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The Strange Energy Budget of Ethanol Production
joeflies writes "The San Francisco Chronicle published an article regarding research on how much fuel is required to make Ethanol. The results indicate that it make take 6 times more energy than the end product delivers."
Compare this to gasoline and hydrogen and you've got yourself a real article.
Ethanol has long been a problem. The real insteresting prospect is the company up in Canada that is creating ethanol from the woddy portions of plants with a genetically modified bacteria see this slash dot story http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/0 7/1846247&tid=14
Madre de Dios! Es El Pollo Diablo! -- Captain Blondebeard
The TFA also disregards the uses of the rest of the byproducts of ethanol production (distillers grain and industrial gases).
The useful thing about ethanol and biodiesel is that we already have an infrastructure available and ready to use it as a vehicle fuel now. With Hydrogen fuel we don't. Same with Fuel Cells.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
"Taking grain apart, fermenting it, distilling it and extruding it uses a lot of fossil energy," he said. "We are grasping at the solution that is by far the least efficient.".
He ignores the fact that, if we wanted to, we *could* arrange the production chain so that it was not dependent on fossil fuel. You could build your farming and fermentation facilities to use solar or hydro power, for example.
Sure, it's fossil-intensive *now*. But it's also not a major energy source yet. If we needed to we could clean up the energy chain - there's no part of the process that requires fossil fuel sources.
-EvilMagnus
"If government funds become short, subsidies for fuels will be looked at very carefully," he said. "When they are, there's no way ethanol production can survive."
Right there the article ignores the politics surrounding ethanol. The politics surrounding other energy sources/storage mechanisms don't have the power that ethanol backers do.
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Also, they've been making ethanol for vehicle fuel in Brazil for years... if it was so very uneconomic I wouldn't expect them to do that.
As in, what gives? I smell politics.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"The author is using data from thirty-year-old production techniques to shoot down the new "buzz" about tomorrow's efficient ethanol production. At the same time, he is ignoring the current research that is generating the buzz: researchers are just now coming up with efficient ways to produce enzymes that can turn raw agricultural waste into ethanol. That means stuff like sawdust, wood pulp, cardboard, corn stems, yard waste etc can be turned into ethanol instead of going into landfills.
Data about how much energy it takes to grow corn is irrelevant, because we won't be using corn. We'll be using lawn clippings, or pulverized construction waste, or re-re-recycled paper, or whatever.
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1;
sure, as long as there's oil, ethanol doesn't really look efficient or affordable except as a fuel oxygenator. but if the oil reserves were to run out sometime soon, ethanol could be poured into most of our existing infrastructure and ease the transition. that's why it's important -- not because it's inherently superior to petroleum, but because it can be manufactured (from scratch) much more quickly.
Did you even read the article? You're missing the entire point! If the oil reserves run out you won't be able to get any ethanol to pour in your car either! Corn based ethanol requires far more energy in its production than it is capable of producing itself, almost all of which comes from fossil fuels. In fact, according to this article producing one unit of energy in ethanol requires 2.3 units of energy to produce. That's gotta come from somewhere, and right now its going to be fossil fuels.
The bottom line is that ethanol programs are, right now, nothing more than another farm subsidy. The politics such programs are beyond the scope of this article, but suffice it to say that touting ethanol as the solution to our energy problems is at best disingenuous, dishonest, and a potentially disasterous diversion from the real technologies we are going to need to maintain our current life styles in the future.
Fossil fuels != oil. Coal can be (and is being) used to fire ethanol plants. We have a larger supply of coal readily available - in the United States - than oil and essentially converting it to a liquid fuel (in the form of ethanol) would be useful for weaning the economy off of foreign oil.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
According to TFA, they are including the energy used in producing the fuel used for growing and harvesting the grain and for making the fertilizers. This should probably be backed out of the equation because these activities will take place anyway - regardless of whether or not we're using ethanol.
No, they won't. Farmers don't grow corn they don't intend to sell, and manufacturers don't make fertilizer they don't intend to sell. Both have increased production expressly for this purpose. Without the ethanol market, the farmers would cut back to keep prices under control. Same for the fertilizer.
Corn (and soybeans) are commodity markets - so farmers will typically sell their crops into the market for what they can get. If there is an ethanol plant nearby, it reduces the basis (this is essentially the difference in the price of corn at the chicago board of trade and the price of corn locally - the price of transporting corn to where it will be used) and has only a slight affect on the price of corn.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
First Falcon-1 to orbit, then Falcon-9. Then I can die a happy man.
I agree, this did smell funny. So I went out and did some research.
It seems that the "scientist" in this story, Tad Patzek (a geologist), has been working for the oil industry quite a bit over the last few years. Odd that he should suddenly be switching his interest to agriculture and begin attacking Ethanol.
Or perhaps it all makes sense if you look at it from the correct prospective.
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Good question. In the early days of oil production, it took one barrel of oil to get ~50. Oil was easy to pump (not very deep), and of high quality (pick and choose your oilfield). Nowadays, one barrel of oil gets you somewhere around 5, less in some fields. The big exceptions to this are a few, very large, oilfields in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the former Soviet states. Some might find some insight into recent US foreign policy here.
Return On Energy is being affected by several factors. Oil is now deeper and stickier, and takes lots of force to suck out of the ground. The gushers have gushed. It is also of lower quality, and more energy is required to refine it.
The ROE calculation for a particular oilfield is difficult to do. Oil producers are very secretive about some numbers, so the margin of error is significant. But what is clear is that the ROE is dropping, and will continue to drop. When it hits 1:1, oil becomes useless.
I think the most interesting thing about this, is that we won't know until after the fact. Suddenly the worker will not have enough paycheck to get gas to go to work in the factory that makes refinery bits, or some convulted economic chain like that. Another reason the calculation is so hard to do.
If we were having an oil deathpool, I would guess 15 years.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Ethanol production from corn, you mean. If you use sugarcane as feedstock, there is a significant net energy outcome.
1 6-Patzek-Web.pdf> published by Mr. Patzek. It could also be argued that he is considering only the current practices in american industry. If best practices were adopted, the results would surely change somewhat.
A more thorough article has been http://petroleum.berkeley.edu/papers/patzek/CRPS4
Do keep in mind though that not all energy is created equal. If it takes some number of units of heat and electricity, we needn't assume they come from oil. Really, studies like this need to break things out into "portable" and "non-portable" energy forms. If it uses more portable energy than it produces, then it's a loser. If it uses less portable energy, but some additional amount of non-portable energy then it could still work out OK.
At the end of the day, we don't make electricity out of oil, so a process that uses electricity and produces oil/ethanol might be useful if we need oil, and have electricity to burn.
This is one of the primary justifications for things like widespread solar and nuclear power sources. Though they don't help our dependence on oil directly, by giving us a limitless/very large source of electricity, we are more able to undertake processes that consume electricity but produce oil/ethanol, helping to reduce the constraints on oil supplies.
Another good example of this is Hydrogen. Hydrogen production is important, but not because you'll run your car on it. It is used in all sorts of industry (including oil refining), and can easily be used with Thermal Depolymerization (TDP) to produce oil from all sorts of useless trash, literally. We currently make hydrogen from natural gas, so it's not worth it to use that hydrogen to make oil, but if we could make it from something else, then the whole equation changes. Lots of industry that burns natural gas or coal, or uses it chemically, could use the produced hydrogen instead, and the natural gas could be used to power vehicles, or even be directly converted into oil.
It's very much interconnected. Saving electricity doesn't really help here, as we would still be converting coal to oil, which isn't really so helpful from an environmental standpoint. Dramatic new sources of power, however, like widespread solar or nuclear allows us to convert effectively limitless energy to an oil like form, and would change things dramatically.
Once again, life is more complicated than what passes for journalism these days.
Don't forget that biodiesel and ethanol come from different parts of the corn plant. (Substitute your favorite plant) Ethanol is made from sugar/starch. Biodiesel is made from oil. You can extract the oil, without affecting how much sugar/starch is in the product. Then turn the sugar/starch to ethanol.
Don't only is this study heavily biased against ethanol by using outdated data, it ignores the biodiesel production (which is somewhat rare), and that the by products are useful in their own right.
Ethanol alone doesn't need to be energy positive (though it is - if you farm with modern methods), so long as you account for the energy left after producing ethanol.
Here's a Cellulosic Ethanol Fact Sheet that claims cellulosic ethanol can be created for an oil-equivalent-cost of $13/barrel.
1: This is more complex than is seems. Ethanol has less energy than gasoline. (~70BTU vs ~109BTU) However ethanol is also about 108 octane (pump gas is 87-92 depending on the grade). If you assume you will never run on gas you can increase the compression, and get almost as much useable energy out of ethanol, even though your input is less.
No. It will be less (even if you up the compression as I suggested above). However even with standard compression, ethanol burns more efficient than gas, so it won't be 30% less. This assumes that your car was designed to run ethanol. If it wasn't your mixtures will be wrong, and you will blow your engine before you get statistically valid results.
3: I'm not sure. I think less, but I don't know. Gas is pretty volatile itself, and its vapors are more harmful.
4: They are close enough.
5: Not really. Oil for many years was cheaper. In the 1890s gasoline was a byproduct they dumped into the lakes to get rid of (litterally), after separating it from what they wanted. Gas engines were designed to use that waste. Henry Ford designed the model T to use ethanol, but gas really was that much cheaper then that it didn't make sense. Gas is more expensive now (and we know about the environmental effects), so it is time to revisit ethanol.
6: Right now the ethanol market is glutted, and farmers are building more plants. You can assume that if more people used it prices would go up. I estimate that the entire US could move to 25% ethanol over the next 10 years, with little effect on price. Farmers build ethanol plants because they don't need to make money on the plant, so long as they don't loose too much. The additional market for corn makes up for it. Not to mention they need more high protein animal feed, which is a byproduct of ethanol production. 25% ethanol would be enough that the US could stop all imports from OPEC.