gnick writes to mention Wired is reporting that an Illinois startup is claiming they can make ethanol from most any organic material for around $1/gallon. Coskata, backed by General Motors and several other investors, uses a process that is bacteria based instead of some of the other available methods. The bacteria processes organic material that is fed into the reactor and secretes ethanol as a waste product.
Seems to me that the Metropolitan Sewer District already uses bacteria on organic matter, without getting any ethanol. Milwaukee is selling their organic matter as Milorganite, but most other cities just *waste* human waste.
Of course, there's always the possibility that your E85-ready vehicle will run like merde. And if your neighbor's RV running biodiesel smells like french fries, what will your E85 car smell like?
Actually, yes. With a generic biomass to fuel process, nearly any biomass could be used, including human corpses.
With the rising cost of funerals and cremation services, maybe the burial method of choice in the future will be in the gas tank of your grandchildren.
Doc: "Mr. Fusion powers the time circuits and the flux capacitor, but the internal combustion engine runs on ordinary gasoline. It always has. There's not gonna be a gas station around here until sometime in the next century. Without gasoline, we can't get the DeLorean up to 88 miles per hour."
it seems that this is the cost of production, not the cost to the consumer. If we are selling it a buck a gallon from the pump after the inclusion of taxes, then I am interested. Until then, please use my corn for good uses such as the syrup in my Mt. Dew like God intended.
No one is debating how much oil there is(maybe a little), all I've heard for the last couple years is how the refineries can't refine the oil fast enough. The environmentalists must be rich because they keep trying to shut down any plans to build more refineries to keep up with demand.
Sounds good to me. I'm all for artificially limiting the supply of gasoline to force people to improve their efficiency and seek out alternative fuels. I hope they don't build anymore oil refineries, ever.
There's just one problem with that thinking. It assumes that all oil gets turned into gasoline. It is only one of many products that are all more expensive because of rising oil costs.
Just so you know, as soon as I read the first five words or so of your rant and saw the ad hominem attacks coming, I stopped reading. If you want to make a point, try to do it without resorting to insults. Obviously you cared enough about what you wrote to wrote a large diatribe, and if you want your time to be used effectively, you shouldn't hurl insults, because it just means you will have wasted your time in writing it.
Such a long rant, so lacking in substance. Whine whine whine whine.... But then there's something! I figure it's not about all these bullshit reasons you guys spout off. It's all about control. You and your do what you do to control people, for nothing more than the satisfaction, because you have to live by the same restrictions you put on the rest of us. Your lust for power makes that all worth it, I guess.
I support rising fuel costs, with taxes if necessary. You know why? Because I want control. Not of you
He wasnt referring to your wanting to live the way you choose. He was referring to the attitude that you should be able to do what ever you want regardless of how it hurts others. Just because killing off 100,000 caribou doesnt hurt you, that does not mean that it doesnt hurt others. There are people in this world that live off of caribou meat. Caribou meat makes up 75% of the diet of the Gwich'in tribe for instance. How does your desire for cheaper oil trump their desire to eat? Because the people in
Whatever happened to the conspiracy theorists from my childhood, you know, the ones who always claimed "the car makers and big old buried that 100 mpg carburetor design", and the like!
I don't know the merits of this particular deal, but it never made sense to me that "car makers" really cared one way or the other about the fuel costs (and the SUV craze has borne that out...)
Car makers like to sell.... wait for it..... cars. Despite the Illuminati Trilateral Bush 9/11 conspiracy theories that are popular on Slashdot, GM really doesn't make out that well when oil is expensive and people don't buy their cars. Case in point: Look at the profits oil companies are making right now vs. the insane losses GM is making right now. Now unlike the John Edwards types who look at profits as always being "evil" they are instead incredibly useful. GM would not be putting a dim
with cars lasting longer these days, people will sell their old one just because the new one gets like double the gas mileage
Which would be a quite dumb thing to do. Okay, it depends a bit on the car and how long your commute is per day. Let's see an example:
I have an 8 year old car which does 10l/100km (23.5mpg [google.com]), and as such it's a gas guzzler for European standards. It still is in prime condition though.
My current car, new cost 35000€ (± 51000$ [google.com])in 2000, and is currently valued about 10000€ (± 14500$ [google.com]) on the second hand market.
A new, smaller, more fuel efficient car, like the one my wife has, does 5l/100km(47mpg [google.com])
My wifes car cost 23000€ (± 33500$ [google.com]) in 2006.
Gas currently costs 1.2€/l (6.66USD/gallon [google.com]). While one car uses less gas, the prices will soar in the same way and as such the evolution of said price doesn't really matter. It shortens the final calculation, which I admit.
One gas tank in both cars is 50l (13.2gallon [google.com]). Coupled with the above information, one gas tank costs 60€ (88$ [google.com])
Now look what happens: I sell my car for 10000€, and buy a new fuel efficient one for 23000€. I now have 13000€ spend, that I have to justify with future gas savings. That's the equivalent of 13000/60 = 217 fill ups! The equivalent of 217*50 = 10850 litres, which means I can drive 108500km with my old car, or 217000km with my new car. That's the equivalent of a bit more than 7 years for the old car and 14 years for the new car. Now look at those figures! In 7 years, my car will be 15 years old and have no value (10 years later it will be a vintage car though) That's a very long time to recoup costs.
Anyone saying the buy a new car "because it has better mileage" should first do this small calculation. If the cost is not recouped in a short time (which means you drive a lot), then it simply is not worth it. Sure, you might have other reasons, but "saving money" is not a valid one.
Ethanol [wikipedia.org] has about 84K BTU/gallon of energy for use in a piston engine. Butanol [wikipedia.org] has about 110K BTU/gallon, compared to an average of 115K BTU/gallon for unleaded gasoline. Butanol also does not absorb water out of the air like ethanol does readily. Butanol can be made by via bacteria fermentation of biomass similar to like ethanol can. Butanol does have a problem with not vaporizing good enough for cold starts in very low temperatures, but that could be overcome with electric heater incorporated in a vehicle's fuel injector system for operation in cold weather.
I guess I might as well karma-whore some more...I completely missed the Wiki page for Butanol Fuel [wikipedia.org]. I also think that Wiki article is wrong about butanol's melting point being 25.5 deg C, that is for pure "tertiary-Butanol", not "n-Butanol" which is the isomer that is preferred for fuel.
process that is bacteria based instead of some of the other available methods.
The bacteria processes organic material that is fed into the reactor and secretes ethanol
as a waste product.
The Illinois startup patentd "a process for using bacteria to transform something into stuff"
and promptly sued everyone in posession of compost.
"Hey, since they beat us to the smartphone, the only thing we could do in response was test the outer limits of stupidity," said Joey, the CIO.
Time could be running out for ambitious entremanures wanting to cash in on the USPTO, however, Joey continued:
"The USPTO asked us a question, which was 'What time is it?' They hadn't ever asked any questions previously. We fear that this question could herald an unprecedented era of consciousness at the USPTO."
Thats right keep dropping production to drive the oil prices up. That will work for a while yet, but now everyone is gunning for them. They drove the oil prices up too high creating the incentives to start driving innovation to help eliminate them from our lives.
You don't get the feeling they're waiting for a critical point and then planning to release oil faster than ever for another 5 years, bankrupting everyone who invested in alternative energy, before lowering production again and repeating the cycle?
"inthishouseweobeythelawsofthermodynamics" is cute when someone's bragging about their perpetual motion machine. It makes you look ignorant when the story is about someone converting one form of energy to another in an incrementally more efficient way than before. News flash: it's obvious that current production methods can be improved upon. What part of that smacks of breaking the laws of physics?
"Even if you produce it county by county, you still need an infrastructure," he said. "People aren't going to go to some remote location for fuel."
This has not been my experience. I have met countless stupid people who will drive 20 miles to save 2 cents per gallon on gas. People would probably drive 50 miles to save 5 cents per gallon of gas.
If this stuff was sufficiently cheap, I'll bet there are people who would drive for hours just to fill up and save themselves $20 at the pump.
Don't expect the price of any petrol replacement to be any less than petrol if widely deployed.
One of the reasons for the high taxes in the UK for fuel is that they want to keep traffic numbers down. Pushing the price up should discourage people from driving so much in theory. Of course, the government just becomes dependent on the taxes and so will want a big cut of any other fuel source. Certainly, in the UK if you drive a diesel fueled by used cooking oil, a waste product which would normally be dumped, the government expect you to pay tax on it. The justification is that the tax is used to maintain the roads although that is supposed to be what the road tax is for. Anyway, it is currently cheaper to use vegetable oil and pay the tax than to use fossil diesel but if it gets more popular to use such biofuels the price differential will go away. Sure, they will be largely carbon neutral but the government will still want the same amount of income from fuel sales, they're addicted. I think the US drivers will have to get used to similar things. Accept it, whether the fuel is from fossil or modern sources, the price is going to remain high. You'll never see $1 per gallon again.
So what we are all excited about is that we might be able to run our country on crap coming from single-cell, brainless, parasitic, life-forms... Isn't that by exactly how we have been running this country for 200 years. It's not called Ethanol. Its called Congress.
we could get 2% efficiency, but if we're getting it cheap, that's all that matters, right?
Yes.
The efficiency argument as it pertains to ethanol is related to the so-called "energy positive" problem. The concern is that if it takes more energy to create the ethanol than it does to farm it and convert it to fuel, then what exactly is powering all that farm equipment? It can't be the ethanol, or we'd eventually run out of energy.
On the other hand, grid power consolidates the power infrastructure and therefore is wonderfully inexpensive. If this machine did nothing more than take grid power and convert it straight into ethanol, it would be a miracle machine. It's almost as good as if you had a machine that converted uranium or plutonium directly into millions of barrels of ethanol. If you get a slight boost from the energy already stored in the corn, so much the better!
The key thing (economically) is to get off of oil. Oil is starting to weigh down our economy and gives far too much power to current and potential enemies. Making transportation cheap again would rebound the economy, bring food prices back in line, and generally improve things for the U.S. (and really, the rest of the world) all around.:-)
The worst estimates are that we're getting 124% energy out with ethanol with current technology - a net gain. And those numbers are based upon old data for crop and ethanol yields and equipment.
Correct. Unfortunately, the current refinement processes still result in a more costly product per unit of energy than petroleum. Gasoline prices are close to making ethanol affordable, but not quite. The advantage to this process is that it would make ethanol cheaply. A result that is far more desirable than pure efficiency. If it's highly efficient in the end, all the better.:-)
BTW, Pimentel still disagrees that ethanol is energy positive. He's really just being a jerk, pushing data that's nearly 30 years old. Not a single study that's independent of his numbers has shown the same results. The only problem is that there are enough gullible people who listen to him.:-/
The nice thing about ethanol is that continued research is almost guaranteed to drive down the price-per-energy cost by orders of magnitudes from what it is today, whereas oil will continue to rise simply by virtue of the fact that it is a limited supply.
So while ethanol is still too expensive to be worthwhile, it's only a matter of time (IMHO a short one!) before ethanol will be as cheap as gas was in the late 90! I still remember 25c per liter (here in Canada, about $0.95/gallon). Maybe then I can affor
The nice thing about ethanol is that continued research is almost guaranteed to drive down the price-per-energy cost by orders of magnitudes
That's true of most technologies. e.g. If we were to embrace hydrogen, I can guarantee that the price of hydrogen fuels would drop like a rock over time.
The real beauty of ethanol is that it is similar enough to gasoline to make it a viable alternative for powering existing engine designs. Which means that the massive investments made in the modern, overdesigned, otto-cycle piston engine can continue to be leveraged while new engine technologies are developed.
In short: Hydrogen would require an entirely new infrastructure. Ethanol would not. Which is a huge win for ethanol.
hydrogen has a different octane than gasoline (so does ethanol by the way), so both require a modified (more expensive) engine.
Hydrogen requires more significant changes to the engine. That's what drives up the price. Ethanol only requires shifts in the timing and better fuel lines to handle the corrosive effects of the Ethanol, thus making it a fairly inexpensive conversion. Flex vehicles are able to detect information about the fuel and adjust the timing of the engine.
As for your next point, both hydrogen and ethanol require new infrastructure if they are to replace oil.
That's a fair point, but I think you overestimate the amount of new infrastructure needed by ethanol vs. that needed by hydrogen. We have methods of building pipelines [usatoday.com] that can handle ethanol. What we DON'T have is a consensus on how to produce, store, transport, or even fuel hydrogen vehicles. Which leaves a rather massive infrastructure gap between ethanol and hydrogen. Ethanol requires some behind-the-scenes changes. No real biggie. Hydrogen requires brand new vehicles, brand new storage systems, brand new transportation methods*, and brand new production methods. We simply aren't ready to build this infrastructure, no matter how much I wish we were.
They only reason they haven't taken off is because ignorant Americans (yes, I'm an American too) have a stupid idea that diesel is dirty technology.
It's not a stupid idea. Up until 2006, the US allowed really crappy quality diesel to be sold on the fuel market. This reduced the pump cost of the fuel, but meant that it was extremely dirty and bad for the environment. There was no way that car makers could create cars that burned these fuels clean enough to meet emission standards. Thus the disappearance of diesel in small vehicles. From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
In contrast, the United States has long had "dirtier" diesel, although more stringent emission standards have been adopted with the transition to ULSD starting in 2006 and becoming mandatory on June 1, 2010 (see also diesel exhaust). U.S. diesel fuel typically also has a lower cetane number (a measure of ignition quality) than European diesel, resulting in worse cold weather performance and some increase in emissions. This is one reason why U.S. drivers of large trucks idle their rigs all night rather than risking a cold-weather start.
In fact, the only reason why ethanol is taking off is because it's a fairly good additive to gasoline to increase the octane rating
That's been true for decades. As a former resident of Wisconsin, I can tell you that nearly all fuel sold in that state used Ethanol as an octane booster, with many pumping stations advertising as much as "10% Ethanol". What's changed is that ethanol is now being blended in at higher quantities while car makers rush to support these "new" fuels. For the first time in my life, I'm actually seeing E85 fuels pop up at your average, everyday gas station. So no, ethanol is not being driven by its use as an octane booster. Your information is out of date.
(* Hydrogen leaks out of nearly any container. That's one of the reasons why it's so hard to transport and store.)
Studies conducted since the late 1970s have estimated the net energy value (NEV) of corn ethanol. However, variations in data and assumptions used among the studies have resulted in a wide range of estimates. This study identifies the factors causing this wide variation and develops a more consistent estimate. We conclude that the NEV of corn ethanol has been rising over time due to technological advances in ethanol conversion and increased efficiency in farm production. We show that corn ethanol is energy efficient as indicated by an energy output:input ratio of 1.34. --July 2002
"Ethanol production in the United States does not benefit the nation's energy security, its agriculture, the economy, or the environment," according to the study by Cornell's David Pimentel and Berkeley's Tad Patzek.
Oh lookie. David Pimentel. What a shocker.:-/
I think you'll find that energy-negative studies not conducted by Pimentel himself invariably contain a "Special Thanks to David Pimentel for providing data." Nice, eh?
124%? That's a pretty slender margin. How many acres are we going to have to devote to ethanol feedstock to supplant oil, at a farm ratio of four times as much land just for running the process to make the fuel for everything else? And are you using fossil-derived fertilizer, or are you synthesizing the fertilizer as part of the energy cycle?
How many acres are we going to have to devote to ethanol feedstock to supplant oil?
That depends on the feedstock. We can never do it with corn, as the math just doesn't bear out. Consider the following, based on the recently-published Crop Production 2007 Summary:
Planted area: 93.6 million acres Average yield: 151.1 bushels per acre Total production: 14.1 billion bushels
Ethanol production from corn usually nets about 9.5 liters of ethanol per bushel. A conversion of all of the corn to ethanol would net about 134 billion liters of ethanol. Ethanol has an energy density of 24 MJ/L, and gasoline's is 34.6 MJ/L, so E85 would come in at about 25.6 MJ/L. Daily average gasoline consumption in the US is about 1.47 billion liters per day, or about 50.9 billion MJ. To match that with E85 would require 1.99 billion liters of E85, which would require 1.69 billion liters of ethanol. Unfortunately, converting all of the corn production to ethanol would allow only 79 days of consumption of E85 at current energy use rates.
It's an extreme, unrealistic calculation, as we could never do a complete conversion, and it doesn't factor in energy used for the planting, care, or harvest. But it does help to drive home the point that it's infeasible to use standard plants for ethanol production. Even switching to sugarcane or sugarbeets isn't going to help because of the massive acreage required. The only mechanisms that will be able to reliably replace our reliance on fossil fuels are those that are able to take advantage of volume of organic materials, including excretion methods such as algae and bacteria, and possibly methods such as cellulosic conversion and thermal depolymerization (if they work out profitably).
Did you consider the cost to plant, harvest and produce potatoes and beets, etc vs corn?
Potatoes cost $2017 per acre to produce.
Corn on the other hand $502 per acre to produce.
That is a rather large difference, corn production also requires next to no man power where as the production of potatoes (root bound crops) is considerably higher.
I recall an article on NPR a while ago. IIRC they were saying that one current but inefficient way to make ethanol from plant matter uses two processes using enzymes. One to break the material down to sugars the other to turn those sugars into ethanol. They were saying the current research is in the direction of having one enzyme do all of this - at reasonable temperatures. They were genetically modifying the same enzymes used to 'stone wash' denim, and IIRC they were investigating enzymes that live in unde
the memories (Score:5, Funny)
aaah...reminds me of college.
Re:the memories (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Better idea (Score:4, Funny)
With the rising cost of funerals and cremation services, maybe the burial method of choice in the future will be in the gas tank of your grandchildren.
Parent
Re:Better idea (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Better idea (Score:5, Funny)
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Mr Fusion? (Score:3, Funny)
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Whoo hoo! (Score:3, Funny)
Only one problem (Score:5, Funny)
Great, but (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Great, but (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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Re:Great, but (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I figure it's not about all these bullshit reasons you guys spout off. It's all about control. You and your do what you do to control people, for nothing more than the satisfaction, because you have to live by the same restrictions you put on the rest of us. Your lust for power makes that all worth it, I guess.
I support rising fuel costs, with taxes if necessary. You know why? Because I want control. Not of you
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What! GM backing cheap fuel! (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know the merits of this particular deal, but it never made sense to me that "car makers" really cared one way or the other about the fuel costs (and the SUV craze has borne that out...)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Now unlike the John Edwards types who look at profits as always being "evil" they are instead incredibly useful. GM would not be putting a dim
Re:What! GM backing cheap fuel! (Score:5, Informative)
Now look what happens: I sell my car for 10000€, and buy a new fuel efficient one for 23000€. I now have 13000€ spend, that I have to justify with future gas savings. That's the equivalent of 13000/60 = 217 fill ups! The equivalent of 217*50 = 10850 litres, which means I can drive 108500km with my old car, or 217000km with my new car. That's the equivalent of a bit more than 7 years for the old car and 14 years for the new car. Now look at those figures! In 7 years, my car will be 15 years old and have no value (10 years later it will be a vintage car though) That's a very long time to recoup costs.
Anyone saying the buy a new car "because it has better mileage" should first do this small calculation. If the cost is not recouped in a short time (which means you drive a lot), then it simply is not worth it. Sure, you might have other reasons, but "saving money" is not a valid one.
Parent
wrong metric? (Score:5, Insightful)
How many joules per dollar does that work out to compared to gas?
Or, even better, how many miles per dollar does that work out to in today's ethanol-powered cars?
Ethanol 89 MJ/gallon, Gasoline 132 MJ/gallon (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Need to make Butanol, not Ethanol (Score:5, Informative)
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More on Butanol... (Score:4, Informative)
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Startup hits "paydirt" (Score:5, Funny)
"Hey, since they beat us to the smartphone, the only thing we could do in response was test the outer limits of stupidity," said Joey, the CIO.
Time could be running out for ambitious entremanures wanting to cash in on the USPTO, however, Joey continued:
"The USPTO asked us a question, which was 'What time is it?' They hadn't ever asked any questions previously. We fear that this question could herald an unprecedented era of consciousness at the USPTO."
OPEC Screwing Themselves (Score:3, Interesting)
for a while yet, but now everyone is gunning for them. They drove the oil prices
up too high creating the incentives to start driving innovation to help eliminate
them from our lives.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Drop the dumb tags already (Score:5, Insightful)
"inthishouseweobeythelawsofthermodynamics" is cute when someone's bragging about their perpetual motion machine. It makes you look ignorant when the story is about someone converting one form of energy to another in an incrementally more efficient way than before. News flash: it's obvious that current production methods can be improved upon. What part of that smacks of breaking the laws of physics?
Re:Drop the dumb tags already (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Good ol' boys in Appalachia do this all the time (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Good ol' boys in Appalachia do this all the tim (Score:3, Funny)
Lookin' for a moon-shine still.
Strangers ain't come down from Rocky Top,
Reckon they never will.
Corn won't grow at all on Rocky Top,
Dirt's too rocky by far.
That's why all the folks on Rocky Top
Get their corn from a jar.
The stupidity of consumers (Score:3, Insightful)
"Even if you produce it county by county, you still need an infrastructure," he said. "People aren't going to go to some remote location for fuel."
This has not been my experience. I have met countless stupid people who will drive 20 miles to save 2 cents per gallon on gas. People would probably drive 50 miles to save 5 cents per gallon of gas.
If this stuff was sufficiently cheap, I'll bet there are people who would drive for hours just to fill up and save themselves $20 at the pump.
No way will it cost $1 per gallon (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the reasons for the high taxes in the UK for fuel is that they want to keep traffic numbers down. Pushing the price up should discourage people from driving so much in theory. Of course, the government just becomes dependent on the taxes and so will want a big cut of any other fuel source. Certainly, in the UK if you drive a diesel fueled by used cooking oil, a waste product which would normally be dumped, the government expect you to pay tax on it. The justification is that the tax is used to maintain the roads although that is supposed to be what the road tax is for. Anyway, it is currently cheaper to use vegetable oil and pay the tax than to use fossil diesel but if it gets more popular to use such biofuels the price differential will go away. Sure, they will be largely carbon neutral but the government will still want the same amount of income from fuel sales, they're addicted. I think the US drivers will have to get used to similar things. Accept it, whether the fuel is from fossil or modern sources, the price is going to remain high. You'll never see $1 per gallon again.
What about the $1 solar panels from last week? (Score:3, Insightful)
Has anything really changed? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:logic (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes.
The efficiency argument as it pertains to ethanol is related to the so-called "energy positive" problem. The concern is that if it takes more energy to create the ethanol than it does to farm it and convert it to fuel, then what exactly is powering all that farm equipment? It can't be the ethanol, or we'd eventually run out of energy.
On the other hand, grid power consolidates the power infrastructure and therefore is wonderfully inexpensive. If this machine did nothing more than take grid power and convert it straight into ethanol, it would be a miracle machine. It's almost as good as if you had a machine that converted uranium or plutonium directly into millions of barrels of ethanol. If you get a slight boost from the energy already stored in the corn, so much the better!
The key thing (economically) is to get off of oil. Oil is starting to weigh down our economy and gives far too much power to current and potential enemies. Making transportation cheap again would rebound the economy, bring food prices back in line, and generally improve things for the U.S. (and really, the rest of the world) all around.
Parent
Re:logic (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:logic (Score:5, Interesting)
BTW, Pimentel still disagrees that ethanol is energy positive. He's really just being a jerk, pushing data that's nearly 30 years old. Not a single study that's independent of his numbers has shown the same results. The only problem is that there are enough gullible people who listen to him.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The nice thing about ethanol is that continued research is almost guaranteed to drive down the price-per-energy cost by orders of magnitudes from what it is today, whereas oil will continue to rise simply by virtue of the fact that it is a limited supply.
So while ethanol is still too expensive to be worthwhile, it's only a matter of time (IMHO a short one!) before ethanol will be as cheap as gas was in the late 90! I still remember 25c per liter (here in Canada, about $0.95/gallon). Maybe then I can affor
Re:logic (Score:5, Insightful)
That's true of most technologies. e.g. If we were to embrace hydrogen, I can guarantee that the price of hydrogen fuels would drop like a rock over time.
The real beauty of ethanol is that it is similar enough to gasoline to make it a viable alternative for powering existing engine designs. Which means that the massive investments made in the modern, overdesigned, otto-cycle piston engine can continue to be leveraged while new engine technologies are developed.
In short: Hydrogen would require an entirely new infrastructure. Ethanol would not. Which is a huge win for ethanol.
Parent
Re:logic (Score:4, Informative)
Hydrogen requires more significant changes to the engine. That's what drives up the price. Ethanol only requires shifts in the timing and better fuel lines to handle the corrosive effects of the Ethanol, thus making it a fairly inexpensive conversion. Flex vehicles are able to detect information about the fuel and adjust the timing of the engine.
That's a fair point, but I think you overestimate the amount of new infrastructure needed by ethanol vs. that needed by hydrogen. We have methods of building pipelines [usatoday.com] that can handle ethanol. What we DON'T have is a consensus on how to produce, store, transport, or even fuel hydrogen vehicles. Which leaves a rather massive infrastructure gap between ethanol and hydrogen. Ethanol requires some behind-the-scenes changes. No real biggie. Hydrogen requires brand new vehicles, brand new storage systems, brand new transportation methods*, and brand new production methods. We simply aren't ready to build this infrastructure, no matter how much I wish we were.
It's not a stupid idea. Up until 2006, the US allowed really crappy quality diesel to be sold on the fuel market. This reduced the pump cost of the fuel, but meant that it was extremely dirty and bad for the environment. There was no way that car makers could create cars that burned these fuels clean enough to meet emission standards. Thus the disappearance of diesel in small vehicles. From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
That's been true for decades. As a former resident of Wisconsin, I can tell you that nearly all fuel sold in that state used Ethanol as an octane booster, with many pumping stations advertising as much as "10% Ethanol". What's changed is that ethanol is now being blended in at higher quantities while car makers rush to support these "new" fuels. For the first time in my life, I'm actually seeing E85 fuels pop up at your average, everyday gas station. So no, ethanol is not being driven by its use as an octane booster. Your information is out of date.
(* Hydrogen leaks out of nearly any container. That's one of the reasons why it's so hard to transport and store.)
Parent
Re:logic (Score:4, Interesting)
Such as? Every recent government study I've seen says the exact opposite.
e.g. The Energy Balance of Corn Ethanol: An Update [anl.gov]:
What you're probably thinking of is sensationalist headlines like this: Study says ethanol not worth the energy [usatoday.com]
Oh lookie. David Pimentel. What a shocker.
I think you'll find that energy-negative studies not conducted by Pimentel himself invariably contain a "Special Thanks to David Pimentel for providing data." Nice, eh?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:logic (Score:5, Informative)
That depends on the feedstock. We can never do it with corn, as the math just doesn't bear out. Consider the following, based on the recently-published Crop Production 2007 Summary:
Planted area: 93.6 million acres
Average yield: 151.1 bushels per acre
Total production: 14.1 billion bushels
Ethanol production from corn usually nets about 9.5 liters of ethanol per bushel. A conversion of all of the corn to ethanol would net about 134 billion liters of ethanol. Ethanol has an energy density of 24 MJ/L, and gasoline's is 34.6 MJ/L, so E85 would come in at about 25.6 MJ/L. Daily average gasoline consumption in the US is about 1.47 billion liters per day, or about 50.9 billion MJ. To match that with E85 would require 1.99 billion liters of E85, which would require 1.69 billion liters of ethanol. Unfortunately, converting all of the corn production to ethanol would allow only 79 days of consumption of E85 at current energy use rates.
It's an extreme, unrealistic calculation, as we could never do a complete conversion, and it doesn't factor in energy used for the planting, care, or harvest. But it does help to drive home the point that it's infeasible to use standard plants for ethanol production. Even switching to sugarcane or sugarbeets isn't going to help because of the massive acreage required. The only mechanisms that will be able to reliably replace our reliance on fossil fuels are those that are able to take advantage of volume of organic materials, including excretion methods such as algae and bacteria, and possibly methods such as cellulosic conversion and thermal depolymerization (if they work out profitably).
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You might want to read the article. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hint: the process does not use corn.
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Re:stop the lies (Score:5, Interesting)
Potatoes cost $2017 per acre to produce.
Corn on the other hand $502 per acre to produce.
That is a rather large difference, corn production also requires next to no man power where
as the production of potatoes (root bound crops) is considerably higher.
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Re:stop the lies (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:stop the lies (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)