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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."
I'd like to know because it's so hard to compare with oil at that level. It's much easier for a consumer to simply look at the price on the pump. But that only tells us what the market is willing to bear (what the fuel is worth), not the true costs of production.
John
But hey, it is something.
How would hemp do?
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
What the hell kind of adjective is that? It's bullshity.
People were just decrying the permits issued to BP for a plant to crack Canadian oil.
The ethanol plant uses a two-stage process to turn cellulose into gas, and then crack the gas into ethanol. Bet the emissions might be interesting.
Do we hold these guys to the standards we expect out of the oil companies, or do they get a pass because they are "greener."
DOE has ponied up $385 million to six different cellulosic ethanol plants, one of which is Range Fuels.
You have to be careful of these kinds of companies' claims. I remember getting interested in a biodiesel-from-algae-grown-vertically project run by an outfit called Global Green Solutions (www.globalgreensolutions.com). They claimed to be able to get 150,000 gallons per acre per year, which is 1000 times the output of oil palm and other biodiesel crops - and 15 times more than other folks' projections for regular algae ponds. It all sounded great, until the basic calculations showed that their 'projections' would have meant converting 85% of the TOTAL solar energy directly into stored energy in the fuel - a physical impossibility. I called their bluff, and they just shrugged and said, "our 100-million-gallon-per-year plant will be open next year and then you'll see." Well, it's now next year, and you can imagine what happened. Nothing.
A-Bomb
Your understanding is a little twisted. It isn't "producing C02", it's shortening the carbon cycle to the point where we are using plants that have grown as recently as a few months ago for energy. The carbon in the plants was removed from the atmosphere by said plants. There may be no net reduction in C02 in the atmosphere over time by using cellosic alchohol, but burning fossil fuels presents a dramatically different situation. The carbon in fossil fuels has been buried for millions of years. This process took a very long time. Burning the fuels releases the carbon sequestered over a period of millions of years in a matter of decades.
In theory, the CO2 that is released from burning the ethanol is reabsorbed by the plants used to make the ethanol, so there's no net CO2. This is why ethanol and biodiesel fuels are the darlings of many environmentalists. In practice, there are other CO2 costs involved, such as (probably) fertilizer, transportation costs, conversion costs, etc. (By "costs" here, I'm referring to CO2 output and nothing else. Of course, there are other costs involved as well.)
Still, it's probably much better than burning fossil-fuels with respect to CO2 output.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I don't mean to be contrary, but spewing carbon into the air isn't a bad thing. Its introducing EXTRA carbon into the air that hasn't been there for millions of years thats a bad thing. If we stopped pumping oil out of the ground today and instead used biofuels of whatever variety you like (biodiesel, ethanol, etc) that would be enough. The carbon in the air would get sucked up by plants as they grow, we would harvest said plants for the energy they have locked up, and we would use it.
The carbon-hydrogen class of molecules have excellent energy storage properties, from methanol (CH4) up to octane (C8H18). Some have higher energy density, cleaner burning, etc. Humanity has around 100 years of investment into the internal combustion engine and it would be wise not to do away with that until we've found something SIGNIFICANTLY better. And by significantly, I don't mean 20-30%. I'm thinking more like 100-300% before it really looks worthwhile.
Anyhow, if we stopped introducing EXTRA carbon back into the surface carbon cycle thats been sitting locked away for the last 10M+ years that'll be enough to do one of two things: stop any potential increase in surface temperatures OR show us that there is a different cause than CO2 causing warming.
That's for one unit of energy WE use to produce it; all that solar power that goes into it is what we're getting out.
It's sad when choosing an installation directory on your own qualifies you as an "advanced user."
X amount of raw cellulosic product in, plus 1 unit of energy to power the process.
The output is enough ethanol to generate 16 units of energy.
In practice, these plants often loop part of the output back to power itself, so the process is simplified to:
X of raw cellulosic product in, 15 units of energy out.
Which is pretty cool.
And that's only 85% if you consider industrial waste from a turkey processing plant to be "usable energy". If you consider the fact that they can run off of completely useless waste products, and feed 15% of their output back into the plant to power it, this is essentially free energy, AND a reduction in landfill contents.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
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.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Actually, plants get carbon from the air, and they do it for "free" (solar energy by way of photosynthesis). It's nitrogen that's the issue. It takes energy (and quite a bit of it) to reduce atmospheric nitrogen to a form that plants can use for protein. Fertilizer supplies nitrogen. That's where the carbon "footprint" comes in, since industrial fertilizer production burns carbon (or some alternative energy, of course).
Plants absorb CO2 from the air. Where were you during high school biology?
Compared to other North American crops, such as corn or switchgrass, HEMP contains the highest percentage of cellulose.
This is yet another reason to re-legalize industrial hemp in the US.
This great annual crop, grows in even the most arid lands, virtually anywhere in North America, without the use of pesticides, or herbicides, and can be baled like hay for easy transportation. It can be used to make:
Why is this crop illegal in the USA? Oh yeah, because politicians and others confuse it with marijuana, and demigog it to death. HEMP is NOT marijuana! You cannot get high from smoking hemp!
Hmm? America making fuel from cellulite? What a good idea. There's certainly plenty of it.
just sayin, that'd be awesome.
Start Running Better Polls
I know that the existing ethanol production systems have enormous tolls on our groundwater supply. How does using cellulose compare? Remember: there is more to the environment than just emissions. One of the last things we need is the Great Plains to become The Great Dunes
If cellulosic ethanol works, say goodbye to things that are mainly made of cellulose, like rainforests. You think Indonesia gives a shit where the ethanol they sell you comes from? There's something much worse than global warming, and that's deforestation. If this technology works, its more dangerous than nuclear power to the ecology, and we need to be very careful who learns how to use it.
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
> America is one huge continent. The USA is the only country that splits it.
If by "splitting" you mean having shores on both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, then by "only" you mean Canada, USA, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia and Chile.
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.
+++ATH0
- Eurasia.
- Africa.
- North America.
- South America.
- Australasia.
- Antarctica
According to Wikipedia, Australasia is actually a part of Oceania, although the only time I've seen the term Oceania used before has been in 1984, to refer to the the Americas, the British Isles, Australia, and a few other scattered bits of the world.In the linked map, this is the '6 continent' model, although their map calls the south-eastern continent 'Australia,' rather than 'Australasia,' which can't make inhabitants of New Zealand very happy...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Hang on - I'm way over in Australia and more than six months ago I heard a radio interview with people running an ethanol plant on cellulose in the USA (North Dakota or Montana - not sure which state). Australia's ABC science show ran the story but the podcast and transcripts have most likely gone by now.
The fuel cell laptop was supposed to appear a few years ago. Still waiting for that one. Coal liquefaction was supposed to appear a few years ago. Still waiting for that one. Now a startup is promoting cellulose liquefaction.
There's your problem, right there.
Plants mine the air for carbon. They literally suck up CO2 in their leaves and use sunlight to break it into C and O2. (Technically the 02 from CO2 is turned into glucose, and two Os from H2O are released as O2)
Plants mine soil for other minerals they need to grow, mostly nitrogen to make amino acids.
Petroleum-based fertilizers are primarily Ammonium nitrate, which contains no carbon at all. In fact, carbon would be an undesirable contaminant in fertilizer.
In addition, there are bacteria that are able to get nitrogen out of the atmosphere, and several species of plants incorporate these bacteria in a symbiotic relationship. If you use the bacteria, you don't need nearly as much fertilizer.
So ignore the lead.
Now for the meaty guts of the story..... cellulose to alcohol. Searching, searching, ...... Nope, not the teensy tiniest clue re : how they're doing it. Usually you'd see some words like "chemical process", "patent pending", or names and links to competent colleges, scientists, or chemical companies. Not a one.
As to actual verifiable facts, here's only one, and it's non-sensical:: a 100 million gallon a year pilot plant.
So lacking the tiniest foothold, and plenty of nonsense, we'll have to assume this is all PR crapola.
If you are interested in the chemistry and thermodynamics behind gasification you should obtain and read "Synthetic Fuels" by Ronald F. Probstein and R. Edwin Hicks, published by Dover (1982, 1990, 2006), ISBN 0-486-44977-7. The first portion of it deals with gasification. The later parts of it deal with taking the "synthesis gas" and forming it into bigger molecules of methane or even liquid fuels. The amount of energy consumed, and the heats and presures and sometimes expensive catalysts, are fairly depressing to the backyard hobbiest.
However, it might be possible to build something that gasifies waste into hydorgen and steam and carbon dioxide, which would then be burned in an engine. A recent slashdot article about a gasification procedure that uses microwaves seems hopeful, because if you gasified in the presense of steam with no oxygen you might have less carbon monoxide. Usually, oxygen has to be present because a portion of the waste is burnt in the same chamber as the gasification occurs, to provide the heat needed.
Of course, playing around with a microwave magnetron has it's own dangers as well.
I believe it is possible to build an apparatus about the size of two shipping pallets and 6 feet high that would take in household garbage and yard waste and produce a considerable amount of electricity. Whether it would be economical, except in places where grid electricity is not available, is a different matter. Having it produce a liquid fuel suitable for storage and use in an internal combustion engine seems like a big leap, but that's what I would like to aim for.
Industrial Hemp is a great source of cellulose, yielding almost 4 times more usable cellulose per acre than trees. The same crop could also provide food and textiles. Plus it would be better for the soil with its deep roots preventing erosion, the plant is drought/pest resistant and does not need artificial fertilizers to thrive, unlike corn.
Get the facts at http://www.votehemp.com/hemp_is_hip.html
And please, no lame jokes about how you can smoke it too, I've heard them all and they only show how little you know about the subject.
If we stopped keeping sugar prices artificially high, and especially if we let Cuban sugar in, it would be amazingly cost-effective.)
Cuban sugarcane is one reason the trade embargo hasn't been ended long ago, and why Brazilian sugarcane isn't being imported into the US. US sugarecane farmers, centered around Lake Okeechobee, FL, hold a lot of political clout.
FalconShould there be a Law?
That is by far our most perpetually renewable resource.
You forgot Poland
In 1892 Rudolph Diesel designed his engine and ran it on vegetable oil. He used hemp oil amoung them. Then in the 1930s Henry Ford built a vehicle not only using hemp in the construction but was fueled with alcohol made from hemp, hemp he grew on his Iron Mountain Estate. Hemp was found to be a good source for fuel. Also in the 1930s MIT did a study showing an acre of hemp produced more paper than an acre of forest. Eventually some who felt threatened by hemp's industrial uses pushed to make it illegal and via the 1937 Marijuna Tax Act and between them they were successful.
FalconShould there be a Law?
OK, first we get past the blogodreck from some site that wants traffic, and look at the Range Fuels site.
This is funded by Kosla Ventures, which is Vinod Kosla's venture capital fund. That's a good sign; he has a decent track record as a VC. (He was one of the founders of Sun, but he later invested in Excite.) Anyway, they're not looking for money; they've got that.
People have been working on cellulostic ethanol for a while. It's not that hard to do; it's hard to do cost-effectively. Here's an overview of the known approaches. Range Fuels uses a heat-driven process, which of course takes energy to run, but is standard chemical engineering. There's other R&D underway to develop a bioengineered enzyme that will digest cellulose at commercially feasible rates. Such enzymes have been created, but they're too slow and making the enzymes costs too much. Work continues.
Anyway, this doesn't look like the big cellulostic ethanol breakthrough. But it's progress.
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.
Where is all of this gibberish about corn coming from?! The article is about cellulosic ethanol -- it's right there in the title. No corn is required. You can make cellulosic ethanol from grass clippings, from tree branches, from discarded copies of Atlas Shrugged, etc. I'm pretty sure those things don't require fertilizer... except maybe the grass, and even then it's only to satisfy the needs of people with so little to entertain them that their sole joy in life comes from getting grass to grow as fast as possible so that they can mow it a little more often.
I hate to toss around insults, but what a fucking retard you are!! Ethanol is the darling of farmers who want to make money because they're capitalists. See how that works? They turn corn husks and straw into ethanol, sell the ethanol, and make money. Of course, they could just keep living off of government bailouts the way they do right now... but I thought we were trying to get away from that kind of shit.
Biodiesel, meanwhile, is the darling of big industrial companies, who want to use the technologies that they developed for oil refining to turn cheap feedstocks -- like the offal from slaughterhouses, waste plastics, and so on -- into oil. They want to take cheap stuff, turn it into more valuable stuff, and sell it for money because they're capitalists. See how that works?
You communist types make me sick. You think that everyone on earth just goes around subscribing to your stupid little ideologies. Sorry, it's not the case. Most of us are a bit more pragmatic, and would like to make some money rather than your solution of just weeping like a spanked child everytime everytime you gas up your hummer and while paying the Islamic fundamentalist oil-masters.
Oh, and where do you think that the carbon in plants COMES from? That's right -- the air. It's called a cycle -- the carbon cycle. Plants consume CO2, plants die, plants rot / burn, CO2 gets released. Seriously, you ARE a retard. Possibly an inbred one, but there's no way to be sure. How do you not KNOW these things?!? Do you live in a cave? Are you a convict? Have you spent your entire life in a church basement hiding from the Great Science Conspiracy that wants to destroy you with evil notions of evolution and thermodynamics?
One tonne of dry biomass on an energy basis is about the same as two barrels of oil. Another pithy fact is that one needs to be able to brew beer at $2.50 per keg in order to compete on an energy basis with gasoline. The last factoid is easy to see. A keg is about 60 liters and at 5% this is three (3) liters of ethanol. Ethanol has about 2/3 the energy of gasoline.
We seldom see these issues described in a compact form. I keep seeing terms like "Ethanol is an oxygenated fuel". In fact it is a partially oxidized fuel which is why it carries considerably less energy than say gasoline or diesel. Liquid motor fuels are for the most part Alkanes and have a chemical formula of CnH(2n+2). Ethanol is an alcohol which has an OH tacked on to an alkane. Ethanol is C2H5OH which is a partially oxidized propane. The oxygen makes it liquid hence relatively safe and easy to transport. Methanol is partially oxidized methane: CH3OH.
Hence it is immediately clear that if we had a large supply of propane then the shortest chemical route to produce ethanol would be from the gas - not from sugar or starch and certainly not from cellulose or other plant matter... except for one thing. The biologic source is renewable. The geological source as best we know is not renewable.
Now the thing that is not emphasized in these discussions is that every gallon of ethanol produced from starch will come out of someone's mouth. It might not be your mouth or mine - it might be a pig's mouth or a chicken's mouth but it will be someone or something currently in the food chain who will have to give up their source of food in order for us to feed our cars.
This is obvious. We do not have a HUGE amount of excess agricultural capacity and we also do not have huge piles of unused grain hanging around. Hence it is clear that we eat what we produce and there is little long term surplus.
The world consumes about 82-84 million barrels of oil per day. This can be found in the BP statistical oil review - there are other sources but this is a very good one. North America consumes about 24-25 million barrels per day if you include Canada.
I share the opinions of those who say we are probably at the world peak of oil production. We will probably stay near this peak for a couple years more. On the news two days ago was an EIA forecast that world consumption is forecast to grow by another 2 million barrels per day next year and that OPEC is expected to step up to the plate. I laughed. I expect that OPEC production will be flat and that the forecast demand will simply drive the price up until the demand is destroyed. Mathew Simmons says it could take over $300 per barrel to destroy the demand. I don't know if I believe what Simmons says will happen before 2015 but I do have a great deal of respect for him. He could very well be right.
Now the issue of cellulostic ethanol. Probably this makes some sense. But you still need to collect and transport a tonne of organic matter to the ethanol plant in order to create the equivalent on an energy bassis of two (2) barrels of oil. Then this material has to be converted at 100% efficiency into ethanol and at zero (0%) cost.... and it has to be 100% convertable into ethanol.
Other alternatives are coal liquifaction and coal gasification to create a hydrogen source for the development of synthetic crude.
As I see it - the ONLY way that make sense is synthetic crude.
We are doing this in Alberta at the tar sands. We are expecting to ramp up production into the 3.3 million barrel per day level by 2015. The problem is that by 2015 if world oil peaks between now and 2010 for instance then we can lose conventional production at a rate of 10% per year on a production base of say 84 million barrels at peak - and this compounds annually... it is an exponential function.
Without nuclear power to create a source of hydrogen we either have to discard literally 1/2 of the carbon we mine or we have to use a chemical process such as Fis