Shell To Stop Selling Fuel With Ethanol ??

Hi guys, went into the local Shell servo today to fill a drum for the lawnmower and saw a sign on each pump that "This outlet no longer sells E10 or fuel with Ethanol" well this raised my eyebrows and i made for the clerk to get some info.

Handed me a nice brochure which basically said it was costing more to make E10 than it could ever save and.... "Ethanol may NOT be suitable for most engines and could cause damage" etc etc....

Well thats about time one of the biggies actually got rid of ethanol, lets hope this happens around Australia, much better for our planes !

Good to see! Hopefully the prices stay lower too....

I think it will only be temporary as the NSW Government only deferred the compulsory changeover date to July 2012, unless there has been another back flip. The postponement mentioned was by the former Labor Government. Of course Premium fuel was not included in the compulsory blending.

Ethanol fuel is good for a lot of cars and a lot of people use it, costs a bit less but doesn't last as many km's (So it can be argued there is no difference cost wise between it and regular unleaded, except with E10 you fill up more) and also it could be argued it is slightly less polluting. Interesting to note that you found someone no longer selling ethanol fuel, earlier this year I stopped for fuel just outside of Newcastle and found that they didn't sell regular unleaded, only E10 fuel and then two types of premium (95 and 98). I found this very strange, but I can use E10 in my car so it wasn't much of a problem.

Victoria stopped selling it probably near a year ago in some of the big outlets. Bad timing for Holden whom had just released their ethanol friendly range of engines.

I hope that Shell are declaring when they are selling ethanol spiked fuels in Tassie.

I've considered them a reliable supplier of untainted fuel (until now!)

Down here we have United fuel as well...wouldn't touch it with a barge pole...

Many pilots down here are testing fuel for ethanol....some surprising results as well...

Every pilot should know how to test the fuel they use for ethanol.

The United near us buys it from shell! The Shell at Moorabbin sells fuel to BP and Mobil. Who knows what you are getting, it's literally Russian Roulette!

Call me cynical but Shell don't make ethanol, they have to buy it from Dick Honan of Manildra fame. Would it not be in their financial interests to snub Ethanol and sell only crude based fuels. That way they control the price, bloody hypocrites.

Both petrol outlets ( BP and Shell ) in my local town of Picton stock only "real " petrol and the Shell outlet has had the E10 bowsers taken out of service . I asked the console person at the Shell what was happening when normal Unleaded was no longer available and he said " it won't happen " ... I suppose we will have to see on that one


Dave C

I use fuel from United. Never had any problem, but I test every batch I use in the aircraft for Ethanol. None detected so far. Their 95 RON fuel is labelled as E10, but the one test I did on it showed about 8%. The cars use diesel, not no issue there.

As to whether outlets sell E10 or not, that is currently a choice, but after the deferred legislation becomes active, they can only escape it by selling substantially to marine use.

E10 isn't really greener, just government policy to appease the global warming adherents.

and there is the bottom line on so much that is going on lately,

Dick Honan recieved a huge grant to expand his ethanol plant from his bestest mate, EX NSW Premier Bob Carr. Lucky Dick.

I'd certainly have to agree there. It's always been pie in the sky stuff. Drilling an 8" hole in the ground would always have to be cheaper than dedicating vast areas of productive farmland to growing ethanol crops. I'd say at a guess the world production capacity of ethanol would have almost peaked as we need the land we've got for food production. As far as the green side goes, it's a bit like solar - it can't exist without oil production, bauxite mining, copper & iron ore mining, sand mining, lead mining, & the list goes on. Unless they figure out a way to make things out of air.
Cheers, Willie.

Drilling an 8" hole in the ground would always have to be cheaper than dedicating vast areas of productive farmland to growing ethanol crops....

i'm confused....what way are u coming at this...?

Sorry to confuse, what I meant was that in the long run it has to be more cost effective to drill for oil rather than set up ethanol plants and the associated land use to grow the crops. Ethanol has probably been an interesting experiment, but to increase the useage of it worldwide means the productive land has to be found somewhere or existing food producing land turned over to producing crops for ethanol. Oil always will have critics, but an oil well doesn't need thousands, or 100's of thousands of acres of land to produce the equivalent energy. It's only my opinion, but ethanol is limited in volume of production & useage because of the way it's produced & will probably always be a token thing. You have to grow ethanol, whereas all the oil was formed millions of years ago & all we have to do is get it out & refine it . That's basically what I was getting at.
Cheers, Willie.

Sugar cane waste can be used to ferment ethanol. Basically any plant material has the potential, which would reduce the need to have dedicated ethanol crops. What happens when oil runs out? I think that will occur in about 40 years or so from memory...
But I do agree... ethanol will never be a viable fuel source while oil remains cheaper, which will probably be indefinitely. That is unless we find another way to extract it from organic matter which is easier and more cost effective... but again while oil still exists no one will fund the research for this...
My prediction is that we will end up skipping ethanol as a complete alternative fuel altogether and move straight to electric.

The only reason E10 isn't already mandated, is that production can't yet support the volume needed to support such a policy. Oh and don't forget that while it needs vast areas of crops to feed it, we now seem to think that irrigation is a bogey man too. Water is for rivers, not for food production!

Don't start me...

There's lots of fallacies in "green marketing":-
- Electricity used to be green and clean until they remembered it is primarily produced from brown coal (in Oz).
- Electric cars that were to be all the rage have dwindled to special purpose use for the same reason.
- Fuel cell technology is interesting, but in the end needs an electrical energy source for most. An exception is one that runs on natural gas.
- Natural gas used to be green and clean, but it still results in carbon dioxide and water.

Since carbon dioxide has become the bogey man, there's really only solar, hydro, wind and for base load, nuclear and geothermal. There's lots of other experiments, but they only produce small amounts. I did see an interesting wave power device recently (looks like a string of sausages), but you would have to have hundreds of them tethered in "wave farms" to produce significant quantities of power.

At the end of the day, life is a balancing act. Get it out of balance and it does not work. There just isn't one simple answer.

Solar, hydro, wind, nuclear and geothermal all need large amounts of equipment produced through methods that generally aren't "green" or "clean" too; that equipment usually needs servicing and a fair amount of maintanance over time too, so it isn't as sustainable as it may seem.... Just can't win to 'save' the planet!

Good riddance, horrible stuff cost me an overhaul on one of my outboards a few years ago, after my local changed over to E10 and the only notification was a tiny little notice on the pumps.

it's a shame the pollies don't realise/wish to acknowledge the limitation/dangers of ethanol..

I read some of the reports... They acknowledge that it is unsuitable for aviation use, but only allowed an exemption for marine use. The excuse seemed to be that PULP was not mandated for E10, so those of us who use ULP will have to migrate to PULP when the mandate becomes effective. Those who already use PULP should not be affected.

Hence the reason I test every batch.

Interesting watching 60 minutes last night about drilling and mining in Siberia.They have more oil than Saudi Arabia.There is still plenty of oil left around the world.

And when the oil runs out, we have the technology to extract oil from our coal and we have the largest coal reserves in the world.

They say Russia has the largest known oil & gas reserves in the world, but I'm not sure if that includes all of the off shore territory that they claim ownership of in the arctic circle. They're getting pretty excited about the ice shelf shrinking & the future exploration opportunities there that didn't exist before. It's had it impact on aviation as well, being the main reason the Tu-95 & Tu-160 strategic bombers have been brought out of mothballs this year. Their biggest danger is that their present economy is not so diversified, and is highly dependant by oil & gas revenues. This drives all their military & domestic modernization policies, so if the price of oil drops significantly, Russia's stuffed. But I think high prices might be here for a while.
Cheers, Willie.

I dont normally comment on old threads, but this one was just so depressing. To be honest, I hate reading unchallenged posts.
Ethanol can be made from pretty much all plant matter. Seaweed is a good one. No land use or water issues there! And ethanol is not just used for fuel, theres medicines, food, solvents and everything else. Old engines or cheap engines with cheap valves and some types of rubber hoses are the automotive issues. Im not informed on the reasons the aviation industry cant use it, but i'll assume its due to the same old technology, the same as cars. All arguments to keep relying on fossil fuels are flawed and are only spouted by those invested in the industry or old folk who dont give a **** about the future or those easily misled by advertising by the biggest spender. If we dont develop these technologies now we will be bent over a barrel by those with easy access to oil (assuming the above posts are correct and there is "heaps" of oil left). Mass production makes things cheap. Mass produced solar is cheap, mass produced ethanol will be cheap. And to those saying that the raw materials required to produce "green" products offsets their benefits... Poor form. The humble home solar panel takes only 1 year to off set its carbon emissions made during its manufacture out of its 25+ year life. And what about recycling? (i wont start)
If ethanol use was mandated, big business would make the effort to build/convert refineries because they know there will be a market. Humanity is lazy and it needs a lot of pushing to do anything worthwhile. Short term profit is the only thing we care about (and the only thing Shell probably cares about). We seem happy to drive the system into the ground. This is why we now have a carbon tax... because all those lazy pricks wont look at the future. This is why we have a government paid NBN being built.... because all those lazy pricks would not invest in one themselves.
Make ethanol in fuel compulsory, educate people on the real affects without spin, make people upgrade their engines where necessary, make it worthwhile for business to produce ethanol.

Best to invest our resources in building alternatives NOW; once the stuff gets rare and hugely expensive, we won't be able to afford (or have the time) to do so anymore.

Bio-fuels will be great for those industries that can't switch over so easily. Aviation being the main one. Just about everything else we do (drive cars, light our houses, industrial processes) can be done with renewable or nuclear electricity; whether it is through charging batteries or separating hydrogen. Only ships and aircraft are a real problem, so lets save what we have for those and switch them to bio when we need to.

*How are you going to harvest enough seaweed to make any meaningful contribution?

*Yes there are a lot of people misled by the advertising of the biggest spender not unlike those being misled by some of the propaganda the Green movement pumps out. That's where the laziness of humanity comes in. We are too lazy to educate ourselves so we take what people tell us as being gospel.

*I think you will find the principals of mass production which make manufacturing so much more efficient, are not nearly as effective in agriculture. i.e it is extremely difficult to double production off a hectare of land and is usually only possible with application of a lot of fertilizer and water.

*If you have to mandate something it is usually because it is not an economical proposition. Perhaps they could subsidize the bejezuz out of it instead, like they do with wind farms and solar.

*I'm glad you didn't start about recycling because most of it takes more energy to recycle than it saves, makes us feel good though.

*We now have a carbon tax because it will raise revenue for the government, no other reason.

*The government (the taxpayer) has to pay for the NBN because there is no way the public would pay enough to use it for it to be viable for any business to invest in.
Just my 2 cents

Regards Bill

It's good to see people discuss these issues in a mature fashion, putting forward logical arguments for & against. I'm yet to come across a one sided coin.

Personally, I like to hear both sides of the story as nothing is simple with these issues. Having spent most of my working life in the oil & gas industry doesn't necessarily mean I like the stuff. I'd love to see clean, green energy replace hydrocarbons one day & there is a lot of good arguments for their merit. The big problem is money and volume & economy of scale. At present we use 85-90 million barrels of oil a day (a barrel is around 160 litres) & that's not including gas. So the big challenge is, how do we replace that, given that humans are not prepared to forgo their modern lifestyle ( electricity & transport ). At the present time, it would be a mammoth task to replace one or two percent of oil useage with alternatives (just a guess). Every bit helps, but we really need some sort of new technology that we don't have now.

The big problem with oil is not lack of reserves, but the fact that we've got most of the easy stuff already. The future there means drilling in deeper ocean & more remote locations, where the economy of scale means higher cost. It's hard to know how it will be in 50 or 60 years. It would be good to be able to replace oil as a fuel, but that presents other problems. Oil will always be needed to manufacture tyres, plastic, fertilizer, road surfaces etc unless new technology is developed. At the moment plastics & oil based products are affordable because the overall demand for oil makes production of these offshoots viable. But that changes when you take fuel out of the equation. If Shell, BP etc have to produce smaller volumes just for the manufacture of the necessary by products, the cost of those would be enormous. Hopefully the industrial chemists will invent something new one day.

The other problem, the biggest one, is money, or what some refer to as the petrodollar. The theories of alternative energy are great, but these are only some of the hurdles to overcome. At the moment, it's real David & Goliath stuff. Hopefully the future will be better.

Cheers, Willie.

Firstly I will say that arguing about what cannot be done yesterday cannot be done tomorrow is silly. With that:

*How to harvest enough seaweed? I only suggest that seaweed can be a contributor. However, 4.5m acres of algae to supply all of Americas transport fuel needs sounds pretty promising.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/a...ed-stomach-microbe-turns-seaweed-into-ethanol
http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/algaes-biofuel-bloom/395
Thats the first two hits i got. Just google biofuel yourself.

*Im sure there is some propaganda, but who is to profit from this propaganda? Where do you get your info that is pro-fossil fuel?

*Mass production in agriculture? Read the article linked above for algae production, but we can also grow meat in factories (there are hundreds of articles on this). I also believe yields in general have increased significantly over the centuries... Hydroponics?
http://www.newscientist.com/article...ithout-slaughter-6-months-to-biosausages.html

*Mandating to help progress? I agree it may not be economical today, and that was my point. Mandating is to fast track because we dont want our kids to pay the price of leaving things to the last minute.

*Bulldust. It takes 3 to 4 times more energy to mine ore and turn it into steel than to recycle steel. 25-70% reduction in energy to recycle paper. Plastic is about 90% energy saving.
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&...L_abnb&sig=AHIEtbS17Z2sH3rr0eY9ueiODmx4LOAiYg
http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/briefings/paper_recycling.html
http://greenliving.nationalgeograph...bottles-vs-aluminum-cans-vs-plastic-2376.html

*Your name at work? A carbon tax will hinder heavy polluters and help green technologies. If it makes some $ for the government, then thats the polluters fault.

*from the prices ive seen, the nbn plans are no more expensive than the current adsl plans. The nbn payback period is said to be around 15 years. I guess you still use dial up?
http://www.whistleout.com.au/Broadband/National-Broadband-Network-NBN-Plans

Not just my 2c, but a whole lot of other peoples also.