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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.
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.
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).
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
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
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.
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.