White Lightning Axiom: Redux

Well, it's looking like the energy bill bucket filled with cash and subsidies has made people look at bio-fuel as a potentially viable market. This is old news out in the mid-west where even my grandfather used blended fuel in his tractors. Finally, now that our innovators and enterprising souls can 'see the money', alternative fuels are starting to emerge here on the Front Porch of America:

At 12th and Vine Streets this fall, a gasoline station owner plans to start selling two fuels made from plants: ethanol and biodiesel.

In New Jersey, a group of farmers and other investors is on the verge of buying land in Gloucester County to build an ethanol factory. [ed. sure, after we pay for 66% of their solar panels, the now have the cash to invest in other government programs ... ARGH!]And in Kensington, a research-scale facility is under construction that would make biodiesel from the grease of Philly cheesesteaks and other fatty victuals.

Heh, being one of the fattest cities in the US is starting to finally pay off. Say, I wonder if you could make bio-fuel from liposuction waste!? California could really do well in that market.

Among other provisions, the measure - signed on a day the price of crude oil hit another high - mandates that refiners sell at least 7.5 billion gallons of ethanol and biodiesel by 2012.

That amounts to a relatively small portion of total U.S. transportation fuel use - currently about 135 billion gallons of gasoline and more than 40 billion gallons of diesel each year - and critics faulted the bill for not requiring carmakers to build more-efficient engines.

Well, you could try to require all carmakers to do this, but I'm thinking that GM won't be around to see that legislation. Now if we could just bring back the option of having diesel engines in our cars ... but nooo, they smell bad. Let the cry-baby simpering begin.

Consumers may not notice much difference. All diesel trucks and buses can run without modification on biodiesel, which is made by chemically treating vegetable oil or animal fats. All new cars can run on gasoline that contains up to 10 percent ethanol, an alcohol fuel made from fermenting sugars from plants, including corn. And, unknown to many owners, more than 3.5 million newer cars can use an ethanol blend of up to 85 percent.

Hmmm, fermenting sugars from plants ... like, say SUGAR CANE or SUGAR BEETS!? Nope, the Sugar Program makes sure that this is absurdly expensive.

Straight biodiesel costs up to $1 more per gallon than regular diesel, whose average price nationwide yesterday was $2.41 a gallon, according to the federal Department of Energy. Usually it is blended with regular diesel fuel.
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Ethanol prices are generally lower than those for gasoline, in part because of a federal subsidy. Both ethanol and biodiesel result in lower amounts of most kinds of pollution in most situations.

Okay, those last two statements would likely benefit from some clarification. Biodiesel costs more because there is no subsidy. Ethanol (E85) costs less because there IS a subsidy. Ethanol would cost less if there was NO subsidy on soy/corn and NO Sugar Program. In the end, you need to heat the mash (read: cook with gas) to create ethanol, you do not need to do that to make biodiesel. We won't even talk about the soy-blight that is starting to creep across our agricultural belt right now.

Philadelphia Fry-o-Diesel is building a research-scale facility in Kensington to produce biodiesel from the smelly goo that collects in traps underneath restaurant parking lots.

"It's a feedstock that we have plenty of in the land of the cheesesteak," quipped Emily Bockian Landsburg, business development associate at the Energy Cooperative, a Philadelphia nonprofit group that owns Fry-o-Diesel.

The current facility will have a capacity of up to 20,000 gallons a year. The goal is to build a for-profit, commercial-scale facility in the city by 2007, with an annual capacity of up to four million gallons, she said.

Well, it looks like unhealthy eating is our best choice for a cheap liquid fuel source for vehicles and heating. To that I say, eat more fatty foods, super size me and pass the artery stints. Wouldn't it be a hoot if good old American Opulence was the key for energy independence?

Critics say the energy bill does too little to promote renewable and alternative fuels.

Yeah, no kidding. Plop 100 more nuclear power plants next to cities that use the most energy and people might get the idea that energy conservation was not just an quaint academic postulation.