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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
At least it's good to see some sort of innovation coming out of Canada...
The research involves alcohol, you shouldn't be too suprised.
Trolling is a art,
Nope. No company does research any more.
Not just alcohol! Alcohol by the gallon! What's more Canadian than that?
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.
Uhm, Canada (like most of the civilized world) uses metric.
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,
> 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
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.
Ok, alcohol by the 3.79 Litre full!
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:)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's actually not true. There is a lot more carbon mass in ethanol (not to mention different binding strengths that require more efficient proton exchange membranes). Your efficiency per unit mass of an ethanol fuel cell is definitely going to be less than that of a methanol fuel cell. In fact, the nice thing about an ethanol fuel cell is that it's not toxic and ethanol is safe and easy to transport around. While it's true that there might be fewer regulatory hurdles to using methanol in fuel cells, that's definitely not the _only_ reason to use methanol instead of ethanol (remember, the only reason not to just use hydrogen in fuel cells directly is the difficulty and cost of transporting and storing significant quantities of hydrogen - a hydrogen fuel cell will always be much more mass efficient than methanol or ethanol).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.