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Ethanol to Hydrogen Reactor Developed
guacamolefoo writes "CNN reports that researchers at the University of Minnesota have developed a small (2 ft. high) hydrogen reactor that turns ethanol into hydrogen and then uses a fuel cell to turn the hydrogen into electricity. It notably does not use fossil fuels in the process. I knew that liquor would save us all some day."
It notably does not use fossil fuels in the process.
:-)
It'll never make it in this country. Bush and Cheney will make sure their funding gets pulled.
Foster Brooks takes a drive: "Honesht Offishur, I washunt drinking, I hadda shiphon shom gash *hic*"
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Good show 'ol chaps! The more of this we see the better!
An eye for an eye... leaves the whole world blind.
My dad has one of these apparatus, but it works the other way. It's about 8ft tall and converts hydrogen (and some other chemicals) TO ethanol
The cause of, and solution to, many of the world's problems.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
so much for the scientests
So, I see that part of the saying "Beer is the solution to all lifes problems" is partly true.
Evolution or ID?
It notably does not use fossil fuels in the process.
It most certainly does use fossil fuels.
Ethanol takes energy to make. Lots of energy, possibly more than it contains. That energy comes from fossil fuels. Ethanol is not an energy source; it is a different way to store energy, and not a particularly efficient one.
Using Ethanol as a fuel is mostly a way to funnel money to Corn Belt farmers.
A 40 of bacardi still costs more than the amount of gas to fill a geo..
.. than an ethanol powered engine?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
It sure is a good thing that Prohibition was repealed. Can you imagine having to buy your fuel for your home generator on the black market, from bootleggers like Al Capone?
One item of interest is that this new technique converts ethanol to hydrogen at a 60% efficiency rate, compared to the 20% efficiency rate with current technology.
This kind of reminds me of when marty got stuck in the 1800s and the doc tried to put alcohol in the delorean, and it blew out some part of it...
Um.... anyway. This technology is a much better thing than the movie.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
I wonder how much Fossil Fuel is needed to produce the Ethanol? I seriously doubt this is a truly Fossil Fuel Free[tm] method of making Hydrogen fuel.
"You never know when some crazed rodent with cold feet might be running loose in your pants."
-Calvin
If its good for you, its good for your car too.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
Hmmm... Now all we need is a way to take electricity, turn it to hyrdogen, and then turn into ethanol. That would be a real achievement. As a matter of fact, I'll get started on that right away.
I was thinking of converting to paganism, but where the hell can you find sacrificial virgins these days?
to create a 1-1.5 gallons of ethanol. Cover article of Harpers last month...
Homer: "one for you" [fills tank]
Homer: "one for me" [fills mouth]
Cop
Me
Cop
Trolling is a art,
does this pave the way for a move from texas oil barrons and billionair middle eastern oir sheiks to mid-western multi billionair corn barrons...i shudder to think of it
Judging by the stinking aroma hovering around my bed on Sunday mornings, I've been doing this for years.
Unfortunately it still takes fossil fuels to grow corn. I didn't see any mention of this in the article, but it would be insteresting to find out if the total amount of fossil fuels (from things like farm equipment, fertilizers, etc) that goes into growing the corn to create the ethanol to create the hydrogen is the same, lower, or even more than that required to turn fossil fuels into hydrogen directly. If its the same as or higher than the direct route, then this "breakthrough" isn't all that great.
The Minnesota researchers envision people buying ethanol to power the small fuel cell in their basements. The cell could produce 1 kilowatt of power, nearly enough for an average home.
But not anywhere close enough for your average Slashdot user.
"Some fight for law. Some fight for justice. What will you fight for? One day, you will see."
...Too bad liquor is going to cost you $50/litre! .. In other news, AA claims victory, while college students world wide go out in protest.
Is a piss-powered car for all the alkis here...
Wishing I was a millionaire since 1969.
Now when the world ends thanks to the Vogons, it's not five pints of bitters that'll save us, it's five fifths of everclear into some reactor that we power up to fire back at the damn paver ships!
This sig no verb.
That article is pretty damn skimpy on the details. Check out this one which I found at ArsTechnica. Perhaps the most important detail is that a rhodium-based catalyst needs to be heated to 700 celsius for the reaction to have any efficiency.
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
Why not work on fuel cells that can work directly with ethanol. Hydrogen is a pain to store and transport. Alcohol is trivial. IIRC, methanol has better energy density but ethanol is ubiquitous and has other wonderful properties instead....
The problem is the Drug War won't allow it .
Just a few more technological advances, and your notebook will page your crack dealer when your blood levels start to dip.
To Alcohol! The cause of -- and solution to, all of life's problems.
But What about the energy it takes to make the ethanol?
Beer has taught me that yeast create ethanol as a metabolic waste product, right? I believe that yeast also create carbon dioxide as a waste product.
I doubt that large-scale industral ethanol plants are using yeast colonies for production... but what do they use? And what are the waste products from that process?
I understand that reducing our reliance on fossil fules is a good thing. However, if substantial amounts of greenhouse (or other undesirable) gas emissions result from the ethanol production process, aren't we just playing Whack-A-Mole with the source of the pollution?
This is very good news. I already use ethanol blend gasoline in my car. Although it is a bit more expensive, it burns cleaner and (obviously) uses less fossil fuels to produce. There was a saying in the mining engineering department at university: If it can't be grown, it's gotta be mined. If we can move more and more toward the growing, then we're finally truly moving toward a renewable energy economy.
Those GM Hywire commercials are pretty to look at, but don't make it clear to the general public how difficult energy-wise it is to actually produce hydrogen. I hope more research funds get pumped into this kind of technology so we can move toward a hydrogen future at a meanginful pace.
We have an Ethanol plant in our town. It smells awful. When the wind changes a bit - usually when it's getting colder, around football season - it blows right across campus. Freshman used to think it smelled like baking bread. OT, I know. But I wouldn't wish Ethanol on anyone. It'll make you sick, and you don't even have to ingest any..
We are one step closer to developing a bending bot!
Yeap, the second law of thermodynamics IS a problem. Let's see, efficiently convert ethanol into hydrogen? Fine. Have a fuel cell that efficiently converts hydrogen into power we can use? Great.
But it uses no fossil fuels? Well, maybe not directly, but... let's see, where do we get ethanol? Hmm. Well, most of it comes from corn. Corn treated with heat. That heat comes from natural gas, usually. So there's a fossil fuel. What else? Corn has to be harvested. Usually this involves tractors, harvesters, and other large pieces of farm equipment that generally run on.. d'oh! More fossil fuel!
According to the US Dept. of Energy, creating ethanol takes about 29% more energy than it provides. Since most of that energy going into the ethanol-creation process is fossil fuel-based, we'd probably be better off just burning the fossil fuels directly. Using ethanol just burns them up even faster.
A source for more ethanol numbers: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/031128.html
End of lesson. You may press the button.
They may take all the alcoholic and turn it in to power is that a world want to live in...? Give me a bottle of Whiskey and a hole in the ozone!!!!
i'm going to use the power generated by the booze i pour in to RUN MY OWN BOOZE FACTORY !!!!!!!!!11!!
_I_ can turn alcohol to Hydrogen too. (and other various sulfrous compounds)
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
I cant wait until some dude tries siphoning gas....
Yeah - good luck keeping those 16 year olds dry too.
I'll drink to that!
Misleading titles? Inflammatory blurbs? Keep in mind that Slashdot is a tabloid.
Ever noticed how most foods and drinks are sweetened with "high fructose corn syrup", rather than the simpler "sugar", and thought it was a bit odd? I'd always just assumed that it was to disguise the ingredient, but that seemed pointless given the nutritional listing of sugar content. Apparently the resolution is that the US government mandates a price for sugar which is about twice the global one. It does not mandate such a price for corn syrup, so corn syrup is cheaper. The major manufacturer of corn syrup (Archer Daniels Midland) "donates" generously to both parties to ensure the continuation of this policy.
(ADM also runs a mammoth ethanol boondoggle based on government subsidies. Every dollar of profits earned by their corn sweetener operation costs consumers ~10$, every dollar earned by their ethanol operation costs taxpayers ~$30.) (ADM also runs a mammoth ethanol boondoggle based on government subsidies. Every dollar of profits earned by their corn sweetener operation costs consumers ~10$, every dollar earned by their ethanol operation costs taxpayers ~$30.)
What's the point in converting ethanol to hydrogen, then using the hydrogen to heat houses? Ethanol burns cleanly already!
Blue Sky Tomorrows
yes! I knew there was some plus side to college!
(btw, for those humor-challenged ppl, this is meant to be funny. If you still don't get it, go rent "Animal House" or any of the "Revenge of the Nerds" movies)
The little news blerb definately peaked my interest. But it left me asking what happens to the Carbon and oxygen? when the Ethanol is processessed to make the hydrogren. Sure the Hydrogen is clean, but you have two carbon atoms and an oxygen atom left as by products. Oh well just have to go check out the Journal.
Hmm.. Ebaum sounds like Slashdot. :)
--- Tao
A Cornell University professor has researched this thoroughly. To summarize the results, ethanol from fermented corn is not gonna work, primarily since all of the farm machines need gasoline.
There's a growing body of scientific evidence that hydrocarbons are completely unrelated to decaying organic matter.
"fossil fuels" may very well be a misnomer.
... there's finally a use for Budwieser?
I keep seeing comments talking about how much fossil fuel it takes to grow the corn.
;)
Y'all just aren't looking far enough down the road. When hydrogen power is cheap and available, all of the places that we currently use fossil fuels to produce the corn can change to hydrogen power as well. If this is pooh-poohed now, we'll never get to the point where we can make the transition.
I look forward to the day when the harvesters, trucks used to transport the grain, air conditioners cooling the fermentors, and heaters powering the industrial stills are all powered by nuclear and/or hydrogen power right along with my SUV.
I'll believe it when I see it. Their technology may well work exactly as they say, but consider this - if you take 100 kJ of ethanol, no conversion process will get you more than 100 kJ of hydrogen - indeed, while the CNN article didn't say, I'd be pretty surprised if the effeciency was over half. Even if it was 100%, the amount of ethanol required to fuel any significant number of hydrogen cars is stunning - we're talking about many billions of gallons. This sounds less like an environmentally sound tech trick, and more like a pipe dream from the minds of Archer Daniels Midland's lobbyists (who are to thank for the impressive sums already wasted^H^H^H^H^H^Hspent on ethanol fuel production - which has been so far a net environmental loss).
Oh, and also, why on earth would you want to convert the ethanol to hydrogen, anyhow? (For that matter, I've yet to be convinced that converting sunlight to ethanol is a wise move - plants don't really make very efficient solar cells).
Having to choose between booze and electricity.
Now where's my jet-pack?
If this is slightly less efficient than an internal combustion engine, I'd be very pleased, because it would still be an electricity source that is much more efficient and nicer for the environment than the coal-fired power plants that currently produce for my home and office.
Maybe someone with more expertise can clarify this or tell me I'm missing the point...
Since ethanol is usually made from plants which have to be cultivated by equipment that burns oil -- combines, tankers, pumps, etc -- my understanding is that the production of ethanol is actually wasteful of fossil fuels. I've read (but haven't been able to corroborate) that the energy required to produce a gallon of ethanol is actually more than the energy produced by a gallon of ethanol.
So, is it really cleaner when you look at the big picture? Is it more efficient?
There's also the cost. Corn-based ethanol is inexpensive because of the huge subsidies the US government gives corn growers. There have been some primetime specials lately connecting the dots between lobbyists, corn production, and the ever growing waistlines of Americans. The small blurb in the article regarding economic potential for farmers is a huge understatement considering these subsidies.
Is this just cool a Good Thing?
But there are two considerations to make here that are not part of the above statement:
I, for one, welcome our beerfly overlords.
The key is efficiency
Almost any car with trivial modifications can run on ethanol by burning it. The problem is that in this way ethanol can compete with gasoline only if oil would cost about 50-60 USD/barrel.
If the announced process would double efficiency of ethanol usage, then ethanol would be able to displace gasoline NOW or at least cup oil prices to 15-20 USD/barrel.
is some oil to power the conversion plant. Or maybe coal!
So people who drink it will get sick maybe go blind and perhaps die. Most people would learn not to drink it soon enough. As for the rest... well, have you ever heard about kids sniffing gasoline?
Ethanol takes energy to make. Lots of energy, possibly more than it contains.
Are you sure about that? I would think that the farmers growing corn could be relying on ethanol for all of their energy needs, and the ethanol plant itself could be run off part of the ethanol it produces, but that the reason this isn't happening now is that it's cheaper to buy fossil fuels than to utilize the more expensive ethanol. Ethanol production can't be so inefficient that it would not be possible to fuel the entire production chain with a fraction of the produced product, can it?
From the article: "The cell could produce 1 kilowatt of power, nearly enough for an average home."
) turns up numbers showing that an iron takes about 1.2KW, or just over 1KW for a toaster. So almost enough for an average home, so long as I wander round the house turning off everything else before flattening my shirt or browning some wheat. That's handy.
A bit of googling (http://www.arctic-cat.com/generators/wattage.asp
(This occured to me because I have a fusebox that can't cope with me using a medium iron and an electric heater on low in the same room. Domestic bliss.)
The old coal plants near here burn sulphur and mercury-laden coal, and thanks to obscene 'grandfathering' rules they pretty much don't have to filter it out of the waste stream. Carbon Dioxide is the least of your troubles in the Ohio River Valley.
Looks promising, considering what some people are saying about the future of oil, and the future of energy sources. http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/
The reactor pushes a mixture of watery ethanol and air over a rhodium-based catalyst heated to about 700 ?C. It takes only five seconds to start up, and produces a steady stream of hydrogen and carbon dioxide with very few other waste products.
So after liberating some (all) of the hydrogen we are left with C2 and O I would assume it would pick up O2 from the air and make C02 as a by product, with potentially some water also.
Last time I checked C02 was a greenhouse gas. It doesn't add to CO2 levels if (big if) the sources for ethanol production extract the CO2 from the atmosphere at the same rate. Keep in mind it isn't just the raw materials, but energy needed to process and create the ethanol, which may cause pollution in the process.
I would have expected CNN to give the actual chemical by-products, and not just summarize as "no greenhouse gasses" which is extremely misleading. I would also be interested to know how many of the H6 get truly extracted, and what remainder go into water (which would say something about efficiency and power density). Or whether some more exotic compounds are left behind that just C02 and H20 (even if only in trace amounts). A molecule here, a molecule there, and sometimes things aren't as benign as one might first assume.
Good news in any event, just wish there where more details.
Letter To Iran
Why not? I mean, robots run on it. Why can't everything else?
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
So why can't we just use hydrogen?
We can get the energy to extract H2 from water from all sorts of sources that might not be practical to use directly in an automobile such as geothermal, solar, wind, tidal, or even nuclear power.
No matter how you efficient you try to make engines that use it, we _WILL_ run out fossil fuel, it's only a matter of time... we will not, however, ever run out of hydrogen.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Ethanol causes Pollution too
Ethanol wrong for CA
I've seen other materials cited saying that ethanol is not harmful. Regardless, I'm sure that the pollution that is generated by your corn-fed in-house ethanol-hydrogen fuel cell will be contained by the time this thing gets to market.
Given the relative difficulty of raising corn on land, wouldn't it make more sense to do some sort of floating kelp farms? Could kelp produce enough sugar to make this viable? Given the growth rate of some forms of kelp, I imagine that it could quickly outstrip land-based plants.
All that is necessary for the triumph of good is that evil men do nothing.
Why go to the trouble of converting it to hydrogen when you could just burn it and loose nothing in the process. The conversion process is just going to decrease the efficiency..
Got Code?
This is a laudable achievement.
The hydrogen is envisioned to replace petrochemicals in automotive uses and small-scale electrical generation with fuel-cells.
The only problem is the ethanol source. Right now it is pretty much corn, period. With present technology, much petrochemicals must be expended to grow the corn and refine it into Ethanol. The fact that no petrochemicals are used in the subsequent conversion to hydrogen is lost on the fact that a large amount of petrochemicals were burned to get the ethanol in the first place.
If a suitably-credentialed person does the math, I think we'd probably find that less petrochemicals would be burned in generating the electricity conventionally, or powering the car conventionally.
We'll have to wait for future tech that can generate the ethanol or hydrogen without using, or by using significantly less petrochemicals.
My idea shouldn't be surprising, because no process is ever 100% efficient.
USNG: 14TPU4605
You should read the latest issue of Harper's magazine. Growing crops takes a lot of oil. In fact, the amount of energy (caloric I assume) yielded from a field is LESS than the amount the oil that was used by the equipment that made it had. Therefore it is not beneficiary. If, however, one were able to use these alcohols to fuel the actual farm equipment, or if we were able to switch to better methods of agriculture, things might begin to turn around.
Photos.
The H2 is an intermediate stage. Think of this instead as an Ethanol-powered generator that is much more efficient than current models. The H2 allows use of a fuel cell, instead of the conventional (fire -> rotation -> rotating magnets -> electricity) technique.
I hardly knew her!
So long, michael. Don't let the door hit you...
Use electricity for things that need the refined power (like lights, TV, hair dryers, AC). Use whatever energy source is cheapest per BTU for heat.
One thing that article doesn't mention is the reason farmers were turning their crop into 'shine. It's a lot easier to transport a 100 gallons of whiskey than to move 20,000 lbs of corn to market. That's a big problem when you live way the hell out on the edge of the frontieer.
Damn gubbemint's always trying to keep the family farmer down.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
What we need is a really psycho, really integrated solution. Sunlight is used to grow corn, which is harvested by tractors powered by ethanol. The corn is converted into ethanol, and distilled using heat from nucelar reactors, killing two birds with one stone. Then the ethanol is used to power cars etc.
Viola!! No fossil fuels required.
We would have to tell the public without using the N word though.....
Sig intentionaly left blank
Even proponents of biodiesel realize that it is not for the mass market. Every article on it that I've read notes this. Essentially, there isn't enough refuse biomass for biodiesel. It'll work as long as a small amount of us use it, but once we get into directly producing biodiesel, and not simply making biodiesel out of unwanted byproducts, it loses all its benefits and becomes terrible.
Photos.
That can't work (at least not as a closed system)...you can't run the corn production and ethanol distillation process on the ethanol produced and expect to have an energy surplus (or even break even) unless the operation is so large, and so efficient, that the energy input from sunlight is larger than the loss through various inefficiencies. This converter was a breakthrough, and it still only reaches 60% conversion efficiency, so it doesn't sound like things are going to be that efficient anytime soon.
Ethanol has been used as a fuel for a long time in many countries, often substituted on a percentage basis with regular gas. It was especially useful during wars etc when petroleum were in short supply.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
As if no-one had ever used a C compiler to compile their original New-Language compiler, and then threw the C away entirely.
/nothing/ else - the energy independence is a huge step forward.
the shift here is from using fossil fuels that take many years of pressure and heat to create, and mostly lie across oceans - to a fuel source that only takes bacteria, the sun, and a few weeks to create, and can be produced in abundance locally.
if
and the numbers for ethanol creation are referring to -engine-grade-ethanol- which must be (expensively) purified. the ethanol source for the reactor in question -doesn't-.
not to mention that the IOP article says that this ethanol->hydrogen reactor is 3x as efficient as an ethanol engine directly.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
I knew that liquor would save us all some day
130+ posts and not a single reference to Bender? He has been doing this for years now... or he will in the future.
Werecars are getting closer everyday!
Perhaps but the community of Slashdot is full of intelligent individuals and geeks from all types of fields, and with a brilliant and complex subculture community of trolls. Ebaum has just idiots with nothing to even talk about.
"we'll never get to the point where we can make the transition."
We will make the energy transition soon enough.
When it become a choice between a wholesale collapse of civilization, or energy sources besides coal and petroleum, civilization will route around the lack of coal and petroleum.
As long as coal and petroleum are available in abundance (and they *ARE* abundant), we won't be driven to do much else.
Bring on the $50./gallon gas, and watch machines that run solar, alcohol, hemp, and animal fat, suddenly become popular. But to expect anything with gas still under $2./gallon or natural gas under a tenth of a cent per BTU? Forget it!
"Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."
- Benjamin Franklin
Anyone besides me that has this vision of huge fields of solar panels in the deserts, piplines with water into the fields and piplines with hydrogen out from the fields.
Old tankers rebuilt to transport liquid hydrogen instead of oil.
This IS the future...
-K
The problem is that it currently takes more fossil fuels to create corn than you could get from that corn in the form of fuel. Unless that changes, it's a net-loss situation even if everything uses ethanol fuel.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Yes, studies of ethanol production have calculated an energy return ratio of somewhere between .7-1.8 to 1. This does not mean that
production of biofuels are unfeasible even if current agricultural
practices and methods of extraction are used. The production of
vegetable oil (a precursor to bio-diesel) can have an energy return
ratio higher than 4 to 1. Look at this
study about biofuel production and page 3 of the accompanying pdf
showing comparative energy
sources.
I though Doc had already been to the future by that point. Hence, the Delorean had been retrofitted with the Mr. Fusion. So why did he need to run the orginal IC engine anymore if the car could freakin' fly?!!! Did the Mr. Fusion just power the time travel bits?!!!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
To the nay sayers pointing out that it takes 1-1.5 gallons of fossil fuels to make one gallon of ethanol you missed a important part of this. "Ethanol can usually only be burnt if it is completely free of water - and getting the water out is an energy-intensive process. Schmidt's reactor works with wet ethanol." So this doesnt require PURE ethanol, it can accept the water being left in, which according to that statement is a large part of the energy intensive process to make ethanol. So this isn't the 'pure' ethanol.
Im just going to hold out for those Cold Fusion generators. They should probably be coming out any day now, right?
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
I see going from hydrogen to alcohol as being much more useful in the future than the reverse.
Here's my grand vision of the future:
Life is too short to proofread.
For those who don't know just how serious the energy problem will be in a few years, read this
Which is why I mentioned the other point, regarding surplus and waste products. If waste and surplus products can can produce enough ethanol for energy needs, then ethanol suddenly becomes a viable fuel regardless of whether ethanol to hydrogen to electricity pulls more energy out of ethanol than burning it in an engine.
So in the furture our robots will be alcoholics?
Using Ethanol as a fuel is mostly a way to funnel money to Corn Belt farmers.
The New York Times ran an interesting story about agriculture and obesity in October, basically discussing how, among other things, American corn has traditionally been so overproduced that corn-growers are desperate to find ways to use it. In the 19th century, the solution was to use it to make alcohol-- the average US citizen's consumption of corn-based alcohol then was more than FIVE times what it is now.
Following the backlash against drinking alcohol around the turn of the century, now much of the corn glut is used as a cheep sweetener. Corn syrup has replaced sugar in most sodas, candy, etc since the 1980s. The article suggests that the move from corn-alcohol to corn-syrup is responsible for the 60% obesity increase plus dramatic increases in "adult-onset" Diabetes.
So is the corn-as-fuel studies a similar way to answer the question-- how do we get rid of all this corn?
Also, see this NYTimes editorial. Some interesting stats in there as well.
W
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Rather than use it for 24/7 power, I would love to have something like this as a backup power source for my ISP stuff, or for my house.. it's mostly solid state, and the fuel is easy to get. For backup power, simply using a H2 tank would be also good.. I wonder how well this thing would scale up to the ~10kw I need to power the server room.
So if we finally come up with a viable alternative to oil/fossil fuels, and the inventor is not mysteriuosly dispensed by the Oil companies, can we finally pull out of the Middle East and all affairs surrounding the Middle East?
That'll get my vote in heartbeat.
Sorry for the flame, but why the #$% do you guys keep putting stories like this on slashdot's front page? This ethanol-->hydrogen thesis is for crack smokers. As pointed out in posts above, the second law of thermodynamics implies that the production of ethanol will kill any energy plus in the equation. For god's sake, all these discussions make me think I'm watching the matrix again with the human battery concept.
Here's from FTW:
One conclusion generally accepted by almost every attendee was that hydrogen, contrary to popularly accepted comfort promotions by writers like Jeremy Rifkin, was not a solution either in the near or long term because of intensive costs of production, inherent energy inefficiencies, lack of infrastructure and impracticalities. Speaking for Daimler Chrysler, which paid lip service to Peak Oil yet acknowledged that it had done extensive research on hydrogen vehicles, Dr. Jorg Wind told the conference that his company did not see hydrogen as a viable alternative to petroleum-based internal combustion engines.
"We use fossil fuels to make hydrogen. That does not result in a significant CO2 reduction. We predict that by 2020 only 5% of fuel use will be hydrogen and that infrastructure and the political framework is the most important factor. In order of relevance and likelihood from the standpoint of the auto industry Wind stated that we would see improved conventional vehicles, starter hybrid vehicles, electric hybrid vehicles and, finally, fuel cell vehicles as solutions, but he had little optimism that fuel cells would ever amount to a significant market share. In a telling left-handed acknowledgement of Peak Oil, Wind noted that one third of all diesel fuels currently used in Germany were biodiesel relying on recycled waste and or plant feedstock. He was particularly critical of ethanol stating that it was not energy efficient.
French presenters confirmed that ethanol was only viable in France due to a three hundred per cent government subsidy to farmers. Otherwise it was a net energy waster.
Ethanol can be produced by many things, other than corn. It can be produced by wood chips, and other waste products... And as for the energy input in making ethanol, there is indeed the sun, and there are many other things that burn other than fossil fuels. One that comes readily to my mind as being appropriate to the production of ethanol is methane gas, easily produced from shit, including our own, which is a resource far defying the limits of abundance! The thing about this development I don't understand is that most gasoline engines can be converted to run on ethanol, so what is the point of using ethanol to produce hydrogen to produce electricity to run a car when you can just burn the ethanol in a combustion engine and get the same energy that way... especially considering the amount of engines out there that could readily run the fuel. Cheers, Joshua
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout!
Keep in mind the subsidies that the Government pays to farmers to help ensure that they make a profit (or break even), and in some cases this means that farmers don't farm their land. If they started to grow corn to be used for ethanol the government subsidies could be reduced or eliminated. Neat.
Then we can wait for the Organization of Corn Exporting Countries to start controlling production...
My sig left me for a younger user id.
Ethanol has two carbon atoms. Where do they go in the conversion process? Probably to Carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.
Of course the thermodynamics of this process make it a bad course in the long run (20+ years). What is needed is more efficient and powerful cells that use water as the source of hydrogen.
Better yet, the deuterium in water, and make a nano-scale fusion reactor!
I think its given that it takes more energy to make a gallon of ethenol then it gives. However what people dont take into account of where the energy is utilized.
take for example growing corn. It takes alot of energy yes. But its centralized and a slow process, in which case one could utilize more efficiant renewable energy. Do you need to plow a field at 20MPH? or would a solar powered plower that moves along at feet per hour do it? Could you use wind to grind the grain? sun to power the distilling process? etc etc
No one disputes there is more then enough renewable energy on this planet to sustain our needs. The trick is to harness it. Cars for example use energy in quick bursts. so producing it on the fly is usually not an option. but if you centralize the production of the energy you can utilize renewable resources to process it (wind water and solar).
We have an Ethanol plant in our town. It smells awful.
The smell is yeast. Its the same smell you get from beer factories.
Freshman used to think it smelled like baking bread.
Again, yeast.
You can't take the sky from me...
The cell could produce 1 kilowatt of power, nearly enough for an average home.
That's about enough to power all the wall-warts in my house.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
8.3 light minutes.
Why did GEAR crush RDP?
First off: I'd love to see a process that "turns ethanol into hydrogen and then uses a fuel cell to turn the hydrogen into electricity". This would be the first scientifically verified instance of alchemy and element transmutation EVER!
On a more serious note, from an earlier post:
Producing ethanol requires nothing more than the sun, some corn, and bacteria.
If you don't care that your ethanol also contains about 60%-80% water, mash residue, and other contaminants, that's correct. Some processes can produce a fermentor concentration of up to about 50% EtOH without killing the organisms but require a gas stripping operation which uses energy to pump the byproduct CO2 back through the fermentation reactor.
You may not care about that, but I guarantee your fuel cell or internal combustion engine cares.
Purification of ethanol is the most energy-intensive part of the whole process. There are a bunch of novel purification processes out there, but so far none uses less energy per unit mass of ethanol produced than is available for later use per unit mass.
I used to be a 100% booster of ethanol fuels, but I've since changed my thinking. I've done the mass and energy balances, and with current technology, there's no way you can produce ethanol cheaper (read: by spending less energy making it than you get out of it later).
Ethanol looks, on the surface, to be a great "renewable" fuel source, but one has to take into account an enormous number of inputs to determine whether or not there's a surplus of available chemical energy at the end of the day.
Consider, for instance, the costs of:
Fuel for farm implements
power for pumping irrigation water
power to transport the corn to the factory
power for the fermentation equipment
power for the solids separation equipment
power for the purification equipment (i.e., distillation, gas absorption, pervaporation (which can't be done yet on a large enough scale to matter), etc.)
Unfortunately, no one has been able to demonstrate a process that, when taking all the energy costs into consideration, that can show a positive energy balance once you subtract the energy expended during ethanol production from the energy input from the sun in the first place.
The old chemical engineering standby (backed by the Laws of Thermodynamics) equation for energy balances:
A = I - O + G -C
Accumulation = Input - Output + Generation - Consumption
At the end of the day, with current separation technology, A is always negative for ethanol production processes from biomass. That is, the net available energy on earth is actually less at the end of the process than when you started.
It's an unfortunate reality, but it's reality.
The reaction heated the catalyst. http://www.iop.org/news/697
Creating ethanol takes 29% more energy than it provides... with current technology.
.43 Eout
Ein = 1.29 Eout
This tech takes ethanol -> energy effeciency from 20% to 60%.
Eout' = 3 * Eout
Ein = 1.29/3 Eout =
So now we can run all the tractors and such off ethanol and still have 67% of the ethanol left over to power other stuff.
If you're burning the Ethanol in a combustion engine, then you're using 1.1 gallon to grow a gallon of ethanol.
But if you use the Ethanol in this plant to produce hydrogen for fuel cells, it's 3x more efficient than burning it in engine, so you gradually convert your farm equipment and distilliation equipment to run off of fuel cells, and very quickly, you're producing more ethanol than you're using to make it in the first place.
Sort of changes the equation, doesn't it?
HFCS is 75% sweeter than sugar. Manufacturers can use less sweetener for the same amount of finished product to obtain the same flavor.
Other attributes of HFCS over sugar (from http://food.oregonstate.edu/sugar/hfcs.html):
# retain moisture and/or prevent drying out
# control crystallization
# produce an osmotic pressure that is higher than for sucrose or medium invert sugar and thereby help control microbiological growth or help in penetration of cell membranes.
# provide a ready yeast-fermentable substrate
# blend easily with sweeteners, acids, and flavorings
# provide a controllable substrate for browning and Maillard reaction.
# impart a degree of sweetness that is essentially the same as in invert liquid sugar
# high sweetness
# low viscosity
# reduced tendency toward characterization
# costs less than liquid sucrose or corn syrup blends
# retain moisture and/or prevent drying out
In short, in a mass-production environment, sugar is used where it needs to be used, and HFCS is used where it can be used. I imagine ADM donates liberally to political parties for other reasons. The biggest one that comes to mind is genetic patents.
Science article, full article available to those with access to Science
More at EurekAlert
Hehe...even if they don't make ethanol for fuel, the mere fact that real Mardi Gras celebrations kick off this weekend through Fat Tuesday here in NOLA will create a pretty good spike in all alcohol sales...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
"distilling 50% takes about as much energy as distilling 90%." bullshit.
It notably does not use fossil fuels in the process.
That's great, except it requires tons of fossil fuels to refine ethanol. Once they figure out that problem, we'll be good to go.
If ethanol is actually to play an increasing role in the energy needs of the first world (or the US specifically), it will not come from corn, it will be a result of the refining of sugar cane in Latin & South America & the Caribbean. Sugar cane has a much higher energy level and is much easier to convert to ethanol.
Quick quiz: which nation is the largest producer of ethanol, and what is its feedstock?
And as long as we are injecting facts into this discussion (yes, I'm new here...), while corn production does require lots of water, less than a third of US corn production is irrigated.
And finally, as for all of the "Does producing ethanol require more energy than it uses" discussion, the real question is whether ethanol is an efficient mechanism to capture solar energy and store it in chemical form. The evidence is mixed. The professor at Cornell who is frequently cited is David Pimentel, an entymologist. According to those who specialize in energy, the conclusion for corn-based ethanol is much, much more nuanced. Newer processing plants (those built in the last 3 years) fed by farmers using appropriate nitrogen application techniques are energy-positive. But there are many legacy plants (as well as legacy farmers). Again, in the long-term, the cost of conversion & transport from warmer climes is actually more relevant, though.
And yes, by the way, IAAAE (I am an agricultural economist). In fact, IAAGE (I am a grains economist for a Big Ten University)
Answer: Brazil, sugar cane.
But he *couldn't* refine a goddamn gallon of gasoline? I mean, you've got oil and fairly advanced chemistry available to you -- what's the big hold up here? You only need enough quality to not gum up the engine on one 0-88 MPH run...
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
While production of ethanol can be inefficient rarely does it result in a net energy loss. Several different studies show anywhere from a 38% net gain in energy to over 100% depending on methods use. The generally cited claim of a net energy loss from producing ethanol all seem to come from only one paper written by David Pimental. To support his claims he seems to have taken a worst pratices view for every step in the production process, a realworld combination found in less than 5% of current ethanol production. The more comphrensive studies I've been able to find show a slight, albeit not stellar, net gain in energy. The most recent (2002) by Michigan State shows a net gain of 0.56 MJ/MJ of input for corn based ethanol production. If one looks at Cellulose based ethonal production, studies show almost a 2.5 net energy gain and it is easier on the environment since it requires less maintenance and fewer fertilizers.
o ne tenergybalance.htm
For reference this site has some good links, including a rebuttal of the Pimental paper (as well as showing the Pimental article).
http://www.econet.sk.ca/pages/issues/ethanolinf
You obviously don't live near farms.
And what of the stink of the processing factories? If (as other posters have commented) that the corn processing factories stink, how bad would the kelp processing factory be? With the rally cry of "Not In My Backyard!", where would these factories be placed?
I suppose there is always...Canada!
High fructose corn syrup is actually 75% sweeter than sugar. Thus, you do not need to buy as much, and the calories per serving are less.
IIRC from the documentary, the reason corn syrup was developed as a sweetner was because the nice little island nation south of Florida where the US got their cheap sugar cane became communist. I believe they also said C&H (California and Hawaii) jacked up their prices in response to the ban on Cuban sugar and made a tidy little profit.
At any rate, corn was known to be a source of sugar, just not a particularly good one. After the coup, serious dollars were poured into researching improved refinement. Until I met my wife, I didn't realize that there is a third source for sugar based sweetners. There is also beet sugar if you've been through Scottsbluff NE or Torrington WY, you've had the pleasure of smelling Holly and Western Sugar's refinement plant. God-awful smell.
An interesting side note was that of all the pop that was converted over to High Fructose Corn Syrup, Dr. Pepper was the only one to continue using sugar cane.
"My fingers Emit sparks of fire in Expectation of my future labours." William Blake
laws of thermo dynamics huh? did you forget about.. oh... THE FRICKING SOLAR ENERGY THAT IS CAPTURED IN THE PLANTS? not exactly a minor niggling detail.
No, this Hydrogen thingy is'nt actually interresting. We have to do it in other ways....
http://www.cheniere.org
"I knew that liquor would save us all some day."
What do you mean by *some* day?
I'm seeing lots of conjecture about greenhouse gases but no information on what the new invention actually produces. Until we get real information, let's be optimistic, OK?
Ethanol is most cheeply produced from petroleum, a.k.a, fossil fuels.
Read Here
.sig error: carrier signal lost.
Wow. A Cato Institute article that quotes a Mother Jones reporter. Politics sure does make for strange bedfellows...
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
I think he was referring to the energy provided to the plants to photosynthesise to produce corn to ferment into ethanol to turn into hydrogen to turn into electricity.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I've been waiting for someone to exploit the following system for several years now. Maybe some intrepid slashdotter will do so soon.
Google's cache of layo.com outlines a procedure and mechanism to use plain old aluminum welding wire as a storage medium for hydrogen. No metallic hydrides need, no pressure storage, and a very small amount of hydrogen exists in the system at any one time... meaning lower explosion potential than even carrying around 20 gallons of gasoline under your car today.
Someone, please do something with this technology. Maybe someone can do a quick energy conversion analysis to see what the energy cost of doing this conversion is?
Wow, that didn't format like I expected... time to start using preview. :)
Although currently ethanol production is expensive and produces little, if any, additional energy than what is required to create it, the reactor could change this.
Think what would happen if all the farm equipment were powered by a fuel-cell and ethanol instead of diesel. This would significantly increase efficiency in the production.
However, the cost of the production could be quite high in the long run. I imagine a lot of water, fertilizer and pesticide is needed to grow the corn, at least with current large-scale farming techniques.
I think this can only become feasible if current farming practices change significantly.
1. Use less, or better yet, no pesticide.
2. Replace all the farm equipment and transportation equipment with fuel-cell powered equipment to improve efficiency.
3. Reduce the amount of water required for growing the corn.
4. Practice farming techniques that improve the soil over time.
I also doubt that we could grow enough corn to provide enough ethanol if everything ran on it. Also, a drought or other major disaster would also have a much greater impact. Perhaps this could be combined with another technique I read about recently where someone found a method of converting most organic waste into high-quality petroleum by combining it with water under high temperature and pressure. It was estimated that if we did this we could supply half of the oil requirement of the US and completely eliminate our dependency on the middle east for oil.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
DUH!, don't trust Wiki, its not accurate at all anymore.
in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome?
Why not just burn the CORN directly? Why bother fermenting and distilling it first?
If you notice the picture, look at how "homebrew" it looks, right? I think such a thing could be built in a garage:
For the catalyst structures, you would need to find and use two separate automobile catalytic converters. I haven't found a confirmation yet, but such converters typically use platinum *or* rhodium as the catalysing agent, in (usually) a honeycomb ceramic matrix. In theory, one could cut/saw the matrix into portions from two separate cat converters, stuff it into a pyrex pipe (look into laboratory surplus) one after the next, with a gap (I think) in between, and run the ethanol through.
I am not sure what the wire (or tubing - in the picture and mention in the text) is for - I don't think it is a part of the actual reactor (maybe for sensing of temp?). You would probably need to heat the reactor up pretty damn hot to get it going, but it might be self-sustaining after that - probably a combo of oxygen injection prior to the platinum honeycomb with some heat to get it charged up, then after that it should be self-running.
Anybody up for dangerous experimentation?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I have found a way to turn beer into piss
love is just extroverted narcissism
there are fuel cells that operate using ethanol instead of hydrogen -- why not use the ethanol directly and save the step of converting ethanol to hydrogen? anyone here know why?
If you live in California and use 1.2KWh/day (36KWh in a month) your monthly PG&E bill (at 13c/KWh) would be $3.99. Anyone from California have a PG&E bill that low, or even close? Mine is usually in the $20-25 range and most people consider that to be very low.
I wonder what accounts for the difference. What kind of refrigerator is typical in an apartment in Switzerland? In the USA you usually get a full-size fridge like what a family with 2 or 3 kids would use. Do people leave computers on 24/7 over there like in the USA?
Rank Presidents by th
I am seeing a large number of posts stating the same thing that it takes more energy to produce the ethanol than you get back in stored chemical energy. I am sure that no one disputes that.
The point of all of this is to reduce emissions from the less efficient internal combustion engine. About 35% of the energy from burning fossil fuels in a car engine is available for mechanical energy. A full scale power plant is around 50-55% efficeint in converting fossil fuels into electricity, and the emissions are much, much less than for a car.
By using the more efficient energy on a large scale to produce ethanol, that is then used in vehicles may use a bit more energy, but it will greatly reduce emissions.
The laws of thermodynamics cannot be defeated (unfortunate as that is), but we can help limit emissions, and that is the goal of both fuel cells, and ethanol use for hydrogen.
As for use in homes, that is stupid except for people that live far from a power distribution network.
Let me state that comment you keep seeing a little differently:
It takes more energy to produce ethanol than that ethanol contains. It doesn't matter what the original source of energy used by the tractors/trucks/heaters is, you're better off just using that than ethanol.
As for "Hydrogen Power", their is no such thing. The hydrogen tech everyone is talking about is an energy storage mechanism, not a generation mechanism. You need to generate the power somewhere, and if you then send that power through the grow-corn-make-ethanol loop, you've lost more than 20% of your power before you even think about how to use the ethanol.
We'll never get to the point of transitioning to alternative energy sources if people who claim to be supporting alternative energy are really supporting technology that just throws energy away. (but provides an excuse give tax dollars to ADM, who then make big campaign contributions)
Sorghum is the main source of ethanol in Kansas.
http://www.ksgrains.com/sorghum/ethanol.html
Of course all of the numbers for Ethanol are based on using Corn as the biomass for fermentation. However, Corn is not the most usable biomass crop for making energy. Hemp provides a much better return on the growing, harvesting and processing.
1 acre of hemp will produce 1000 gallons of fuel per growing season. Hemp also grows more quickly that corn and can be grown in areas where corn will not. Of course, thats completely ignoring the hempseed oil, which also is able to provide energy in the form of bio-diesel.
Of course, hemp crops are usable for other things as well, including paper. Hemp can produce more paper per pound, and grows much more quickly than trees (4 month investment instead of 10-20 years).
Those same hemp fibers can also make clothing which is rugged and weather-resistant.
A field of hemp costs less to grow (in both resources and time) than an equal field of corn.
But, some people smoke the flowers and enjoy themselves... obviously its far too dangerous to use here in the USA.
Get a life, not a lifestyle. - Hikem Bey
Retail cost of gasoline: ~$1.65/gal
_Wholesale_ cost of fuel-grade ethanol: $1.71/gal
[Chemical Market Report, January 2004]
The ratio of profits to subsidy is completely meaningless number. For example, if they were to turn around next year and give their employees a small raise which cut into their profits in half, it would mean that we pay $60 for every dollar of profit they make, but that doesn't mean they are wasting twice as much money.
A more usefull number would be the ratio of revenue to subsidy. I couldn't find that in the report you linked, but assuming their profit margin is about 10%, then for every dollar I pay for ethanol another three dollars comes from the taxpayers.
Homebrewer's sidebar:
One more reason to use dried malts instead of sugar to make your beer at home.
Atlas Shrugged : Thematic Story
I'm surprised that cheese wasn't somehow involved
You need to remember that the CO2 in the ethanol came from the atmosphere when the corn plants were growing.
So, while the fuel cell releases CO2, it does not add to the amount that is currently available.
I would be more concerned about the byproducts created through the manufacturing of the original ethanol - there must be some kind of sludge left over to be disposed of ?
The flaw in the claim that this thing doesn't use fossil fuels is in the source of the ethanol; most fuel ethanol comes from grains - in the U.S., from government-subsidized grain corn. Due to the poorness of overcultivated soil in nearly every temperate region where grains grow, it takes a lot of petroleum-derived fertilizer to grow that grain - multiple calories of hydrocarbon energy for each calorie stored in the grain, in fact. Fermentation and refinement of the ethanol, of course, reduces the net energy yield of this process.
Find a better source of ethanol, though, and I'm sold.
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
If you take the hydrogen from the ethynol, what's left? And what do you do with that waste material?
Ethanol is a lot easier to transport, refill,... than hydrogen. I bet a lot of energy is wasted in the ethanol->hydrogen reaction. So why not just use the ethanol directly?
More energy is used to purify the ethanol to standards that make it compliant with current internal combustion engines than is ever won back from burning the ethanol. I.e. the ethanol must be modified to emulate gasoline in order to be burned directly, and that takes a lot of energy.
Ethanol having its hydrogen extracted doesn't require any such purification process, making the conversion of ethanol->hydrogen, then burning the hydrogen, vastly more effecient than burning the ethanol directly. three times more effecient, according to the article. This leads to a situation where we can remove traditional energy sources from the equation, using the sun+soil+water to grow the crop, using sun+some small amount of energy to ferment, using some small amount of energy to extract the hydrogen, then burning the hydrogen. As long as the energy won from the sun is greater than the energy used to ferment the ethanol and to extract the hydrogen we have a self-sustaining energy economy (assuming we aren't draining acquafers and the like).
Best of all, we can produce the energy here at home, and stop pouring dollars into countries with regressive religions and toxic idealogies...which in turn might do something to slow the spread of toxic idealogies in our own countries.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Even if we can mass produce ethanol cheaply we'll still need to find ways to get rid of C02. Time to plant a tree.
Actually, the reason we have the subsidies is to maintain capacity for that time (in the not so near future?) when we finally piss off the entire world and we have to feed ourselves.
We need to be able to feed ourselves if things go bad... isolationist that we would rather be.
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX
You get a shitload more rain in Wisconsin than Kansas, Nebraska and South Dakota.
Lake Iowa is the corn-growing king, however.
And I'm sure there will be a point in time when the non-renewable sources (gasoline, diesel) will have too high of a cost-to-produce/profit-to-sell ratio, and the street price of 1g of ethanol will be cheaper than 1g of gasoline.
If, of course, the major oil companies don't patent all the technology (we do know how brilliant the patent office is...) and prevent anyone from developing the technology further.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Sweeter -- higher fructose content -- corn has been developed over the last few decades.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Add a fermenting tank and a distiller to the front end. Bam! Grain in... electricity out!
Hydrocarbon reforming is nothing new, and people have been doing it for at least 5 years.
The process is a simple "convert HxCx into H2 and C0x"
The product streams are usually ~65-70% H2, 15-20% CO2, and blance CO (and in really bad tests some smaller hydrocarbons). All you have to do is pass the product stream into a fuel cell, and whammo, power from ethanol.
Most of these reformers can eat just about any hydrocarbon, not just ethynol (at high enough temperature). The reforming is an exo-thermal reaction which is why reformers are occasionally close to the fuel cells (some fuel cells are only efficient in the 700-1000C range). The reforming process is usually more efficient the higher the temp.
...To Big Corn
Amateurs discuss tactics. Professionals discuss logistics.
What is this miracle crop, you might ask?
This miracle crop scares our government, and numerous other larg-scale entities (such as various corporations), because of its multitude of uses, and the fact that it is so easy to grow. At one time, it was grown in plentiful amounts right here in the United States. Then a ban was induced in the early part of the twentieth century (but was lifted briefly for World War 2), and farmers couldn't grow it. Recently, products made from it came under our government's eye again - but the courts beat them back once more (of course, these products are made mostly in Canada, or from the crop grown in Canada). We, the people, are being denied access to growing this crop, and reaping its benefits, by our own government. A government started with a document entitled the "Declaration of Independence" - written on paper made from the very fibers of the crop denied to us today!
So, what is this wonderous crop, you plea?
Say it loud - say it proud - let the world and our corrupt politicians know it: HEMP! HEMP! HEMP!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Hopefully this will help solve problems such as http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/. That's some scary stuff...
- Vegitables, growing them under the Sun;
- Ethanol, getting it from sugar or potato;
- Hydrogen, getting it from ethanol in the proposed reactor;
- Electricity, getting it from cell by oxyding the hydrogen;
- Moving parts, getting it by using electicity in the motor;
Excuse me? Doesn't it look long and ineffective?Here is what I propose:
- Sugar, growing under the special vegi-skin on human bodies under the Sun after small genetic modifications;
- Miving skeletons, after burning the sugar in muscles;
You see? Much shorter, simpler and easier. Of course, human bodies are efficient for all kinds of jobs. So modify genetically other animals, or design new ones. Byt keep the principle as simple as possible:- Tired? - Go and take a sun-bath to get some sugar in your blood.
- Too much sugar? - Go and do some job for the society.
And no more conflicts between white people and black people - we are all gonna be green by thenLess is more !
So, basically, I call bullshit on not having enough biomass to run the farm equipment. Actually converting farms over is another story.
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
Do they even bother numbering the license plates?
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
My hunch is that they are pro-ag industry and know that ADM is buttering their bread heavilly.
There are other excellent posts here on ADM.
Read them because they are a great way to understand how our government often fails in its charge of being a democracy.
The question is how do we fix these problems so that our society can solve real problems like feeding people and providing energy without ruining the planet.
I would not be surprised if this reactor didn't require a pretty pure ethanol.
also keep in mind that water/ethanol solutions have an azeotrope of 95% at and around atmospheric conditions. this means the driving force for separation (the concentration difference between the liquid and vapor phases) is effectively zero under atmospheric pressure. so unless you want to do pressure/swing distillation-which is very energy intensive-the best you can get is 95% ethanol (190 proof for those of you that drink the stuff).
-- john
Yes, but you don't use that iron or toaster 24 hours per day, do you?
... but not 24 hours/day, I'll grant you that.
I could, if I put my mind to it.
Really what I want to do is make a first slice of toast, then iron that slice while toasting a second slice
-kgj
-kgj
Liquid nitrogen engine...
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
I always hear environmentalists say that solar power is the best replacement for oil power. What I want to know is what chemicals are used to manufacture solar panels. The way I understand it solar cells are a lot like computer chips to manufacture. It would take thousands of square miles of solar panels to power the U.S. How much toxic waste would be produced?
...says they watched Hawkeye Pierce and BJ Hunicutt on MASH for years to get the inspiration.
Corn isn't exactly the best plant to use? maybe something with higher sugar content and easier extraction? maybe a grass? Ethanol only needs sugar, there are some pretty high sugar content grasses (umm.. sugar cane but there are others) or even somethign like left over canola biomass?
Or how about a genetically modifie solutions. Take a very simple and robust grass and add a snippit of DNA for fructose/glucose with a super promoter in front, copy it a few dozen tiems and you'll have soem pretty sweet weed. ahh weed.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
I call bullshit right back. A lot of things are possible, but what you are describing is NOT what is happening.
Yes you could easily create solar distilleries, but that is not what the lovely United States is doing. They're using pollution-spouting 20 ton tractors to grow corn, which they then use natural gas (another fossil fuel) to heat for the distillation.
End result? The United States is paying tax dollars and further increasing the consumption of fossil fuels by encouraging the use of ethanol as a fuel. Dumb? I think so!
No comment.
Now, Lanny Schmidt of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Xenophon Verykios of the University of Patras, Greece, and colleagues have developed a potentially portable ethanol converter. In it, a solution of ethanol and water passes through a fuel injector--a nozzle that ordinarily pumps gasoline into a car's motor--and into a gently heated chamber, where it vaporizes and mixes with air. The mixture then passes through a porous plug of aluminum oxide covered with rhodium and cerium oxide, which catalyzes reactions that yield hydrogen and carbon dioxide. The reactions heat the catalyst to over 700C, which keeps the process going. The gadget converts essentially all of the hydrogen in ethanol into hydrogen gas, the researchers report.
"Their process has the advantage that it is very, very fast," says James Dumesic, a chemical engineer at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who is working on producing hydrogen from sugars. But he points out that the ethanol process also generates a lot of carbon monoxide, which the high-power fuel cells that might someday propel cars cannot tolerate. Gabor Somorjai, a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, points out that rhodium happens to be "the most expensive catalyst you can ever make."
Bullshit again! A lot of people are calling bullshit these days. Perhaps that is because they are smelling themselves?
The debate on biofuel is moot. The fact is biofuel comes from the sun. The fact is, if you had a solar cell the size of the entire United States (including Alaska), you would only harvest 1% of the energy that the United States consumes! Doh!
So it doesn't matter how much biofuel you create. You can have canola growing over the entire world, and you will still not meet the energy demands of the world. Not even close.
Now if the population of the Earth was only 100-200 million, you may have a chance. Too bad we have 6 billion!
It is POSSIBLE to do all this, if you want to burn dollars-converted-to-ethanol.
It surely isn't economic, even ignoring conversion costs.
Fossil fuels have hydrogen also, and can be used in fuel cells just as ethanol is in this article.
The problem is getting rid of the activated carbon.
Lew
"The Constitution, the WHOLE Constitution, and nothing but the CONSTITUTION."
No shit. I can't believe that point keeps coming up.
Earth is closest to the sun (perihelion) when the northern hemisphere is experiencing winter, and furthest (aphelion) when the northern hemisphere is experiencing summer. (In 2004, perihelion was on Jan 4, and aphelion will be July 5. [source])
Earth's perihelion: 147,000,000 km = 8.17 light-minutes
Earth's aphelion: 152,000,000 km = 8.44 light-minutes [source]
The tariff on potable alcohol is very expensive. It is much cheaper to produce denatured alcolhol for industrial purposes. All you have to do is add something poisonous to the alcohol to keep folks from drinking it :)
I believe we will run into a similar problem as now if we continue to use fuel cell's. The main idea of switching to fuel cells is to eliminate greenhouse gas production, and eliminate dependence upon fosil fuels. While fuel cells do not produce any hazardous byproducts, they do produce the most notorious greenhouse gas - water vapor. Once fuel cells become more mainstream and are used for just about everything. The production of water vapor will increase, creating a worse greenhouse problem then carbon dioxide ever has. This is just a theory, but I don't think fuel cell's are the answer but a temporary solution.
Your car is ugly. And your headlight is all busted up.
And you have found a way to do WHAT?
Make you case better or you are clearly trolling...
Does (some of) the extra energy input during the converion make it into the final products?
Perhaps they should get together with those University of Wisconsin researchers who developed a tin/nickel catalyst for breaking off hydrogen atoms at a much lower temperature.
See this article.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
As long as it takes more energy than can harvested from a gallon of ethanol in order to produce that gallon of ethanol, it is irrelevent as to whether ethanol comes from a renewable resource. If that barrier is broken, then it does begin to matter and I agree with your comment entirely providing it is contingent on ethanol production providing a net gain of usable energy.
Pimentel based his research on the economics of burning a relatively pure form of ethanol in a conventional combustion engine.
An article above from nature.com clearly states that this new technology uses a relatively watery ethanol as an input. The watery ethanol avoids a purification step that uses a lot of energy.
Additionally the article states that the energy efficiency of using the produced hydrogen in a fuel cell is about 60% compared with 20% achieved by burning ethanol in a combustion engine.
IIRC another website states that Pimentel thinks it takes about 129% of the produced energy to create ethanol. This new technology should change the equation so that producing ethanol creates usable energy.
I think everyone could be missing the idea here; we all agree that there are much more efficient ways of producing hydrogen than synthesizing it from ethanol. The purpose behind this reactor is not to produce hydrogen from ethanol, but rather to serve as a converter of ethanol to hydrogen.
Hydrogen, in its liquid state, is extremely difficult to handle and to store. Ethanol on the other hand, is already in use as a fuel additive around the world, and can more or less be safely stored and transported using the existing gasoline infrastructure.
As I recall, there were also experiments in solar energy conducted in Israel years ago that focused on using solar furnaces to drive a chemical conversion process, rather than produce steam to run electric generators. The aim was to essentially "store" solar energy as chemical energy. More research in this area could lead to more efficient ways of producing ethanol.
-P.R.Deltoid, hailing from MacSlash.com
Wow. Time for a break. I read it as Espanol to Hydrogen. Now that would be cool.
ADM is a huge supporter of the US government's perverse sugar tariff. They're big fans of keeping low-cost foreign sugar out of the US market -- guess why?
'jfb
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
Heres a video of me, laughing at you!
My nerd power overwhelms your hatred!
http://www.muchosucko.com/viewlink663.html
It's not just a fuel cell! It's also a fuel still!
Buy our new patented Fuel Stell product now!
Sorry. I'll leave, now.
Just think about it folks. Why is oil so cheap (compared to its energy cost) to harvest right now? Because there's a century of infrastructure built around its harvest. There are researchers making things more efficient, oil wells galore, efficient refineries, and why? Because we put a whole bunch of money and time into the research of it.
/NEED/ a ton of upkeep to grow, we just do a ton of upkeep to keep it edible. No one gives a sweet damn if the corn they use to power their vehicle was infested with ergot or weevils or blight, or little green bugs. It's all hydrogen in the end.
The total cost of delivery of a single gallon of gasoline is still quite high. It has to be mined, shipped to refineries (which uses oil!) refined in several stages (also uses oil), then shipped in individual semi-trucks (also uses oil) to get to it's final destination, which is for the most part a huge network of individual mom-and-pop owned gas stations. In addition to this, tankers fall over, refineries produce the occasional bad batch, pipelines break and need repair (oh boy, how about those SUVs needed to get to the point the pipeline broke in alaska), there are oil spills in Alaska, oil tanker ships. All these indirectly use oil to harvest oil.
As opposed to the infrastructure surrounding ethanol -- a fledgeling (no, I don't mean ADM) industry with some government and corporate funding and only 30 years of poorly funded research backing it. In 100 years, where will we be with this? One really darned great thing about grain alcohol, is that nearly every place in the non-desert world is suitable for growing some kind of grain that can be changed. Sugar cane, barley, hops, corn, rice. All can be turned into alcohol organically, with yeast, and the varieties of each can be grown in nearly every clime in the world, as opposed to having to be mined and distributed on the hub-and-spoke system. Locally managed stills can make enough ethanol to power entire towns for the most part, with a surplus. Believe me, we know the volume homemade, illegal, inefficient, made-by-the-village-drunk 'stills can produce in Arkansas and Tennessee. How about efficient stills made by corporations with the money to put into the research of draining every last drop out of the infrastructure they create? No long, hazardous shipping across outdated hub-and-spoke shipping lines. Fine-grained (no pun intended) distributed, low cost production facilities are a much better way of creating electricity and vehicle fuel.
The really great thing is that all these grains don't
This can be the key, folks. This can avert the disaster heading our way once oil becomes expensive to mine. We just have to put the money in now while we can.
Guinness does give you strength...
But on the other hand, a situation where a gallon of ethanol costs a couple of bucks at the local gas/ethanol station would be sweet...
You're right that this is not the solution. According to http://www.aeiveos.com/~bradbury/Papers/Photosynth eticEfficiency.html the efficiency is between 1 and about 7 to 10 percent in the real world. Solar is 10-20% efficient...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
First one (to the grandparent) - the carbon dioxide produced by burning ethanol, or by removing its hydrogen, is counterbalanced by the CO2 removed by the corn as it grows.
Second - true, ethanol isn't the most efficient thing on the planet. But consider this: the U.S. has HUGE stocks of crops that go unsold every year. The government subsidizes the farming industry, paying them to NOT ship stuff to market. Otherwise the prices would fall through the floor and farmers would go belly up.
Yes it's a fucked up way to run things but with the U.S. government, are you really surprised?
So consider this: you have all these crops sitting in storage that can be fermented into alcohol. They're already grown. The power used by the farming equipment is already gone. Doesn't it make sense to get some of that energy back, rather than letting it rot?
I also heard one time that there was this carb that got 100 miles to the gallon, but then the big oil companies stole it fromthe guy who had.
Oh, and a few more things that turn into ethanol quite readily.
1. Potatoes (really good. soil-healthy crop)
2. Grapes
3. Wheat
4. Sugar Beets
5. Honey
6. Rye
7. Apples
8. Peaches
9. Oats
10. Several types of hardy grasses, including milkweed, dandelions, cattails.
The list goes on. What's more, there's a surplus of all these every year. Regularly, crops simply get dumped into the ocean to mitigate price drops caused by low supply/demand ratio. We already farm too well. What if farmers could sell their entire surplus, every year? The revival of agriculture as a way of life. Even the >gasp small-farm -- remember what I said about local farming being a better way to produce energy because you don't have to ship it?!
...ever heard of a process called photosynthesis?
I am NaN
Now if ethanol can be derived from waste or surplus or if the energy can be extracted from ethanol in a more efficient manner, this is no longer a consideration and your consideration, which gives you the biggest bang for the buck becomes the only consideration.
BTW, the 30% number is the amount of energy that can extracted from ethanol through burning it in an internal combustion engine. Converting it to hydrogen and running the hydrogen through a fuel cell may be more efficient.
I can just see it now. In the future when all cars are converted over to hydrogen - drunks will NEVER RUN OUT OF GAS!!
sheesh!
Why not create an ethanol enhanced bumper crop that is tailored to our needs? It's not Frankenfood if nobody eats it. Photosynthesis made fossil fuels, why not use DNA as well?
Let's see.. Maybe gasoline is used because of it's energy density?
Well we could change the laws of physics if the reality doesn't fit our emotional wants and desires. Just write your congressman.
Gasoline 9000 Wh/l 13,500 Wh/Kg
LNG 7216 Wh/l 12,100 Wh/Kg
Propane 6600 Wh/l 13,900 Wh/Kg
Ethanol 6100 WH/l 7,850 Wh/Kg
Liquid H2 2600 Wh/l 39,000* Wh/Kg
150 Bar H2 405 WH/l 39,000* Wh/Kg
Lithium 250 Wh/l 350 Wh/Kg
Flywheel 210 Wh/l 120 Wh/Kg
Liquid N2 65 Wh/l 55 Wh/Kg
Lead Acid 40 Wh/l 25 Wh/Kg
Compr Air 17 Wh/l 34 Wh/Kg
STP H2 2.7 Wh/l 39,000* Wh/Kg
How many sugar cane fields have you seen growing around North America? Compare that to the amount of cornfields we have. Corn grows very well in North America, but sugar cane doesn't. In countries where sugar cane grows better they are more likely to use sugar in their foods. The book Guns, Germs, and Steel covers the use of regionally grown foods very well.
"Getting more energy out violates the second law..."
The energy comes from hydrogen fusion inside our sun. The solar radiation which results is absorbed by plants and converted by photosythesis into the complex molecules that eventually are converted into ethanol. In short, it's a solar power scheme.
"the efficiency of ethanol production is low..."
So long as more energy comes out than goes in the process is fine. Estimates range from 25% excess to 2.5 times.
"it takes fossil fuels..."
Anyone should be able to imagine that eventually the tractors, etc will be powered by ethanol, biodiesel and hydrogen.
"the catalyst must be heated to 800C"
The rhodium catalyst heats itself as a byproduct of the reaction with the ethanol.
"you're still putting CO2 into the environment"
There is no net increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because the next corn crop (or whatever green crop is grown) reconsumes the carbon dioxide byproduct of the previous hydrogen production. In other words the CO2 is self recycling.
Finally:
This kind of research is a good thing! Just because some big corporations want to profit from it doesn't mean it's fraudulent or a violation of the laws of physics and chemistry... and code geeks who skipped the chemistry and physics curriculum should be smart enough to know what they don't know... hehe
"Knowing everything doesn't help..."
I saw a great article, maybe on k5, that shows how much extra energy is used to create a gallon of ethanol vs. a gallon of gas, and the gallon of ethanol actually contains LESS energy than the gallon of gas. There's definately a whole lot of heat death going on in this system.
This is not a hoax, as they do have a plant operating for ConAgra's Butterball turkey plant in Carthage, MO. It produces oil (convertable to other petro-based fules and plastics) from turkey wastes!
Changing World Technologies
Now, sit back and imagine that this type of facility could be used to recycle are landfills into commercially useful products.
Its also useful to purify and reduce other waste products from current petroleum and coal supplies (think sulfur and mercury).
I always get the shakes before a drop.
I've always wondered if it would make sense to breed a super strong breed of horse, or ox, or elephant, or similarly strong animals to take on heavy pulling work that we use internal combustion engines to do now. Animals can be relatively clean as their waste products (manure and such) can be used to fertilize the land, and their remains (bones, meat and such) could also be used after they've gone. The plant/herbivore combination is about the most efficient solar power solution we have available to us now... I think that an elephant would do an excellent job of pulling a plow.
An eye for an eye... leaves the whole world blind.
Right now affective PEM (proton exchange membrane) fuel cells require two elements that are expensive and hard to maintain. First the solid state acid or Nafion 112 (by Dupont) is very fragile and hard to manipulate, and second the catalyst MADE OF PLATINUM (bling bling) is too damn expensive. Currently both of these issues are trying to be resolved, mainly developing a nano-ceramic catalyst or the other option an enzymatic catalyst. Both of these once perfected would be cheap and increase efficiency. For now we have no reason to be getting excited over this excess hydrogen.
From what I know, it IS possible to distinguish hemp from marijuana by flying over the countryside, with specialized instruments.
Perhaps you could explain to me why we are using a grain crop (corn) to produce sugar for ethanol instead of sugarcane, the crop we grow to make sugar?
It also tastes kind of foul. There's a reason why Coke tastes better in almost every other country but this one. Although by the same token, Pepsi and Sprite just don't taste the same with regular sugar.
"Oh, and a few more things that turn into ethanol quite readily..."
Hemp?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Hemp's great. What's related to it closely? Don't stop there, man. We've need a list a mile long.
You know what's really great about the fermentation and distilling process? The byproducts are absolutely astounding fertilizers. Fibers, nitrates, permangenates, all kinds of fun trace nutrients that are distilled away, don't burn, but do go right back into the soil. And it's a net carbon gain of 0. The CO2 generated by this is no greater than the carbon fixed from the soil and atmosphere needed to make the plants in the first place.
... here in Brazil. Since the 80's the Brazilian Govt. have implanted a project called Pro-Alcool and since then millions of car (a good slice of the total ammount) is runned by Ethanol. It is cheaper (at lease here because we have a huge ammount of sugar cane planted), it is less polutive but isn't that efficient at all ... You still have to use some fossil fuel (like gas) to start the engines.
Erm... surely the real question is: Why do you still grow all this corn in the first place?
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
The next step is to begin working to genetically engineer plants that produce more of the kinds of materials that benefit the distillation and catalysis of ethanol. Corn is a poor energy source when you consider what it takes to grow it, and how devastating modern agriculture is to the soil.
Not to mention the fact that agriculture is essentially owned and regulated by Big Oil, who also own the companies that make seeds and the companies which make nitrogen fertilizers. No serious progress is likely to be made in agriculture or energy technology as long as the interests of Big Oil remain paramount.
The smart direction, I think, is to look at aquatic plants, algae, bacteria, and the like. If a bacterium or yeast could be developed to produce ethanol in sufficient quantity, and a closed system could be developed that takes in sunlight and produces all the kinds of things bacteria and yeasts produce - ethyl, nitrogen, methane, etc., it would go an amazingly long way towards improving the efficiency of these processes.
The trouble with our current crude methods is that they are simply unsustainable and produce far too much pollution and waste.
Recently a technique was developed to convert any kind of solid waste into constituent materials, including a rich form of oil. This project was undertaken with support from ButterBall because the costs of waste disposal for their turkey abattoirs are hilariously high.
Now imagine a similar kind of energy plant, except instead of slow-heating wastes and so forth, it has a chain of vats containing various forms of bacteria, single-celled organisms, simple plants, etc., in a closed ecosystem. Wastes and other materials from one vat are leeched out and channeled to the next vat in line. Nitrogen and CO2 are funneled to the plants, and their oxygen is fed to some single-celled creatures. Round it goes, probably feeding back into itself in a closed loop. Except, of course it isn't a closed loop. Free materials like oxygen, CO2, nitrogen, hydrogen, etc., are constantly being added to the system along with plenty of sunlight. The result is that you end up with a huge abundance of excess which can be siphoned off.
The grail of energy will be to engineer or discover bacteria capable of freeing hydrogen itself. Maybe some of those deep-sea hot vent varieties have some creative genetic ideas!
We are so used to thinking of energy in terms of limitations, and so there seems to be a rush to knock energy out quickly and with great force. The fact is, slower, gentler, more methodical methods are available using the power of living cells. We only have to learn how to utilize and program these molecular machines to do our bidding.
I have a friend who is utterly convinced that Free Energy Devices (also known as Zero-Point Energy Taps) are possible, they exist, and they are suppressed by Big Energy interests. I am naturally skeptical of the idea, but at the same time I'm open to the possibility, if only because at the atomic level everything is going a million miles an hour all the time. If you could tap that energy at the molecular scale I believe you could produce - essentially - a perpetual-energy device.
For example, if you were able to build a device on the nano-scale which captures electrons - like a cashmere sweater - and then instead of just forming a diffuse cloud of electrons were able to channel those electrons into a medium and hold them... well you get the idea. We know static is real, and we know a little bit of it can produce a pretty impressive shock. If a trillion of these devices could fit into a square foot then I imagine you could extract a pretty impressive amount of electrical energy.
There have to be thousands of ways to efficiently borrow excess energy. Another method that occurs to me is to layer materials in a manner such that electrons are caused to flow in a specific direction. I'd be interested to know if layering materials - let's say nickel and copper - can produce energy flow passively, or if a catalyst such as acid or NaCl is always required to "pull" electrons out.
-- thinkyhead software and media
Well, that was an interesting read.. I hadn't run across this idea before, but it isn't exactly rocket science :-). I knew lots of metals would react with water and produce hydrogen gas given the right conditions (sodium and potassium being among the more well known). I particularly liked the simplicity with which he obtained the right conditions. Add a circulating water bath (which I think he already has) to flush the aluminum oxide out of the reactor and a plate separator to settle it out of the water and it might run a bit longer between degoopings.
However, my main concern would be the energy conversion efficiency in such a system. Not just Al->H2, which is clearly positive, but the whole cycle of bauxite->Al->H2. From old school movies, I recall that a lot of electricity is used to create aluminum metal from bauxite (which is essentially aluminum oxide). There may be more efficient ways to store that energy than as a pure Al. Heck, even with losses, H2 gas might be more efficient.
Welcome to the net of 1000 lies. Upgrades are scheduled soon that should bring us to the 10,000 lies mark.
. . . those camel fuckers wrapped in sheets can go back to the stone age where they belong.
I thought you had it, until you said that it was the deisel to run the tractors which makes ethanol less "green" than we might imagine.
I wish I had the actual figures, because I can't remember them now, but it boils down to the fact that naturally-grown corn only yeilds x amount of corn per acre. Corn isn't grown 'naturally', though; corn today produces several times x amount of corn per acre, as it is dosed well with fertilizer, which is, you gessed it, a petroleum product. I wonder how many more forms of energy storage we can some up with, and how many more transformations we will put it through before being used? Each time energy is transformed from one form to another, some of it is lost, as no process is 100% efficient.
--something witty
There are multiple research paths underway to efficiently (cost, land, etc.) convert solar energy to hydrogen. I wouldn't want to rule any one path out at these early stages.
Solar > PV > Electrolysis > Hydrogen
Solar > Thermal > Hydrogen
Solar > Biomass > Ethanol > Hydrogen
Solar > Biomass > Methanol > Hydrogen ...
The problem with the first path is that the Photo Voltaic energy conversion is terrible (under 20%). The electrolysis efficiency is better (65%), but still the overall efficiency is quite low. More direct paths to go from solar to hydrogen may be possible (see: http://gcep.stanford.edu/pdfs/hydrogen_workshop/Ma cQueen.pdf )
It is more difficult to measure the overall efficiency of solar to biomass to hydrogen, but cost and land use are probably all you need to know. I could imagine that the efficiency is much worse, but if you have fertile land to spare (unlikely with population growth), it may be cost completive with other methods.
Dara
I agree that The Market will push everyone to switch to alternative sources once fossil fuel gets more expensive than the alternatives.
However, my worry is that once we pass the peak oil production point, oil will get more expensive very rapidly. Too rapidly. Demand will continue to rise and when supply starts to drop, scarcity could balloon the cost far more and far faster than most people imagine.
The resulting high energy prices would be devastating to our economy, as they prevade the entire system and the economic system has a lot of positive feedback in it that leads to a sinking spiral.
Can alternative energy sources be scaled up and integrated into the infrastructure fast enough to prevent an economic and societal melt-down? I'm really trying not to be alarmist, but look at the big picture.
Research like that in the linked article are progress towards the right goal, but will it be enough?
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
You might claim it could be made lots better. SO FREAKING WHAT? That is how it is done, and nobody is pushing to make the ethanol tax abatement contingent on the use of non-fossil-derived fertilizers and solar distillation. Maybe if you could get your solar hydrogen plant (making clean but really-hard-to-squeeze-into-tanks hydrogen) to make ammonia without any fossil CO2 emissions, you'd have something. You could use hydrogen in a Sabatier reactor to process the CO2 from the fermentation into methane (a far more useful fuel than H2) and the byproduct heat from the Sabatier reactor to help distill the ethanol. But you'll notice that nobody, but nobody, is doing this.
Chippewa Valley installed a 1500 HP boiler to generate steam for their distillation. However, they are not even co-generating electricity to offset their consumption; the investigation of this was left to the state.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I just don't understand why they keep toying around with the lossy process of converting a combustable fuel into electricity. It will add large poundage to the design of any vehicle, since there will be the need to have batteries to store the charge. It is possible today to directly fuel the gasoline engine with Hydrogen. With minor modification, any engine can use it. The power curve stays very close to the same as with gasoline. ...and hydrogen is
100% reusable.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Preface: I'm a biochemist.
YOU DON'T NEED HYDROCARBONS TO PRODUCE HYDROGEN GAS, M'KAY? You don't need ethanol, you don't need anything other than electricity.
How you say?
Well, think about this: A hydrogen fuel cell oxidises hydrogen gas with oxygen to produce water, right? (Look it up.)
Also, there is such a think as catalytic hydrolysis of water. What is this, you ask? Why, IT'S THE EXACT GODDAMN REVERSE REACTION. It can be done quite easily, using a proper setup. So, you don't need "fossil fuels." Boom, you have hydrogen and oxygen gas, easily separated, with no fossil fuels. The only thing you need to generate hydrogen is WATER. Which YOU THEN USE TO MAKE ENERGY TO MAKE ELECTRICITY BY TURNING BACK INTO WATER.
IT'S A MIRACLE! Water => hydrogen + oxygen => water!
All you need is a LARGE input of energy. Now, you say, "Aha! I have you now, you have to evil fossil fuel of nuclear power plants to generate electricity." However, you're DEAD WRONG. Solar, wind and hydroelectric power, if utilised enough and efficiently, would be able to provide for all of our energy needs. Optimising energy usage would help a lot, but probably wouldn't be necessary.
"Well," you say "Why haven't we done this already?" To this I say: PROFIT MOTIVE. Do you think ANYONE would really make a profit by doing this? It would mean essentially DESTROYING the oil industry, as well as major infrastructure changes. It's expensive, and people would rather make the next hundred generations pay for it in high cancer rates, ridiculous amounts of respiratory diseases, and a poisoned planet.
So, to summarise: There is no need for fossil fuels at all. People are just too lazy and stupid to change.
Now, you see, this whole argument is useless. Try to be a little better informed next time, eh?
For a bunch of people who call themselves nerds, the /. crowd has certainly been short-sighted lately. Nerd!=whiner.
A compact ethanol to hydrogen reformer means that at least two of the the LARGEST problems stopping the adoption of hydrogen have been solved
1) Transportation:
The existing gasoline transport/storage/dissemination architecture can be used for ethanol
2) Net production of CO2
Until now, the cheapest ways to produce hydrogen have relized on fossil fuel consumption. Now hydrogen can be derived from biomass.
To everyone who complains about ethanol subsidies: corn is NOT the only way to make ethanol. You could probably find a way to ferment whatever is fastest growing--after all, this is not for human consumption.
In summary, I hope this thing is for real...
around 2 ft tall use alcohol as source of energy?
Sound very much like Bender.....
if Futurama was not bound by scensorship
i could see Bender using "hemp" as fuel
The energy that went into making that oil was expended millions of years ago, and it all started as solar energy that was converted into plant and animal matter by the appropriate biological processes. [...] It's just that those hundreds of millions of years produced a large reserve of oil, so that the energy expended in finding it, drilling it, refining it, and transporting it is less than the amount of energy we get out of it -- but the total amount of energy that's gone into getting the oil into a usable form *is* still greater than the amount that's produced when it burns.
According to one fairly rough, recent estimate, each gallon of gas in your car required ninety-eight tons of prehistoric plants over millions of years to create. Talk about redefining "fuel efficiency," this is something that will eventually come into play should global oil reserves hit the downward slope of output that will inevitably come, unless we figure out a way to rush-fossilize a few hundred billion tons of plants per year into new fossil fuel reserves. Considering the total amount of plant biomass on Earth, suddenly that inefficient ethanol car or unreliable wind generator may be ultimately worth the drastic lifestyle change. Hell, it may be eventually necessary to maintain any kind of lifestyle involving advanced technology at all.
Put it this way--barring a freak discovery of nearly unlimited, accessible hydrocarbon reserves and a way to use them without causing more damage to the global environment, the end of the fossil-fuel civilization is an eventual certainty. What comes after it depends on what we do, or fail to do, to prepare for it. This is not fearmongering, it is realism of the most critical sort. After all, we still have to live here for the next few hundred years at least.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
The Campinas State University (Unicamp) has made this on July 2003. It wasn't a small device, but the technology was there, with the sugar-cane ethanol. For those who want to try some portuguese, This is the official release from Unicamp. Surely the Minnesota guys may have done a good work, but reinvent the wheel is not a great deal.
convert farm vehicles to use this fuel, now no more fossil fuels in the loop...
sheesh! is it so hard to work out
A U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) analysis concludes that the use of ethanol reduces CO2 emissions 27% more than gasoline, as well as reducing other greenhouse gases such as sulfur dioxide (SO2). Ethanol-blended fuels are the only commercially available fuels which have a CO2 benefit.
(Oh, and I, for one, welcome our new fuel-cell-powered robot overlords.)
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
Really, how is "nearly enough" useful anyway? Either you are short a bit of power, or have to have two, in which case you've got way too much.
I guess this is only meant to augment our current distribution system and not replace it. It's unfortunate, since we've been promised fuel cells in homes for a long time now...
Everyone knows that corn is crappy!!! The best
usage of acreage, by far, would be Marijuana.
You can produce a LOT more ethanol cheaper and it's
less stressfull on the land.
Of course, folks don't want you to know such stuff.
The fact that good for ethanol != good for hippie
pipe filling never really filters into their limited
scope of anything.
Oh, and a few more things that turn into ethanol quite readily. .... ....
4. Sugar Beets
This is potentially great news for local farmers who are quite worried about foreign sugar producers dumping (cane) sugar onto the US market due to "free trade".
Otherwise the only thing that will be left growing in Michigan will be piles of Canadian garbage.
The real key to biofuels would be the ability to use cellulose as the feedstock instead of just simply sugars.
Currently there is work going on to reduce the cost of using cellulase enzymes in the bioethanol process. Currently, cellulase-based bioethanol requires 30-50 cents of cellulase per gallon. To be economically competitive with sugar processes, the price has to be brought down to 5 cents per gallon.
At that point, bioethanol production could use the entire plant, including a large amount of plant waste that is simply thrown away today.
Please... So called "nerds" and "geeks"
Left over fat frier oil would work great too!
From the (Science, not CNN) article:
The formula of the process is:
C2H5OH + 2 H2O + 1/2 O2 -->
2 CO2 + 5 H2
The process produces hydrogen and carbon dioxide, which we know is a greehouse gas.
The CNN article does NOT say the process doesn't produce greenhouse gasses. It says "Hydrogen does not emit any pollution or greenhouse gases. But unlike oil or coal, hydrogen must be produced..." That production produces, in this case, CO2.
Now if the CO2 is trapped, fine, it's not vented to atmosphere and causing greenhouse problems. But it has to go somewhere and how much soda can we drink? It could be recombined as:
2 CO2 --> 2 C + O2
but then you've got a lot of carbon to dispose of, and the process would probably require so much energy that you'd lose the energy benefit you'd gained by making H2 out of C2H5OH in the first place.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
...about how this really works:
Could we make a big one that is just as good?
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
There is already a strain of hemp used for textiles that has a max of ~1.5% THC, not enough for recreational use but thats what the other strians are for.
If anyone wants some REAL info about hemp in the US read "The Emperor Wears No Cloths" by Jack Herer. It details the history of Hemp and how it became iligal, and blows all the claims by D.A.R.E out of the water.
Read, search the internet, get the truth.
Yep, lots of electricity to get bauxite to Al, since bauxite is not so clean. But then if you were able to capture the 'cleaner' aluminum oxide from these H2 generators and recycle it back into aluminum, it would probably take less to convert it back into pure Al than from bauxite. The aluminum could be a mostly closed system with enough recycling, and the recycling would be easy with the proper design. Put in a new spool of Al wire, change out the aluminum oxide collector for a new one - maybe free with exchange to encourage recycling, add some distilled water, and you're ready to keep producing more H2 on demand.
Seeing how much energy we use as a society, we're not going to get away with pure solar. Just not enough energy density per square foot using today's technology. Something like a few pebble bed nuclear reactors, or maybe throw in some solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, hydro, whatever other energy sources we have access to, and we can probably get mostly away from fossil fuels... at least as a fuel source for vehicles.
Fossil products will probably still be used for a long time for plastics and such...
The oil took in as much carbon when it was alive as the decomposing animals and plants did more recently - it all stacks up. With the amount we're pumping into the atmosphere now, we can't even let inevitable volcanoes slide: we have to account for them in the carbon budget, and not pump that much more through our industrial waste, or we'll have more carbon in the atmosphere, regardless of its source.
--
make install -not war
Sugarcane has the highest solar photosynthesis efficiency of any plant at about 8%. Fuelcells get about 40% efficiency, probably about 60%+ by the time they're in any significant use. So we're talking about 5% of the "insolation" of canefields in the US. That's about 700 watts/m^2. That's about 480 m^2:seconds, or 20 m^2:day, or a small 12'x12' roof to grow 335Kj of canesugar per day, at the fuelcell's output terminal. Or you can have a giant toxic corrupt nuclear target, providing power "too cheap to measure". We can grow more American sugarcane in rural swamps, and clean up the industrial runoff, or we can stripmine and build despotic foreign countries into strategic nuclear materials assets. We can grow up, or we can kill ourselves as fast as we can.
--
make install -not war
I did the math for 8% efficient sugarcane photosynthesis. The real problem with the math in the grandparent post is that it assumes we're farming in swampy valleys on land. Now that we've got clean high-efficiency organic solar, we can channel a small amount of the generated energy to growing it on the huge expanses of the sea surface, less than the current truck/train transportation energy. In mats hundreds of miles across, a farm can channel dozens of gigawatts. And some of that power can be expended scrubbing the exhaust into plastic or fullerenes, sequestering carbon in useful materials. If we were smart, we'd just live off the materials in banana, bamboo and coconut trees, but if we must have machines, at least let's feed them booze.
--
make install -not war
I dunno if anyone has mentioned this, but I've heard of running diesels on vegetable oil works pretty easy.
frequently amounts to a very substantial proportion of all the coal extracted. Large draglines on mountain-top removal strip mines consume thousands of megawatts of electricity, I have heard up to 50% of the power produced by the coal being extracted.
Large-scale industrial coal mining is very energy intensive in every sense of the word. So ethanol isn't the only energy technology where the numbers don't fall where intuition would expect them to be. Obviously, oil-shale mining would be even less efficient than coal mining, since coal is minimally treated compared to oil-shale.
We obviously need a source of energy not dependent upon fossil fuels (natural gas, oil, coal, etc.) which includes agriculture as now practised. One experimental energy source is hydrated methane deposits - frozen natural gas in sea-bed deposits locked within an icey crystaline lattice.
But of course, in the long run, this too is a non-renewable fossil fuel, and so is not a long-term solution for our descendents. It might do for us, and our kids and grandkids, but not in the truly long-term.
Do you go to a University or live near one?
Go to your local University library (or if they allow online access..) and take a look at yesterday's issue of Science.
It has articles on both the microreactor and the human embryonic stem cells that were cloned.
Favorite
ADM will be the new OPEC. Now we will have to find a safe way to dispose of hydrocarbon-based fuels. We could just bury them in Saui Arabia.
The only thing new in this world is the history that you don't know.[Harry Truman]
all the radiation from the sun is going to kill us, as will the earth's radiocative core!
This is my sig.
GE makes a 3.6 megawatt turbine. That's 6 times as big, in case you are innumerate too.
but I haven't yet seen cost figures that make it worthwhile.
Because you are an ignoramus who does not even know what's going on, and you are too stupid to look before posting. Even when you are right, you discredit it with all the blatantly wrong things you claim as truth.
If it's true that producing ethanol from corn results in a net energy loss, it's highly irresponsible for our government to subsidize this activity! Now I'm starting to understand the reason for all the Archer Daniels Midland advertisements when I watch Meet the Press...
A recent article in Consumer Reports also blamed America's obesity epidemic on these subsidies. The subsidies make sources of empty calories, such as corn syrup, very inexpensive. On the other hand, growers of healthy foods like spinach do not receive subsidies.
There's nothing special about the profession of agriculture that makes its practitioners more worthy of government subsidies than any other industry (say, auto body repair, Java programming, or plumbing). If you think the subsidies help to preserve "family farms," you've been duped. If you think farmers deserve subsidies because their incomes are subject to disruption by drought, etc., let's give then private crop insurance instead.
Subsidies in general almost always distort economic activity away from the most efficient paths. It's time to level the playing field and eliminate all subsidies, especially agricultural ones. Yeah, I might have to pay three cents more for a can of Coke (because it's sweetened with corn syrup). But the tens of billions of dollars the government is spending on subsidies could then be redirected into deficit reduction and/or tax relief. Not to mention, we'd be able to eliminate a large chunk of the bureaucracy at the Dept. of Agriculture. The benefits to 280 million Americans would far outweigh the costs to a small special interest group (the agribusiness recipients of the current subsidies).
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
All the pro-nuke voices, like yours, are voices of reason. All the anti-nuke guys I've ever listsned to were simply misinformed.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
http://google.netscape.com/search?q=cache:Q-GXBuQJ rJEJ:www.atomicengines.com/ships.html
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
for summing it up so perfectly.
Look HERE for a more informative article directly from the University.
Here is the response to the creation of CO2 by the hydrogen reactor:
"reducing carbon dioxide emissions (because the carbon dioxide produced by the reaction is stored in the next year's corn crop) "
So, they are saying yes the hydrogen reactor creates CO2 but when the next corn harvest is planted it then takes the CO2 out of the atmosphere and into the corn plant itself. Where as with oil, once the oil is burned the CO2 is never used again.
Also note, it takes energy to refine oil also. Oil does have an initial energy loss to produce.
If cars used electric motors then the braking system recyles the energy back into a generator which reacharges a battery. With todays cars the energy is absobed in brake pads through friction and heat. So, not only are there savings in the fuel cell and electric motor but also in the braking system. ( I've seen some hybrid cars with the technology )
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Other posts suggested that hydrogen is explosive. Yes, hydrogen is explosive. The Hindenberg blimp is a perfect example.
But if you have a hydrogen reactor then you can have a tank full of ethanol in your car. The amount of hydrogen can be limited in the automobile for safety reasons. Hydrogen would be produced as an intermediate between the hydrogen reactor and the hydrogen fuel cell as needed. The article indicates that the hydrogen reactor can be made small. Small enough to fit in the car!
Thus, using hydrogen is not necessarily an explosive situation like people who refere to the Hindenberg suggest
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I think the point with this article is that we now have an interface between ethanol and fuel cells that rely on hydrogen.
A cornot engine has a maximum of 40% efficiency. I think the point with the hydrogen reactor is that the ethanol can be turned into hydrogen. The hydrogen powers the fuel cell. The fuel cell makes electricity. The electricity can power an electric motor for example. I'd wager that an electric motor is more effiecience that a petrolium motor. I'd even guess it might be like 60% efficient.
So, if we use petrolium we loose 60% of the energy in a carnot motor car because a carnot engine has the theoretically most efficiency. In acutality, real engines probably loose 80% of their energy with deasel being the most efficeint.
Also, we could take the hydrogen reactor and use the energy in the distillation process. They imply in the article that they could get 1 kilo watt out of the thing. If its enough for my over then its enough for distillation. Or just use the ethanol itself in the distilation process.
So, we have a *net savings* in energy usage with the cars. Thus, even if it is still necessary to use some oil ( which might be debatable ) we have net savings when used in autos.
Sounds like a trade-in model is the best bet for this -- like car batteries and propane tanks, one trades their old, exhausted H2 generator for a refueled one. Some company gets to break the old reactors down for recoverable materials and "refill" them. Implies a bit of standardization in H2 generator design and capacity though, something I think auto manufactuers have difficulty doing.
Now, if the deisgn allowed easy and quick replacement of just the reactants by the user, and they were in a design that that allowed them to be one-size-fits-all from motorcycles through Hummers, then it becomes another type of fuel the filling station carries. The limitation to adoption of something like that is probably more dependant on supply/demand and profit margin for the individual stations.
Welcome to the net of 1000 lies. Upgrades are scheduled soon that should bring us to the 10,000 lies mark.
(nt)