Ethanol is taking over the world!
 

Or at least brazil and the US: http://gas2.org/2008/05/22/ethanol-u...rises-sharply/

I was watching something on tv about Brazil's ethanol and they have it made. Apparently they don't have to import any oil. In addition to that, the ethanol they produce is from by-product/waste of sugar canes so they aren't replacing food with it (unlike in the U.S).

Ya, we just don't have the amount of rescources to produce the Millions of barrels we use consistantly. It's just not possible for the US to produce enough for the amount we use.

True, switching back to oil a sec I think Alaska is capable of producing only 16% of the oil we need. We a hungry bunch ..

I hope corn ethanol producers don't drag this effort under.

"I hope corn ethanol producers don't drag this effort under."

They are a powerful bunch ... and it looks like they are going to get their way with that ridiculous farm bill, too.

Isn't switchgrass a more efficient way to make ethanol?

I'm not exactly looking forward to more ethanol. I currently use a 10-15% blend and it's dropped my fuel economy at least 4-5%

thats what i heard, i dont know why they dont start using that more :(

Corn producers or ethanol producers, to whom are you referring?

In what way is that farm bill ridiculous?

Switchgrass grows well in a tropical climate, not so tall up north.

Fuel economy in what units? Btu's per mile? $ per mile?

"Corn producers or ethanol producers, to whom are you referring?"

I was referring to corn farmers that sell their crop to produce ethanol.

"In what way is that farm bill ridiculous?"

Farmers are having a record year. Taxing citizens to pay farmers subsidies when they are doing better than they ever have is ridiculous (subsidies in general are economically inefficient ... should be used as a last resort to keep producers afloat, etc ...).

"Switchgrass grows well in a tropical climate?"

I have no idea. I thought I'd toss it out there for discussion. Maybe it could use its own thread? Maybe I should have searched here for "switchgrass" first?

"Fuel economy in what units? Btu's per mile? $ per mile?"

I was calculating MPGs. I suppose $ per mile is just another conversion factor from that figure. No idea how to arrive at BTUs per mile without doing some research first. ... just hadn't occurred to me.

Switchgrass will grow in Canada and the U.S. from what I know of it. It is suppose to have a much better energy return than corn when turned into ethanol.

Corn ethanol is bad for the environment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/08/sc...=1&oref=slogin

Bad for the economy.

http://www.american.com/archive/2008...anol-subsidies
http://www.usnews.com/articles/busin...op-prices.html

Bad for FE.

http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/c...anol_ov1_1.htm
http://www.drivingethanol.org/ethano...questions.aspx

Energy will be priced by heat units eventually, that is still shakin' out, but it has to happen.

I scanned these articles and all were spun to the max.

Any new source of energy is bad because people actually think, they can burn as much as they feel like.

Does anyone have any updates on where we are with cellulosic ethanol?

I think that some of the negative press on biofuels is because it can cut into the fossil fuel kings tax base. Many midwest states/provinces could become energy self sufficient if biofuels is done well. Right now I agree that how ethanol is produced is not a net benefit to anyone but the seed and fertilizer producers.

Biofuels do have the potential for people to become fossil fuel free. Currently I heat with my own wood, so the fossil fuel input is probably $40/year for the chainsaw and atv, this saves us maybe $1500-2000 per year in oil or propane or electricity. We do however spend about $3000/year (or more with current prices)on gas for the two cars, so if I can cut this down to near zero I would be very happy to watch oil prices be manipulated to infinity...

It seems using canola oil is the easiest way to get off the pipeline, diesel cars can be converted fairly cheaply and I don't have to build/learn how to operate a still, to create alcohol, plus tractors are mostly diesel too. Not many diesel chainsaws though...

Anyhow, I have quite a ways to go before we burn our own veggie oil in our cars but atleast I'm thinking about it.
Ian

Legislation is already starting against wood burning in some states. You need to invent a way to extract the energy without creating smoke. Any ideas? This is a big one. Did you know you can heat wood in a chamber and burn the gas in an engine?

Corn ethanol is certainly not the best, but does have advantages.
The super negative info always assumes that Gasoline just appears, it does not, "production" of gasoline has a HUGE environmental impact in my area.

Ethanol will never replace gasoline. While it can match gasoline's efficiency through increased compression, it cannot be produced in large enough quantities to sustain our current appetite and growing demand.

The race to biofuels is only going to lead to food competition and environmental degradation. If you enjoy the thought of rainforests, virgin deserts, and open coastlines you should plan your trip now. Man has a propensity of defecating on his own doorstep.

I couldn't have summed up the issue any better myself. The solution isn't to switch from heroine to cocaine, it's to lose the addiction. Big Oil -> Big Agribusiness -> Big Electricity gets us nowhere.

I have two ideas: catalytic converter or masonry heater.

Smoke (i.e. particulate matter) only exists due to incomplete combustion. Most stoves or heaters burn wood at too low of a temperature to get anywhere near complete combustion.

That growing black hole called the oceanic dead zone that expands every year in your backyard is not caused by oil...

I would easily guess that on an energy/pollution ratio, gasoline scores extremely high. The extraction, processing, and transportation of oil is among the most efficient of all forms of energy (~98% I believe). It is it's use that is inefficient. The oil sands may be changing that though...

- LostCause

ethanol in brazil is produced by cutting down huge swaths of rainforest to grow it.A most foolish investment and temporary solution.

ethanol is very corrosive and will corrode metal pipes hence it must be transported by truck not pipeline.

ethanol is heavily subsidized in the usa and is driving up food prices dramatically in the supermarkets.

interesting catch 22 is how much more would gas be without the ethanol blending?Stop ethanol and food price goes down but gas goes up.What a predicament.I noticed quite a few people going slow like me at <55mph on the freeway here in LA.Have never noticed as many slow drivers here.

Try 80% for gasoline and 84% for diesel, and thats only extraction and refining.

Outdoor boilers are being banned in many states that I know of, but don't confuse an outdoor boiler with a modern indoor woodstove. Catalytic or not, the new EPA woodstoves burn very efficiently and cleanly if used properly.

Nearly all outdoor boilers seem to be designed with a grade 2 knowledge the combustion process, therefore they are about 1/3 as efficient as an indoor woodstove and pollute around 100 times as much.

The major problem with indoor woodstoves is the lack of automated fire management, we run ours very hot and therefore burn as much "smoke" as we can but this requires supervision until the fire stabilizes. We aim for a stove top temp of 800F so combustion temps must be 1400F or more. I should try to record a video of adding a single peice of paper into the stove at these temps. It takes about 45 seconds to a minute for it to slowly be reduced to ash, you can see everybit of energy being pulled out of it. Many people still run their indoor stoves to cold in an attempt to burn overnight, and they produce lots of smoke. With an automated draft control, woodstoves could be very efficient even for those that don't have the knowledge or time to monitor and control them properly.
I have read that a company is thinking of developing one as a retrofit so hopefully they will become common soon.

Woodstove are also carbon neutral, and for us, we are people most effected by the pollution that is emitted. Obviously they aren't so great for an urban environment if everyone has one but I imagine they could added at a density of 1 per block without a major air quality reduction.
Ian

Any biofuel that competes for agricultural resources (arable land and fresh water) is ultimately a bad idea.

Biofuels have to grow in deserts and use salt water. Otherwise they cause the price of food to go up.

It has to rock to be a corn farmer these days. Corn has tripled in price since the ethanol subsidies were enacted. I've seen it over $10/bu on the CBoT. But that means the price of corn flour has also tripled. Tough times in Mexico where corn flour is a staple.

Ethanol (actually denatured alcohol) does have its virtues. It has fabulous octane rating. The Corvette used as a pace car at the Indy 500 had a John Lingenfelter LS7 modified to run on E85. Lingenfelter's company jacked up the compression, advanced the ignition timing and increased the fuel injector size and with Emerson Fittipaldi at the wheel that 'Vette easily did the 150 MPH pace speed these open-wheelers need these days.

In my area I would guess that agricultural production could be increased by 100% easliy if it made economic sense to do it. Myself and 4 neighbors have 250 acres of unused fields and no one is knocking on our doors asking to rent them, and I'm nt pricing out a tractor to do it myself. This land is not prime farmland but it all was farmed in the recent past. Because modern industrial agriculture is so fuel dependent that I don't think farmers are coming out much ahead than they were before ethanol, especially on less than ideal land. Government subsidies had artificially lowered the price of corn to where it made sense to convert it to ethanol, now ethanol subsidies still promote corn being used even with a tripling in value.

Corn ethanol seems to be a disaster as a biofuel, corn is hard on the land, takes a huge amount of fertillizer, and is energy intensive to harvest and process. I do think that a process to utilize cellulouse could be implemented well with crops that produce well without so many energy inputs.

The final solution is just use a fraction of the energy we use now, then the demand for any fuel is less and biofuels can play a significant role without affecting food prices. Our consumption based society will finally be seen as unsustainable and we can work on being carbon neutral and nutrient neutral(sustainable agriculture, not industrial agriculture).
I imagine north america will be alot more like western europe which isn't so bad. Integrated public transportation and all that. The average family won't own 2 cars and won't need to.
Ian

France is one of, if not the most densely populated countries in the world. The only thing that passes for wilderness is the French Alps, which is covered with mountaineers year round. Western Europe is "progressive" because they need to be. The problem with people is that they don't consider diets until they become obese.

Europe destroyed their land. North America is well into the process. What ever happened to learning from others' mistakes? :o

"Economics" - what a dirt farmer dangles in front of a donkey.

- LostCause

I couldn’t agree more. Right now it has become very fashionable to bash Bio-Fuels but it doesn’t make sense to me as I see a future of electric cars and vehicles that cant use electric running on bio-fuels. How else are we going to solve our CO2 problems?

Agricultural resources diverted to fuel production is not the problem, the problem is we have never properly applied the correct value to our resources. An article that I recently found states that the U.S. spent $611.3 billion between 2000 and 2005 on agricultural subsidies, that averages to $101.9/year (source http://www.speroforum.com/site/article.asp?id=14305 ) and yet another source I found stated that ethanol subsidies were $7 billion for 2006 (source http://zfacts.com/p/807.html ).

While corn to ethanol is really not the solution because it has an energy payback of 1.3:1, If you look into what Bio-D gets and Brazilian ethanol are getting it becomes much more promising (3:1 and well over 4:1) showing that Bio-Fuels actually will work. What current subsidies and regulations are doing is paving the way for future crops to hit the ground running.

It seems silly to complain about the $7 billion in subsides on ethanol compared to $101 billion the U.S. spends on agriculture and the $101 billion really shows that we have not been paying the market rate for food for a real long time. Where I am from there has been no money to be made in farming for 20 years. Where are the incentives to increase food production if there is no money to be made and why should farmers struggle just so people can have cheap food that they waste. We need to start pricing our resources properly and production will shift away from goods that we no longer need and to ones that we do.

"Western Europe is 'progressive' because they need to be. The problem with people is that they don't consider diets until they become obese. Europe destroyed their land. North America is well into the process. What ever happened to learning from others' mistakes?"

That would require people to think ... and they would rather turn on American Idol and turn their brains off.

To get the most from our fuels, we need two things:

1. Engines designed around and dedicated to burning 100% pure ethanol.

2. Pure gasoline for our current vehicles.

Automakers can bump up the compression ratio and change the fuel maps for existing engines that burn only ethanol. That way they'll be able to squeeze as much power as possible from it.

Also, by getting the ethanol out of our gasoline, existing cars will get an instant 10% mpg boost.

However, running ANY amount of ethanol in cars designed for gasoline is foolish. No good comes from giving gasoline engines ethanol. The reason the oil companies aren't up in arms about it is because it doesn't actually decrease gasoline consumption. The volume displaced by the ethanol is on par with the MPG decrease. That extra volume may as well be air. The only favors done here, are for the corn farmers.

Brit Hume read this short bit on Special Report about 1 week ago:

"A provision in the farm bill vetoed by President Bush — but made law when the veto was overridden by Congress — calls for up to $16 billion more in crop subsidies than previously projected. The program is called Average Crop Revenue Election or ACRE.

The Washington Post reports it gives farmers the option of trading in their traditional subsidies for a government pledge to give them 90 percent of the difference between what they make in a given year and their usual income. The hitch is the formula for determining benefits pegs the payments to current — record — prices for grain. So if prices fall back to normal levels, huge subsidies will result.

One farming blog is urging readers to sign up for the program, calling it
'lucrative beyond expectations.'

Defenders of the farm bill say grain prices will not come down much in the five years the legislation is in effect — meaning food prices will stay close to their current record high levels."

I got to see David Blume speak not too long ago.

He's the author of THE book on making your own ethanol.
He is a big fan of making alcohol from SUSTAINABLY grown crops.

He also won an award for his reporting on how oil businesses were buying up corn futures, artificially, driving up the price. (NOT food vs fuel, which is more media spin than anything)

There is a big ethanol plant about 20 miles from my house, which has just gone bankrupt. They put a TON of money into the place to get up and running, and then the price of ethanol dropped in half, once the "corn-bubble" popped.

Who will buy it? Perhaps an oil company? They would get a really good deal on the place. We do have more and more government requirements for "clean energy", and big businesses would do well to diversify.

We do have some county planners who are presenting the concept of an Eco-Business park on that property. Would be really cool if that went through!

My opinion is the biggest problem with any "green", or energy concern is everyone spends all their time trying to defecate all over anyone's ideas that nobody ends up doing anything.

"easy to criticise, hard to create"

Ethanol is NOT the solution that will save the world.

But it IS a bridge away from petroleum which IS a finite resource (how can it not be?)

Most importantly, ethanol is something that runs in our countless millions of existing cars with minimal adjustments, so we don't have to take millions of working machines and throw them away and waste energy and resources building new ones.

Throwing away a working, already-delivered-to-its-theater-of-operation machine is ecologically irresponsible and also retarded.

Sure, let's keep building next-generation vehicles that don't need liquid fuel and stuff... but let's ALSO keep using the machines we have so we don't have to figure out what to do with several hundred million hunks of metal and plastic eh? They'll wear out on their own eventually.

Frankly, if you want to fix the problems caused by humans, the only logical solution is to stop making so many humans. Not by genocide, not by war, not by eugenics, just by waiting longer to start having kids. Have as many as you want, but wait till you're 25 at least. In 100 years, you can have 5 generations breeding at age 20, or 4 generations breeding at age 25, get it? Nobody is prevented from having kids, nobody is oppressed, no rights are being denied anybody, no holocaust is needed. Just everyone getting on board and waiting to have kids until they're older... and better able to afford/raise kids too.

Until people realize the solution to the problems of man is less men, and all get on board with a solution instead of just nagging and whining and criticising it... we may as well be shoveling sand against the tide with a broken spork.

Any car made since 1990 can run up to 50% alcohol NOW, no modification necessary, so why convert, just add alcohol.

I don't get your logic, any alcohol you burn is displacing gasoline, just at 95% per gallon equivalent. The real reason big oil is not up in arms is that not enough alcohol is yet in the system to make a difference to their bottom line. As far as doing favors for corn farmers, wouldn't you rather give a dollar to an Iowa corn farmer than give it to despots, dictators, and thieves? If you want to have a US foreign policy that can affect real change in the middle east, stop giving them our money.

Darren

Buy his book!
 

Hi all,
I just joined this thread, and find it disconcerting how much misinformation is out there concerning ethanol. I humbly suggest everyone go out and read David Blume's book "Alcohol Can Be a Gas" before repeating the things you hear on TV about ethanol, most is incorrect at best. Well, at least read the first couple of chapters, it's a BIG book! :thumbup:

bennelson,
It doesn't sound like the operators of the distillery near you had a good business plan, if they were entirely dependent on corn. They should have been able to switch to another feedstock and keep on going.

Darren

Brazil's corn oil comes at a steep price, just the labor alone would be considered slavery.

They put up with it, why, I can only guess there exists little in the way of options.
These folks are doing what must be done.

Would you go out and mow down fields of sooty, stenchy corn with a machete?
Because to use machines in the production isn't efficient, it's all done via manual labor.
Oh sure, they burn it first to make it easier.
Which in turn presents a huge ecological weight.

And I could be wrong but I don't think it's good for longevity.

I wonder why aren't there programs to plant biofuel crops in yards. I'm sure there's a lot who will want to make a little extra money without having to do much.

Yard waste
 

Wouldn't that be cool! Mow the yard, take it to the distillery, and trade it in for a gallon of fuel. Write a grant proposal and send it to the government, and see if you can get it built under the "energy research" stimulus program.

Darren

I haven't heard the Brazilian use much corn for fuel, they mostly use sugercane to make ethanol. I think they mostly use corn for cattle feed, just like we do in the US. As far as working conditions and pay, I don't have any facts, so I can't really comment.

As far as longevity goes, burning and making fuel from living plants is carbon neutral, carbon in, carbon out. Digging up carbon from millions of years ago is not. So if you are concerned about Global Warming, it is much better to grow and burn then to dig and burn.

darren