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Startup Claims to Make $1/Gallon Ethanol
gnick writes to mention Wired is reporting that an Illinois startup is claiming they can make ethanol from most any organic material for around $1/gallon. Coskata, backed by General Motors and several other investors, uses a process that is bacteria based instead of some of the other available methods. The bacteria processes organic material that is fed into the reactor and secretes ethanol as a waste product.
aaah...reminds me of college.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
First thought was Marty's "Mr Fusion" on the back of his DeLorean. (Dump in a few banana peels -- 1.21 gigawatts!)
Moonshine all around, its on me tonight!
The bacteria used in the process only grow in the middle east.
it seems that this is the cost of production, not the cost to the consumer. If we are selling it a buck a gallon from the pump after the inclusion of taxes, then I am interested. Until then, please use my corn for good uses such as the syrup in my Mt. Dew like God intended.
I don't know the merits of this particular deal, but it never made sense to me that "car makers" really cared one way or the other about the fuel costs (and the SUV craze has borne that out...)
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
$1/gallon would be great if it were gasoline, but one gallon of ethanol doesn't store the same amount of energy as a gallon of gas.
How many joules per dollar does that work out to compared to gas?
Or, even better, how many miles per dollar does that work out to in today's ethanol-powered cars?
Yes.
The efficiency argument as it pertains to ethanol is related to the so-called "energy positive" problem. The concern is that if it takes more energy to create the ethanol than it does to farm it and convert it to fuel, then what exactly is powering all that farm equipment? It can't be the ethanol, or we'd eventually run out of energy.
On the other hand, grid power consolidates the power infrastructure and therefore is wonderfully inexpensive. If this machine did nothing more than take grid power and convert it straight into ethanol, it would be a miracle machine. It's almost as good as if you had a machine that converted uranium or plutonium directly into millions of barrels of ethanol. If you get a slight boost from the energy already stored in the corn, so much the better!
The key thing (economically) is to get off of oil. Oil is starting to weigh down our economy and gives far too much power to current and potential enemies. Making transportation cheap again would rebound the economy, bring food prices back in line, and generally improve things for the U.S. (and really, the rest of the world) all around.
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But I forget: this is Slashdot.
Hint: the process does not use corn.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
"Hey, since they beat us to the smartphone, the only thing we could do in response was test the outer limits of stupidity," said Joey, the CIO.
Time could be running out for ambitious entremanures wanting to cash in on the USPTO, however, Joey continued:
"The USPTO asked us a question, which was 'What time is it?' They hadn't ever asked any questions previously. We fear that this question could herald an unprecedented era of consciousness at the USPTO."
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Thats right keep dropping production to drive the oil prices up. That will work
for a while yet, but now everyone is gunning for them. They drove the oil prices
up too high creating the incentives to start driving innovation to help eliminate
them from our lives.
Got Code?
I recall an article on NPR a while ago. IIRC they were saying that one current but inefficient way to make ethanol from plant matter uses two processes using enzymes. One to break the material down to sugars the other to turn those sugars into ethanol. They were saying the current research is in the direction of having one enzyme do all of this - at reasonable temperatures. They were genetically modifying the same enzymes used to 'stone wash' denim, and IIRC they were investigating enzymes that live in undersea volcanic areas. But who knows, this company could have found another enzyme , or used selective breeding to get the traits they desire.
Basically, the NPR article made it sound like research in this area is not that extreme. It's just a matter of finding the right enzyme or bacteria.
According to the gubmint So that's $1.48 a gallon of gas. I haven't seen that price on gas in a loooooooong time.
Did you consider the cost to plant, harvest and produce potatoes and beets, etc vs corn?
Potatoes cost $2017 per acre to produce.
Corn on the other hand $502 per acre to produce.
That is a rather large difference, corn production also requires next to no man power where
as the production of potatoes (root bound crops) is considerably higher.
Got Code?
The worst estimates are that we're getting 124% energy out with ethanol with current technology - a net gain. And those numbers are based upon old data for crop and ethanol yields and equipment.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
"inthishouseweobeythelawsofthermodynamics" is cute when someone's bragging about their perpetual motion machine. It makes you look ignorant when the story is about someone converting one form of energy to another in an incrementally more efficient way than before. News flash: it's obvious that current production methods can be improved upon. What part of that smacks of breaking the laws of physics?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Here in Brazil I've seen Ethanol being sold by $0.35/liter (~ $1.32/gallon) to the final consumer. I guess the ethanol industries can produce it by far less than $1/gallon. Here about 80% of our fleet of automobiles are powered by Ethanol (including my car), which is produced using sugar cane.
Nevertheless, the mass cultivation of sugar cane is destroying several other agricultures, mainly in Brazil's South and Southeast regions, besides the fact that the producers and farmers usually burn the unused bagasse (crushed sugar cane) and the crops after harvests, being responsible for Brazil's high position in the rank of top polluters.
We can already turn everything based on carbon molecules into petroleum.
Why are we wasting our time and wasting food and alcohol?
[End Of Line]
I know some good ol' boys in Eastern Tennessee who make ethanol from corn mash for less than $1 a gallon. Been doin' it for decades.
Correct. Unfortunately, the current refinement processes still result in a more costly product per unit of energy than petroleum. Gasoline prices are close to making ethanol affordable, but not quite. The advantage to this process is that it would make ethanol cheaply. A result that is far more desirable than pure efficiency. If it's highly efficient in the end, all the better. :-)
:-/
BTW, Pimentel still disagrees that ethanol is energy positive. He's really just being a jerk, pushing data that's nearly 30 years old. Not a single study that's independent of his numbers has shown the same results. The only problem is that there are enough gullible people who listen to him.
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From TA:
"Even if you produce it county by county, you still need an infrastructure," he said. "People aren't going to go to some remote location for fuel."
This has not been my experience. I have met countless stupid people who will drive 20 miles to save 2 cents per gallon on gas. People would probably drive 50 miles to save 5 cents per gallon of gas.
If this stuff was sufficiently cheap, I'll bet there are people who would drive for hours just to fill up and save themselves $20 at the pump.
Ethanol has about 84K BTU/gallon of energy for use in a piston engine. Butanol has about 110K BTU/gallon, compared to an average of 115K BTU/gallon for unleaded gasoline. Butanol also does not absorb water out of the air like ethanol does readily. Butanol can be made by via bacteria fermentation of biomass similar to like ethanol can. Butanol does have a problem with not vaporizing good enough for cold starts in very low temperatures, but that could be overcome with electric heater incorporated in a vehicle's fuel injector system for operation in cold weather.
Don't expect the price of any petrol replacement to be any less than petrol if widely deployed.
One of the reasons for the high taxes in the UK for fuel is that they want to keep traffic numbers down. Pushing the price up should discourage people from driving so much in theory. Of course, the government just becomes dependent on the taxes and so will want a big cut of any other fuel source. Certainly, in the UK if you drive a diesel fueled by used cooking oil, a waste product which would normally be dumped, the government expect you to pay tax on it. The justification is that the tax is used to maintain the roads although that is supposed to be what the road tax is for. Anyway, it is currently cheaper to use vegetable oil and pay the tax than to use fossil diesel but if it gets more popular to use such biofuels the price differential will go away. Sure, they will be largely carbon neutral but the government will still want the same amount of income from fuel sales, they're addicted. I think the US drivers will have to get used to similar things. Accept it, whether the fuel is from fossil or modern sources, the price is going to remain high. You'll never see $1 per gallon again.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
Well, the numbers may be inaccurate, but this is what I came up with from searching the net:
US corn production (2003/2004): 259.273m metric tons here
US sugarcane production (forecast FY 08): 3.388m metric tons here
US sugar beet production (forecast FY 08): 4.549m metric tons here
I don't profess to know anything about economics and how supply and demand affect how much of each crop is produced/available for use in fuel, so draw your own conclusions, or provide an explanation if you are so inclined.
Someone didn't read the comments. This process uses the corn husks and stalks rather than the ears themselves. Waste matter. No competition for food.
Still waiting for the $1/watt solar panels from last week. Would even take the silicon nanotube batteries from the week before.
The nice thing about ethanol is that continued research is almost guaranteed to drive down the price-per-energy cost by orders of magnitudes from what it is today, whereas oil will continue to rise simply by virtue of the fact that it is a limited supply.
So while ethanol is still too expensive to be worthwhile, it's only a matter of time (IMHO a short one!) before ethanol will be as cheap as gas was in the late 90! I still remember 25c per liter (here in Canada, about $0.95/gallon). Maybe then I can afford a car! And maybe then my public transit won't have yearly price hikes on fuel price alone!
124%? That's a pretty slender margin. How many acres are we going to have to devote to ethanol feedstock to supplant oil, at a farm ratio of four times as much land just for running the process to make the fuel for everything else? And are you using fossil-derived fertilizer, or are you synthesizing the fertilizer as part of the energy cycle?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
From the article: May Wu, an environmental scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, says Coskata's ethanol produces 84 percent less greenhouse gas than fossil fuel even after accounting for the energy needed to produce and transport the feedstock. It also generates 7.7 times more energy than is required to produce it. Corn ethanol typically generates 1.3 times more energy than is used producing it.
Meet your miracle machine, or at least a plan for it. Actually, it's even better than what you suggest: it converts electricity to real oil.
Unfortunately, I've done some rough calculations assuming $.1/kWh electricity converted at 40% efficiency, and the energy alone comes to $9/gallon of gasoline.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
Actually, yes. With a generic biomass to fuel process, nearly any biomass could be used, including human corpses.
With the rising cost of funerals and cremation services, maybe the burial method of choice in the future will be in the gas tank of your grandchildren.
Soylent Gas is people!!!!! Farewell Karma!
I like my beverages with warning labels!
That's true of most technologies. e.g. If we were to embrace hydrogen, I can guarantee that the price of hydrogen fuels would drop like a rock over time.
The real beauty of ethanol is that it is similar enough to gasoline to make it a viable alternative for powering existing engine designs. Which means that the massive investments made in the modern, overdesigned, otto-cycle piston engine can continue to be leveraged while new engine technologies are developed.
In short: Hydrogen would require an entirely new infrastructure. Ethanol would not. Which is a huge win for ethanol.
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I guess I might as well karma-whore some more...I completely missed the Wiki page for Butanol Fuel. I also think that Wiki article is wrong about butanol's melting point being 25.5 deg C, that is for pure "tertiary-Butanol", not "n-Butanol" which is the isomer that is preferred for fuel.
Once two strangers climbed ole Rocky Top,
Lookin' for a moon-shine still.
Strangers ain't come down from Rocky Top,
Reckon they never will.
Corn won't grow at all on Rocky Top,
Dirt's too rocky by far.
That's why all the folks on Rocky Top
Get their corn from a jar.
His diesel has returned to the tribe. Hail the Muad'Dib!
At the bottom of the
So what we are all excited about is that we might be able to run our country on crap coming from single-cell, brainless, parasitic, life-forms... Isn't that by exactly how we have been running this country for 200 years. It's not called Ethanol. Its called Congress.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
At the bottom of the
I think you could make fertiliser as a waste product of the biofuel process.
its a very valid point about farmland though. food prices will still go up, because of the increased cost of land, even if you could make it slightly cheaper to transport.
Web Design
How many acres are we going to have to devote to ethanol feedstock to supplant oil?
That depends on the feedstock. We can never do it with corn, as the math just doesn't bear out. Consider the following, based on the recently-published Crop Production 2007 Summary:
Planted area: 93.6 million acres
Average yield: 151.1 bushels per acre
Total production: 14.1 billion bushels
Ethanol production from corn usually nets about 9.5 liters of ethanol per bushel. A conversion of all of the corn to ethanol would net about 134 billion liters of ethanol. Ethanol has an energy density of 24 MJ/L, and gasoline's is 34.6 MJ/L, so E85 would come in at about 25.6 MJ/L. Daily average gasoline consumption in the US is about 1.47 billion liters per day, or about 50.9 billion MJ. To match that with E85 would require 1.99 billion liters of E85, which would require 1.69 billion liters of ethanol. Unfortunately, converting all of the corn production to ethanol would allow only 79 days of consumption of E85 at current energy use rates.
It's an extreme, unrealistic calculation, as we could never do a complete conversion, and it doesn't factor in energy used for the planting, care, or harvest. But it does help to drive home the point that it's infeasible to use standard plants for ethanol production. Even switching to sugarcane or sugarbeets isn't going to help because of the massive acreage required. The only mechanisms that will be able to reliably replace our reliance on fossil fuels are those that are able to take advantage of volume of organic materials, including excretion methods such as algae and bacteria, and possibly methods such as cellulosic conversion and thermal depolymerization (if they work out profitably).
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Well if would work with kudzu it would be wonderful.
The funny thing is that kudzu really is about a perfect plant. It is editable. The leaves can be eaten is a salad and the roots can be eaten as a starch like a potato. The Flowers can be made in to a jelly. It can also be used for animal feed. It is also a legume so it actually puts nitrogen back into the soil. Even more if you plow the waist back in. And it grows with no fertizer and needs no chemicals. The problem is that well it grows like a weed.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
You make some good points, however you are slightly misguided. First of all, hydrogen can be used in an existing otto cycle engine. Hydrogen combustion can easily run a modified engine since anything explosive and a gas could theoretically work (though random burning things are better suited for diesel engines). They actually did this on Mythbusters and fed hydrogen gas into the carburator of a car. It ran for a couple of seconds until it backfired and burning hydrogen came up in their faces, but that's because hydrogen has a different octane than gasoline (so does ethanol by the way), so both require a modified (more expensive) engine.
As for your next point, both hydrogen and ethanol require new infrastructure if they are to replace oil. Ethanol contrary to popular belief is not just gasoline from corn. It cannot and DOES NOT take the same production path as gasoline. Oil products are transported primarily by pipeline which costs about a penny per gallon to move it across the county. Ethanol cannot be used in pipelines because A) it grows mold B) is highly corrosive and C) is totally useless if water infiltrates the pipeline. Thus all ethanol today is shipped in barges, rail cars, and mostly by fuel trucks, all of which run on diesel. Thus the cost associated with shipping ethanol is much higher than shipping gasoline, which is the number one reason why E-85 stations are not everywhere.
In fact, the only reason why ethanol is taking off is because it's a fairly good additive to gasoline to increase the octane rating (much better than lead in any case) and the government pays oil companies to sell it. It isn't profitable at all to make or sell on its own.
Now if you want to talk about Biodiesel, now that's something totally different. It runs unmodified in diesel engines (and is actually better for them) and it can be piped right along side normal diesel in a pipeline (provided it doesn't get too cold). Plus diesel engines have been more efficient than otto cycle engines for a long time. They only reason they haven't taken off is because ignorant Americans (yes, I'm an American too) have a stupid idea that diesel is dirty technology.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Such as? Every recent government study I've seen says the exact opposite.
e.g. The Energy Balance of Corn Ethanol: An Update:
What you're probably thinking of is sensationalist headlines like this: Study says ethanol not worth the energy
Oh lookie. David Pimentel. What a shocker.
I think you'll find that energy-negative studies not conducted by Pimentel himself invariably contain a "Special Thanks to David Pimentel for providing data." Nice, eh?
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Hydrogen requires more significant changes to the engine. That's what drives up the price. Ethanol only requires shifts in the timing and better fuel lines to handle the corrosive effects of the Ethanol, thus making it a fairly inexpensive conversion. Flex vehicles are able to detect information about the fuel and adjust the timing of the engine.
That's a fair point, but I think you overestimate the amount of new infrastructure needed by ethanol vs. that needed by hydrogen. We have methods of building pipelines that can handle ethanol. What we DON'T have is a consensus on how to produce, store, transport, or even fuel hydrogen vehicles. Which leaves a rather massive infrastructure gap between ethanol and hydrogen. Ethanol requires some behind-the-scenes changes. No real biggie. Hydrogen requires brand new vehicles, brand new storage systems, brand new transportation methods*, and brand new production methods. We simply aren't ready to build this infrastructure, no matter how much I wish we were.
It's not a stupid idea. Up until 2006, the US allowed really crappy quality diesel to be sold on the fuel market. This reduced the pump cost of the fuel, but meant that it was extremely dirty and bad for the environment. There was no way that car makers could create cars that burned these fuels clean enough to meet emission standards. Thus the disappearance of diesel in small vehicles. From Wikipedia:
That's been true for decades. As a former resident of Wisconsin, I can tell you that nearly all fuel sold in that state used Ethanol as an octane booster, with many pumping stations advertising as much as "10% Ethanol". What's changed is that ethanol is now being blended in at higher quantities while car makers rush to support these "new" fuels. For the first time in my life, I'm actually seeing E85 fuels pop up at your average, everyday gas station. So no, ethanol is not being driven by its use as an octane booster. Your information is out of date.
(* Hydrogen leaks out of nearly any container. That's one of the reasons why it's so hard to transport and store.)
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switchgrass, hemp, sugar cane, etc... - there are so many other potential biofuel/ethanol sources that would have a better yield than corn.
Ethanol is still not an alternative fuel. It's a supplemental alternative fuel. There's not enough corn grown in the US to switch entirely to it. Heck, there's not enough land in the US even to grow enough corn to satisfy our needs.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Here are a few publications on the process. They're not all freely available.
The original patent by Paul Baskis. (1992) Thermal depolymerizing reforming process and apparatus.
A new patent (issues about two months ago, though it was filed more like three years back) by the folks currently working at Changing World Technologies. (2007) Process for conversion of organic, waste, or low-value materials into useful products.
A research report for the Illinois Council on Food and Agricultural Research from the University of Illinois on what appears to be a similar process, if not the same one. (1999) Thermochemical conversion of Swine Manure to Produce Fuel and Reduce Waste. (There's a layman's write up at National Geographic News.)
An SAE report on recycling polyurethane foam and other plastic crap from shredded car interiors. (2005) Recycling Shredder Residue Containing Plastics and Foam Using a Thermal Conversion Process.
Another SAE report on the same topic. (2006) A Life Cycle Look at Making Diesel Oil from End-of-Life Vehicles.
I don't know if anything was published in a peer-reviewed journal; the CWT website doesn't appear to link to anything, and I don't know if that's par for the course for an engineering firm, or if they're not publishing to keep things secret, or if they're selling snake oil.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Here [Brazil] we have ethanol avaliable for ~$0,75. With the fuel crisis at 70's our government created an ethanol program wich included a law that makes all gas stations in the country sell ethanol, gasoline and diesel. Today our cars run with gasoline, ethanol ou both. But we have something that you haven't: sugar-cane, a lot of it. TIP: You can import ethanol from us...
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