Did you hear the good news, while EPA is holding down the fort against Ethanol, BIG OIL is raking it in: Copied this off Theoildrum.com today. NEW YORK — The major oil companies continue to climb back from the recession, with higher fuel prices driving up earnings. After setting record profits in 2008, the oil industry tanked last year as the global economic downturn induced a dramatic drop in oil and natural gas prices. On Thursday, Exxon Mobil Corp. said it earned $7.56 billion in the second quarter, its best result since the last three months of 2008. Royal Dutch Shell Group posted a 15 percent gain in net income. A day earlier, ConocoPhillips said net income nearly tripled in the April-June period. Chevron Corp. reports its quarterly results on Friday. The jump in profits comes as oil companies wait out a ban on deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico that is scheduled to last until Nov. 30. Shell took a $56 million charge for idling its rigs while Exxon halted work on an appraisal well and suspended operations at one of its Gulf platforms. But their operations are so vast that the impact is likely to be minimal. And both remain committed to drilling in deep water around the globe, including the Gulf. Exxon continues to explore the deep waters off countries like Indonesia and the Philippines. "Slight delay in the Gulf, but we're proceeding full speed ahead in the rest of the world," Exxon Mobil Vice President David Rosenthal said in a conference call with investors. Shell said it plans to wait out America's six-month ban on exploratory drilling.

The current limit could hinder meeting that mandate and the building of celulosic ethanol plants. Why take the risk if the market isn't there?

Ethanol is 35% oxygen and the rest is 65% hydrogen and carbon just like gasoline. E10 is 3.5% oxygen and E15 is 5.25% oxygen----isn't it amazing how 1.75% more oxygen can cause so many problems in these officials minds. They must not realize that almost everything on the road today can compensate for atmospheric oxygen content at sea level and 10,000 feet with plenty of cushion to spare.

The mandate was a dumb idea. It didn't match the vehicle fleet. Now the people who screwed this up the first time want us to forget their record and trust them that they know what they are doing this time. This time they get to damage my car and other machines that were not designed to use higher blends.

Marcus, Your vehicle and other vehicles will not be damaged. They will run better, more complete combustion will take place in your engine, pollution will be reduced, etc. Internal combustion engines were invented to run on alcohol with a little adjustment to the timing and air intake...which fuel injected engines will do automatically at blends up to and exceeding E50 ("non" flex fuel cars)! Ideally, we will start making alcohol only engines so that common vehicles will have high compression ratios and get better gas mileage than regular gas only cars while delivering more power.

Patrick, If we are going to believe science fiction, why don't we skip ethanol and go straight to dilithium crystals? The ethanol industry refuses to guarantee its product and repair my car if you are wrong.

Rather than splitting up the market with different age cars getting different fuels, it is seems the EPA could just increase the allowable ethanol content in gasoline by 1% per year for the next 5 years to get to E-15. Keep the trend going to get to even higher blends like E-20 or E-30. This is predictable and gradual which should help stabilize agricultural and other markets. Could be a concept worth looking at.

Predictability is important to industry and agriculture. Its time to stop jerking the biofuels industry around and get on a predictable - sustainable path to the future, for everyone’s benefit, including farmers, consumers and industry as a whole.

Thomas, What is the theory behind the gradualist approach to higher blends? If the seals in your car dissolve as a result of the higher blends, will a gradual changeover give you a different outcome? Do you think that a 1996 Chevy Impala would build up a tolerance to the higher blends like an addict builds up a tolerance to heroin? Or is this the boiling frog metaphor? If you do a bad thing gradually, the victim won't react.

More debunked propaganda from Marcus...ethanol will not "dissolve" the seals in your car! Especially vehicles made after about 1982 when lead (an octane booster) was pretty much phased out and automakers were making all their cars alcohol tolerant since alcohol is also a tremendous octane booster without the nasty side effects caused by lead or benzene exposure. Alcohol (ethanol) is non toxic, clean burning, very high octane & renewable. Oil companies hate it because alcohol can be made by anybody which means they can't patent it and charge an arm & a leg for it to boost their profits!

Patrick, You don't need permission from an oil company to sell E85. Go do it! Put it in your own car! Go do it! When the Germans and Japanese ran out of gasoline at the end of WWII, their planes stayed on the ground. It wasn't because they couldn't get permission from Exxon to fill them with E85. And it wasn't because they didn't need higher octane. It was because their machines weren't built for hooch.

Any one have a bridge for sale?

Like grains of sand being washed away from under a giant statue, the Big Oil Gasoline Monopoly is slowly being chipped away at. This is one more grain of sand gone! Fuel competition will be good for the consumer.

Lots of firms install their own fuel pumps. Every ethanol plant should install a blender pump and make its employees fill up with E50.

Marcus, you seem to not grasp the concept of consumer choice. We should have blender pumps installed at all gas stations so that motorists can decide if they want to fill up on E10, E20, E30...E85 or E98! They will have they choice to fill up on dirty gasoline with a little bit of the good stuff in it or any blend up to nearly straight ethanol (denatured with 2% denaturant to make it undrinkable). Ethanol (from many biomass sources) is excellent as an additive to gasoline but even better as a replacement to gasoline! Clean burning, cool burning (burns 300-400 degrees cooler than gasoline), renewable, domestically produced and the list goes on & on.

Just further proof that Ethanol is a superior fuel. Indy 500 racers already know this very well...they have been running pure ethanol for 4 years now and are breaking all kinds of records.

How sad, what a world we live in, no one seems to tell the truth any more. Someone needs to stand up and tell all these self interest special groups -- NO!

Many of you may recall the decision by the EPA to eliminate lead out of the gasoline back in the mid '70s. There was NO ARGUEMENT - JUST DO IT. All the engines produced before then required replacement of valves and valve seats to keep them from burning up on unleaded gasoline, if you couldn't find leaded gasoline. Also, expensive catalytic converters were required to burn the CO out of the exhaust of unleaded gasoline and if you accidently ran leaded gasoline, you would destroy this expensive catalytic converter. I don't recall the upheaval by the special interest groups or general public over those changes then. Corn ethanol was brought on mainstream as an oxygenate to replace the EPA banned additive, MBTE. Now the EPA is a stumbling block to the very component used to replaced an additive that they banned. This is quite confusing to me - If we don't use an ethanol blend at all - what oxygenate required by the EPA, are we suppose to use. This is pretty basic - rule out all the rhetoric on subsidies, foreign oil, mathematic equations, etc. and it still appears to me that we must have ethanol blends to comply with the EPA. If the same money was spent supporting this basic fact as is spent on fighting ethanol, there would be no need for all this bickering. NO ARGUEMENT - JUST DO IT.

The mandates of the EISA of 2007 were poorly drafted. The mandates exceed the blend wall using E10. And as long as those mandates remain in force, any approved higher blend is mandatory, since the mandates cannot be fulfilled using the current vehicle fleet (At least the one on Planet Earth) and E10 alone. And some of us would like to choose for ourselves. If E15 was safe, the ethanol industry would guarantee it and assume the liabilities. But the ethanol industry wants the revenues, but not the liabilities. Heads we win! tails you lose!

I do not have a problem with people having a choice, some people are smokers and that is their choice but I don't want to have to be liable for their health care down the road. We all know ethanol reduces tailpipe emissions and makes for a cleaner environment overall, I would propose we follow the example set by congress in regards to the tobacco industry. Simply if you are going to continue to use something not good for you or the environment you pay for it in the form of higher tax. A fuel surcharge of say $.25/gal for gasoline not including say a minimum of 15% Ethanol should be passed as law, the funds generated by the surcharge would be used in the road fund coffers to rebuild our country's roads and bridges. Consumers still have a choice of fuel and much needed funds to repair our roads are generated if they choose a non environmentaly friendly fuel. A win win scenario for all.

Ag producer gets close to advocating what many of us have been advocating instead of subsidies for biofuels: taxes on pollution. However, to put a surcharge only on gasoline that does not contain a minimum of 15% ethanol is rather arbitrary. For one, it favors one solution (ethanol) over others, no matter how the ethanol in question has been produced. Second, it creates a "knife-edge solution" -- E14 gets a $0.25 per gallon tax imposed on it, but E15 doesn't -- even though it might, for distribution-cost reasons, have the same effect on the environment for E10 to be used in one locality and E20 in another. Third, it treats ethanol as pollution-free. Ethanol is cleaner burning in respect of some pollutants, but not of others (especially when burned together with gasoline): all combustion creates some pollution. ---- That all said, I hope there can be more debate on how one might approach the question of reflecting pollution in the prices that consumers pay for their fuels.

Mr Steenblik, Are you suggesting a carbon tax? I think your points above are reasonable, and I suppose a carbon tax would be a smoothly graduated, fuel source blind tax that would be an effective tax on pollution.

Mr. Farley, Yes, I am suggesting that there be some carbon tax as you describe. It would also make sense to graduate taxes according to other pollutants, but what makes that difficult for many fuels is that the levels of pollution created, unlike CO2, often do not depend only on the characteristics of the fuel itself, but also on how the engine is performing (e.g., particulate matter), or even local climate conditions (e.g., ozone precursers).