November 2014 - Page 3 of 7 - Fuel Freedom Foundation

Report declares opportunity for growth in E85 market

NACSonline reported that there are opportunities to grow the E85 market — but only if prices remain significantly below those of regular grade gasoline and the automobile industry continues to produce flex-fuel vehicles at historic rates, according to a new report released today by the Fuels Institute.

Depending upon the likelihood of various scenarios, E85 sales will, at a minimum, double by 2023 — but could experience a 20-fold increase in sales over the same time period, according to the 40-page report, “E85: A Market Performance Analysis and Forecast.”

Researchers evaluated the performance of more than 300 stores that sell E85, also known as flex fuel, and developed forecasts taking into account a variety of factors that could ultimately affect sales. The Fuels Institute projects that E85 sales will increase from 196 million gallons in 2013 to between 400 million and 4.4 billion gallons in 2023.

Biofuels have experienced remarkable growth over the past 12 years, from 1.75 billion gallons sold in 2001 to 14.54 billion gallons sold in 2013. While the bulk of that growth has been from the embrace of E10, future biofuels sales growth will be highly dependent upon increasing the sale E85, a blend of gasoline with 51 to 83% ethanol.

Ethanol documentary takes a provocative look at oil industry

November 14, 2014/in FFF in the News, Media /by Fuel Freedom Staff

A documentary designed to change the way people think about renewable fuels — called “PUMP The Movie” — has been showing around the country, including this week in Lincoln. Screened at the Mary Riepma Ross Media Arts Center for about 100 attendees at an event hosted by the Nebraska Ethanol Board, the film takes a provocative look at the oil industry, the grip it has on the nation’s motor fuels and what competition might mean if alternative fuels could gain a meaningful share of the nation’s gas tanks.

It is a question with Great Plains-sized ramifications for the Midwest, where Iowa and Nebraska rank first and third in corn production, and first and second in production of ethanol from corn. Iowa has 42 plants, Nebraska 24, part of a U.S. fleet of about 225 built with a capital investment of about $230 billion in recent years.

Gal Luft: Key to energy security is fuel competition

November 14, 2014/in What's The Buzz /by Fuel Freedom Staff

Gal Luft, an advisor for the U.S. Energy Security Council, and a member of Fuel Freedom’s board, explains a great deal about energy security in this interview with China Dialogue.

Energy security requires two things, essentially: availability and affordability.

In order for energy to be affordable, there must be competition, so that one form of energy — say, power generated by oil — doesn’t have a monopoly. Here’s an excerpt:

The key for energy security is to have fuels that can compete against each other. In 2008, for the first time in Brazil, less gasoline was sold than ethanol (many cars used in Brazil are multi fuel efficient). The economy is then much more resilient. With competition over price, the pricing will then eventually reach equilibrium. There are many other options to create competition for the running of transportation, such as electric vehicles, bio fuels, CNG. Both China and the US are able to reduce their reliance on oil. China is the largest producer of methanol, while the US is the largest producer of ethanol – this would however, require flexible fuel vehicles.

100 turn out for screening of PUMP in Nebraska

November 14, 2014/in Environment, FFF in the News, Media /by Fuel Freedom Staff

Gasoline will average $2.94 in 2015, feds predict

November 14, 2014/in Economy, What's The Buzz /by Fuel Freedom Staff

Are low gas prices going to stick around for a while? The U.S. government thinks so.

The federal Energy Information Administration issued its monthly report on Thursday, and it predicts that gasoline will remain below $3 a gallon throughout 2015.

Specifically, gas prices will average $2.94 in the new year, 45 cents cheaper than this year. That will let consumers keep a total of about $61 million in their collective pockets.

According to AP:

That may not seem like a lot in the context of a $17.5 trillion U.S. economy, but economists say it matters because it immediately gives consumers more money to spend on other things. Consumer spending accounts for 70 percent of the U.S. economy.

“It would be a reversal of the trend over the last few years where consumers can’t stretch a dollar far enough,” says Tim Quinlan, an economist at Wells Fargo.

Quinlan says the price of gasoline is one of the three big drivers of consumer confidence, along with stock prices and the unemployment rate. “Lately all three are moving in the right direction,” he says.

Energy analyst Michael Lynch, writing in Forbes, acknowledges that “Some will scoff at the drastic change in the forecast, arguing that such a big revision cannot be credible, and that an economic recovery next year should bring higher prices.”

But analysts usually make predictions based on the current price of oil, and don’t predict wild swings one way or the other. However, increased global supply should keep prices down in 2015, according to Lynch’s own analysis:

A strong global economy next year, combined with slowing shale oil production growth and/or instability in Libyan production should tighten markets, but might not raise prices much, certainly not to $100 a barrel. And a diplomatic agreement with Iran that ends sanctions, combined with rising Iraqi and Kurdish production, will probably turn $80 into the new price ceiling. Longer run, I remain an outlier with a firm belief that even $80 a barrel cannot be sustained in the wake of rising global oil supply.

House approves Keystone XL again, Senate up next

November 14, 2014/in Environment, What's The Buzz /by Fuel Freedom Staff

The U.S. House approved, for the ninth time, construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, designed to carry Canadian tar-sands oil to the Gulf of Mexico.

The bill passed Friday by a vote of 252-161, but prospects in the Senate are unclear. The Senate is due to take up the bill Tuesday, but the measure must beat the 60-vote threshold to move forward.

USA Today reports:

If it overcomes a 60-vote threshold it will head to President Obama’s desk where he will either sign it into law or veto it. The president has delayed a decision on the pipeline, deferring to an ongoing review at the State Department, but White House spokesman Josh Earnest suggested Thursday that the president could veto it.

Obama has declared previously that he would only approve the pipeline if it could be demonstrated that the project wouldn’t increase greenhouse-gas emissions.

Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana has been promoting her own bill in the Senate. The bill approved Friday was sponsored by Rep. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. He will face Landrieu in a runoff election next month for the Senate. Landrieu has an uphill battle to win a fourth term: Although she beat Cassidy by 1.2 percentage points on Election Day last week, neither candidate won at least 50 percent of the total, forcing the runoff. Observers expect much of the support of the third-party candidate in that race, Rob Maness, a Tea Party favorite who won 14 percent in the election, to swing to Cassidy.

Why is Landrieu so strongly in favor of Keystone XL? A story on Slate.com tried to figure that out, as well as why the leadership in the (for now) Democratic-controlled Senate is so willing to bring her bill to the floor for a vote:

What’s befuddling isn’t that the Democrats are playing politics with Keystone—it’s that they’re playing them so poorly. Thanks to their seven-seat-and-counting gain on Election Day, Republicans will take control of the Senate next year for the first time since George W. Bush’s second term. More importantly for the Keystone crowd, the pipeline is all but certain to have a filibuster-proof 60-plus votes in the next Senate, whether Landrieu is there or not.

Pew: Support for fracking slipping, but Keystone XL still popular

November 13, 2014/in Environment, What's The Buzz /by Fuel Freedom Staff

A Pew Research Center survey shows that support for hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” a technique for freeing oil and natural gas trapped within layers of shale rock, is falling among Americans.

As the graphic shows, 41 percent of Americans supported the drilling technique in the recent survey, down from 44 percent in September 2013 and 41 percent in March 2013.

$fracking graphic$ But the proportion opposed also decreased, from 49 percent in September 2013 to 47 percent. It’s the “I don’t know” response that’s on the upswing, from 7 percent to 12 percent.

The fracking survey was a key data point among a wide-ranging set of opinions Pew solicited from Americans on their views about the midterm elections and about political leaders of both major parties.

Construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would deliver oil from Canada’s oil-sands formations to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast, still enjoys majority support. According to Pew, 59 percent of respondents support its construction. But that’s down from March 2013, when 66 percent supported the project.

Currently, 83 percent of Republicans surveyed support it, compared with only 43 percent of Democrats.

Is Bakken crude more volatile than other kinds of oil?

November 13, 2014/in Over a Barrel Blog staff /by Fuel Freedom Staff

The Wall Street Journal takes note of an issue that’s growing in importance: Whether crude from the Bakken oil-shale formation is more volatile, and explosive, than other kinds of crude oil that comes out of the ground.

The geological makeup of the oil is crucial to regulators who are in the process of deciding whether to impose additional restrictions on companies that transport Bakken crude by railways.

The WSJ story begins:

Regulators set to decide on crude-by-rail shipping rules are relying on testing methods that may understate the explosive risk of the crude, according to a growing chorus of industry and Canadian officials.

The tests’ accuracy is central to addressing the safety of growing crude-by-rail shipments across the continent: whether Bakken crude contains potentially dangerous levels of dissolved gases. Several trains carrying Bakken crude have exploded after derailing, including a fiery accident last year that killed 47 people in a small town in Quebec.

The North Dakota Industrial Commission is expected to decide Thursday whether to impose new rules on transporting oil on railroads. A study by the state’s Petroleum Council concluded that Bakken crude was no more volatile than other light crudes found in Texas and other fields. But the testing that went into that report might have allowed flammable gases, called light ends, to escape before the samples were collected and processed.

The U.S. Department of Transportation also has proposed new safety rules for oil by rail, including phasing out the aging tanker cars (called DOT 111) used to transport the oil within two years.

Entrepreneur Jigar Shah: ‘We need fuel choice’

November 13, 2014/in What's The Buzz /by Fuel Freedom Staff

Clean-energy entrepreneur Jigar Shah makes a case for investing in technology that will help the United States end its dependence on foreign oil, instead of just talking about it.

In a post for Unreasonable.is, he laments the lost opportunities: The U.S. has reduced its oil imports by 15 percent over the last two years as the country has ramped up its own oil production. But we “still imported an average 7.4 million barrels of crude oil per day during the first nine months of 2014—at a cost of more than $240 billion.”

Increasing fuel-economy standards in vehicles has gotten us only partway toward oil independence (he notes that as miles-per-gallon have vastly increased since the 1970s, so too has the weight of the cars Americans increasingly prefer: the large SUVs). He adds:

The predicted increase in oil drilling in the U.S. and Canada will get us even closer. But no matter how we slice the data, we will still depend on imported oil. Domestic drilling and fuel standards are not enough—we need fuel choice.

Shah writes that replacement fuels like methanol, hydrogen, electricity and other renewables are cheaper than gasoline or diesel.

However, the Government has not systematically put a plan in place to give American’s access to these fuels at local refueling stations. In fact, the Government regulations in place today make it difficult to add these fuel choices.

In addition to alternative fuels, vehicle efficiency technologies offer another off-ramp towards oil independence. With only one out of every seven gallons of gas being used to move the car forward, it is time to stop waging war in the Middle East and start the war against vehicle inefficiency.

He lists some interesting innovations for increasing fuel efficiency. Check them out.

Some experts say China really is serious about climate change

November 13, 2014/in Environment, What's The Buzz /by Fuel Freedom Staff

The reaction to President Obama’s climate-change deal with Chinese President Xi Jinping, among congressional Republicans, was swift and negative. The prevailing sentiment is that China didn’t give up as much in the bargain as the U.S., and that China isn’t likely to live up to its end of the agreement anyway.

But Mother Jones magazine quotes some experts on U.S.-China relations, and they say China is indeed serious about cutting greenhouse-gas emissions.

MJ’s James West writes:

So I asked experts on US-China relations to explain why this deal was so attractive to the leaders of two countries that have historically locked horns over everything from human rights to lingerie imports. Here’s their explanation of why China really does want to want to act on climate change, and why the bargain makes sense for President Barack Obama, as well:

China has to act on air pollution. If it doesn’t, the country risks political instability. Top Republicans have slammed the US-China deal as ineffective and one-sided. “China won’t have to reduce anything,” complained Sen. Jim Inhofe (Okla.) in a statement, adding that China’s promises were “hollow and not believable.”

But the assumption that China won’t try to live up to its end of the bargain misses the powerful domestic and global incentives for China to take action. The first, and most pressing, is visible in China’s appalling air quality. President Xi Jinping needs to act now, says Jerome A. Cohen, a leading Chinese law expert at New York University. Why? Because “the environment—not only the climate—is the most serious domestic challenge he confronts.”