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$1/Gallon "Green Gasoline" In Sight
mattnyc99 writes "We've gotten excited here about the startup that claims it can make $1/gallon ethanol out of anything from trash to tires. But we've also seen how cellulosic ethanol is a better option, and how ethanol demand in general is only adding to the worldwide food crisis. So what about $1/gallon gasoline? NSF-funded researchers at UMass Amherst just completed the first direct conversion from cellulose using a new method of hydrocarbon refining, which they claim can be commercialized within 5-10 years and essentially make fuel out of anything that grows. Quoting: 'We already have the infrastructure in place to distribute liquid fuels. We're using them to power transportation vehicles today, and I think that's what we'll be using in 10 years and in 50 years,' Huber says. 'And if you want a sustainable liquid transportation fuel, biomass is the only way to go.'" The process is running at about 50% efficiency now; the $1/gallon figure is based on getting to 100%.
Mr Fusion!
Seeing doc putting in that banana peel was just too much :-)
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
well, it should be fun driving the Hummer around in all that future desert such "cheapness" will lead to
I'm willing to pay $2/gallon for the opportunity to use the 50% efficient stuff.. Why wait until you reach your target of $1/gallon when what you have is already cheaper than normal gas?
FWIW, we do NOT have an infrastructure for distributing liquid fuels that are predominantly ethanol... thats one of the real big problems. It corrodes the living sh#% out of virtually all of our liquid fuel transportation infrastructure.
Cheap ethanol is good if the production of biomass to produce it doesn't displace food production, and $1/gallon would certainly be nice, but we have to be realistic about ALL the problems an ethanol-based fuel economy will entail... replacing all the pipelines being just the start.
More importantly, if they get 50% of the cellulose's energy into hydrocarbons then processing twice as much cellulose should given them a $2/gallon hydrocarbon. What they should tell us is whether a gallon of their hydrocarbon mixture has the same amount of energy as a gallon of oil For example, a gallon of ethanol has about 2/3rds the energy of a gallon of regular gasoline, so if it's only priced at 2/3rd the price of regular it won't break even.
The bottom line: we need price in dollars per kilojoule, not in dollars per gallon.
The minute the government stops subsidizing the production of ethanol, not only will farmers start moving back to wheat and other foods that the world needs, but ethanol will be forced to survive on its own next to gasoline, and it will vanish in the puff of bad logic that brought it into existence. Let's not forget the recent story about increases in beer cost as farmers switch over to corn for ethanol. Also informative is this recent Time magazine article debunking the benefits of ethanol. This is just another political stunt at the expense of the world's food crops and my inebriation. When will Congress learn that manipulating the economy never has the desired effects.
I thought this was a joke, then I saw that the article was in Popular Mechanics and thought "whew" (because every story that has ever run in popular mechanics about technologies of the future has been spot on).
Different articles. First link is about a company that can convert ethanol to gasoline. (And the advantage of that is that you don't have to buy a new car -- your existing car, which runs on gasoline and not ethanol, will still work with the new fuel.)
The fourth link is about converting cellulose (i.e., plant material) into something that seems to resemble gasoline. The 100% efficiency they're talking about isn't thermodynamic -- they're talking about doing 100% of the conversion that is possible, when they're doing 50% of it right now.
I still don't trust it; as someone above commented, with gasoline costing more than $3/gallon in the US right now, being able to do it for $2/gallon would mean they could raise as much financing as they could produce. (On the other hand: one of the reasons gasoline is so expensive in the US is because of the refineries, and this stuff would -- one presumes -- still need to be refined. And might need a different refinery, which would raise the cost even more. The article, sadly, doesn't give any significant details.)
It's amazing how many things are 5-10 years away.
if i had a car that ran on patent applications, i could literally shovel garbage into it and get wherever i needed to go
and it wouldn't cost anything
heck, they'd pay me to take the stuff away
I just bought a car that happens to take this E85 ethanol combo gas.
It dropped my mileage from city 22 to like 16, highway 30 to 22.
It was a little cheaper due to government subsidies ($2.77 vs $3.30 at the time), but it didn't come close to breaking even with the drop in mileage.
Overall very disappointed.
Where are the plug-in hybrids?
Cellulose is plant matter. You know. Grass clippings, corn stalks, etc. I see you really must like eating GRASS CLIPPINGS along with the COWS. Similar intelligence, perhaps?
CELLULOSE IS NOT FOOD!
Cellulostic Ethanol: Educate Yourself!
[/rant]
That's rough, but at $118/bbl, the cost of refined gasoline is somewhere about $2.50/gallon. The $3.50 you're paying at the pump includes distribution and taxes. So you'd pay $3/gallon for a fuel that stores only about 60-65% of the energy as the $3.50/gallon gas your paying now. Not really economical. At their theoretical 100% efficiency, it's about a wash, though you'll still have to visit the pump half again as often to fill up.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
When we can make affordable fuel out of trash, garbage, and untreated sewage, then trash, garbage, and untreated sewage will nearly immediately be in short supply. Cost of the raw material will increase, and make the finished product less affordable.
Pretty soon after that, we will cut down perfectly good trees for no other reason than to make liquid fuels. Darn. There goes the forest. And the parks, etc. Not so good.
It's just not that easy. But it's attractive, and will keep us until we can do the electric car thing and do away with liquid fuels altogether.
Maybe.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
When I calculate my fuel mileage based on ONLY how much diesel I actually pay for, I get about 30-33 highway mpg in my 7900 pound 3/4 ton diesel truck.
Gasoline engines are a flawed design and gasoline/ethanol is a flawed fuel. It does have a place such as in motorcycles or small engines. I'll take my diesel powered vehicle any day of the week over some inefficient gasoline powered vehicle.
Only if it's claimed that the thermodynamic efficiency is 100%. The word "efficiency" is also used in other contexts where values of 100% or more make sense, and do not violate the laws of thermodynamics.
For example, home heat pumps are generally given an efficiency rating that indicates the ratio of heat output vs. electrical input (i.e., how many watts of heat are blown out the vents divided by how many watts of electrical power are consumed). This value is usually greater than 100%, but this is OK because this definition does not include the heat which is removed from the outside air and transferred to the indoor air. In other words, that specific definition of efficiency does not consider the complete system, and it deliberately ignores some of the energy that's being consumed.
Heat pump efficiency is defined this way because it allows useful comparisons to other kinds of climate control devices. A plain electric space heater would consume 1000W of electrical power in order to dump 1000W into the room, while a heat pump might only consume 500W of electrical power (I made that number up) in order to dump the same 1000W into the same room. While that doesn't reflect the thermodynamic efficiency of the heat pump, it does let you see that this example heat pump will consume half the electrical power of a space heater in order to heat the same room.
I'm not trying to debate whether the "100%" value in TFA makes sense here, because I haven't read TFA yet. I'm just pointing out that there are valid and honest uses for the word "efficiency" where values of 100% or more make sense, without implying any sort of perpetual motion.
Although collecting large amounts of easy to process cellulose materials will cost money too. You can't just go around picking up everyone's grass clippings and store them, or take a week transporting them. Nature also breaks down cellulose, and dissipates the energy they are extracting. So you would need to gather this material, ship it, process it and/or store it in ways that prevent decomposition....and all that costs money.
And most likely means things like switchgrass farms, or some other dedicated farming, so its concentrated in one place (easy for processing and transport). But then you have the problem of that farm land competing with our food growing farm land...which causes land prices to rise, causing increased food costs.
I think using enzymes to break down the ENTIRE plant is the way to go if we're going to do biofuels. The reason is simple: by using the entire plant, it means all the agricultural waste from conventional farming can be turned into almost any fuel you can imagine using enzyme processing, avoiding the major issue of having to overgrow corn and sugar cane/beets just to make more ethanol.
Suddenly, all those weeds out there become a biomass base, and farmers will be more than happy to ship the plant waste from growing corn, wheat, rice, etc. to a cellulosic processing plant to turn into biofuels.
If the oil companies are at all sane, they'll be investing heavily in this if it's technologically feasable. They don't care where the oil comes from so long as they're the ones refining and distributing it. If they can get feedstock from someplace that isn't perpetually on the brink of all-out war, so much the better.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Here's the home page of the University of Amherst prof who did this. There's a picture of him holding a test tube of synthetic fuel derived from biomass sugars.
I'd be more impressed if he was standing next to a 5000 gallon tank of the stuff. On a small scale, if you're not worried about cost, you can make just about any hydrocarbon from any other hydrocarbon. It's hard to measure operating costs until the process is scaled up. So I'm skeptical of the cost claims.
Any political benefits politicians could get from the oil business would absolutely pale in comparison to the benefit they could get from promising the electorate $1/gal gasoline. Campaign contributions work at the margins, but not against a headline issue like this.
I do wonder how much organic waste we are just letting go in the garbage every year now, though? I mean, millions of yards get mowed weekly (or more depending on where you live)....not to mention golf courses, stadiums, parks...etc. Then as someone said, we have tons of paper and boxes that are garbage each day. How about recycling most all of that waste paper into fuel?
I'd say at the start...that amount of ethanol, combined with the domestic oil reserves we have....could get us off the world 'grid' pretty quickly. Eventually..we could get off the fossil fuel altogether, but, this would be a huge stop-gap answer.
I wonder how much organic waste we currently just throw in the trash now, which could go for this type of ethanol generation? We could quit using corn for ethanol (well, except for consumption) right away too.
Now, if we could just do away with the fscking corn subsidies, and lift the sugar tariffs we could also kick the HFCS problems we have, get food prices back down a bit, and have real Coke with real sugar again in the US.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
50% efficiency does not imply $2/gallon.
They have to input pre-processing and heat. They don't say where break-even is. Maybe that's at 90% efficiency.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
same reason i was apopleptic about the idiocy of hydrogen power. which, as a fashionable topic for science morons, seems to have run its course thankfully
please, science idiots, learn:
if you expend lots of energy manufacturing your energy medium, you are being more wasteful than just choosing a more intelligent energy medium
hydrogen is great, of course, because it burns clean. but it is a b*tch to store and transport, and most importantly, although something clean is coming out of your exhaust, everything that went into getting hydrogen into your fuel tank created more pollution than if you were burning coal in your car
the solution to our energy crisis is nuclear and electric cars
japan and france: show us the way to a cleaner, cheaper energy future, without the security concerns: nuclear
its safer than it ever was (you can walk away from a pebble bed reactor and it will just gradually shut down: no active management needed), and horrible waste is only a product of the usa's hesitance to use breeder reactors (because they make bomb grade materials). but if you use breeder reactors, you have a tenth of the nuclear fuel waste which loses its radioactivity in a few centuries, rather in 10,000s of years, AND you get way more energy output. as uranium runs out, use thorium like india. and as we begin to run out of thorium in a few centuries, mankind better have been able to master fusion power by then, or we are doomed anyways
i think, to provide security to nuclear plants, you would need one one hundredth of the amount of security resources you need now to make sure oil still flows to our shores
or just keep counting the body bags coming from iraq because your mind still believes propaganda about nuclear power based on 1960s technology
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Twelve-and-three-quarter inches. Unyielding. This wand belonged to Bellatrix Lestrange.
"In sight"? Hardly. The only way to make gasoline is to distill hydrocarbons. As usual, the hyperbole of the title obscures the actual article. $2/gallon combustible organic fuel which is very inefficient compared to gasoline is the real situation. "Hope" of reaching $1/gallon and 100% efficiency is just empty hope
As long as it's ethanol, it's going to be monstrously expensive to transport. Ethanol is, essentially, a food product which rots.
If this process can help make with turning coal and other high-carbon materials into actual gasoline, it might be interesting.
However, do not underestimate the physical space and cost to build new fuel processing factories. No matter what, the world's energy needs will increase.
The goals should be to focus on the most effective methods of converting physical substance into harnessed energy, not the fantasy of "clean" energy. Think of all the people who bought or promote electric vehicles claiming they are "clean". That idea is beyond stupid. The energy has to be created somewhere then distributed. All distribution systems have loss. They might be "cleaner" at the point of use but they are not gross clean.
The cleanest energy would be something like wind or water power. They're not efficient and they can't power wheeled vehicles sufficiently. That leaves the concept of combustion in some form. Little pebble reactors in vehicles? Forget it. That leaves the process of a controlled burn. What is the best substance to burn considering infrastructure, portability and energy return aspects? Hydrocarbon. That's all there is to it.
Having said that, for static location energy needs like an electric grid, there could be some advantage to biomass conversion or forms of incineration when they are also used as a way to reduce the expense of handling trash. They'll never be as efficient as burning hydrocarbons because it takes energy to turn them into hydrocarbons. Oil and coal are the closest forms to carbon which are viable fuel sources for combustion.
This is being done/worked on. It's called Terra Petra "Black Earth" and is being developed for use in biomass gasification.
Basically you gassify carbonaceous materials such as wood or other biomass. Instead of allows all the biomass to be consumed in the process, you pull a portion of the charcoal out of the gasification stream and then disc it into the earth. Charcoal, being a fairly stable version of high density carbon will remain in this state for a very long time and in a sense becomes fertilizer for the soil (over time). Charcol is a more stable form of carbon than just raw biomass which will otherwise decay into CO2 as it rots
In fact, in the amazon, this has been going on for 1000s of years and is a way to make otherwise not so great tropical soils fertile.
Gasification combined with Terra Petra has the possibility of not only being carbon neutral, but carbon negative. If you gassify existing biomass (in particular the waste wood and garden clipping stream of most municipal wastes) you start out carbon neutral. The carbon in the waste stream is already destined to either be incinerated or 'mulched' which releases the carbon as CO2 either way.
If during the process of gassifying this biomass stream, you extract a portion of the charcoal that is created, you can then sequester it in the soil. Thus becoming carbon negative to the extent you pull from your gassifier. The trade off is that you have less carbon to convert to CO for use as a producer gas.
Filmo The Klown
The only drawback is that the landfills are being refilled with ash, and eventually will run out of room again.
what if we were to grow plants, cut them down, and stick them underground in some salt mines or something?
This is essence what happens to most of the paper that enters most American homes (newsprint, magazines, junk mail) - it gets put out in the trash, and ends up in a landfill, where it gets buried and takes decades to centuries to break down.
So, don't recycle that paper! Put it in a landfill and sequester that carbon!
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
I call BULLSHIT on this. It wouldn't matter if gas was $.01 or $10.00 @ gallon, I still have to drive to work, shop and do several other chores. I don't drive any more or less then when I was able to buy gas for $.89 @ gallon. The only difference is that it just costs me much more to do said chores.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
1) The whole point of recycling is to keep from having to drive stuff way out to a landfill. It gets, you know, recycled instead. I believe that Portland has over %50 less waste going into their 'distant landfills' since they have started recycling.
2) If the garbage was not being separated then the one garbage truck would fill up faster and have to make more trips back and forth between the 'distant landfill' and the pickup route.
Think about it. The total amount of garbage didn't magically triple overnight. They didn't suddenly have to purchase and run three times the number of garbage trucks; the existing trucks are just used for different tasks now. I bet the total fuel consumption won't be all that different.
3) Where Portland wastes diesel fuel in the garbage industry is that they have multiple companies serving the same routes which is less efficient than it could be. This would be true whether they are recycling or not.
4) You are seriously underestimating the energy saved by recycling. The energy saved by recycling aluminum cans alone will probably cover all the fuel costs for the whole garbage truck fleet. A can manufacturing industry website states that for every 40 aluminum cans recycled the energy equivalent of a gallon of gasoline is saved.
http://www.cancentral.com/recFAQ.cfm
Please find something more constructive to bitch about.
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..