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Ethanol From Waste Straw
phcrack writes "The CBC is reporting that 'Iogen Corporation of Ottawa has developed enzymes to break down waste straw and wood chips into ethanol on a commercial scale.' Apparently traditional ethanol from food crops like corn used at least as much energy to create as they released when burned. It's nice to see that big oil companies are helping fund a project like this too. It's very rare today to hear of a major company throwing money at a research project since the '80s."
It's nice to see that big oil companies are helping fund a project like this too.
Of course they'd fund it.
Around here "gasohol" is a 10% ethanol, 90% gasoline mixture. Any company can find a way to make that 10% ingredient cheaper than their competitors will find themselves in a very enviable position. It's smart business.
Trolling is a art,
the enzymes are made from petroleum. Oh well- at least it is a step in the right direction...
It may be rare to hear about them, but long-term research certainly isn't dead. There are companies (3M, Dow, DuPont, Monsanto, GlaxoSmithKline, and Lockheed Martin all spring immediately to mind) that have been conducting long-term research projects older than most of the Slashdot crowd.
That we don't hear a lot about them has less to do with their scarcity than it has to do with the relative non-newsworthiness of the progress these projects make. People don't want to hear about the bricks being put in place; they want to hear about the store opening.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Cellulose ethanol is a terrific idea, and saves food crops for food purposes, but I wonder just how much cheaper it's going to be. What sort of scale do you need to manufacture this on before the price is competitive with corn ethanol?
Anyone have any idea or more info about this technology? At least it's good to see some sort of innovation coming out of Canada...
Methanol is more useful for fuel cells anyway.
The thing is, oil companies at this point have to know that as soon as people can find a reasonable fuel source to power their cars, they're going to jump on it. It's in the best interest of the oil companies to start researching ways that they will continue to make money.
Does this mean I will still have to pay up the ass for a good scotch?
could you use the stalks of corn and other agro waste to produce ethanol?
and will this produce enough to increase the percent of ethanol in gas from 10% to 50% or more?
if they can do that, and make it cheaper than a gallon of gas, then we should see a drop in energy prices.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
I better buy those landscaping woodchips before the price skyrockets.
Nope. No company does research any more.
...than the big wood chips and big straw companies. You won't be laughing once some Saudi prince has control of the global straw markets.
Around here "gasohol" is a 10% ethanol, 90% gasoline mixture.
Well buddy, around here, "alchohol" is a 100% ethanol, 0% other useless crap mixture.
Cheers!
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
Silly people with your namby-pamby ideas of a brighter future through green, efficient energy.
Oh, wait...
Any generalization is a stupid one.
Because it doesn't provide enough biomass per acre. The more conventional crop to make ethanol out of is sugarcane. It *is* feasable to make ethanol out of high biomass crops like sugarcane.
The reason this corn statistic keeps coming up is because America has a large corn surplus and the government were wondering what to do with it.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Nice opportunity to re-look up enzymes and ethanol. Too bad there's no good Wikipedia entries on "profit margin" ...
I'm thinking about it, therefore I might be.
In Soviet Russia we are making ethanol (C2H5OH) even from rotten potatos. By the way, why are you trying to burn it?
Regards, Sir Raorn.
From the article:
Both Petro-Canada and Royal Dutch Shell are supporting the project with $24.7 million and $46 million respectively.
Trolling is a art,
Straw? Woodships?
Beverly Hillbilies anyone?
<insert witty linux comment here>
Wood chips, eh. I have a big pile of paper here that needs to be processed. Might as well do something useful with it...
> It's very rare today to hear of a major company throwing money at a research project since the '80s."
That's because research is usually either classified or not 'sexy'. The fact that you don't hear about it all the time is because if there is nothing to announce the researchers are happier researching than writing press releases ('sorry nothing yet').
MP3 Search Engine
what an ignorant fucktard.
I, my father, and some of my closes friends have worked in ethanol production from food crops, and we have 2 observations to present.
1. Farmers around the midwest are being paid not to raise crops. The crops they do raise are at times bought by the US and dumped at sea. Others are mixed with the maximum amount of dirt to make sure the maximum profit can be made on sales by weight & volume without violating health rules. From here, we can't see why there is any need to preserve food crops for "eatin'"
2. Ethanol from corn uses as much energy to make as it provides when you burn it right now. Like any new effort the process is going to be inefficient at the start. As we continue to streamline the process, produce continuous flow rather than batch production, and become more selective in the corn we use, this problem should fade away.
3. Ethanol generates a lot of money for my state. Use it and I get lower taxes.
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
They aren't used up when they react, so you don't need massive volumes of them as a feedstock.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
It's nice to see that big oil companies are helping fund a project like this too.
If ethanol were threatening to the oil companies pockets, they'd not be helping research it, but instead shutting up the researchers.
Do you really think that there is some mitigating factor other than greed that has gas prices up over $2 a gallon in some places?
I think it would be in humanities best effort to make more efficient use of what we do have as opposed to distracting ourselves with something else that won't get adopted on a wide-scale until something major hits the fan. While some may disagree, alternate fuels will be nothing more than an alternative until something happens to big oil.
I am very croius how the chemistry of all this works. Normally when cellulose (wood) is fermented methanol is produced and not ethanol.That is why some people still call methanol wood alchohol. Usually you need to ferment a sugar like fructose to get ethanol. (methanol has one carbon and ethanol has two)
quis custodiet ipsos custodes
Since the corn farmers of Iowa have made ethanol a political litmus-test for presidential nominees, the American people have been stuck paying huge amounts (something like $30 for each $1 of profit earned by ethanol sales) to provide "corn welfare" benefits. Do you really think that such a powerful lobby will allow imports of a cheaper type of ethanol?
Expect to hear planted stories about the unhealthiness/antienvironmental harms of the "new" ethanol, followed by urgent Congre$$ional action to shut off the flow of cheap foreign ethanol (and amend such a ban to include Americans who might get the idea of making ethanol from products other than corn). This isn't tinfoil-hat stuff, just the depressing reality of democratic politics: when the public isn't interested in an issue, naked interest-group politics takes precedence.
Make cheese not war 8:)
Parent didn't RTFA
...to an alcoholic vehicle. Fuel efficiency and "greenness" would be greatly improved if you used plain ethanol, 50 proof...you just modify your car's fuel injection system and away you go. (Regular gas, for comparison, burns with 12.5% efficiency, and diesel with 25%; if you have 50proof alcohol, it's probably somewhere between the two and not difficult to distill to that level.) The benefits of alcohol are renewability and the safe emissions, of course; how does gasahol compare with unleaded gasoline? Not terribly favorably, I imagine.
Correct. Mod parent down to Hades!
You just misspelled profit margin.
Brings up an interesting question: Do all Canadian petroleum companies get use of this tech since Canadian taxes helped pay for it? Or does just the consortium get to profit from it for a while since they did the actual research?
Either way seems fair from certain perspectives, but if Shell and Petro-Canada are the only ones to profit then what percentage of Canadian cars will actually run the stuff? How many petro companies are there in Canada? How many Canadians will really benefit from their taxes?
I'm thinking about it, therefore I might be.
Big oil companies are just scared bio fuels will catch on without them in charge of it. They will tinker around with it and then dump it later. They did the same thing in the 70's. They will ramp up the price to a new high and when they lower it back down it will never quite reach its old low. This is how they raise the price. First they raise it way up and then suddenly the price will drop. Most
consumers will never notice they will just be glad its not 2 dollers plus a gallon.
Here's why...
Got to love those California environmental regulations!
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
Uh, I meant grandparent. Uuuhh, great-grandparent now actually.
Man did I pick the wrong week to stop sniffing glue ...
to commercial ethanol production on a scale where it can be a usable fuel for such things as transport. To be honest, I wonder how much closer we would be to that goal if ethanol wasn't thought of firstly by our culture as a means of getting drunk .
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
I seem to continually produce this, especially at night. Might have a whiff of sulfur in it occassionally.
0.1kg yeast, 4l water, 1kg sugar. One apple or a potato, or some grain or rice or whatever fruit you want. Mash the fruit. Mix the ingredients. Leave in a warm place for 3-4 days. Heat to about 70C, cool the fumes. You get about 1l of around 50% pure ethanol. 7.1 Calories (kilocalories) per gram of pure ethanol will give you 3550Kcal for your work. You burn less than 500Kcal doing this all.
The oil companies are funding this research so they can receive the patents on it. Then they basically bury the inventions. Take solar energy. Oil companies own somewhere around 90% of the patents on solar energy. Why do you think they do this? Simple, better to fund the research themselves so they own the patents. This prevents anyone else from actually inventing something new and possibly marketing it. Do you think the oil companies will ever push solar energy? Not on your life. The same goes with ethanol.
Rats... I think I'm paranoid.
When Big Oil spends money researching renewable energy, I start imagining that their intent is to scuttle development. I could be wrong, though. Maybe they do want to develop new energy sources. I mean, they can still get a good firm strangle hold on supplies by patenting the new techniques.
Knowledge is power, after all.
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
Airplane glue has acetone, not alcohol! Stay on topic.
hopefully, we can switch to a 'green' economy, with ethanol slowly replacing gasoline. carbon neutral would totally rule.
2 /1 3/1922243&mode=thread&tid=134
this is good news for these guys from awhile back.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/0
anyone see us switching to an ethanol economy instead of a hydrogen economy? i kinda think that hydrogen cars are going to be like electric cars, neat concept, but not pratical in any sense. ethanol can use our existing infrastructure and its not as difficult to handle as hydrogen.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Novozymes Biotech in Davis, California is selectively breeding better enzymes for converting the cellulose in corn by-products to fermentable sugars. They passed their economic goal some time ago, but they are still making improvements.
First entomology, then virology, and finally bioinformatics systems. Bugs follow me wherever I go.
Apparently traditional ethanol from food crops like corn used at least as much energy to create as they released when burned.
This is really neither hear nor there. Nobody is thinking about using ethanol as a combustable fuel. It is just too expensive for that. One big reason for this is because ethanol needs to be very pure for combustion, the main thing being that it can't have any other liquids like water in it. So at present, it is only used as an additive to gasoline, because the blend results in cleaner exhaust.
However making ethanol for fuel cells is something like 4x more efficient, because it doesn't have to be as pure. I can't find the slashdot-linked orignal article that I read, but google has some more info. I haven't read all the details about it yet and how it compares to methanol, biodiesal etc, but it seems worth checking out.
Oil companies will throw cash at anything that will be profitable for them. People love to say how big oil want to lock people into oil/fuel products - but that's not true.
They want to do anything that will make them the most money. If something else comes along, they will adapt. I did some work at BP energy trading and trust me, they would trade *anything* that would make them cash (when I left they were looking at weather futures).
The rate at which ethanol burns is faster than gasoline. Which causes more stress on the pistons which is why the mixture is only 10%. Oh and not to mention gas mileage with ethanol is lower. The shit just is not good for your engine.
AcmeShells.com The cheapest Eggdrop
Quibble: My company has one employee. What exponent larger does it have to be before it too is also a supermajor? :)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
first you say there are no oil companies funding it now you show why they are? Forgot the meds this morning?
ethanol can easily be hydrolized. Use it for fuel cells. Its a step in the right direction, in my opinion. Imagine if we could pull a back-to-the-future, and turn trash into energy. Raise millions of birds back from the dead with one stone ;)
Oil from straw! /me smacks himself.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
Healthy soil needs a lot of that "waste material" in the form of composted organic matter. Without it, the soil will eventually become far less friable and/or fertile and farmers will need to use even more petroleum based fertilizers to grow their crops in a sand or clay base. Perhaps the oil companies are hedging here?
Wow. The moderators are apparently not educated on the truth about ethanol.
You shouldn't be allowed to use mod points until you pass a test about the topic. Then the truth would show.
Ultimately, the brick companies will come out on top of both straw and wood concerns.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
Apparently traditional ethanol from food crops like corn used at least as much energy to create as they released when burned.
Surely not! Uncle Sam couldn't possibly be involved in subsidizing a net negative industry. That would be pork barrel politics.
But seriously, any chemist/good engineer can tell you that corn based ethanol is an absolute waste of time for fuel purposes. Of course your average save the planet person sees corn based fuel and goes nuts thinking you can grow a backyard full and fill up your gas tank.
I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them. Isaac Asimov (1920 - 1992)
1. The research is not mature enough to be able to tell if ethanol produces more energy than it takes to produce it. People around here and in the media make blanket statements without any scientific research to back it up. All the reports I have seen don't even qualify where they stop and start measuring energy use for production. The fact remains that very little research has been performed on ethanol production when you compare it to the oil industry. Even if Ethanol doesn't produce as much enegy as it takes to produce right NOW..why not give it a chance an keep spending money on the research to maximize it. I've been around Ethanol production for the past 15 years. It has been bashed by the big fish for many years, because it was a threat. It has also been the victim of a monopoly (ADM).
2. Take a Flexible Fuel Vehicle and combine it with a hybrid electric automobile and you suddenly have a vehicle that achieves 40 MPG+ and can run on 0-85% ethanol (100-15% gasoline). Am I the only one that can see this? E85 fuel can be placed in the EXACT same fueling infrastructure that we have here in the US. This is the next step in my opinion. We can drastically cut our dependency on OPEC, slow the need for oil, and give the government less reason to dump food in the oceans.
"Taburetowka" in mass production
take a look at the patent
is a classic "Straw Man" argument.
It's very rare today to hear of a major company throwing money at a research project since the '80s.
Of COURSE it's rare for an oil company to fund any research into alternative energy sources.
Do you think the oil companies will ever push solar energy?
If it is patented they can't hide it, in fact patents are published for all to see.
Yes, they will. If they own the technology, and it offers a better return why wouldn't they?
If it is the future why not get a head start on their competition, within a few years that they could handle competition.
We are close to the point where we are using oil faster than we are discovering new supplies. The only direction for oil prices is up.
Alternative energy sources are now becoming profitable. We are going to see a lot more of this kind of thing.
My current favorite project converts turkey guts to oil. (www.changingworldtech.com) The latest I have heard is that they are now running a profit. They calculate that if America's agricultural WASTE could be converted to energy, there would be no need for oil imports.
These are exciting times. Building 'refineries' all over the country to convert waste to oil will create many jobs. This will be a good thing for the economy. It will also be good for the environment. If we use biomass rather than dug-up oil, we will not be contributing new CO2 to the atmosphere.
A supermajor company is one that can buy and sell elections...can run a country totally with money/power...can ruin entire communities if they decide to relocate to a cheaper place.
If your company with one employee can obtain that, then you've got a good business model.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
I can think of a few reasons.
1 Taxes are a big part of gas prices.
2 $2 isn't tha much, people pay more then this for a bottle of water.
Very rare today to hear of a major company throwing money at a research project since the '80s.
Ummm, maybe you should take a look at the pharmaceutical or biotech industries. They have a long and storied history of throwing cash at well qualified researchers to solve major problems.
2. ethanol from food crops like corn used at least as much energy to create as they released when burned.
I think the point of the research is to attempt to solve problems such as those. If you knew what the answer was before you began, it wouldn't be called research, would it? I wish that biodiesel would get some funding, as it really stands a chance at providing an alternative fuel and could minimize the effects of cracking plants that are needed to produce lower molecular weight fuels such as gasoline.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
3. profit!!!!11111 'arrrrrrhh!
One must separate the water from the Ethanol to make it useful, this is typically done by distillation which uses nearly as much energy as the ethanol produced. What is worse is that Ethanol/Water is aziotropic. This means that when distilling ethanol from water, eventually the separation hits a stopping point at about 95% ethanol because the boiling points of water and ethanol in a mixture of 95%/10% ethanol/water are about the same. This is why the highest proof alcoholic drinks are typically 180-190 proof (as opposed to 200 proof which would be 100% Ethanol). Mass separating agents (nasty additives) have to be added to the ethanol/water mixture to elicit a near 100% separation. This makes purification even more expensive.
Ethanol in gasoline is almost all chemical and refinery byproducts. Almost none is from bio sources because the chemical byproduct is so much cheaper than bio-fuel ethanol. In fact some alcohol produced at chemical plants is purified and sold for human consumption (it is added to some cheap gins). It's kinda weird to see a bonded and taxed tank of ethanol on a chemical plant site.
Bio-produced ethanol often sounds good to politicians, but unless there is a new low energy water/ethanol separation process, it will never be economicall feasible on a large scale.
Canada
Leading the world in being directly North of the United States.
"It's very rare today to hear of a major company throwing money at a research project since the '80s."
On the other hand, it's very common to see unfounded statements being thrown around on Slashdot by folks who really don't know what they are talking about.
I was reading here some mentions of how the US government pays farmers not to grow crops. I've heard of it before and I was wondering what the rationale is. I guess we'd have a huge surplus if everyone grew as much as they could all the time, but isn't it a little more complicated than that? If we used all of our land all the time, wouldn't we deplete it faster? I mean, doesn't the soil need time to regenerate? I know people want to grow food at full capacity and feed the world or make fuel or whatever, but is that really sustainable? What about all the petroleum products used to make the fertilizers to grow the crops? Does that get figured into the amount of net energy the ethanol provides?
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Car companies don't the profit from selling gasoline.
Lock in consumable methods sometimes work, but if the profit is too large there is competition.
Razor blades (I can now get generic refills), toner cartridges.
If you can make a good profit selling solar panels that last forever, someone will do this.
I would.
It's very rare today to hear of a major company throwing money at a research project since the '80s.
It's rare to HEAR about it. It's not rare for it to happen.
Most media outlets aren't willing to say anything positive about capitalism, it undermines their agenda.
Actually I have heard that hemp is one of the best producers of biomass. If all you want is cellulose then you don't need the sugars and starches found in corn and sugar cane.
Yeah, it's really smart to replace petrol with ethanol; a fuel that takes more energy to produce it than it yields...
Isn't that the same as solar cells, given that they require massive amounts of energy to make, output feeble amounts of energy on a per-cell basis (and at most 0.707 of that is harnessable as alternating current), and have a finite lifespan (primarily to cracking caused by heating/cooling cycles)?
Actually, ethanol/methanol is a great step toward solar-powered cars; capture the solar energy with plants, store it as chemical energy, release it as heat energy within an internal combustion engine. Of course, one could argue that this is already what happens when you start up your Hummer.
Enthanol/methanol are a far better automotive fuel than electricity, so if this replaces the (misguided) efforts to produce electric cars, that would be excellent. It's still effectively zero emissions, since every CO2 molecule which comes out of the car's tailpipe was already scrubbed from the atmosphere when the plant was growing. There will still be NOx and unburnt HC, as there are with conventional cars, but neither one of those species is chemically stable in our atmosphere and both are rendered back to N2, CO2 and H2O very quickly.
I have two big worries with electric cars. The biggest being the batteries - by necessity, the greater the energy density of the battery, the nastier the chemicals inside it have to be. Weird things happen to cars - accidents, ditched in lakes, etc. - so it doesn't seem like a good idea to be carrying around hazmats which make gasoline look benign. The other great worry is that electric cars all must be recharged somewhere - how many new nuclear and coal power plants will have to be built to keep all these electric cars recharged?
Transition would be easy, too - as soon as the fuel is economically feasible, gas stations can start dedicating a pump or two to it. Many modern vehicles are already built to run on methanol - Chrysler experimenting with "Flexifuel" Plymouth Acclaims and Dodge Spirits as far back as 1992. And with a little bit of work - swapping old rubber-diaphragm fuel pumps then doing standard tune-up stuff like adjusting the mixture and the timing - just about any antique vehicle will run happily on the stuff. The hardest converts will probably be 1980s EFI cars.... and diesels.
Well, okay, diesels will already run happily on vegetable oil.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
No, I doubt it could be done with one employee. I just wanted the solution for the exponent x in: 1**x = supermajor. That way I can create a business model with exponential growth to reach that required number. (Hint: I was quibbling about the term "exponent larger".)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
No, because 99% of the world's vehicles would destroy themselves within an hour of running such a high concentration of ethanol. Rubber seals and hoses in the system simply can't tolerate that much ethanol(I believe they'd swell). Moving components like fuel pumps rely on the gasoline for lubrication; too high an ethanol percentage, and they'd rip themselves to shreds.
It would be economically unfeasible to replace all the components- you'd literally have to replace the entire fuel system, including pump, lines, regulators, check valves, and injectors.
Please help metamoderate.
I mean, they can still get a good firm strangle hold on supplies by patenting the new techniques.
They obviously can no longer control the supplies (straw? sun? wind? waves? right). So they have to patent the process and the processing equipment. But, patenting nature is pretty damn hard. Once you know it's possible, people will find other wys of achieving the same thing. Then it's a lot easier to control that I don't start an oil well in my back yard (since there's no oil there).
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Gasoline is 25% ethanol, and car fuel alcohol is... 15% gasoline! How's that??
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
The question I have is how much more efficient is this process than thermal depolymerization of the same feedstock?
Politicus
In other news, scientists at some college have discovered that eating tacos before sleep will cause the individual to create methane gas the next day.
"With this discovery, the United States may finally have a reliable alternative to fossil fuels," the scientist claimed. "The only problem we now face is creating a process to collect the gas and the possibility of mud butt."
You have to dig around a bit on Iogen's site, but they do come up with *some* numbers. On their FAQ page they claim 300 liters per tonne of feedstock. Corn-based ethanol has a similar yield, though, and it yields more per acre than barley or wheat. (If my superficial googling is reliable, corn can yield 10 or more tons per acre compared to about 3 or 4 tons of straw.)
This is fantastic if it reduces the cost of ethanol production, and allows it to be produced from straw that is currently just burned. But it won't make the gas industry obsolete.
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
No idea, but that is irrelevant. It appears that nearly any farm waste can be used, as well as other cellulose-based waste (e.g. wood chips, sawdust, yard waste) that people/companies often pay to have removed. It may not be the solution to the world's energy problems, but it is a lot more of a step in the right direction than you give credit for.
It does NOT take more energy to create ethanol than is present in the ethanol.
This is an urban myth based on BAD research done by oil companies in the early 70s. Visit www.e85fuel.com and get some accurate up to date data. The modern enzyme based processes have a 38% energy gain in the cycle EVEN From corn.
Stop just mindlessly spewing unsubstantiated facts! Your web site purports to be a news portal.
START ACTING LIKE JOURNALISTS IF YOU ARE GOING TO PRETEND TO BE THEM
It's good to see some actual facts tossed around about oil economics.
Seriously, these are the kind of stories which make the populace at large think that the solutions to the world's energy problems is just around the corner, so in the mean time lets squander our remaining oil reserves and pollute the atmosphere.
Yeah, generally I view this sort of thing with skepticism. But if you take a look at Iogen's website, you'll see that they can take 1 ton of cellulose-rich farm waste and turn it into about 300L of ethanol.
Not only could you have a hell of a party with that, but there are other possibilities.
They can use wood chips. So, probably paper too. I'm sure there's a fairly large waste stream from paper recycling, of paper and pulp which can't be used to make new paper. How about tree bark? How about compostable waste from the garbage? Maybe even cotton fibers?
This is a *massive* quantity of raw material which is all waste anyway. And all of it is plant-derived, so consuming it as fuel causes no net increase in CO2.
All they need to do is not tax the fuel, and you've instantly provided cost competitiveness and a powerful incentive to convert your vehicle (if it isn't already ready for it).
I read that there's an ethanol/methanol gas station here in Ottawa, but they're for the federal government vehicles. It's just down the street from me, in fact. I'm a federal government employee, I wonder if I can fill up my personal vehicles there?
My 1976 Dodge Ram has an aftermarket fuel pump on it. The fuel pump is a high-volume unit, designed for drag racing, and I put it on because it was cheaper than an original replacement part (more competition in the aftermarket). But it's rated for 100% methanol. The carburetor, which I rebuilt soon after I bought the truck in 1999, has a brass float - also safe for methanol. I replaced the rubber body-to-engine fuel line at the same time as the fuel pump; it's also safe for methanol.
In short, I can fill up my Ram with ethanol or methanol. If the cost is competitive, I'll happily throw a vacuum gauge on it and adjust the timing and mixture for the new fuel.
The old big-block, with bores the size of paint cans, really won't care what the fuel is as long as it pushes the pistons back down at the right times.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I work at a large Lockheed plant, and we actually are building this bomb... out of ethanol. It really is more friendly to the environment.
David Pimental suggested that ethanol production from crops is a net energy loss. This is patently absurd. However - it is possible that the way things were actually done back then - given the massive subsidies - did result in an energy loss.
It is very clear that a great deal of energy can be harvested from crops and using the celulose in the straw is an excellent way to go.
Now - here is the problem with this idea. We will not get enough energy from bio-sources to supply what we need. In fact - we cannot get enough from even the vast Alberta tar Sands to supply what we need.
The total Canadian natural gas resource - if allocated to the tar sands upgrading - can only enrigh about 10% of the 300 billion barrels estimated to be recoverable - and this does not represent much of the 1.8 trillion barrels present.
Ditto with the oil shales in the USA.
And on a related note, you can now make crude oil from pig manure:
7 03 1-2004Apr13.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A
It's very rare today to hear of a major company throwing money at a research project since the '80s
Intel?
Microsoft? - I only mention MS because they give Bill all kinds of money, and he is the ultimate 'research project'
Lilly?
WTF?
I tried for 5 years to come up with a clever sig...only to realize that I am not clever.
No, the reason the media don't report it isn't their 'hatred of capitalism', it's because it isn't sensational enough. Bad things are sensational, whether it's US troops being shot up, princesses dying in Parisian road tunnels, or Democrat presidents playing around with interns. Companies investing money into research isn't news, it's business. Results get reported in the business news, they only reach the main news either when it goes wrong, or the good news is big enough (and simple enough) that it fits their sensationalist agenda.
At a municipal solid waste to energy conference in CA last week, a PHd and consultant from EPRI said biomass to energy is viable energy source and will soon be economic.
Unfortunately, if ALL of CA production were converted to energy, it still would meet only 5% of total energy used in CA.
It seems Marijuana grows quite well in many climates. I believe BC has sizable production, but then again, that my be hydroponics.
:-)
But still you could get pot from the buds and alcohool from the wasted stalks. Two vices from one plant.
As much as I think the tech I am about to push has been overhyped, I am going to push it anyway...
Electric cars will not be lugging much battery, they will have a fuel cell (and maybe a relatively small battery for regenerative braking).
Now, this easy, cleaner source of ethanol would be an excelent way to get the necissary hydrogen...
Even thought ethanol is cleaner than petrol, it is still dirtier when burned in an engine that may not have as many polution controls, or be as well tuned as a central hydrogen processing plant would be...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
Novozymes from Denmark also develops these enzymes. Funny thing is the enzymes are first sold to liquor companies because they help them to get "cleaner" booze out of their raw materials. As price is much less an issue in that industry, the whiskey-boys end up paying for a large part of the devellopment costs. So think about it during your next tequila slammer: you are paving the way to a clean environment!
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
A company worth mentioning that does this in the US is: http://www.arkenol.com/ They too have been at this for decades, but poltics keeps it from becoming mainstream.
Nothing is foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
It isn't just the soluble sugars that they use when making ethanol, though the fact that sugarcane and similar do produce lots of sugar does make it easier.
You're right about the space though. Ethanol contains less energy than petrol and it's going to take truly *HUGE* amounts of land dedicated to *any* crop (be it sugarcane, sweet sorghum or corn) in order to fill the energy needs purely through ethanol.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Gilette made its fortune by releasing a blade that lasted twice as long. This is directly contrary to the point you're making, that companies sit on patents that could reduce the sales of their current products.
If some energy company found a way to make solar power very cheap, then they would sure as hell release it, and dominate the marketplace. History shows this time and again, as well as basic economics.
A good study by the Hawaiian government.
http://www.hawaii.gov/dbedt/ert/ethanol/
It covers potential crops, production methods etc.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
I think perhaps there is a potential misalignment with your numbers, thought I admit I did not do any research yet.
The barley or wheat if used in the manner this article seems to outline (using the entire stock) is not comparable to the weight yield of corn used for similar conversion. When you harvest corn usually only the kernels are used and they can compromise as little as 10% of the weight of the product. What weight of corn that is the actual kernel, is mostly water weight, not the weight of the extractable/convertible materials.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
For a govt study of corn ethanol energy input/output, see:
d f
http://www.transportation.anl.gov/pdfs/TA/141.p
It seems to show net energy gain even if only look at ethanol. But ya gotta wonder - if it's a net energy producer, why do they run the ethanol plants on fossil fuels or electricity, instead of burning ethanol?
I guess it's the subsidies they get more for selling it as a gas additive than it costs them to buy the fossil fuels needed to produce it - makes it more profitable.
OK - that's fair, maybe we needed to subsidize it to help pay for the R&D. But now that fossil fuel prices seem to be on the rise, it's time to require ethanol producers to start burning their own fuel in order to keep getting the ethanol subsidies.
As for gasoline being a tame fuel, remember that a single cup of it explodes with the power of a stick of dynamite. How many cups in a 50 litre fuel tank? It seems safe to normal people because they use it every day. People are scared of hydrogen because of explosions: pfah!
As for supplying the energy for electric vehicles, there is also hydro-electricity and wind power which are now widely used. Moreover, a coal-fired electric power plant is more efficient than most (if not all) vehicle power plants. Even if coal replaced gasoline through our electric network, environment would be winning.
All that said, I think waste veggie oil is the fuel of the future. A recycled product, does not pollute, and smells good to boot!
You're not old until regret takes the place of your dreams.
If you'd read the article, you'd see that the advancement is that conventionally the efficient way to make ethanol is using food products such as corn, which yeilds a great deal of energy. However, trying to convert common cellulose such as wood or grass to ethanol used to be a useless endeavour... until now.
Basically this turns any sort of shit vegetable matter that's lying around into energy, which is a big fuckin deal if you ask me...
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
You're correct! Hemp is one of the best producers of biomass. Hemp can directly produce oil (nearly as much as rape), which (with rather slight modifications) can be used to fuel a diesel engine. And you could possibly use the rest of the hemp for the production of ethanol as described in the article.
:-)
Another wonderful aspect of hemp that it doesn't need fertilizers and that hemp is nearly resistent against most varmints.
There are hemp sorts available, that don't make fun smoking cause they don't contain enough THC. These sorts can safely be seaded everywhere.
No, my post is not a pipe dream
Bye egghat.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
Just goes to show that being pro-environment and/or a professor doesn't exempt you from being a dumbass on any particular environmental issue.
Whew, I'm having a bad slashdot day - I think I'll go back to watching my stock portfolio go down.
FYI: Exxon has about 90,000 employees and $250 billion in revenue, for what its worth.
The 10+ ton figure was from several places and was for up to 30% moisture-content silage. I don't have time now to look up the sites again but the search strings I used were:
corn "tons per acre"
straw "tons per acre"
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
...industrial hemp, the stalks in particular. You could harvest 50% of the stalks a year for ehthanol conversion, and plow under the other 50% back into the soil to keep the "tilth" up. Your soil for growing is just a big carbon cycle, you put carbon in, have plants, sunlight and water give you an increase in how much carbon you can take out, either food or fuel or for other purposes like manufacturing plastics or whatever. It's always a net gain, it's hard to make it NOT a net gain, as the solar (fusion power we have now) gets delivered free of charge and is pretty reliable. No wires or centralised monopolies required for it, cool beans there. And grown products store readily and are safe, example, I can accumulate "stored solar" in the form of my woodpile, by passing all the middlemen, do it on-site, and it's quite a nice fuel, and they have modern exterior to the home furnaces that are multipurpose you can get now, heat, hot water and electricity, all from your wood.
If the process for this ethanol conversion can be gotten to the homeowner sized status,and they can make both the DEA cowboys and the BATFinks back off from it, it would be great! I could easily use the big chipper here, use the extra branches from the trees I cut, and use those chips to make my fuel for use in the truck,tractor, chainsaw, etc. Even as an adjunct to normal store bought fuels, if you could cut it 50/50 or whatever it would be valuable.
Quite a few years ago there was a similar project, that used bacteria to breakdown cellulose and they released methanol instead of ethanol, an even better fuel, albeit more poisonous to handle, but I have lost track of that project and I don't know the status of it.
Another really super project going on now uses some specific strains of blue-green algae who's waste product is hydrogen gas. THAT has some good potential as well, say an enclosed pond or pool of the critters in some water and some composted biological matter suitable for their nutrient needs.
there's a HUGE variety of technioques out there, what needs to happen is every homeowner make the committment to do SOMETHING to adding to the enerrgy pool, rather than just being a consumer only. Once that mindset gets better established, we will all profit from it, from more R&D and so on. We just need to show the big guys and government we are serious about it, and the only way to do that is to go for it, not wait. Talk is cheap, actions speak louder. Leading by example is always more effective in the long run.
This is just like the early home computer years, we need energy pioneers to make the commitment to "just do it", knowing full well it's not perfect now but it will get better over-all the more people who take a direct hands-on interest in the whole subject.
Alright, this is silly, but I'll bite. How about some proof, links, etc. Call me lazy, but I'm not about to duplicate the research of every AC out there. As to the responded to the parent that was bitching about the parent being mismodded, well, it is flamebait, read it. Its merely an attempt to incite anger/argument (i.e. flaming) with no proof. If you don't want to be modded as flamebait try to come up with something a little less acidly sarcastic, maybe with actual content.
Water is a remarkable battery if we could manufacture a fuel cell affordably (i.e. - out of non-noble metals like platinum). Just add electricity and you've got H2 and O. Lovely.
Yeah, that's essentially a battery all right. You're investing energy to dissociate the hydrogen and oxygen. You then have to compress the hydrogen and fill automotive fuel tanks with it.
There are two big problems. Big problem number one is that a tank of hydrogen is several orders of magnitude more frightening than a tank of gasoline. Hydrogen seeps through cast iron, exactly like acetylene but faster. And it burns with a hell-fire, requiring far less ignition energy and over a wider air/fuel mixture than gasoline. I don't want to share the road with cars fuelled up with that.
Big problem number two is where are you going to get the energy to do this electrolysis? Nuclear plants? Coal plants?
Solar and wind have poor practicality to being put onto the grid - solar cells output DC, wind turbines could output AC but the frequency won't be stable. Either one must be provided to the grid in lock-step with the 60Hz sinewave coming out of the wall socket, and that will require inverters producing perfect sinewaves in phase with the grid. Inverters can be, at thereoretical best, 70.7% efficient - practical inverters are less. But at least electrolysis could harness DC power from them directly, providing a more useful application for this energy.
However, solar cells are inefficient (both in terms of real estate and energy capture) and have a finite lifespan (heating/cooling cycles primarily). Wind turbines will cause public protest ("You're not building that in my backyard! You'll spoil my view!") and will affect the local climate - take enough energy from the wind and you'll slow it down, causing weird things like new orographic precipitation, etc.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
First of all, no vehicle will *run* on 50 proof alcohol. You need more like 70-80 proof. There is too much water content in 50 proof (half!)
And if you're speaking about fuel efficiency in MPG, no Ethanol is not more efficient. Ethanol has less energy content per unit of volume than gasoline, so you have to burn more of it to get the same power.
And I can tell you right now that Ethanol is *nowhere* near as efficient as a diesel engine.
Sorry, brain fart. I was thinking *percent*. 50 percent would be bad enough, but 50 PROOF? No, no, no. Not a chance. You need at least 70-80% alcohol content, 90% preferred, which is 140-180 proof. (For those not in the know- proof is a measure of purity- 200 proof is 100% pure, 100 proof is 50% pure, etc).
California got forced to use Ethanol because of corn-growers in the Midwest. What will the U.S. government do to subsidize them if CA can buy ethanol made from straw instead? Oh, that's right - pay them to leave fields fallow for years. Maybe they should ship it to Africa and the Middle East as international aid. At least then the federal money for international aid and the federal money for subsidizing farmers would be the same.
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
The only twist in this cellulosic process is the source of the sugars (hydrolysis of cellulose rather than starch); the process from there on is the same story of fermentation and distillation. Fermentation is going to use the same old Saccharomyces regardless of the path, and as a byproduct you get... lots and lots of dead/dormant yeast.
Which is not to say that you need to get this fancy. I read about a USDA project in the 1960's which fed cattle on newsprint pellets enriched with urea (to give essential nitrogen to the cow's stomach flora), but doing the fermentation outside the cow to harvest the ethanol yourself still yields animal food.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
In this case it was a bacterium that accomplished largely the same goal as this enzyme. Let's hope it doesn't end up destroying all living plant matter on the continent.
I live in the southern Willamette Valley in Oregon (think of Eugene). A little known fact is that the major agriculatural crop around here is grass seed. Most all of the grass seed purchased in the US and a good chunk of the world market is grown within 50 miles of me.
The biggest problem with grass seed production is the waste straw. A quick back-of-the-napkin calculation yields about 1 million tons of grass straw which has to be disposed of every year. The traditional method has been to burn it, which creates enormous amounts of air pollution. We've been looking for an alternative solution for years, such as converting it into silage for livestock feed, and recently we've actually been able to sell it to Asia for that purpose. (All those big boats coming over full of cars and going back empty offer good rates on shipping...)
One of these factories located in this area would have a huge supply of raw material while providing a significant environmental benefit at the same time.
Total generation capacity in the USA in 2002 was a bit over 900 gigawatts. 122 GW is a lot more than Kansas could use, and much more than could be transmitted out of the state by conventional means. To make productive use of this much power you'd have to get fancy, such as by promoting an economy based on zinc-air or aluminum-air batteries and using excess wind to refine ZnO2 and Al2O3 back to metal during times of surplus. You could move bulk powdered or pelletized oxides and metal using tank cars or even pipelines.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Funny how naptha, a byproduct of the production of lamp oil from this crude petroleum oozing up in places like Pennsylvania and Texas, has changed things since its debut as cleaning fluid.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
People seem to think that this means that you aren't gaining anything by making EtOH from lignocellulose.
Consider the energy content of 1 ton of straw, and we'll just call that 1 unit.
Into this process you put 2 units of straw, and get out 1 unit of energy. So you get out the energy equivalent of one unit of straw.
The process isn't that efficient, true. You are consuming 1 unit of energy for every 1 unit you generate. But you're still coming out ahead, because you're using STRAW FOR ENERGY. It's essentially free. The dominant cost of corn stover (the straw in discussion) is transporting it to the refinery.
I hate to be repetative, but a lot of people are missing the point. To convert 1 unit of input to 1 unit of output can require an additional 1 unit of input and still be economically reasonable if your inputs are inexpensive.
I just got back from the Biotechnology Industry Organization world congress conference, which was all about this technology. It's certainly got a ways to go yet, but it's not a fundamentally broken concept just because it requires 2 tons of corn stover to produce EtOH equivalent to 1 ton.
The point was more about the hazard from a spill from a vehicle.
Quickie estimate: Suppose you crash a car into a pond containing half a million gallons of water. The car has 600 pounds of lithium-ion batteries, and 100 pounds of lithium dissolves into the pond. This is 45 kg of lithium in ~2 million kg of water, or about 2.2 ppm. If you weigh 45 kg and you want to get the therapeutic dose of 14 mg/kg, you'd need to get 630 mg of lithium which would require drinking ~280,000 liters of water.
The stuff is safe enough to use in cars, QED.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
The only smart energy business is that in which net positive energy can be attained. That is, the product will produce more energy than it takes to manufacture it. Out of all forms of synthetic energy, wind, hydroelectric and some solar types will produce net positive energy.
What the hell are you talking about? I never even took physics, and I know that's total bullshit. Where to begin??
The only smart energy business is that in which net positive energy can be attained.
You really mean some energy conversion process that defies the theory of relativity, which is thought impossible. Even nuclear fission and fusion follow the laws of energy conversion. As I'm just a simple Perl hacker I won't pretend to know more than this, except if I'm wrong on of this at least we'd be talking about tech that's NOWHERE NEAR production use.
Out of all forms of synthetic energy, wind, hydroelectric and some solar types will produce net positive energy.
I'm not sure what you mean by "synthetic" energy - there's no such term. Perhaps you mean "alternative energy"? That's a term used to describe non-fossil fuel (and non-nuclear) fuel energy technologies. It sounds dismissive, like "alternative medicine". I'm not going to guess what you mean by "some solar types"... I wasn't aware of any type except photovoltaic conversion.
By the way: wind and hydroelectric are kinetic energy, powered by the sun.
Sorry to come down on you so hard. I'm not the most informed person of science, but I get pretty annoyed when people dismiss ethenol/methanol. Especially when their facts are wrong.
You don't have to be a "granola eco type" to believe that bio fuels are THE short-term solution:
* The United States is very good at producing corn. It would be nice to export something other than jobs.
* That said, ethanol can be created from many things besides corn. So, there's no geographic monopoly!
* OK, the Saudi's WOULD have to rely on others for their energy needs, but seriously, FUCK THE FASCIST BASTARDS. (Note: they're not ALL bad. Never trust anyone who labels an entire culture, including yourself if you hate Americans. In particular I've known a few Saudis who studied in the US, and THEY don't fit the Wahabbist Islamic extremist stereotype).
It turns out Saudi's were "told" about the Iraq war before Powell. This is true... but what if they and Bush decided it was a good way to get the US media off the trail of Saudi involvement in 9-11?
Someone please pinch me so I don't notice that the left-leaning, pot-smoking, Vermont Green Party folks are now the patriots, while the suit-and-tie "global investor" types are profiting and supporting oil/terrorist links.
* (M)ethanol is NOT cheap, but nothing's free. I'd rather pay a price at the pump, than give it to Saudis.
* "Grown" fuels implies that greenhouse gasses are REMOVED from the atmosphere.
Fuel cells might be a mid- or far term solution. It certainly has less testing than alcohol fuels therefore it's a lot further away from solving our national security.. I mean our ENERGY problems.
That would be 280 liters, not 280,000 liters - still more water than you can drink in a week.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
I live in California, and in spite of it making my life more expensive, I do love those California environmental regulations, except the ones about engine swaps in cars. (A 2 stroke weedwacker engine is about 6,000 times as "dirty" as an average car with a catalytic converter.) So I approve of most of what CA does to try to improve environmental cleanliness, but some of it is really amazingly idiotic. Eliminating 2 stroke lawn mowers, leaf blowers, and the like would probably do more at this point than the laws against swapping in non-USDM engines achieve.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This is not the great wonder that it appears to be on it's surface. This product, ethanol, has proven to be a very hazardous when combusted. The byproduct of burning or combusting ethanol dissolves very easily in water, but leaves the carcinogens intact. Read the official report on what is is doing and has already done to our environment here at ChemCases,. The following is a link to an article on CBS News last month the makes that connection between Ethanol and MTBE and pollution; This is serious stuff and making this very harmful fuel even cheaper ought to have us very worried. Where are the articles on how to solve this problem, there aren't any because a solution doesn't exist yet.
The links you provide talk about MTBE and Methanol.
MTBE != Ethanol!
read www.ethanol.org for more info
Don't spout what you don't know about.
When will people quit repeating this falsehood? It's been disproven over and over. You can trace most of these claims back to some named David Pimental, along with the number "70% more". The most recent study that disproved it that I am aware of (in a long chain of them) was by the USDA in 2002. Not only is there a 34% net energy gain (and there is tons of room for technological improvement), but of the energy used to produce the ethanol, only 17% came from liquid fuels such as gasoline.p df
http://www.usda.gov/oce/oepnu/aer-814.
Here's the '95 report, when it was only 24%:
http://www.ethanol-gec.org/corn_eth.htm
This is common knowledge. My father is a VP of a fairly major oil company (I.e., hates the ethanol subsidies that they offer), but willingly admits that the net energy balance for ethanol is positive.
Furthermore, even *IF* ethanol took more energy to produce than you get out of it (which it doesn't), that is irrelevant. What is relevant is the value of the product vs. the value of the inputs. For example, if your energy is from burning agricultural waste (which often is used to heat the vats), you're burning... a waste product. Yes, it has energy in it, but it's not energy in a form that is particularly desirable. Even if the energy source was coal, you would be turning a fuel that cannot be used in internal combustion engines into one that can.
So, please - do your part to stop the spread of this information that hasn't been valid since the '70s, and is irrelevant anyway.
Rhetorical questions suck. Why ask a question if you don't want an answer?
...trying to convert common cellulose such as wood or grass to ethanol used to be a useless endeavour... until now.
small point here.
It hasn't been useless, just not cost effective. The enzyme hydrolysis process was not economically feasable, nor was the acid hydrolysis (both of which work to break cellulose into simple sugars, which can then be turned via distillation into ethanol).
Insofar as "cost effective" is concerned. The true cost of gasoline is $5.28 + a gallon, you just pay most of that cost through taxes instead of at the pump (http://www.iags.org/n1030034.htm this was funded by NDCF, a conservative think tank, not a bunch of liberals, thier estimated cost is $15 +/gallon)
Companies invest fortunes in R&D all the time, everyone from computer chip makers to pharmaceuticals spend billions in R&D, just because you don't hear of it doesn't mean it ain't happening. Likewise just because it doesn't conform to some eco-utopian vision of yours doesn't mean it isn't worthy R&D.
It is more accurate to only say the ethanol is the *least toxic* of the simple alcohols. It is still quite toxic.
How many useful enzymes might we develop for the $90 billion we are spending in Iraq per year or the $$$$ developing a laser cannon (see Airborn Laser ) Makes you wonder why the rest of the world might think the US a tad militaristic.
Something to think about.
I don't know about the 300 mile range, but we've already got electric cars that'll do 0-60 in less than 5 seconds...
http://www.austinev.org/evalbum/035.html
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
Ethanol as a motor fuel has been around for years and has been "The Next Big Thing"(tm) for most of that time. Ethanol as a gas additive, E85, pure ethanol, ethanol/fuel cell combinations. They are all great on paper and most would all probably work in commercial applications.
Ethanol is able to be manufatured from "locally" grown products in "local" plants by "local" employees. In many ways it is less polluting. There are many great things about it. Even big business sees the potential.
So why are the cards stacked against it? Because oil prices can go wherever they want to out of the well head. If the big E ever started getting a foot off the ground, the big oil producers would sacrifice profit to keep pumping. They would do this to assure that our addiction to oil wouldn't slack. Because the oil processing infrastructure already meets 100% of the demand for oil, these costs can't be beat by Ethanol processors (it costs a lot to build a plant). Consumers would see no need to change because oil can be kept cheaper than ethanol for as long as the producers want it to be.
Think of it like a Microsoft versus Netscape. The costs can be borne by the manufacturers for as long as it takes to beat the competition.
I see from your linked article that they have the Highlander working for them, so it must be a boon to mankind.
"Iogen has demonstrated that clean, renewable fuels are no longer a dream, they are a reality,? said Duncan Macleod, Portfolio Manager of Shell Global Solutions "
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
While it was good for your great-grandfather, there are some unintended consequences that I worry about. When an old farmer puts off retirement to not grow things, then there is no land for a young farmer to buy, so there is an entire age group of would-be farmers that don't get started in farming and have to go off to do something else. Secondly, all of the suppliers for the non-growing farmer get hurt, from manufacturers of farm equipment to mechanics. The fallout is that when the soil bank 10 years is over and it is time to get back to growing, the expertise and resources needed to do the growing may not be around.
I'm not pointing this comment at anyone, I'm just saying it is kind of a shame.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
Lithium-ion batteries are about 10% lithium by weight (tinyurl.com/yqzg8), but your figure of 600lbs of battery seems about right (based on some electric cars Google provided).
Accordingly, the car would have 60lbs of dissolved Lithium. To get that below a dangerous dose (170mg/kg for a 70kg adult = 12g from 10L) would require dillution in 23,000L of water, or a pool of water 400ft by 2ft by 1ft deep - in other words, about 400ft of ditch.
In comparison, lead-acid batteries are 65% lead by weight, meaning there's about 20lbs of lead in your car right now. 50% of lead is absorbed by ingestion by children, and blood concentrations of less than 30 ug/dL (300g/1000000L), meaning this lead would need to be dilluted by at least 30,000,000L of water to be safe, or more than 1300 times as much as the lithium.
Of course, neither is likely to leak this thoroughly, since both batteries are sealed, and lead-acid batteries do have the advantage that much of the lead is solid, rather than dissolved. Nevertheless, it appears that lithium-ion batteries do not provide a larger toxicity threat than the car batteries we use right now.
> > if we can produce enough ethanol from ag waste and
> > yard clippings
>
> We can't. Not even close.
Yes, we can - here's some info from Tennessee: eerc.ra.utk.edu/tnswep/activitiesPDFs/ha-ma-W.pdf
In particular, notice that there is _11 tons_ of agricultural waste produced per person per year. At 300L ethanol per ton, that's _870 gallons_ of ethanol per person per year.
At 60% of the energy density of gasoline, that's the equivalent of _520 gallons_ of gas per person in the US, per year, just by processing all the agricultural waste that would otherwise end up in a landfill.
Since the average American uses _460 gallons_ of gasoline per year, we get the following result:
PROCESSING AGRICULTURAL WASTE INTO ETHANOL FUEL WOULD REMOVE THE NEED FOR GASOLINE FUEL
Also, the rapid combustion of hydrogen results in an implosion, which is usually not as bad as an explosion (such as that caused by the ignition of gasoline vapor).
Finally, seepage can be reduced by lining the tank.DC output is ideal for electrolysis.
(In fact, using AC for electrolysis would require a subsequent step to separate the resulting oxygen and hydrogen.)
You don't need to convert to AC or put it on the Grid; have the solar cells in the vicinity of the electrolysis plant and you're all set.
The problem with the 50% efficiency (and other problems) of fuel cells will be solved or mitigated with the passage of time, as more and more research is done by energy companies (due to the finite and diminishing supply of fossil fuels).
In the meantime, these problems can be avoided by burning the hydrogen and using the heat to run a Stirling or other engine.
The engine can drive a generator to generate electricity, or the mechanical output can be used directly.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
USDA Report in 2002
'95 report
An important factor is the huge surplus of straw that is produced in the Midwest US from farming operations. All those millions of tons of wheat, corn, soy, rice, etc. come with 10X as many millions of tons of straw. At present the industry has a problem getting rid of it. I think at present it's mostly burned. I don't know if it's used to generate electricity yet. If it could be converted to fuel then the farming operations could produce their own tractor fuel, and eliminate a disposal problem at the same time.
Now, if they can just figure out a way to do the same thing with old tires...
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
The technology is here, the only problem is cost.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist