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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.
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."
Growing all that corn also takes a Lot of Water. more water than rain. The High Plains Aquifer is steadily being drained and by some estimates may not last as long as the world's petrolium reserves.
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....
Ethanol takes energy to make. Lots of energy, possibly more than it contains. That energy comes from fossil fuels.
No.
Our current industrial-ag model of crop production consumes quite a lot of fossil fuels. That does not mean the same thing as "growing corn and converting it to ethanol requires fossil fuels".
Producing ethanol requires nothing more than the sun, some corn, and bacteria. Yes, you'll notice that list includes an energy source, but not "oil".
Using Ethanol as a fuel is mostly a way to funnel money to Corn Belt farmers.
To that extent, I will agree with you, because we do use an industrial-ag model of crop production. We don't need to, though.
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.
How many gallons of oil does it take to put a gallon of gasoline in your tank. And remember one gallon of oil does not equal one gallon of gasoline.
Also, if you are going to be paying money to fuel your car would you rather pay it to American farmers and corporations or foreign oil barons and corporations.
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Please tell me how you will plow your farm, plant your corn, harvest it, process it and transport it to the ethanol plant, what you'll make your fertilizer from and how you'll get your ethanol to your hydrogen plant all without using any fossil fuels...
Or even with fossil fuels, in such a way that it makes sense to do at all...
Inquiring minds want to know.
Please tell me how you will plow your farm, plant your corn, harvest it, process it and transport it to the ethanol plant, what you'll make your fertilizer from and how you'll get your ethanol to your hydrogen plant all without using any fossil fuels...
Using the hydrogen of course. Duh.
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?
A lot of people are saying this- but it seems to imply that farming equipment, etc. must always run on fossil fuels.
It sounds a lot to me like saying - "yeah that new C language seems o.k. but you still need language X to write a compiler for it- so what's the point" But once you move beyond that- you can drop language X or in this case fossil fuels. What if your farm equipment starts running on fuel cells? The move from fossil fuels has to take place in steps.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
And when we have powerful enough fuel-cell enginges, we won't have all that farm equipment relying on fossil fuels, so they will be taken out of the equation.
Actually, all fuels take more energy to produce than they contain -- thanks to the same Second Law of Thermodynamics that Uncle Cecil seems to misunderstand at the end of the linked article. (Don't get me wrong, I like Cecil, but I think he made a little mistake.) Anything that produced more energy than was put into it would violate the Second Law.
You might respond to this by saying, "But it takes less energy to get oil out of the ground than that oil eventually produces when burned!" Well, not exactly. 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. Not really any different than the ethanol produced by plants that are grown with solar energy.
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.
The amount of oil available on our planet is finite. There's still plenty of debate about how much is left, but there's never been any indication that more oil is being produced inside the planet, at least not at a rate that's anywhere near what we use it at. Which means we are going to eventually need alternative fuels. (Assuming our rate of consumption doesn't decrease drastically.) That might be 10, 20, 50, 500 years in the future, but it *will* happen.
All that said, there's also no reason why we have to use fossil fuels to produce ethanol. It's just that fossil fuels are currently the cheapest energy source. That won't remain true forever: the cost of all renewable sources will only ever decrease, as technology improves.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
The idea was to run stuff like tractors on hydrogen created from ethanol... :-)
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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.
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"Ethanol is not an energy source; it is a different way to store energy, and not a particularly efficient one."
I'm not claiming that ethanol production is a wonder of modern science, but your argument is equally applicable to everything other than direct use of sunlight or geothermal energy, isn't it? As far as I know, wood, fossil fuels, and ethanol are all formed by processes that start with sunlight and proceed through a series of relatively inefficient reactions to store it in a usable form.
Science is a stepwise process; while this ethanol->hydrogen converter isn't a silver bullet for our energy problems, it's clearly a step in the right direction. Maybe the next step is to make the ethanol production process more efficient or to adapt the converter to work with methanol. The whole point is to make advances that, while they may not solve the whole problem at once, lay the groundwork for an eventual solution.
while I haven't read the article in Harpers, I would guess that much of the fossil fuel involved is used in the distillation process (i.e., removing the water from the ethanol/water mixture). This reactor tolerates eth/h20 mixtures as low as 50%. So, I would further guess that this reduces the cost and demand for fossil fuels...
I don't no if one can extract the Ethanol from the mixture using only solar power.
A Solar still takes very little knowledge, and no oil to build.
Growing all that corn also takes a Lot of Water. more water than rain. The High Plains Aquifer is steadily being drained and by some estimates may not last as long as the world's petrolium reserves.
You seem to know about this stuff...
Do you know if anyone has considered using wind or solar energy to power the ethanol producing equipment? Considering corn is farmed on lots of land with lots of wind and sun, it seems like this could help ethanol production become more viable.
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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..
I take it you've never sniffed the air downwind of a petrolium refinery or an oil well....
This is true only with respect to burning ethanol as a fuel in an internal combustion engine. This statement does not appear take into account the difference between an internal combustion engine and the conversion of ethanol to hydrogen to electricty to motive power.
You also are ignoring the fact that the ethanol can be produced using ethanol based energy. The tractor power, the distillation, the factory incidentals, the distribution, all of that energy could be provided by ethanol. That it isn't produced that way yet is due in large part to the lack of a widely available efficient ethanol conversion process.
The "hydrogen-based energy economy" has been hampered by the fact that hydrogen is not as easy to deliver as gasoline. However, ethanol is exactly as easy to deliver as gasoline, and the infrastruture already exists to do so. The problems with converting methanol or ethanol to hydrogen for fuel cells (the expense of the platinum catalysts) has been one of the final roadblocks to widespread adoption of fuel cell powered vehicles.
Crying "corn belt subsidy" before the technology even sees the light of day is counter-productive. Yes, some people are going to get filthy rich off of whatever fuel supplants oil. Unethical people will make financially-motivated decisions to use a "dirty" process and release lots of pollution. There will be more crooked deals with more crooked politicians, there will be kickbacks and porkbarrels the likes of which will relegate Haliburton and Cheney to the junior varsity level. Some oil industry barons will be ruined, many oil industry workers will lose their jobs, and the world will be changed. But it needs to change. The new direction may or may not be ethanol, but it can't remain fossil fuel based forever. And we need to explore those alternatives now.
John
I don't claim to know whether this is a net gain when all energy costs and byproducts (chiefly carbon dioxide) are taken into account, but don't dismiss the idea out of hand by spuriously equating it to the burning of purified ethanol.
Here's an article with a bit more information.. I found this link elsewhere in this discussion.
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.
It takes about 30% more energy to produce a gallon of ethanol that one gets out of burning that same gallon of ethanol.
What's the equivalent numbers for gasoline and diesel?
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
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?"
First of all, it's Yeast and not bacteria.
(I'm a homebrewer going commercial)
Yeast will at best get a corn mash up to about 20% ABV (Alcohol by Volume) To get this any higher, you need to distill it which requires lots and lots of heat (look up the specific heat of water and remember that 80% of your mother liquor is water).
In addition to the alcohol, there are lots of other chemicals - I don't know but I would be pretty sure that some of them would need to be removed or they would corrupt the chemical reactions. I would not be surprised if this reactor didn't require a pretty pure ethanol.
Finally, given the poor efficiency of fuel-cells, you might be better off just burning the ethanol in a micro-turbine. These will run on anything and have nice numbers.
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.
Of course you are correct on this point.
However (you knew that was coming, right?), the point Cecil was probably trying to make was that the amount of energy we can harness effectively from the burning of ethanol is less than the amount of energy that went into making it. Add to that the waste in the process of creating ethanol (that process can't be 100% efficient, right?) and there is definitely a net loss. Because we can't harness all of the energy created from the burning of ethanol (light for instance), and the fact that the process which creates it is not perfect, it ends up costing more energy to produce than you get from burning it.
And I am fully aware that this is just a limitation in the current method of creating and burning ethanol. This procedure could be improved over time.
Taft
It seems that this discovery is an improvement to the current method of extracting energy from ethanol. In most current applications, ethanol is burned to harness its energy. In the application described in the article, the ethanol is converted to hydrogen which is then turned into electricity.
So it seems the breakthrough here is probably a more efficient way of extracting energy from ethanol. That's gotta be a good thing.
Taft
As long as market forces are not making it happen, there's no real reason to force it. (Certainly not for the environment's sake. Industrial agriculture makes the gas-burning automobile look like a field of lillies... and non-industrial agriculture could never provide the yeilds needed without plowing under all the rainforests and irrigating all the deserts of the world.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I don't think so - I would have sworn that although nobody's succeeded at turning lead into gold yet, they HAVE turned BISMUTH into gold. It only cost them a few billion dollars to build the particle accelerator to do it with, too. And they got, as I recall, 8 whole atoms of Gold in the process...
I'm in the wrong line of work - I should get in on that 'particle physics' scam. "Yes, senator, this $50,000,000,000 grant is absolutely necessary if I am to discover the Pineapple Upside-Down Quark before the Soviets, uh, I mean, Red Chinese, uh, I mean, Terrorists do!"
(Note for any humor impaired particle physicists and/or sympathisers reading this - YES, it's a joke! Jeez...)
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So what does your message say? "You can't possibly understand the pain of being a farmer!" or some other content-free statement.
As to your suggestion I try farming some time, let me just say that there are ALREADY TOO MANY people TRYING to make a living farming - why would I be stupid enough to create a business that has no hope of succeding without government subsidy?
Why dont farmers who are being paid not to grow crops just get in to some other business? There are two primary reasons. 1) why work when i can get paid to do nothing? (great reason to get rid of the subsidies in the first place) and 2) My 'quality of life/lifestyle' will change - my family have always been farmers! (tough - the world changes and you need to too)
I hear complaints like "The farm has been in our family for generations and now because we can't compete with the 'big' industrial farms, we are in danger of loosing our way of life and our livelyhood!" To which I reply "Great - get out of farming, go get an education and do something ELSE. Tell your kids to get an education and do something else." I don't do what my fater did for a livng and it doesn't hurt me or him a bit. If big 'mechanized' farms are driving the little guy out of business then the little guy should go into business doing something else.
The reason we have all these subsidies is because there are too damn many farmers - if we stop paying them to do NOTHING with their land then perhaps they'd go do somehting else and actually contribute to society.
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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.
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.
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
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.
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
Even proponents of biodiesel realize that it is not for the mass market
Can you show me some sources? Biodiesel already is in the mass market. Many citys run it as B20 in their buses.
Essentially, there isn't enough refuse biomass for biodiesel.
Who said you only have to make biodiesel from refuse?
It'll work as long as a small amount of us use it
No one has ever suggest we switch to 100% biod. It can be just another part of the alternative energy mix. Going just 5% bio would mean a lot of cash that stays in the US and not going to Suadi Arabia.
http://www.windmeadow.com/
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
Producing ethanol requires nothing more than the sun, some corn, and bacteria. Yes, you'll notice that list includes an energy source, but not "oil".
Silly argument.
Getting from one place to another requires nothing more than putting one foot in front of the other untill you are there. Yes, you'll notice that ther is no need for "oil" in transportation.
Unless of course, you want it to scale.
The current practice of industrial ethanol production is powered by fossil fuels.
The idea that we can just use ethanol to power its own industrial scale production is untested at best. We might find that we consume all the ethanol before get any of it to consumer applications (which was, I believe, the original poster's point)
The idea that you seem to be hinting at, adopting farming techniques that do not depend on industrial methodologies, would never produce enough ethanol to create a viable market for ethanol power solutions. (chicken-egg thing)
Besides, if we abandoned the tractor we'd all be up to our elbows in horse shit. (Of course some people will be right at home)
> would be an alternative to oil if only the US ..and killing Iraqis too of course.
> government would stop pouring hundreds of
> billions of dollars a year in to subsidizing
> the oil industry.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
This is a really important question, and I wish I knew the answer, but keep in mind that the toxins resulting from solar panels are fixed costs--you pay per solar panel, not per kilowatt hour acquired from the solar panel. Or so I'd imagine.
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?!
transport it to the ethanol plant
Hell, I'm pretty sure that most of my dad's cousins still have an "ethanol plant" hidden back behind the barn.
what you'll make your fertilizer from
spent mash, corn waste, hay. Feed it to the "fertilizer plant", get bacon whenever you "upgrade" the factory.
how you'll get your ethanol to your hydrogen plant all without using any fossil fuels...
RTFA. The unit does that for you.
Ethanol can be produced from agricultural by-products as well (such as corn-cobs and stalks, rice and wheat straw, etc.), not just whole grain. Alongside renewable natural gas, this technology could reduce farm waste and agicultural surplus problems, reduce America's dependance on fossil fuels, help balance the trade deficit, and help family owned farms stay in business while reducing the cost of energy for the end user. All good things, IMHO.
A lot of people will be crying at the demise of the oil import giants, but I am certainly not one of them.
Read, L
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.
Erm... surely the real question is: Why do you still grow all this corn in the first place?
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
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...
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.
Most days have 24 hours so 1.2kW would give 28.8kWh/day not 1.2kWh/day,