i have good news!

[qwikz28]

and it has nothing to do with car insurance! i just got this notice in my email:

Energy Bill Advances E85

With the President’s signing of the new national energy bill, a landmark public policy has been adopted which will result in the use of 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels by the year 2022. This action represents a significant change in the energy strategy of the nation and, for the first time, actually drives the country to use less petroleum in our transportation sector. The reduction in petroleum consumption will result from an increase in the fuel economy of new motor vehicles and the mandatory use of renewable fuels.

During 2004, approximately 141 billion gallons of gasoline were consumed in the United States and the new Renewable Fuel Standard established in the energy bill will require 25% of that 2004 baseline amount be in the form of ethanol and biodiesel. Ethanol produced from cellulosic feedstock must comprise 58% of this total by 2022.

Just as importantly, the energy bill also addresses many of the issues E85 advocates have faced in our attempts to grow the fueling infrastructure. Key components of the bill will:

Prohibit franchise agreements from restricting the sale of renewable fuels.

* For purposes of E85 and B20, no franchise agreement shall limit the conditions under which these fuels shall be sold.
* Agreements entered into on or after the date of the Energy Policy Act update shall not restrict a franchisee from:
o Installing a renewable fuel pump.
o Converting an existing tank or pump to renewable fuel.
o Advertising the sale of renewable fuels.
o Purchasing renewable fuels from persons other than the franchisor.
o Listing renewable fuel availability on signs, dispensers, or light poles.
o Allowing the use of a credit card for payment of renewable fuel.

Congressman Joe Donnelly, D-2nd district of Indiana stated, “While there are a number of reasons why ethanol has yet to mature on the market, a significant contributing factor is that many of the big oil companies use a variety of strategies to make it difficult for their franchised gas stations to offer ethanol. For example, the standard contract issued by many big oil companies prevents franchisees from purchasing fuel from anyone other than the franchise supplier. Since many suppliers do not sell E85, the stations within the franchise cannot either.”

Donnelley went on to say, “In passing the Energy Independence and Security Act, we are taking a crucial step in expanding the availability of E85 so more Americans can take advantage of this clean fuel made from corn grown right here in Indiana.”

The legislation also includes a requirement for the head of each federal agency to install at least one renewable fuel pump at each federal fleet fueling center in the United States by January 1, 2010. The Department of Energy (DOE) is expected to establish a pilot program of no more than 10 refueling infrastructure corridors and provide no more than $20 million for this pilot program. The legislation authorizes $200 million per fiscal year from 2008 to 2014 for the infrastructure program.

The National Ethanol Vehicle wishes to extend our appreciation to both the Congress and the Administration for working together to overcome partisan issues and agree on the content of this historically important shift in the nation’s transportation fuel policy. This is a first, but significant, step in addressing a national goal of securing energy independence, while advancing environmental stewardship.

and on a side note, i watched the movie I am legend with my gf today. total rip off of 28 days later.

[DaSkinnyGuy]

So does this mean in the future we will have to convert out fuel pumps and tanks in our cars to be able to use the renewable fuel and does this mean lower prices at the pump?

HaHa to the side note never seen either movies.

[Knipps]

need cliff notes!

[qwikz28]

congress passed a bill helping e85 and b20 to be more readily available. in case you all didn't know, oil companies have been working hard to make it hard for gas stations to acquire those fuels

[r0nin89]

Originally Posted by qwikz28

and it has nothing to do with car insurance! i just got this notice in my email:



and on a side note, i watched the movie I am legend with my gf today. total rip off of 28 days later.

Lol you mean to say that I am Legend which was a book a long ass time ago is a rip off of 28 days later?

No my friend, it goes I am legend, resident evil, 28 days later.

[Savage_Messiah]

How is this good news?

[BonzoHansen]

It didn't end tax subsidies for ethenol, that i am pretty sure of.

[JW]

Originally Posted by Savage_Messiah

How is this good news?

Thats exactly what I was thinking

JW

[SteveR]

To bad E85 right now is more expensive than gas and insanely hard to find.

[qwikz28]

Originally Posted by Savage_Messiah

How is this good news?

you guys ever wonder why e85 isn't so readily available? its not because there isn't a demand for it. look how many flex fuel cars are out there. its because oil companies forbade gas stations to sell it in their contracts. why? because it has only 15% gas instead of 90%. e85 is less money so more people will use it if their car is capable. some people will even be so reckless as to buy a flex fuel vehicle. the benefits to this are two fold. one, mainly the general and ford only make flex fuel vehicles. and two, lower demand on fuel will SLIGHTLY lower gas prices. not to mention the economic and environmental benefits but no one really cares about that stuff.

Originally Posted by r0nin89

Lol you mean to say that I am Legend which was a book a long ass time ago is a rip off of 28 days later?

No my friend, it goes I am legend, resident evil, 28 days later.

didn't know that. ok i'm a little happier now

[qwikz28]

Originally Posted by SteveR

To bad E85 right now is more expensive than gas and insanely hard to find.

where did you find that info? its less than $2 a gallon in the midwest.

[BonzoHansen]

I thought there was also supply issues and transportation issues (like no pipelines, special storage requirements, etc.) to prevent water contamination.

[SteveR]

Originally Posted by qwikz28

where did you find that info? its less than $2 a gallon in the midwest.

Melissa and I looked it up maybe a month ago and the closest place is like Brooklyn and it was like $4 or something a gallon.

[NightRydaSS]

Originally Posted by SteveR

Melissa and I looked it up maybe a month ago and the closest place is like Brooklyn and it was like $4 or something a gallon.

PH has it, and it is like $.20 cheaper then reg

[edpontiac91]

Originally Posted by SteveR

To bad E85 right now is more expensive than gas and insanely hard to find.

Plus, EVERY new car magazine that does a road test has found that when they used E85, their mileage went into the toilet. What good is it, when you pay MORE for it, but get LESS gas mileage?

[BonzoHansen]

Originally Posted by edpontiac91

Plus, EVERY new car magazine that does a road test has found that when they used E85, their mileage went into the toilet. What good is it, when you pay MORE for it, but get LESS gas mileage?

IMO E85 is all about energy independence. If they can make it viable (a big IF) using grasses or whatever, and where its impact on food crops is minimized, that is a home run for the US.

[88Z-Man]

Originally Posted by edpontiac91

Plus, EVERY new car magazine that does a road test has found that when they used E85, their mileage went into the toilet. What good is it, when you pay MORE for it, but get LESS gas mileage?

I heard the same thing a few years back. If there is a large drop in fuel economy what good is it? OK you pay say for sake of arguement 50 cents less per gallon but have to fuel up twice as much because of the milage drop off. Its all a game with the oil companies the goverment and OPEC. There was no reason for the spike in prices to begin with. If we had the refining capability and the refineries were not 40 years or older, our prices should still be under or at $2 a gallon, no matter what they say is going on in the world or natural diasters. (But my opinion doesn't matter) Sorry a little of subject, just venting.

[procamaroz28]

e85 is cheaper and the decreased gas milage isn't noticable but the main problem is that in order to extract the ethanol from corn you must use lots of energy (burning up coal) which all it does is solve expensive gas problem but makes polution alot worse (coal burns real dirty)

[EchoMirage]

you get less mileage and less power with E85.....but, once the prices go down, youll be using alot less gas, hence cheaper to buy, and less dependance on oil. its a stopgap measure, since youre still polluting, and still using some gas, but at least its a step in the right direction. like someone said, its less then $2 a gallon in the midwest, where its made and more readily available. thats still more exp. then what gas was even 5yrs ago, but compared to $3+, so what if you get a little less mileage. IF things went well for it, the price of E85 could continue to drop and drop. so lets just say it cost $1 a gallon. would you care if you got 5mpg less at that point?

[qwikz28]

the idea is not the prices now, but what the prices will be eventually (we're talking sub-$2), reduced emissions, independence of foreign oil, 105 octane, yada yada....

i'll take a 5mpg hit for that.

[Knipps]

Originally Posted by EchoMirage

you get less mileage and less power with E85.....but, once the prices go down, youll be using alot less gas, hence cheaper to buy, and less dependance on oil. its a stopgap measure, since youre still polluting, and still using some gas, but at least its a step in the right direction. like someone said, its less then $2 a gallon in the midwest, where its made and more readily available. thats still more exp. then what gas was even 5yrs ago, but compared to $3+, so what if you get a little less mileage. IF things went well for it, the price of E85 could continue to drop and drop. so lets just say it cost $1 a gallon. would you care if you got 5mpg less at that point?

Originally Posted by qwikz28

the idea is not the prices now, but what the prices will be eventually (we're talking sub-$2), reduced emissions, independence of foreign oil, 105 octane, yada yada....

i'll take a 5mpg hit for that.

but if what he says is true, where coal is necessary to process and refine the corn we're bound to run into the same problems

[qwikz28]

i never heard of coal being used to burn corn. i'll have to look that up. and right now the focus is on trying to extract ethanol from waste. kinda like biodiesel

[JL8Jeff]

We have to start somewhere to reduce our dependence on oil. This country will never be able to rely solely on any form of E85 or whatever because we won't have enough capacity to produce it. I remember watching a show where they explained that Brazil uses sugarcane I think for their fuel source because it doesn't take as much energy to get the fuel out of it like corn. There is another "crop" that works much better than corn here in the US and I forget what it is.

edit: it's the sugarbeet that produces much more sugar for ethanol than corn. I think there is another plant as well.

[BonzoHansen]

Originally Posted by qwikz28

i never heard of coal being used to burn corn. i'll have to look that up. and right now the focus is on trying to extract ethanol from waste. kinda like biodiesel

I believe the chain is coal is burned to make electricity, which is in turn used to make ethanol.

[BonzoHansen]

Editorial from today's Journal.
Dim Bulbs
December 21, 2007; Page A18 WSJ
The White House is boasting that the energy bill President Bush signed on Wednesday is actually less ambitious than the agenda proposed in his State of the Union address earlier this year. That's praising with faint damns.

As recently as last week, it seemed the final draft might have raised taxes on the oil and gas industries by some $21 billion to fund subsidies for wind and solar projects. Another provision required that utilities produce 15% of their electricity from "renewable" sources, regardless of supply; currently they are a mere 3%. All that was relegated to a Congressional dumpster, thanks to veto threats from the White House.

The pity is that the entire bill didn't go to the same place. The Administration's environmental views are supposedly paleolithic, but it's long been obvious that Mr. Bush has also bought into some of the Beltway's most useless energy superstitions. This political panic is bipartisan.

Whenever Washington decides to intervene in energy markets, the results run the gamut from the merely wasteful to the genuinely disastrous, like price controls and gas lines. This time the main result will be higher energy prices all around, especially from the bill's two most destructive planks. Neither a major increase in the production of "renewable" fuels nor a ramping-up of fuel-efficiency standards for automobiles will have any real effect on climate change, or "addiction" to foreign oil, or whatever. But while imposing real economic costs, they offer the appearance of "doing something."

The Renewable Fuel Standard requires fuel producers to use at least 36 billion gallons of "biofuels" by 2022, a fivefold increase over the existing mandate, created just two years ago. The current supply comes almost exclusively from corn ethanol, and the new laws will continue that trend with specific, year-by-year usage requirements. Ethanol production will double, with plenty of pork, subsidies and tax preferences to grease the way.

All this while even many hard-core environmentalists are backing away from ethanol. Cultivating row crops like corn is highly energy intensive, often requiring a gallon of fossil fuels to produce a gallon of ethanol. The mania clears more land for agriculture while draining aquifers and increasing fertilizer runoff. Then there are the market distortions, not least higher food and commodity prices.

The evidence is convincing enough that it may even have filtered through to Congress. While there are plenty of handouts for ethanol in the short term, per-year production is capped at 15 billion gallons around 2016. Everyone agrees that this is the "practical limit," meaning that it's hard to achieve a greater yield without plowing over most of the Midwest. Rather than learn a lesson and move on, though, Washington decided to throw a similar subsidyfest for other "alternatives." The balance of the 36 billion gallon quota is made up by biodiesel and fuels derived from cellulosic sources like switchgrass or wood chips.

The problem is that these technologies remain speculative. At best, there are a few pilot programs outside of the laboratory -- but nothing on a commercial or cost-effective scale. The bill will prop up these boutique fuels in hopes of a breakthrough, but essentially it is legislating the creation of a new industry from scratch. No doubt Vinod Khosla and the other California venture "capitalists" are happy to join Big Corn at the federal subsidy trough.

And let's not forget the hike in the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, a new mandate that auto fleets hit an average of 35 miles per gallon by 2020, up from today's 27.5 mpg baseline. Such standards are now an obligatory political gesture, but back in reality they're an indirect tax that does almost nothing to influence gasoline consumption. Meanwhile, they put severe burdens on Detroit's auto makers, which have translated the impressive efficiency gains of the last 30 years into the bigger, more powerful cars that consumers have wanted to buy.

Oh, and Washington officially joined the world-wide lightbulb prohibition movement. The regular incandescent bulb has worked fine since the 1880s, but Congress is dictating that it be phased out starting in 2012 in favor of compact fluorescents. CFLs may be more efficient, but here's a textbook case where the market is more illuminating than the dim bulbs on Capitol Hill. Come to think of it, that sums up this whole exercise.