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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."
RTFA, this method uses less energy.
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,
You are conveniently ignoring the fact that most of the US is unsuitable for growing sugarcane.
Corn on the other hand, can be grown all over the place.
all cars built after 1995 are flexible fuel cars. and since then, cars have been certified to run on E85 which is 85% ethanol 15% gas.
add to that the ethanol fuel cell, and screw hydrogen. if we can produce enough ethanol from ag waste and yard clippings, we can just use ethanol as it is easier to make, easier to transport, and is closed with regards to the carbon cycle (i.e. no negative impact on the environment from the CO2 used since the plants used have to use the same amount to grow.)
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
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.
No, no, in Canada the gallons are Imperial, which is 160 Imperial oz (28.41 mL/Imp oz) or 4.546 L, compared with a US gallon being 128 US oz (29.57 mL/US oz) or 3.785 L.
More importantly, we drink beer in Imperial pints (1/8 Imp gal, or 20 Imp oz) which is 568 mL verses a US pint (1/8 US gal, or 16 US oz) which is 473 mL.
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.
Helicopters, mail sorters for the US postal service, advanced targetting systems, a few other things...but bombs? Not really. At some plants, sure, but its definately not even a large portion of the company portfolio.
http://www.cleanairchoice.org/outdoor/e85.asp
http://www.e85fuel.com/
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.
Oil companies do lots of research into natural gas and ethanol and the like because they know that one day, many many years from now, the oil production will not be able to meet demand. The company that can provide the fuel via another method will be the one making the profit. It just makes sense.
Anyway, if you get a patent on something, it is made public knowledge, and it is available for public use by anyone after a few years. And, in the meantime, the knowledge is used to further the state of the art.
So what you are saying is: Oil companies fund alternative fuel resource research and that knowledge is made public, furthering the state of the art and making us more independant from oil. They own the rights to the inventions for a while, but they make the invention public knowledge and the invention is released to the public after a period of time.
Well, that sounds pretty reasonable! Maybe these companies aren't the evil entities the propaganda you listen to would leave you to believe? Maybe they are normal people, trying to make some money, and concerned about the future.
On the flip side, when was the last time someone who went "off the grid" contributed to the state of the art in energy production?
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
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.
Big oil companies produce most of the ethanol used for fuel at least in the US . . . from crude oil sources as a byproduct. This will not cut our dependency on OPEC. If ethanol becomes a staple fuel, big oil can comvert refineries to maximize ethanol production and produce it in larger volumes and cheaper than bio-sources.
Producing more energy than it takes to produce it is not the lynch-pin in the economics model. Right now, ethanol can be and is produced in chemical plants from crude oil sources for much cheaper than it can be produced from bio-sources. Purification of this byproduct is also cheaper because ethanol is slightly polar and most of the other things in the chemical soup at these plants are non-polar.
Until the economics change, Bio-fuels will be economically challenged in the marketplace.
Actually, it's a myth that the ethanol process uses corn that goes for food. Most corn doesn't get processed into food. It is used as animal feed and the by-product of corn ethanol production is a distiller's mash that is actually better for animal feed since it is high in protein and rich in water-soluble vitamins and minerals. Because the fermentation process removes only starch, all the remaining digestible nutrients are left in the distiller's grain.
Additionally, the net energy output of corn ethanol is 34% (PDF). It does not take as much or more energy to produce a gallon of ethanol. Plus, this is using traditional distillation methods. If we really wanted cheap energy we could use solar stills and run a 160-170 proof ethanol in our slightly modified E-85 cars and trucks.I do think ethanol from waste straw is a good idea but getting it from corn is also a good idea that could be even better.
"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?"
Yes, I really do, and I think you are naive for suggesting otherwise.
Contrary to what may be suggested by the moniker "Big Oil," there are several oil companies. They compete with one another.
The oil business is a difficult one to compete in. Ever wonder why Exxon bought out Mobil (to form what was for several years the largest company in the world?), BP bought out Amoco, etc? Economies of scale. It's nearly impossible to run a petroleum company and make any money unless you are HUGE. Profit margins are very tight. It's a mature business. You can't come up with a special widget, form a 1 man company, and be successful selling it to a niche market overlooked by big companies. Gasoline is gasoline is gasoline.
Oil majors are broken up into an upstream business, a refining business, and a petrochemicals business. One of the reasons this is done is to smooth out gains and losses associated with fluctuating oil prices which oil companies themselves don't control nearly as much as OPEC. When oil prices are high (supply is artificially low b/c of OPEC control), the upstream and refining businesses make money. However, petrochemicals suffers because the feedstocks to petrochemical processes are refined petroleum. When prices are low, the upstream and refining businesses suffer, but petrochemicals does well.
It just so happens that you and I are direct consumers of a big chunk of refined petroleum, namely gasoline. We are not direct consumers of petrochemical feedstocks (you don't go to Wal-Mart and buy a cylinder of ethylene or benzene). So unless you have been involved in the business, you know only half the story.
It's a dumb thing to complain about, in any event. The price of gasoline over the past 20 years or so has actually risen less than inflation.
Accroding to this usda research, producing ethanol is energy positive. What proof do you have that it is not?
http://www.windmeadow.com/
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."
Not true. Apparently you can't run the mix through long pipelines. Much of our fueling ifrastructure relies on these pipelines from the refineries to fueling depots where it is further distributed by truck.
When sent through the pipelines, E85 tends to separate back out... It's only available near locations where the alcohol is produced and can be mixed directly.