America's First Cellulosic Ethanol Plant

hankmt writes "The state of Georgia just granted Range Fuels a permit to create the first cellulosic ethanol plant in America. Cellulosic ethanol produces ethanol from cellulose, which all plants have, instead of from sugar, which is only abundant in food crops. Corn ethanol only produces 1.3 units of energy for every unit of energy that goes into growing the crop and converting the sugar to ethanol. Cellulosic ethanol can produce as much as 16 units of energy for every one unit of energy put into the process. The new plant will be online in 2008 and aims to produce 100 million gallons of ethanol a year."

Comments

Still harder to make than corn

[lecithin]

But hey, it is something.

How would hemp do?

Re:USA's first plan, not America's First

[Dogtanian]

America is one huge continent. The USA is the only country that splits it. Wrong; they are called "North America" and "South America" in the UK, and probably many other countries too.

Why do you think there are 5 rings in the olympic symbol? The 5 continents: America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Oceania. Let me tell you something; at its thinnest point, the connection between North and South America is significantly narrower than that between Africa and Asia.

More significantly, I have *never* seen a truly convincing argument or explanation as to why Europe and Asia are (or were ever) considered separate continents- it seems to be a cultural distinction, which has nothing to do with physical geography. At any rate, North and South America are *far* more separate then Europe and Asia are.

Ironically, you can see this in the picture that you linked to.

How does this meme get propagated?

[StarKruzr]

The existence of advocacy for both cellulosic ethanol and algae-derived biodiesel shoots your ridiculous envirowhackery full of holes.

Biodiesel is not a carbon SOURCE. Petrodiesel is a carbon source in that it takes carbon that was NOT part of the biospheric carbon cycle before and MAKES it part of the carbon cycle.

This is not hard to understand. Try retaking 9th-grade earth science, chief.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[djh101010]

{sigh} you really must be new here. There's no need to be snide over a typo, and other than your pointless grammar-Nazism, you offered nothing of substance in your reply.
Sorry, but going from "ethanol" to "methanol" isn't likely to be a typo, it's either an intentional manipulation to introduce FUD, or an outright error, or an example of dramatic ignorance of the topic. Wasn't sure which was the case, hence my question.

Your inappropriateness aside, are you actually claiming that the Federal Government does not subsidize the conversion of corn into motor fuel? Huh. That's a remarkable degree of ignorance,
And, that's a remarkable degree of "where the fark did you get that from what I wrote?".

given the nearly forty billion dollars that Congress has given in such subsidies in the past decade. Your taxpayer dollars at work. In any event, just so you won't think that I'm making this up
Yeah, whatever. Far as I'm concerned, better we subsidize biofuels from US sources, than give money to countries who hate us, so, yeah thanks for the link and all that but I don't see it as a problem. In fact I think we should subsidize the infrastructure for same, so we can get this stuff into production and stop pretending we like the arabs.

You seem to have taken my question about "Methanol, who said anything about that, we're talking about Ethanol here" and expanded it into a series of assumptions, some amusing, and some outright wrong.

I wonder why you do that.

Re:Where do these numbers keep coming from?

[Jerf]

There's one and only one way to find out if ethanol-from-corn is a net win, or in fact any other alternative energy proposal: Strip it of all subsidies and throw it out into the marketplace. (More advanced students will note that we also need to internalize the appropriate externalities.)

If it is in fact an energy-positive process, the extra energy can be sold. If the process is economically viable, then pretty much by definition of "economically viable" they will be able to run at a profit. If it is not, then they will eventually go out of business.

Now, my point is not that this is desirable. It must be the ultimate goal of any alternative energy production system, but in the short-term you can make good arguments about subsidizing things to get over start-up costs, experiment with multiple things before we know which is the correct answer, etc. My point is simply that you can do math from now until the last drop of oil is pumped out of the ground and you won't really know whether such a marginal process is truly net-positive.

That's the beauty of money; it's hard to wrap your mind around it, but if you just let it do its thing, it will automatically account for labor costs, equipment costs, etc., and with some judicious law making (which has a roughly 0% chance of happening) it can account for the externalities as well, and the final result will be obvious and unambiguous. It can even account for corruption and mismanagement etc., which are really real risks, not illusions. It's the only way to go from theory to reality.

Sugar

[Mark_MF-WN]

Thanks for not reading the article... or even the headline. The article is about CELLULOSIC ethanol. You know, cellulose? The stuff that isn't sugar?

You can make cellosic ethanol from grass clippings, those bags of leaves that everyone is getting rid of each falls, fallen tree branches, corn husks, not to mention the tonnes of produce that each and every grocery store throws away every single day because it couldn't be sold.