OT of an OT: Ethanol

[Fyron]

Rather than clog up the other thread, I'll reply here:

Note that I only referenced that site for the number 7, adding in the reference from a really quick Google search. I wasn't basing any argument off of it. Take that as you will.

It doesn't matter what crop you use, you still have to use crops to create the ethanol. This will, beyond any shadow of a doubt, increase the amount of crops that have to be grown. You can certainly use excess crops that don't get sold for food, but there are only so many of those. Talking about a nation with a population of 266+ million that has who knows how many 10s-100s of millions of cars, you're going to need to grow a lot more crops. Then think about China and India converting to ethanol. This has nothing to do with oil companies or PR, it is basic logic... Such efforts will require cultivating more land. This is not deniable. More wilderness will be tamed. There are tradeoffs with converting to ethanol to think about. There are always tradeoffs to think about. That was my only point. Any new technology has good and bad tradeoffs that have to be considered.

Can plastics be made efficiently from ethanol, or in a similar manner? Or will they still require crude oil?

Atrocities said:
FlexFuel cars are already being sold in South America in great numbers. They have an established distribution infrustructure for ethanol fuel and have been selling it for years now.

The myth that we would need huge amounts of land to cultivate bio-fuel is a myth started by the oil companies in order to discourge research into that area. The truth is, you can make ethanol from many crops not just corn.

Alcohol fuel is the best alternative and is what I believe they are using in Brazil at the moment. Remember, the oil companies don't want alternative fuels on the market and have virtually bottomless pockets to keep the anti alternative fuel PR machine going.

"Its bad for the environment." - false
"Its bad for your motor." - False - look to flex fuel engines built by most manufactures now.
"It will cost more to produce." False, look to brazil and see that it is about a 1/3 the cost of gas.
"It will hurt the economy." Untrue, just flat out a lie.

Don't buy into the PR machine funded by the oil companies.

Imperator Fyron said:
Ethanol would require a huge amount of land to be added for cultivation for any sort of wide-scale use (possibly as much as it takes to make food for 7 people, if this site is reputable), which is not particularly good for the environment either (though obviously in a different way). Ah, tradeoffs. Hmm... a quick search for "ethanol production" found a number of issues with using it as a fuel.

Renegade 13 said:
I wish is was possible to make a car that could be powered by nitrogen! After all, about 76% of the atmosphere is nitrogen. Unfortunately, it's a rather stable element, and wouldn't work as a fuel at all.

Now ethanol...that's a fuel we should be using more. Cheap, easy, renewable, environmentally friendly.

Whoops, a little off topic there. Oh well.

[Atrocities]

What your creating is alcohol. There is a huge myth that you need thousands of acres of land to make one gallon of alcohol fuel. That is simply untrue. If you take the combined US gross production of alcohol beverage in the US compared to the land used to make these products, you will find that per gallon of alcohol produced, less than 1/1000 of an acre of land is used.

Sugar is the primary ingrediant to making fuel. Keep that in mind. Corn fuel is just a very very very small part of the overall products that can be grown to make fuel. Sugar Beats take up very little space compared to the amount of sugar they make. Converting that sugar into fuel still yeilds a very healthy amount something on the order of 80%. Now this is all from memory mind you so my numbers could be off, but the truth is, alcohol fuel is more pratical than we have been led to believe.

[Will]

Hmm, I always wonder which threads cause these random OT hijacks...

Anyway, most of what I have read regarding ethanol advocates the use of switchgrass. That is basically the kind of grass that is naitive to, and grows all over, the US Midwest and Southwest. The process involves crushing out all the sugary and juicy bits of the grass, then beginning the distillation using the remaining stuff as fuel. That said, I have no idea on the feasability of the process. Switchgrass is already abundant, and would require no work to cultivate, and only a little amount of work to harvest it (you mow it). But I haven't seen any studies about what volume of ethanol a typical acre of land can produce in a 365 day period, or if the leftover material used to distill the ethanol is enough fuel for the entire process. Plus I do know that it will take a while to modify the infrastructure to accomodate different fuel; most likely, initially all of it will go into a biodiesel blend, where 80% is standard diesel, and the rest ethanol. Once engines that are designed to work with pure ethanol instead of gasoline, then we could start seeing pure ethanol pumps at a "gas station" instead of blends.

Anyway, I have seen a flurry of commentary on the subject of converting our energy dependence from oil to ethanol, so we should be seeing the results of a lot of research and many studies come out during the next year. It may turn out to be a bust like so many claimed magic pills, but it is still promising at this point. I wouldn't be suprised if there is a study within two years involving creating an ethanol distillery and distribution center based on the switchgrass method in a small town somewhere in the southwest US (probably in Arizona or New Mexico, outside of one of the university towns), with several residents agreeing to purchase ethanol-optimized vehicles and only being able to buy fuel at that one location. They'll do it because it'll be subsidized by a government research grant, and will likely be supported by a few universities, so the residents would essentially get a second new car at discount, and will buy fuel for it at what would likely be 1/3 to 1/2 the price of gasoline. If that works without much of a hitch, there would be more grants to slowly expand it out, etc.

[Fyron]

"What your creating is alcohol. There is a huge myth that you need thousands of acres of land to make one gallon of alcohol fuel. That is simply untrue."

Nobody posted such a statement though? What post are you reading? The study I had linked to talked about a _years_ worth of energy anyways...

"Corn fuel is just a very very very small part of the overall products that can be grown to make fuel."

I don't understand why you are so concerned about corn? The study had to pick something to analyze... Its not really possible, or even advisable, to analyze every single plant in one study. Part of suggesting we implement a new technology is determining whether or not it can work. Studies like this are a basic part of the scientific process.

=0=

Hey Will, go to your IRC window please.

[Thermodyne]

You make alcohol (hydrocarbon) with sugar (hydrocarbon), which most plants produce. Beets, Cane Sugar and Corn are the big three sources right now. And there is a good source for almost any agro climate. In the US, we hear about corn because the industry spends money to promote itself. Beets would probably be a better crop for production. A self renewing grass is the best. Problem with bio alcohol fuel is the energy it takes to make it and then the fact that takes 1.63 gallons of pure alcohol to equal the energy in a gallon of gas. As for emissions, we don’t wear gas masks in alky race gars because they look cool. One of the combustion byproducts of methanol is formaldehyde. Alcohol is hard to store, and it is so hydroscopic that it visibly absorbs water from the air. Also, methanol (the kind that comes from bio) is highly corrosive, it will eat through an aluminum fuel cell in less than a years worth of use. Bio only pans out if there is no oil. It does not offer a true source of substitute energy. Much of the promotion today is done in pursuit of US Federal subsidies. Public funds being spent on bio should be diverted into hydrogen research IMHO. Or…..Bio research should look at hydrocarbon based oils as fuel. Peanuts and soybeans being two sources already in production along with corn. It takes less energy to produce and returns more energy per gallon.

[Jack Simth]

Why burn sugar ethanol when we can Manufacture Crude Oil?

Which, incedentally, also gets us such useful things as plastic, in addition to fuel, takes no conversion of the existing distribution setup (just conversion in production - instead of pulling it out of the ground, farm and alter), and even allows for recycling. Assuming, of course, that the company's claims are accurate.

[Thermodyne]

Well from my poorly educated point of view, it is foolish to waste time and money on carbon based fuel sources. At some point in the future, we will reach the atmospheric tipping point for atmospheric carbon load. I would like to see a government backed push into hydrogen. Right now, the major challenges are basically just engineering, and money will usually push to technology past these kinds of barriers.

[Jack Simth]

Funny thing about that.... plants, and things that eat plants, have a net 0 atmospheric carbon impact when you burn the resulting fuel - plants took the carbon out of the air, animals ate the plants to get their carbon, carbon is bound up in the fuel, carbon goes back into the air when burned. Some of the carbon gets pulled out for things like excrement and plastics, so in general it will actually reduce the amount of carbon in the air, not increase it.

Might have a little problem if global warming is the only thing holding off an ice age, but hey, everything has risks.....

Biggest problem with hydrogen is that it only stores the energy used to split it; it doesn't capture it from the sun (like a plant does) in order to make hydrogen burning (to water, rather than helium....) a viable option, you first need more power than you plan to generate from burning the hydrogen. And even then, we still need plastics.

[Captain Kwok]

Yay! A good old biomass discussion!

Ethanol could work for the US in a limited capacity, such as replacing 15% or so of gasoline if developed well. Which is good! Like Jack Smith said, ethanol does not add any net CO2 emissions - like fossil fuels or even synthetic fossil fuels would. Bio-desiel is also gaining popularity, although it's a mixture of various fatty acids.

Corn is the most commonly used crop for ethanol in the US, but there are other alternatives (like Will mentioned, switchgrass etc) that have less environment impact.

Brazil's fuel industry was almost entirely ethanol-based from the mid-70s to the early 90s - until they had too many cars - so they've now got to import some gasoline. The main reason why Brazil was able to do this was sugarcane, which is one of the most efficient plants for making ethanol.

The holy grail of biomass is the ability to degrade cellulose effectively. A number of cellulose-degrading enzymes have been isolated from fungi and have been cloned into E. coli etc. for fermentation of organic materials.

Ethanol is probably best suited to displacing gasoline use, rather than as a power source. It'd be better to develop the other greener alternatives (hydro, wind, etc) for now.

Bio-plastics tend to be made out of cellulose or starch-based polymers and are really just starting to gain popularity. Right now a significant percentage of landfill is petro-plastics that will take forever to degrade, so they'll keep making up a higher and higher percentage of our refuse. You'll probably notice a few of the more green stores using starch-based bags.

Lastly, the hydrogen dream is nice but it's a little ways off. I think it will take the invention of something like fusion power to provide the amounts of extra electricity we'd need to split water into hydrogen. If that happens, then we might get lucky and see a new H2 economy.

[Renegade 13]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ethanol_fuel

For ethanol to contribute significantly to transportation fuel needs, it would need to have a positive net energy balance. To evaluate the net energy of ethanol four variables must be considered: the amount of energy contained in the final ethanol product, the amount of energy directly consumed to make the ethanol (such as the diesel used in tractors), the quality of the resulting ethanol compared to the quality of refined gasoline and the energy indirectly consumed (in order to make the ethanol processing plant, etc). Although a topic of debate, some research that ignores energy quality suggests it takes as much or more fossil fuel energy (in the forms of diesel, natural gas and coal) to create an equivalent amount of energy in the form of ethanol. In other words, the energy needed to run the tractors, produce the fertilizer, process the ethanol, and the energy associated with the wear and tear on all of the equipment used in the process (known as fixed asset depreciation to economists) may be more than the energy derived from burning ethanol. Two important flaws are cited in response to that argument: (1) the energy quality is ignored, which economic effects are large. Principal economic effects of energy quality comparison are the cleanup costs of soil contamination stemming from gasoline releases to the environment and medical costs from air pollution resulting from refining and burning gasoline. and (2) the inclusion of development of ethanol plants instills a bias against that product based strictly upon the pre-existence of gasoline refining capacity. The real decision should be based upon the long term economic and social returns. The first counter-argument, however, is specious, in that burning a gallon of cleaner ethanol is still pointless if it implicitly requires burning 2 gallons of dirty gasoline to create that ethanol in the first place.

Depending on the ethanol study you read, net energy returns vary from .7-1.5 units of ethanol per unit of fossil fuel energy consumed. For comparison, that same one unit of fossil fuel invested in oil and gas extraction (in the lower 48 States) will yield 15 units of gasoline, a yield an order of magnitude better than current ethanol production technologies, ignoring the energy quality arguments...It is suggested that an energy balance of 200%, or two units of ethanol per unit of fossil fuel invested, is needed before ethanol mass-production will become economically feasible.

According to a report by the Minnesota Department of Agriculture, when taking into account the energy needed to extract, transport and refine crude oil into gasoline, the final energy product of gasoline has an energy ratio of 0.805. That means ethanol production is 81% more energy efficient than gasoline, without factoring in the energy qualtity considerations. A 2002 report by the United States Department of Agriculture concluded that corn ethanol production in the U.S. has a net energy value of 1.34, meaning 34% more energy was produced than what went in. This means that 75% (1/1.34) of each unit produced is required to replace the energy used in production. The study also concluded that the energy used to produce and convert the ethanol was from abundant domestic sources, with only 17% of the energy used coming from liquid fuels, therefore, for every 1 unit of energy from of liquid fuel used, such as gasoline or diesel fuel, there was a gain of 6.34 units of energy. MSU Ethanol Energy Balance Study: Michigan State University, May 2002. This comprehensive, independent study funded by MSU shows that corn ethanol production has a net energy value of 1.56: it produces 56% more energy per unit volume of ethanol than it consumes. Nevertheless, as noted earlier, these relatively small energy gains are problematic, for they imply that between 2.79 (assuming net energy value 1.56) and 3.94 (assuming net energy value 1.34) units of ethanol must be produced for each unit of ethanol that can be sold to consumers. Actual net energy values might be improved by measures such as burning corn stalks (which are not fermentable using current technology) to run some parts of the corn ethanol production process that currently consume petroleum, gas, or ethanol (similarly to the way bagasse is currently burned to produce energy to run the ethanol production facilities in Brazil). As of 2005, ethanol production from corn may require an increase in the cost of petroleum before to become economically viable without government subsidies. Although for periods in the year 2005 ethanol traded for less than gasoline and diesel before any subsidy.