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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
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.
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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?
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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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!"
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.
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?
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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.
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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