If You Have the Stones: The Ethanol Blend Wall, Revisited

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) ... Ah, that was a time when leaders had the stones to set difficult targets and stick to them, preferring to bet on American know-how than organize the sounding of the retreat.

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things,” said Kennedy a year prior to that, “not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

Now, as they say, let us turn to the challenges of the US ethanol blend wall. You’ll forgive us, if here in Digestville we rate the challenge as “lower on the difficulty scale” than the race for the Moon.

But, then as now, there are the nay-sayers. We can’t afford it. It’s too hard. We have other priorities. We don’t need it. The end zone is too far. The goalposts move. The other guys are too big. Yada yada yada.

...Today, there are roughly 14 billion gallons of ethanol production capacity in the US (and roughly 2 billion gallons of biodiesel production capacity — and around 500 million gallons in next-gen capacity, online today or some time in 2013).

And, the mandate for renewable fuel usage in the US (in 2012) was 15.2 billion gallons, including 2 billion gallons of “advanced biofuels” and 13.2 billion gallons of first-generation ethanol.

Put it all together, you have a robust pool of supply to meet mandates that are expected to rise for 2013 – and plenty of “room in the tank”.

...“DuPont is a 200 year old company which has brought forward innumerable new technologies to the market,” (Jan) Koninckx (global business director for biofuels at DuPont) added. “We’ve seen the [opposition's] strategy before. We have heard these short-sighted arguments for old technologies in the past. The arguments are indicative of short-sighted thinking, aimed at preservation not innovation. Most of all, they are aimed at keeping the US dependent on a single source of transportation fuel, with all the price volatility that comes from that dependence.”

...If all the US has are E10 blends – such as available today — then, indeed, there are problems distributing more than 13 billion gallons of ethanol into the fuel supply.

...Widespread distribution of E15 pumps is one solution — expensive for distributors to install, and cuts into the oil refiner’s share of the overall product revenue.

...E85 itself has not proven to be a popular product — per-pump sales rarely justify the hassle and expense of installation. However, “blender pumps” that allow the customer to select their preferred blend of ethanol and gasoline are used, successfully, in Brazil, and have started to make an appearance in the US.

21.4 billion gallons of biobutanol
4 billion gallons of biodiesel
1.5 billion gallons of renewable diesel

If companies built that kind of supply by 2022, that would meet the overall RFS2 target and all of it would be blendable using today’s vehicles and infrastructure. READ MORE