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Vinod Khosla Talks Ethanol
IamTheRealMike writes "Vinod Khosla, venture capitalist and co-founder of Sun, has a new obsession these days. Ethanol is the fuel touted by many as an alternative to dwindling oil stocks, but is it all it's cracked up to be? Whilst Khosla is an avid supporter of ethanol as an alternative fuel (video link) his optimistic views have been rigourously challenged by Robert Rapier, an oil industry insider who is also engaged in a quest to discover alternatives. Recently the two debated via phone the merits of an ethanol economy, and Mr Rapier has now written up a report of the debate. What will be powering our cars 10 years from now?"
Probably oil.
Still.
Ethanol powered drivers are already behind the wheel of many American vehicles. This seems more of a problem than a solution. Though the Fred Flintstone Engine would seem to work well, especially with enough ehtanol in your system that you don't notice that you just lost all the skin on your feet at the last red light.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Ethanol has shitty energy density. The solution, if you are using liquid fuel, is to use biodiesel for diesels and butanol for gasoline engines. You can run E95, 95% ethanol and 5% gasoline, in diesel engines just by increasing compression and changing fuel delivery (not sure if it's increase or decrease; I'd guess increase.) You can run butanol in gasoline engines without modification, though low-compression engines may need to have their timing advanced since butanol has a higher octane rating than gasoline, IIRC.
Regardless what we make biofuel out of, the most important point is that it not be topsoil-based. Agriculture is the most destructive technology ever unleashed upon the Earth by mankind. Hydroponic crops make dramatically more sense as fuel feedstocks.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm at my work right now, where I am employed as an energy analyst. It is the opinion of every single person in the industry that there is no real possibility of replacing gasoline with ethanol. It would take the entire corn harvest of the United States to make that much ethanol, not even counting how much ethanol you would have to burn to harvest the corn. We will continue to burn gasoline until it becomes so expensive that people use alternate transportation, or until we all die in some horrible war. The whole ethanol thing is just another wall street fad that's brought in a bunch of suckers.
I submitted this story last night, and it didn't get posted.
I think all new cars will be supporting e85 gas (85% ethanol) within 10 years, but the most commonly used will still be the 15% stuff, cause of all the used cars on the market that can't handle e85. The biggest issue is going to be getting e85 gas stations out there (of course, as more and more cars start supporting it, more and more stations will popup). Here in Wisconsin, I've seen several e85 stations pop up in the last handful of years, so that I now know of 5 e85 stations within an hour of my home.
Corn based ethanol is certainly not a good deal. Our subsidies are so high that, should they disappear (another topic entirely), ethanol would be dead. Sugar (i.e. sugar beets, sugar cane) produces a much more energy-dense ethanol, but we are up against the corn lobby (yes, there is one) in making that transition.
An interesting read, regardless. I do believe that most oil companies are aware of environmental concerns, though most will not agree as to how successful (or sincere) they are. As a business person, it would make sense for the traditional oil companies to get their hands in the ethanol coffers (ahem, I mean, business) sooner rather than later.
Ethanol may not be the be-all-end-all of fuels, but it would be a heck of a lot better (as a renewable resources) than relying solely on petroleum.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
What will be powering our cars 10 years from now?
Can you say Mr. Fusion?
"You will pay for your lack of vision..." - Emperor Palpatine to Ray Charles
making money.
He's a VC. He sells you on hype. You buy the stock of the companies that he invests in early. He cashes out at or shortly after IPO. He couldn't care less what happens to you afterward.
The only reason Vinod is interested in ethanol is because there is money to be made. For him.
Period.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
It is not oil, ethanol, or [insert silver bullet technology here]; it is all of them together.
We don't need a 100% replacement for oil. If we can replace 10% with one economical technology, 5% with another, and 2% with yet another then good. Repeats as additional technologies become economical. Tony
And lastly, most ethanol is produced by corn in an extremely wasteful process that requires an enormous amount of energy which cuts in on its overall efficiency.
Worldwide, most ethanol is actually produced by sugarcane. The corn thing is a US-specific thing based largely on the economics of government subsidies. Per-acre ethanol yields for sugar cane (Brazil and India) and sugar beets (France) are reportedly double that of corn in the US.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
The first caucuses of the Presidential campaign season are always in Iowa. It's always the first news of the season, and the winner of Iowa gets huge amounts of free, positive press coverage.
Iowa is where the corn comes from. No politician who ever expects to run for President can afford to piss off Iowa. Even if you're not running today, if it's even on your mind, you vote the way Archer Daniels Midland (the immense agribusiness that can ruin your political life in the farm belt) tells you to vote.
We wouldn't even be talking about ethanol if it weren't for that little quirk of politics. I'd love to see some party say, "Ya know what? Let's make Iowa third rather than first and see what happens." We might still be talking ethanol, but we sure wouldn't be talking about getting it from corn.
If you want to get energy independent quickly and reliably, this is the answer. If you want to create a lot of sloppy hype and get people to spend stupid amounts of money on shoddy technology that's going to be under development for decades, then micro-pile atomic reactors are a better bet than Ethanol.
Ethanol is not perfect. It's only being hyped because GM et al are selling E85 engines. They aren't selling Diesel engines because they don't know how to make small ones. VW, BMW, Peugot, Reanault, and Mercedes all have decades of experience with small block engines. E85 is being pushed because if they pushed Diesel engines what little is left of the big three would collapse over night. Personally, I prefer Diesel. It isn't going to explode.
The EROI for ethanol is 1.67 to 1 while the EROI for biodiesel is 3.2 to 1. That is, both have a positive energy balance. But that still doesn't change the fact that corn and soy are crummy energy crops. It just so happens that they have huge agribusiness lobbies behind them. Of course, trading ExxonMobil and Chevron for ADM and Monsanto isn't a big improvement.
That having been said, ethanol and biodiesel don't have to come from these feedstocks. The folks at SUNY ESF have figured out how extract simple carbs from cellulose for fermentation using only heat and pressure with only water as a solvent. And then you have the enzyme approach the Iogen folks in Canada are pushing. Likewise, the algae biodiesel folks are really close to turning the corner.
My point? Just because corn and soy based biofuels aren't a magic bullet doesn't mean that liquid biofuels don't have an important place in our energy policy.
Disclaimer: I drive a 2003 VW TDI that gets 46mpg lifetime (paper log, not dash readout). By using the B20 pump near my house, I can go 57.5 miles for every gallon of petrodiesel consumed.
Why don't you verify it yourself using a little bit of common sense:
Sunlight energy: 1kW/m2 at noon measured at ray-perpendicular plane
USA land area: 9,161,923,000,000 m2, adjust this for sun angle (Rearth=4,000 miles)
Daylight hours/day: use your best judgement here.
From this, calculate how much sunlight energy hits the US of A per day.
Corn sunray-biomass efficiency 5-10%
Fermentation efficiency (sugars/cellulose to EtOH): 30-70%
From this, calculate how much sunlight energy hits the US of A per day.
How much of the energy can be converted into Ethanol?
Now compare the total energy convertable to ethanol with the oil energy currently consumed:
USA oil consumption: 20,000,000 bbl/day
Metric: 159 liters/bbl
Oil energy: about 15 kWh/kg; density: about 0.8 kg/L
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Whenever someone pushes ethanol that hard, they're really pushing for corn subsidies. If he starts talking wood chips or sawgrass, that might be something worthwhile, but as it stands it's just another pork project.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Actually, Brazil (which encompasses much of the Amazon basin), manages a great degree of self-sufficiency for vehicle fuel using ethanol, and they haven't had to use 97% of their land to do it. A large part of their success stems from the fact that they use sugar cane, not corn, to make ethanol, which I read is far more efficient in terms of both land use and energy required for conversion than corn.
Corn is not a great source for producing ethanol, but the reason it is the highly touted source in the US is because there is already a massive and highly subsidized infrastruture for growing corn in the US, and corn farmers have a powerful lobby. Ethanol from corn may well not be a long-term energy solution, but that doesn't mean that ethanol form other sources can't be viable, and Brazil has shown that.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
As a kid I went with my dad to his job in facilities for a large company. This company had a bank of diesel-powered generators in their basement - huge 24-cylinder beasts. On this trip there happened to be a 20 gallon bottle (think old water-cooler bottle) sitting on the floor with about 6 inches of diesel fuel in the bottom. I inquired as to whether this was a safety hazard - and then watched as a co-worker deliberately struck a match and dropped it in the bottle.
The match fell to the liquid and was extinguished.
As a slightly older youth I attempted to repeat this experiment - only this time with a) a plastic container, b) gasoline, and c) outside on the driveway.
I think my eyebrows grew back within a week or two.
Now the next useless fact: Gasoline does not explode in the engine either. If it does it is called detonation or knock and will eventually wreck the engine. Although it burns much faster than Diesel (hence gasoline engines running at much higher rpm) it is flame not explosion.
Finally, (and this perhaps needs to be posted all over this thread because a lot of people do not understand it) ethanol has a higher octane rating than standard gasolines and has more charge cooling. As a result it can be made to burn more efficiently in an engine because the compression ratio can be raised. A modified Atkinson cycle (compression ratio lower than expansion ratio) ethanol engine can have quite reasonable efficiency, not as good as Diesel but better than lead free gasoline. And it should lose less power in the catalytic converter.
Although the fuel tank needs to be bigger than that for a gasoline engine, because of the lower energy density, this has little to do with cost per Joule which is the important thing. It does not matter if I need 6l/100Km versus the 5 used by my Diesel engine if the cost per Joule is comparable.
And finally finally, ethanol fires can be put out with water and reduced in intensity very quickly with water mist. It is comparable in safety to Diesel, as is recognised by the experts - marine safety agencies. The main problem with ethanol is that it doesn't really mix that well with gasoline, but this is the only way to introduce it gradually.
Pining for the fjords
Actually, it's not nothing. They are warning boaters against using ethanol, becuase it dissolves fiberglass, which boat fuel tanks are made from. The interior of the fuel tank dissolves and gums up the engine, causing really bad things to happen.
In regular engines, there is evidence (informal, no scientific studies to date) that ethanol produces a buildup on parts exposed to combustion much more rapidly than regular refined fuel, which, in your case, would cause your spark plugs to need replacement sooner (you might pull them and check, it's pretty easy, really). I don't know of the effects on engine horsepower and torque, but it shouldn't be a drastic change from gasoline.
just an analog boy living in a digital age.
yea 200-400 at current use. Now multiply the number of people needing it for their cars, planes, and lights by 5-10 and see how long it lasts. Also Drilling the permafrost for oil, while possible is expensive, really expensive compared to drilling even in the ocean.
China is literally 4 times the popultion of the US alone. what about india? The problem with most of the long range prediction is that they assume that more oil won't be used in the future or use the modest growth rate of the US or europe. No one is figuring on a billion chinese needing cars or computers. Let alone their childern. On top of the UE or european growth rates.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Not only are Pimental's figures grossly incorrect for corn, but there are much more efficient feedstocks that blow them completely out of the water.
This doesn't even account for ethanol from cellulose. If we can devise a way to efficiently break cellulose down to sugar, then ethanol become trivial to produce.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").