Slashdot Mirror

Biodiesel from algae is most desirable when it is part of a system. For instance, algae can be produced in wastewater pond systems and processed for biodiesel, then it can be processed again for butanol, thus serving as part of the sewage treatment process, and providing fuelstocks for two direct-replacement fuels, one for diesel and one for gasoline. David Ramey of ButylFuel, LLC told me in an email conversation that they would like to use this type of processed algae cake feedstock, but that so far they have been unable to secure a reliable source of the stuff which is not salt-contaminated, which is a problem for their process. (You could also process the waste algae for alcohol, but it is unlikely to be as efficient as Butanol and it is not a 1:1 replacement for gasoline. Butanol can also be mixed into diesel fuel, but that's not its claim to fame.)

I just noticed I forgot to account for the maybe 30% efficiency of gas versus 85% electric engines. That makes the current numbers much lower but still borderline unreasonable.

There's no reason the existing liquid fuel distribution infrastructure can't transport biodiesel or butanol which is a drop in replacement for gas. Wholesale conversion to electric vehicles doesn't make sense if you have to pour a billions of dollars into the electrical energy infrastructure to support it. You end up using more oil in the longer run in that scenario.

I believe our primary goal should be energy independence, with the next goal as cleaner fuels and energy production methods. Just switching to a different energy carrier like batteries or hydrogen isn't making much progress towards either goal. Presently, plug-in vehicles just mean the burning coal or oil elsewhere. Hydrogen still has a huge number of problems like energy density, and the fact that we're making it by cracking nat gas and throwing away 20% of the energy - just burn the nat gas instead!

http://butanol.com/

>> 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.

This is a myth. More demand does not result in consistently lower prices. There is hardly any material on the face of this earth more desired than gold - and yet its price is not only not dropping, it's a de-facto international standard for measuring inflation of currency!

For all intents and purposes, no amount of "research" is going to cause the price of gold to drop, short of some magical form of alchemy. The price of ethanol may drop somewhat as the infrastructure needed to produce, store, and use it is developed, but it will very quickly reach a "commodity" status and its price, like the price of corn, or steel, or milk, will tend to stabilize in the long term.

BTW: Ethanol is crappy fuel. It's hard on your car, it's not as energy dense as gasoline, and producing it here in the 'states is ridiculous. Consider instead: Butanol!

1) It won't ruin your fuel economy. (MPG) It's energy density is almost identical to gasoline.

2) It mixes with gasoline.

3) It requires no modifications to your gas-powered car.

4) It produces as much as 42% more energy per acre than Ethanol.

5) It doesn't evaporate as fast as gasoline, mean it doesn't "go bad" as fast.

Go Butanol!

I got into a conversation about alternative energies over the holidays with a friend of mine who has her PhD in something Agricultural Science related from Purdue, and when the conversation went to ethanol she informed me that apparently there's a much better alternative in butanol. According to the first link I've provided, Butanol is both a "cleaner" fuel source than ethanol and has a higher energy content (110,000 Btu per gallon for butanol vs. 84,000 Btu per gallon for ethanol, for reference gasoline is 115,000 Btu per gallon). It requires little to no modification of existing engines and can be shipped through existing fuel pipelines. Historically it's been considered less viable than ethanol because of relatively higher production cost.

About Butanol Energy

However a researcher from the midwest (Ohio I think) has patented a process by which it can be produced more cheaply than ethanol *without having to change existing gasoline infrastructure.*

Here's the researcher's company.

More Butanol Information

From what my friend told me, the only thing preventing this right now is a lack of funding and public awareness. So please read it for yourself and spread the word.

BioEthanol is rather silly when compared with BioButanol.
BioButanol works almost perfectly in existing cars and pump infrastructure.

And it performs much better too, offering comprable mileage to gasoline.
Rather than Ethanol which offers about 30% less mileage.

Overall it shares all of it's benefits, and almost none of it's weaknesses.

http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Butanol
http://butanol.com//images/Bubbles%20with%20gas.JP G

So far DuPont and BP are big backers of the tech.
http://www2.dupont.com/Biofuels/en_US/FAQ.html

While not specifically named in the article, this seems a lot like butanol, a four-carbon alcohol. Its energy density is very close to gasoline, and far better than two-carbon ethanol. We can even use it to fuel modern gasoline engines without modification (the site I referenced ran several thousand miles in a 1992 Buick). BP and DuPont are co-operating on a project to bring butanol into the alternative fuels market.

And it's carbon neutral.

Ethanol from grain isn't the best fuel out there, but it's here NOW, it works NOW, and you can get a vehicle that runs on ethanol NOW. And it's domestic and renewable. What's more, it has upgrade paths: cellulosic ethanol, engines designed specifically for ethanol (greater efficiency and able to run on hydrous alcohol), and butanol.

Biodiesel? Transesterified biodiesel is made from alcohol. How is it going to be cheaper than ethanol? And no: 10,000 hippies running their VWs on waste fryer oil aren't going to reduce global warming or reduce US dependence on imported oil.

Besides using coal to fuel the production plant, a lot of energy is used to fertilize and irrigate the corn

Uh...where? I have NEVER seen corn being irrigated.

the corn may also have to be transported a long way to the facility

That's why you make and use ethanol where the corn is. Or wait for butanol, which doesn't corrode gasoline pipelines like ethanol does.

On average, about 40 percent of the energy needed to make ethanol goes into growing the corn and about 20 percent is needed to transport it, with the production plant accounting for the other 40 percent. But, of course, the energy costs and emissions associated with farming and transportation can be much higher than average.

And it's light outside except, of course, when it's dark. Did a high-school student write this?

Helloooooooo? Petrocrats in Russia? Oil dollars to Islamic extremists by way of Saudi Arabia and Iran? Anything that gets the US off of imported oil ASAP is a GOOD THING.

Didja take a look at that website about the solarplane? All kinds of mumbo about "pushing the envelope", and by the language, it's pretty clear that anything resembling construction is a *long* way off.

But, any dolt could take a nice, efficient catamaran, replace the sales with a solar rigging and a trolling motor, load the boat down with some MREs, and start sailing.

Not saying it'd be pleasant, but I'd rather sit on a Hobicat than try to get through the night in an ultralight plane knowing that battery life would just *barely* make it through the night, with almost no margin for error. (and yes, I'm a pilot)

The kind of aspect ratio they're talking about would be mighty difficult to fly, since it would be very prone to flutter, and the difference between the cruising speed and the stall speed would be almost negligable!

Not to mention having to be both very lightweight and also very strong...

Scary!

Better to fuel up a general aviation craft on butanol call it "green" and be done with it! Really, when you read up on it, butanol is some seriously cool stuff.

1) It mixes freely with gasoline

2) It burns like gasoline, in cars unmodified,

3) It can be made from corn, wheat, cheese whey, just about any agricultural product or byproduct.

4) It handles moisture much better than ethanol.

5) It's possible to extract more energy (in BTU) as butanol from corn then as ethanol.

Seriously, the fuel of the future for the United States is here, and it's butanol. (Bio-Diesel is probably more appropriate for Europe, where they have many more diesel cars than the US which is almost all gasoline-powered)

Just as green, and much easier on the pilot!

Many people like to talk about Ethanol based biofuels. The problem is that Ethanol has certain properties that make it unattractive. It is not very energy efficient to produce, it is corrosive, etc.

Anyways, there's a company called Environmental Energy Inc that has found a new way of producing butanol for biofuels. They claim their process is much more energy efficient than current methods for producing ethanol based biofuels. Also butanol has certain characteristics that make it more appealing than ethanol based fuels.

I don't work for these people or anything, but I am stuck analyzing their business in a technology commercialization class. If half of what they say is true, their technology would revolutionize the biofuels industry and potentially make it a legitimate competitor to petroleum based fuels. On the other hand, the company has this weird don't-exchange-control-for-anything strategy that will probably leave them bankrupt.