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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.
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.
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
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.
Very true. There are three solutions to this problem.
The first is a fuel stabilizer added to the fuel. This can be a toxic solution, but is not necessarily. One possibility is (as you say) to thin it with petrodiesel. Another is to thin it with alcohol, which as we know is already known to be run in diesel engines with only minor additive and modifications. A modern TDI diesel with high compression (One report I read featured vehicles running at 23:1 compression pre-turbocharging, which is fairly high except that some of your old school mercedes diesels are 22:1 anyway) but I'm not sure if an additional additive would be necessary to prevent the alcohol and biodiesel from interacting somehow.
The second is some sort of heating mechanism. For instance, a small, electrically-heated fuel reservoir could provide enough fuel to start the vehicle, and operating heat could be used to heat the fuel tank. This does add some weight and complexity but it could be a working solution. This could even be a subreservoir inside the fuel tank, that the driver is not necessarily even aware of.
The third solution is basically just a modification of the second, in which we have a completely separate fuel system. We fill this with petrodiesel and start up on it. Even petrodiesel requires heating at very low temperatures, of course, but we can use an additive with this fuel, and not feel too bad about it almost regardless of what that additive is, because we're only using it to come up to temperature.
I still believe that butanol has the most promise, however. To quote from butanol.com (a business, mind you):
The primary reason is that it's a direct replacement for gasoline, and even at current prices it's not dramatically more expensive than gasoline. Most butanol is currently made from petro sources, but (again, as per the front page of butanol.com) "The historical ABE fermentation technology produces a variety of fermentation products. The ABE process uses bacteria to produce Acetone Butanol and Ethanol. This fermentation process yielded a 6:3:1 ratio of Butanol, Acetone and Ethanol".
Thus the biggest problem with this process is "what do we do with the acetone"? :)
(The ABE process was first used to make chemicals for TNT.)
The best part is that the process works on any biological material, the only thing that changes (based on how tightly the constituent parts are bound to each other) is how long it takes to break down. All of our organic waste could simply be ground up into mush (whatever isn't already) and fed into reactors for this system.
Well, actually, the best part is that it's energy-dense, cleaner than gasoline, and works in gasoline vehicles without modification.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.