Originally Posted By: Wolf359
Originally Posted By: Tegger
Originally Posted By: turtlevette
Billions. Not millions. I don't understand how people can make that mistake.
The "millions" refers to the cellulosic ethanol mandate. I should have been more careful.
Excerpt from the Wall Street Journal article from last week:
"On Wednesday the EPA retroactively reduced
the 2013 gasoline-blending mandate for cellulosic ethanol
to 810,185 gallons from six million. If that sounds like
a big cut, 810,185 gallons is precisely every last drop
the industry managed to produce. The 2014 mandate is
nonetheless pegged at a preposterous 17 million gallons."
I think your quote doesn't really make sense because you left out some key units and I think you also made a mistake between gallons, barrels, days and per year. I think in 2012, they made some 12.7 billion gallons of ethanol from corn. Or around 830,000 barrels of ethanol per day. In 2012, the US consumed about 133 billion gallons of gasoline. 10% of 133 billion is 13.3 billion so if the EPA hadn't scaled back the mandate, instead of E10, you'd have to go to E15 in order to use more than 13.3 billion gallons a year.
If you were really talking about a total of 810,185 gallons, that's just a drop in a bucket.
I think Tegger is right on this. He is talking about cellulosic ethanol, not corn-derived ethanol. When Congress wrote the ethanol mandate, they were mindful of the criticism that mandating 36 billion gallons of ethanol production by 2022 was going to cause too much of an increase in food prices. So they threw in a placebo in the form of cellulosic ethanol, which can be made from non-food plants grown on marginal lands not used for corn production. The promise was that in 10 years, cellulosic ethanol production was going to ease the pressure on corn ethanol, but that didn't happen.
From Business Week:
"U.S. legislation in 2007 mandated that a growing quantity of “renewable” biofuels be mixed with gasoline—9 billion gallons in 2008, climbing to 36 billion gallons by 2022. Last year the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, responsible for implementing the law, demanded fuel companies mix in 14 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol and 2.75 billion gallons of so-called advanced biofuels, which are usually manufactured using scrap wood or corn husks."
So here we can see how well the government's promise in 2007 has been kept: 2.75 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol was mandated, 810 thousand gallons was actually produced. Just another case of social engineering by the gummint that just won't work.