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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,
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
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
Uhm, Canada (like most of the civilized world) uses metric.
> 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
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:)
Even more important is the fact that sugar growers have there own huge government subsidy (mostly import taxes) and midwestern corn farmers want to keep their ethanol subsidy.
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.'
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.
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).
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.
No, I'm not.
This statistic that it takes more energy to produce ethanol than is gained by burning it is bandied about all over the place but it is *only* valid if you are talking about corn, I'm not even sure that it is still valid for corn.
Sugarcane isn't the only crop which is feasable, there are several high biomass crops which thrive under differing conditions; Napier Grass, Leucaena, Eucalyptus, Sweet Sorghum is one of the more promising.
Of course there is some irony in the fact that some of the best areas for growing sugarcane are also some of the poorest.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
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.
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
The question I have is how much more efficient is this process than thermal depolymerization of the same feedstock?
Politicus
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.
If ethanol were threatening to the oil companies pockets, they'd not be helping research it, but instead shutting up the researchers.
I've got two questions for you.
If gasoline were completely replaced by ethanol, what companies would be positioned best in the market to distribute it, deliver it, and sell it? What companies would own a massive fleet of tanker trucks, miles and miles of pipelines, storage tanks and distribution centers, and hundreds of thousands of facilities with underground storage tanks and pumping devices for delivering ethanol to a consumer's vehicle?
(I'll give you a hint -- both questions have the same answer.)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Of course there is some irony in the fact that some of the best areas for growing sugarcane are also some of the poorest.
Irony? Try, "luckily"... this just means that the land can be had cheap, or the people can be employed cheap, and either way it's more money to their community AND a lower cost of production. Which of course means that the ethanol will be cheaper in the end, meaning lower prices to the consumer.
Hopefully, this will raise the locals out of poverty. If some of the richest areas were best for growing sugar cane, no one would ever be able to afford to grow the stuff in the first place.
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.
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.
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?
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.