The big knock on ethanol
By on Jul 20th, 2006 at 6:11 pm
The big knock on ethanol
is that it requires too much fossil fuel to produce. But David Hallberg of E3 biofuels has created a closed loop system to create ethanol with less than 3% input from fossil fuels. Take a video tour of Hallberg’s plant on kicktheoilhabit.org.
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Brazil uses sugar cane.
July 20th, 2006 at 6:12 pmWhatever George Bush eats has to be considered fossil fuel.
July 20th, 2006 at 6:13 pmI’ve never seen any reports on how much fossil fuel it takes to make gasoline.
July 20th, 2006 at 6:22 pmThe stuff sure doesn’t come out of the ground by itself and it doesn’t travel across the ocean by itself and it doesn’t refine itself.
Ethanol from cellulose is also fine. IT is ethanol from corn that has potential problems and a few even argue is not a net energy yielder.
A bigger problem is that ethanol from crops, even with cellulose derived ethanol (allowing you to use crop straw and not just the good stuff, eg, corn kernels) will only get us about 10% of the oil supply in transportation at best. Hence we ding down our use of oil a bit, but for a reliable renewable replacement fuel, I am afraid we really have to look at hydrogen produced renewably.
July 20th, 2006 at 6:35 pmI say we all just slow down and go back to the days of the horse… we can still keep the internet, though.
July 20th, 2006 at 6:40 pmEthanol will never happen, because if it does, Dick Cheney’s stock will plummet.
Darth Cheney will use all of his power to keep this from happening.
July 20th, 2006 at 6:42 pmBigger knock on biodiesel from researchers at Un of Minnesota…”Still, the researchers caution that neither biofuel (soy or corn) can come close to meeting the growing demand for alternatives to petroleum. Dedicating all current U.S. corn and soybean production to biofuels would meet only 12 percent of gasoline demand and 6 percent of diesel demand.”
July 20th, 2006 at 7:35 pmBut, but, but the science to switch to alternative fuels just isnt there! We MUST suckle at the tit of Saudi Arabia until mother Saudi Arabia runs out of sweet Saudi oil… For the sake of our childrens and grandchildrens SUVs!
July 20th, 2006 at 7:42 pmA recent study in Science “Ethanol can contribute to Energy and Environmental Goals” January 27, Farrell et al., found that farming to produce corn is the biggest source of uncertainty in how much greenhouse gas emissions are reduced. The study best estimate found that ethanol could reduce reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 13% and reduce petroleum use by 95% if corn is the feedstock. To really reduce greenhouse gas emissions the study found that it was necessary to switch to a cellulosic feedstock.
July 20th, 2006 at 7:45 pmBigger knock on biodiesel from researchers at Un of Minnesota…â€Still, the researchers caution that neither biofuel (soy or corn) can come close to meeting the growing demand for alternatives to petroleum. Dedicating all current U.S. corn and soybean production to biofuels would meet only 12 percent of gasoline demand and 6 percent of diesel demand.â€
Comment by bones
And yet if we combined 10 different types of alternative fuels it would all add up to 100% … but you know … math … thinking … republicans… maybe in a few years… SOME things just are not “advanced” enough right now…
July 20th, 2006 at 7:47 pmMaybe we need to crawl out of the dark ages and start considering ALL options like logic thinking beings…
The use of ethanol-blended fuels such as E85 (85% ethanol and 15% gasoline) can reduce the net emissions of greenhouse gases by as much as 37.1%. Ethanol-blended fuel as E10 (10% ethanol and 90% gasoline) reduces greenhouse gases by up to 3.9%. By the year 2010, the reductions for E85 and E10 are projected to be 44.5% and 4.6%, respectively. This represents only a small percentage of the total greenhouse gas reduction required from the Kyoto Protocol. It is expected that once ethanol is made from cellulose, the greenhouse gas emissions reductions will further improve. Hemp produces four times as much cellulose per acre than trees.2
July 20th, 2006 at 7:49 pm…don’t forget to ditch the high mileage SUV’s, gas guzzlers, jalopies and the like.
AND for crissakes, drive less?.
then, maybe, band-aid cures like ethanol might make a difference…
July 20th, 2006 at 8:41 pmI saw Mythbusters burn recycled fryer grease in a diesel Mercedes?! Who knows what the long term effects on the engine might be, but I’m sure you could mix it with standard diesel.
Fast food joints would love to be able to sell grease rather than pay someone to dispose of it.
Now, if I could just start my recylced, state-funded, liposuction-fat-for-fuel program.
You could still eat like a pig, then have your fat sucked out and sold for fuel?! We could kill two birds with one, er, stone…
July 20th, 2006 at 8:49 pmThanks for posting!
you have just provided me with my new [Barak Obama Yardstick!
If this information becomes part of his Leadership on this issue, he goes drastically UP in my estimation.
and if it doesn’t…
July 20th, 2006 at 8:54 pmWho’d have figured cow crap may soon be gold.
Hey did you read about that scientist that created oil from pig manure?
http://www.chiefengineer.org/content/content_display.cfm/seqnumber_content/2515.htm
Chemically, pig dung isn’t as different from oil as one might think. In Zhang’s reactor, a process known as thermochemical conversion partially breaks down hydrocarbon molecules that make up most of the excrement, and voila: porky petrol.
But given duhbyas fondness of Pig…..
July 20th, 2006 at 9:08 pmMake a car battery that is capable of going 500 miles before being re-charged.
Shitcan the combustion engine as much as possible. What is it, 120 years old now? The battery operated cars they made 10 years ago worked. They just only got 120 miles. That isn’t enough for some of us, well me anyway…..
July 20th, 2006 at 9:58 pmEthanol is not feasible also because it won’t make us oil independent, even if we used all our corn:
” According to a study published by the National Academy of Sciences, it was found that neither ethanol nor biodiesel can replace much petroleum without having an impact on food supply. If all American corn and soybean production were dedicated to biofuels, that fuel would replace only 12 percent of gas demand and 6 percent of diesel demand, the study notes. The study also questioned ethanol’s environmental benefits noting that despite the 12 percent reduction in greenhouse gases, ethanol has ‘greater environmental and human health impacts because of increased release of five air pollutants and nitrate, nitrite and pesticides.’ ” (July 13th “t’s Corn vs. Soybeans in a Biofuels Debate” The New York Times)
So you all might want to change paths on this whole corn ethanol promo cuz its not the answer, cellulose ethanol has more promise
July 21st, 2006 at 1:01 amI don’t know. If we are to ue renewable fuels, it seems to me that there are those more economical than ehtanol. Ethanol is oxygenated (a bonus), but I would think corn oil (or all kind of other plant oils) would work pretty well as biodiesel. It should take less energy to extract oil than make chamical alterations.
Really, instead of focusing on ethanol, the overall energy and mass balance needs examined for various renewables.
Other ideas….How about animal fat? We can’t seem to get rid of the stuff fast enough.
How about methane from the pig manure lagoons from modern agriculture practises. Look, it makes the methane (just as much a greenhoyuse gas as CO2) anyway. May as well use it.
July 21st, 2006 at 1:18 amPlease don’t encourage ethanol as a fuel alternative. It’s still a fossil fuel. It just hasn’t fossilized yet.
We have to move beyond burning things for energy. Especially organic mass. Beyond the Pump.
All of our enthusiasm for agri-fuels distract and detract from our focus and innovation on a real solution to greenhouse emmissions – electric cars powered by zero emmission electricity like solar and wind.
Don’t be fooled by the immediate, national security need to eliminate imported oil. Greenhouse gas emmissions are a far greater national security threat than instability in the Middle East.
Secondly, don’t be fooled by the proponents of agri-fuel. They are just the same old agri-businesses looking for a new way to make a buck.
As was previously posted here, there is not enough plant life on the north American continent to make a dent in our energy consumption. The land and top-soil could never sustain it. It is a pipe dream and another short term scheme to make a profit at the expense of posterity itself.
Be responsible. Before you even mention fuel alternatives, talk about efficiency. Don’t call 8it conservation. This word make people afraid. But “real men” like efficiency. And our use and production of energy is highly inefficient.
Ethanol is a dirty scam.
July 21st, 2006 at 1:40 amThe Bush Regime will never allow any new fuel to replace petroleum, nor will Hillary Clinton do so when she is installed as president in 2008 > Bush clan and Clintons are partners now!
July 21st, 2006 at 2:41 amIt’s the rate of production that matters. This is true whether the fuel is gasoline from crude oil, oil sands, shale, or ethanol. The rate of production must be in line with the rate of consumption. None of the alternatives will come close to matching the forecast decline in the rate of production of fuel from crude oil. None.
And this rate of production is likely reaching it’s zenith. I second the comment above – Before you even mention fuel alternatives, talk about efficiency. It may simply be the only viable option on the table. This is a matter of the utmost national security. “real men” also like national security.
Develop sensible alternatives as rapidly as possible, but don’t fall into magical thinking.
July 21st, 2006 at 6:42 amA question about the E3 plant featured here. The claim is that the integrated system reduces the costs of refining corn into ethanol, right? But what about the energy used to till the soil, plant the corn, irrigate it, and then harvest it? My sense (from reading up on ethanol) is that these tasks require a lot of fuel, which seriously diminishes the efficiency of ethanol as a gasoline substitute? Does the E3 plant do anything about this problem?
July 21st, 2006 at 8:11 amThe only silver bullet I can see are battery powered everythings and the batteries get charged from pebble bed nuclear reactors. But seeing as the anti-nuclear crowd goes nuts about anything with the word nuclear in it (even though pebble beds cannot “go critical”) then that would mean we need to use NON-silver bullet solutions. OR we just educate everyone on pebble bed reactors…
This means using ethanol and and wind and a composite of many different energy generating technologies… FIRST to get us out of the middle east and THEN go about making things more pollutant free.
July 21st, 2006 at 9:22 amThe Bush Regime will never allow any new fuel to replace petroleum, nor will Hillary Clinton do so when she is installed as president in 2008 > Bush clan and Clintons are partners now!
Comment by Jay Randal — July 21, 2006 @ 2:41 am
Thank you, Jay Randal, for adding so much , as usual, to the discussion…not
July 21st, 2006 at 10:41 amIf you want answers to the questons around ethanol, please download the Is Ethanol Controversial? paper at http://www.khoslaventures.com/resources.html .
July 21st, 2006 at 11:17 amLol post 25 robg > whatever floats your nonsense boat > lol.
July 21st, 2006 at 1:07 pmThe combined ethanol plus biodiesel gives about 10% or so of what we get from fossil fuels for transportation. That is assuming we get cellulose based ethanol (not corn).
Pebble bed reactors are interesting but would exacerbate the following problems about nukes:
1) Reprocessing–without reprocessing and breeding, pumping up demand for nukes gives us a lifetime of decades for nuclear power. We might push that to ~1000 years with breeding (extracting plutonium produced from the nonfissile and abundant isotope of uranium). Reprocessing is much harder with pebble bed fuel (you have to take off the carbon and silicon and deal with a huge number of little uranium pellets).
2) Pebble bed is tailor made for dirty bombs. The fuel units are tennis ball sized and even when hot easier to handle than the large fuel rods of conventional reactors. Grab a couple, make a dirty bomb.
July 21st, 2006 at 1:41 pm[...] Interesting Ethanol news – a process has been invented that lowers the fossil fuel imput to creating ethanol to 3%. [...]
July 21st, 2006 at 2:23 pmBio fuels, like ethanol and methanol, produce greenhouse gases when burned, so they are no better than the hydrocarbons burned in fossil fuels. Ethanol is burned
When ethanol is burned, it produces:
C2H6O + 3 O2 –> 2 CO2 + 3 H2O
When methanol is burned, it produces:
2 CH3OH + 3 O2 → 2 CO2 + 4 H2O
Oil, coal, peat and natural gas are all fossil fuels that result from bio mass that has been fermented under high pressure and high temperature for eons – so in a sense, they too are bio fuels.
Bio fuels are NOT a solution to global warming, just an alternative to fossil fuels, to lessen our economic dependence on foreign sources of fossil fuels.
July 21st, 2006 at 3:08 pmkindness,
Batteries aren’t the best way to store electricity from nuclear or hydro-electric dams for transportation. This energy can be stored chemically, by converting it to chemical energy. Electricity can be used to add hydrogen and oxygen to liquid chemicals, to later be released through catalyst or reduction. These liquid chemicals would not need special high pressure tanks, as gaseous hydrogen and oxygen requires. The oxygen and hydrogen would then be reacted in a fuel cell, which produces electric power and water.
The spent liquid chemicals could be recycled by using nuclear or hydro-electric power to add the hydrogen and oxygen back. Whenever you fill up with the hydrogenated and oxygenated liquids, you would drain the spent liquids for recycling.
July 21st, 2006 at 5:19 pmFinally, I have the last word on this subject.
July 21st, 2006 at 6:02 pmWord, bro.
July 21st, 2006 at 10:43 pmTo Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions
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