesel and or gasoline) by year end.  The department of Entropy is expecting KIOR to produce (8 million gallons of ethanol equivalent out of 14 million gallons) 56% of all the cellulosic transportation fuel in the US this year.  Ha Ha!!

The local TV station in Mississippi had the following to report on May 21 2013 in the video link below

“The plant has only shipped one truckload of diesel so far this year, but that number is expected to grow as the process is refined and the product becomes more pure.”

http://www.wcbi.com/wordpress/columbus-based-kior-plant-provides-tour-of-facility

By May 21 almost 40% of the year had already passed and the company that the US DOE is leaning on most heavily for cellulosic fuel has only delivered a single truck load.  I doubt that KIOR will produce the other 4 million gallons of diesel this year.

Condi was reelected as a director for another year and on March 18, now more than two months ago, Condi claimed the following: "KiOR is changing the American energy equation by innovating and commercializing an entirely new generation of hydrocarbon-based diesel and gasoline fuel. By making the promise of cellulosic fuels a reality, KiOR demonstrates that these fuels are an attractive option for lessening America's dependence on foreign sources of energy."

Condi we all know you could not find weapons of mass destruction and now we can’t find weapons of mass combustion.  You and Dr. Chu Chu Train are both at Stanford so I suggest you stroll over to the mad doctor’s lab and ask him if KIOR made the promise of cellulosic fuels a reality or whether he was simply the worst secretary of energy ever?

    

Even Dr. Chu who brought us Solyndra, Ener 1, Fisker, A 123, and other gangrene flops knows that KIOR delivering one truckload of diesel over a period of 8 months cannot be called making the promise of cellulosic fuels a reality.  Condi stick to playing the piano and teaching poly sci, thermodynamics is not your strong suit.

Vinod Khosla keeps on loaning KIOR money to keep the steam coming out of the stack while very little diesel is yielded.  I hope he can pull the plug on this gangrene company just like he did on Range Fuels and Cello his two other cellulosic busts.  Also it seems like he has pulled the plug on Calera the thermodynamic fake out that was to make cement from sea water and carbon emissions.  Calera got Bechtel and Peabody Coal all excited about a chemistry that simply was impossible.  KIOR got Condi excited about alchemy lessening America’s dependence of foreign sources of energy.

Also have to report that Ray Lane had a bad week and settled to pay the IRS over $100 million.  Poor Ray, his friend Al Jazeera Gore threw him to the wolves regarding Fisker and then the Cincinnati office of the IRS and a few rogue vultures acting independently pecked at whatever was left of his carcass.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2013-06-07/ray-lane-rode-tech-boom-tax-shelter-wave-broken-by-irs-crackdown