I have to say that I found myself in a bit of shock reading Piers Akerman’s column last Saturday. Piers was highlighting some of the deficiencies in the policy in NSW mandating that regular unleaded petrol be replaced with ethanol blended fuel this year. In fact the article was so cogent, and even handed I worried that perhaps someone else had slipped the article in under Piers’ byline. I was quickly disabused of that suspicion once I read the final paragraph:
The market must decide the support for ethanol-blended fuel – not the government, not monopolies and not urban Laborites and Greens determined to punish users of so-called fossil fuels.*
* My emphais.
Oh Piers, don’t ever change.
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…and Piers should know, being a living fossil himself.
They’re not really “fossils”, you see, because they are not ancient enough to justify that definition. As the world was created about 6,000 years old, nothing on earth (or under the earth) can be rightly classified as fossils. There’s no such thing.
Piers may be onto something here.
The concept of ‘fossil’ fuels is clearly only a construction of Teh Left.
It follows therefore that fuels is just fuels. Whether so-called fossil fuels, or so-called biofuels.
The spurious distinction does, however, beg the question why Piers thinks the market must determine ‘support’ for one or the other
Offhand the only answer I can think of is that the market is frightfully good at that sort of thing, and it would be a pity to under-utilise it.
That’s akernomics.
So the next time I’m at the local servo for a fill-up I might duck in and ask if they’ve got any “so-called fossil fuel”. I’ve not seen any at any servo yet but maybe it’s one of those things you only get if you cough in the right voice or use a particular handshake.
…or then again, one might expect this from a so-called “journalist”.
Maybe Piers is a believer in the abiogenic origin of petroleum, that petroleum is not a product of the decomposition of long-dead organic matter but “that petroleum was formed from deep carbon deposits, perhaps dating to the formation of the Earth. Supporters of the abiogenic hypothesis suggest that a great deal more petroleum exists on Earth than commonly thought”. So petroleum is not a fossil fuel, and it will never run out! The theory is, unhappily, wrong, see, for example http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2005/11/4/15537/8056#comment-9938.
Dave typoed {my emphasis}
What’s really funny is that the policy is being implemented by … the NSW Liberals, rather than The Greens and Labor. In fact, the policy is being criticised by The Greens. This leads us to the tell-tale signs much earlier than the last line that tell us it was Piers.
The phrase ‘hip pocket’ (sometimes in concert with ‘nerve’) is an all purpose rightwing trope. It borders on the meaningless. Suffice it to say that for rightwingers, there is no time when the hip pocket is not being hard hit by something or another. That’s especially true when they aren’t in power. Objectively though, inflation is modest and stats tell us that most people are financially better off now than they were a decade ago and even three years ago if we ignore super portfolios. That’s not cogent and balanced. “Labor-green lunacy” isn’t either. It’s another rightwing trope.
Technically correct but misleading. Firstly, price. Because most petrol is imported what it costs is hostage to international markets, exchange rates and so forth. If the Straits of Hormuz are blocked, petrol prices will spike. If the $AUS declines it will too. Local ethanol should not. When a carbon price on fuel comes in, again, petrol prices will rise.
While standard petrol is more energy intensive, ICEs use it fairly inefficiently. because not all standard petrol in all fuel reserves in petrol stations has an equal octane rating, the ignition on engines is set to prevent “pre-ignition” which can cause catastrophic damage to engines. Accordingly, the thermal efficiency of standard petrol engines falls well short of what it would be if one could ensure absolute consistency in fuel and adjust and maintain the ignition accordingly.
If vehicles were run on pure ethanol, consistency would not be a problem. Not only that, but whereas the octane rating of standard petrol is about 91, the octane rating of ethanol is about 129. That would allow the spark to be radically advanced so that ceteris paribus all engines could have a longer stroke, and thus more mechanical motion per ignition event. What the engine trades in combustible hydrocarbons is compensated for in greater thermal efficiency. Engines that run on ethanol run about 25degC cooler, meaning that engine wear is also reduced. On the downside, they can be harder to cold start in very cool conditions.
That’s misleading. Yes, ethanol is corrosive of seals. You’d need to change the seals more frequently or choose more robust seals. That’s not an absolute bar though. People change their oil and get lube jobs about as frequently as you’d want to do that.
True. Standard fuel often doesn’t burn completely, and those deposits can be moved about with ethanol. That’s an argument for phasing out “so called fossil fuels” rather than a plea against ethanol.
Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t think using ethanol blended petrol is a good idea. I especially don’t think there’s much to be said for turning standard food crops into biofuels, as the EROEI isn’t good enough. Frankly though I wouldn’t trust anything Piers Akerman said on anything without some rational source corroborating it.
And as for dinosaurs, they’re a figment of the Evil Left’s devilish agenda to brainwash the vulnerable minds of students.
Re: Ethanol.
I reckon we ought to run engines on the fuel they’re designed to run on. More engines are being designed to run on ethanol, and that’s fine by me.
Fran, I’m afraid you’re getting stuck in the same just-us thinking that americans who think they can be “energy independent” are getting stuck in. Unfortunately, the moment ethanol becomes cost-effective, there will be an international market for it. If the straits of hormuz get clogged (but they won’t – iran has a sharp stick to take to a gun-fight), the international price for ethanol will also spike. Sure, that’d be great for sugar-growers, and they’d finally have something to replace all those trade barriers and/or subsidies, but the price of ethanol would still go up.
A shift to ethanol would also be surprisingly expensive, in the short term. Most cars on the road now won’t run on it (safely). Long-haul trucks sure as heck won’t run on it, and if they did they’d have to double their fuel storage (brilliantly safe, you’d agree). Forget about air transport or shipping – even after the engines are converted (after testing), the “bounce per ounce” would increase the price of running aircraft, since you have to drag all the extra fuel up into the air.
My own view of ethanol is that it’s the claytons’ biofuel – the biofuel you have when you don’t really want to pay the costs of a biofuel. A little bit of it will run in most cars, it uses feedstocks we already produce and the contracts just happen to go to
liberal party donorslocal producers. But it’s actually not a terrifically great fuel.I derive great comfort from the thought of Abram riding a dinosaur from Ur on Chaldees to the Land of Milk & Honey,(Exodus 3.8 ”..the locality of the Canaanites & the Hittites & the Amorites & the Perizzites & the Hivites & the Jebusites..etc”) where the sound of the turtle is heard in the land.
WTF does a turtle sound like, glub, glub?
To which I’d add, MOC, that the idea that scaling up the production and distribution of ethanol to sub for any substantial part of current liquid fuel is hard to imagine. Yet without that capacity to scale up, the demand for ethanol-capable vehicles ill not underpin mass production of the vehicles. It’s not realistic over any time scale one might consider.
I wasn’t pitching ethanol. I was merely objecting to Akerman’s line of reasoning.